I don't want to defend anti-abortion sentiment. — fdrake

being unwanted pregnant for 9 months — Benkei

First, wages for pregnancy and nursing women and childcare, Give the up-coming generation and its needs its real value in society. Which is near the top of the list and a long way above the defence budget. When that is all in place and pregnancy and birth are accorded the high status and rewards they deserve, then there may still be a few unwanted pregnancies, and then I will listen to arguments either way, as to whether "pregnancy dysphoria" should be treated surgically or with counselling under this or that circumstance.

It's a bit off topic, but I think these comparisons can be illuminating.

the reasons for focussing on trans issues are, as Dr Cass highlights, that the numbers are increasing exponentially. There's no precedent for that. — Isaac

Is there any model aside from the social that can explain this increase?

A1 ) Surgical transition is permissible in some contexts, y/n?
A2 ) Hormone treatment is permissible in some contexts, y/n?
A3 ) Gender affirmation schooling (voice therapy) is permissible in some contexts, y/n?
A4 ) Therapy for gender dysphoria is permissible in some contexts, y/n?
A5 ) Counselling for trauma which has caused all this shame is permissible in some contexts, y/n? — fdrake

This all feels to me rather like the question of abortion. Given social pressures, economic and normative, on women who become pregnant, that we are not going to treat or try to change, should, abortion be legal? A reluctant yes, but removing the stigma and properly funding childcare and motherhood would be a better solution in almost every case.

To be honest, I don't have the expertise to answer, but it is clear to me that there is a need or desire to transition only to the extent that what one is, is, or is felt to be, "wrong". And that means it is a social artefact. And what is permissible is an artefact of the same society. So I suppose that what society says is wrong with an individual, it needs to facilitate them changing. But I don't have to like it.

B1 ) If identities are socially constructed, what stops shame from being an essential part of one?
B2 ) What general consequences does this "artificiality" of shame have for people who have it?
B3 ) Why can't people's characters be inherently shameful? We can be quiet or good at mathematics, but not shameful, why?
B4 ) Why is it appropriate to treat "character" as a state of nature, prior to social identity, whenever we observe someone their character's expression becomes identified? As much as socialisation builds character, it builds identity - that these two develop in tandem undermines treating one as a state of nature and the other as social artifice. — fdrake

B1. Shame is ubiquitous, but what stops it from being essential is that it can only arise from comparison.
B2. This is a huge question, that I could make a whole thread on. From shame one hides oneself and tries to be what one is not, leading to anxiety of being exposed as a fraud, and from being hidden comes the sense of isolation and loneliness. Think of anorexia for an example of how social pressure creates lethal misery through body-shaming.
B3. I don't understand the difference from B1.
B4. I distinguish character and identity by crude definition thus: character is what one is, and identity is the image one has of what one is. Both develop and change due to biology, socialisation, and other environmental influences. (No one becomes a pianist or comes to see themself as a pianist without a piano in the environment.) Does this make more clear how shame operates at the level of self-image, and not at the level of actual self? How it operates though is to divide the individual into inner and outer, and all the other conflicts within psyche. Hence, in this case 'I am outwardly male and inwardly female' or vice versa. So the division between state of nature and social artifice is indeed part of the same division in psyche, and of course the individual cannot actually be divided, so some aspect must dominate and some aspect must be suppressed. Or some aspect acted out, and some aspect hidden away. and because we feel this division, we look for and cherish the imagined unity of 'authenticity', the great prize of therapy.

Speaking of anorexia, another body dysphoria, would we advocate liposuction as a treatment?

I'm sorry but I beg to differ. Take for example the homeless. Have you dealt with them? Don't they come off as the genuine saints of society, and even the target of Jesus' teaching? May, I ask if your speaking about only people in power such as leaders or priests? — Shawn

I'm describing very generally the conflicted nature of the human psyche, as an explanation for occasional violence and violation. Power, as opposed to dependence is a factor in the expression. There may be people who are not conflicted, or are never in the position to manifest their negative. Homeless folk who tell passers by to f off do not thrive. They are like infants in their dependence.

But I'll stop here, because we have drifted too far off topic.

It's during the teenage years when things start emerging as problems. I think these teenage years where mental health issues can crop up is what your talking about. Is that something that I'm portraying accurately with regards to what you are saying? — Shawn

Yes. a child is helpless and dependent and cannot resist the demand to be this or that. The teenager is starting to become more independent, more resistant to demands to be, and starting to become sexual. All of which is in conflict with being good for Mummy. So that is when there is an internal conflict developing.

I don't think people want to hurt other people most of the time. — Shawn

Yes, but it is because they don't, that the person they are busy not being because they are being good becomes the bad person who does want to hurt other people, and in a special situation it can to come out. Have you read about the cruelty of nuns, and the sexual antics of priests? The saint creates the sinner in himself.

Do you mind me asking — Shawn

Not at all, ask away. Do you mind that I don't really know the answer?

There's a phrase that haunts me; "Be good for Mummy." One is told to be something, always and everywhere, to be good, to be better, to be, God help us, authentic. And so everyone is always being something or other, which can only happen by negating what one is. And the being that is negated is angry, frustrated, and hungry, for its own life. The prisoner in one's own psyche hates the one who is so free as to say yes to everything. Does that resonate at all?

Do you think the experiment would go the same in the East?
In a small rural village or tribal community? — HarryHarry

I don't know. In a way Marina's experiment was a set up. It would have been dull if everyone had been kind, and there was no sex or violence. So there was and that is interesting, and remarkable, but it tells us that that is what interests us, and that it tends to escalate.
In my dull normal life, people are never that free with each other, even when drunk. But it's interesting that sex and violence is where the op's mind went, and it reminded me of Rhythm 0 because 'do whatever you want with me' is very close to 'say yes to everything'.

Sometimes we do collectivism — DingoJones

Roads, for example. Each individual making their own roads according to their own standard would be confusing and lead to potential conflict at every crossing. We can come to some arrangement to share the roads, maybe. Agree to all drive on the right or something, might work ok most of the time, 'til someone wants to assert their individuality.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhythm_0

When the experiment is done, the results are not nice. Such is what we are.

That's not an apt analogy. — SophistiCat

'Fings ain't what they used to be. It's less apt here than it was at the old site for 2 reasons: 1 the old was explicitly run to produce an archive of readable threads, whereas this is, as you say, more of a community discussion, and 2, there seems to be much less editing done here than on the previous site. We used to correct for spelling, grammar and punctuation - don't think that happens much here. Nevertheless, it is a form of publication, and copyright is assigned. Publishers are communities too. So it's not actually an inapt analogy, though you may not find it useful or agreeable to your understanding.

It is a voluntary community, moderated ideally for that communities benefit. — hypericin

Actually it is a privately owned site, run by the proprietor for his own purposes which obviously do not necessarily coincide with what anyone else thinks they are or should be. I suspect the community aspect is important to him, but also probably the philosophy.

Bans are indeed a punishment — Amity

People often see them that way, but I prefer to see them more as self-defence on behalf of the community, the way I ban goats from my garden. They may see it as punishment, but I like the goats elsewhere, just not amongst my vegetables.

When were they tried? What consituted 'temporary'? — Amity

A long time ago in a site far far away. I think a week and then a month, but they failed to make any friends, but rather increased the conflict. This site being still smaller, is a little more easy-going, but I imagine there are still bans for low quality, and lack of language skills, which of course are not punishments at all, but simple disqualifications. The principle of moderation back then was to act for the benefit of a theoretical non-posting reader - whose opinions are never heard by definition, but might be measured by site traffic and rate of increase of membership.

It is only a concern when it is related to the 'status' of a forum member.
If you see the label 'Banned' on someone's profile, what is your first impression? — Amity

That is a valid point, I think. It would be better to find a neutral term - "account closed" or some such. Not sure if the software can be tweaked?

Time out for a re-think and for calm to prevail. — Amity

Sounds more suitable for kindergarten than a grown up discussion.

If you are thinking about justice, I would suggest you are misconstruing the situation. Think of tpf as a magazine or philosophical daily paper, staffed by volunteer contributors and volunteer editors. Because of the volume of work, editors do not edit before publication but afterwards.

Nobody thinks it a great injustice if the Times does not publish an article they send in, or indeed if they decide having published some, to stop publishing any more. Folks get banned because they make too much work for the mods; they get warned and have the opportunity to adjust. Those that do not heed the warnings are unlikely to heed them next week, or next month. Those that get angry about the house style, or the quality of the editing need to find a publication more to their taste, not keep coming back to one they do not respect.

The bar is low. You don't have to be especially literate, especially polite, especially learned or clever. A child of eleven could survive, as can many non native English speakers and uneducated in philosophy. As someone who has banned many on the predecessor site to this, I can say that one gets a deal of abuse from folks, up to and including attempts to hack the site and destroy it, and personal threats. It's not much fun moderating, and bans are no fun at all. Mods agonise over decent posters gone rogue, and even listen to criticism in threads like this. And they actually try to be fair, even to the extent that mods get fired and ex mods get banned. Temporary bans have been tried, and found to be troublesome, possibly because they foster the idea that bans are a punishment that might be just or more likely unjust, rather than the site protecting its reputation and integrity.

Every time a bird puts a twig on his nest he is incurring a debt to wilderness. — NOS4A2

And the penalty for this bad behaviour is to be shot and eaten. :death:

why you need to be this recalcitrant — Benkei

One of the mysteries of life.

My economics starts from 2 principles.

1. “If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe” Carl Sagan.
2. "Property is theft!". Proudhon.

Accordingly, 100 people who contribute to producing something automatically incur a debt to the rest of the world for the value of the resources they have appropriated to themselves, and the damage they have caused to other resources, ie the environment. Thus every fenced off field owes a debt to wilderness, as does every cut down tree, every mine and quarry, and every factory. This unpaid debt is now being called in by way of climate change and environmental degradation.

@Mikie actually knows this, but somehow cannot integrate it into his economic understanding. He is alas not alone in this.

Doesn't follow. Nothing follows if you can't take the reliability of your cognitive faculties for granted. The argument is so corrosive that it undermines everything, including itself. — SophistiCat

You can think whatever you please, but I find it is preferable to order one's thoughts to align with the world. Satisfying conditions of certainty come low on the list. What follows will follow, regardless of arguments. So I will continue to take my faculties for granted, except when they prove to have been at fault, which, alas, is often enough.

I think the aim of meditation is just the first bit:

I sit quietly — Art48

The rest is the usual busy-ness and recitation of thought trying to explain and give purpose where it has no place and does not help.Unfortunately with all that going on, there is no chance of any quiet sitting.

You cannot pull yourself out of the abyss of skepticism by your bootstraps using reasoning and empirical evidence if the very reliability of reasoning and observation are in question. — SophistiCat

Then you are dead.

Try again. — Mikie

You try again.

100 people all contribute to producing something. — Mikie

No.

100 people and the accumulated wisdom of 10,000 years of human civilisation and the accumulated capital of 7 billion years of evolving life all contribute to producing something. The 100 people had better go on a diet because the economic pie is way past its sell-by-date.

One cannot embed all one's reasoning in a psychological theory, including the reasonings that have led to that psychological theory. The epistemological buck must stop somewhere. — Thomas Nagel, Evolutionary Naturalism and the Fear of Religion

Physically, the buck stops with the world. Senses evolve to indicate threats and opportunities. They have survival value to the extent that they do that rather than entertain with celestial visions and music. They have value, that is, to the extent that they tell the truth about the world more often than not.

Language extends the senses. The scout reports that the buffalo are in the next valley, and the hunters set out. Language also has survival value to the extent that it tells the truth more often than not.

Reason has survival value to the extent that it helps conserve truth in language.

I am not dead, therefore I can trust my senses, my friends, and my reasoning (more often than not). Reason passes the harsh test of keeping us alive. You can stake your life on it, and do, every day.

"a unicorn is running" — Agent Smith

Logically, it's a simple claim: there is a unicorn, it is running. There is no problem with it at all except it happens to be false concerning this world. And there is no problem either with "In Narnia there is a unicorn that runs" which can be true of Narnia, a fictional world.

Why agonise over this stuff? We understand - you understand that unicorns are mythical creatures and that is the reason for using it rather than a rabbit.

We need one of those signs:

The boss is not always right. But he's always the boss.

Religion is commonly based on some “sacred” writings, — Art48

Do you imagine that writing predates religion? Let me tell you a different story. I'll call it "Animism". As Mankind developed through spoken language, the awareness of his awareness that we call consciousness, he naturally assumed that everything else was also conscious, because his philosophy professor had told him not to assume he was special. Animals were obviously aware trees were clearly alive, volcanos were angry, the wind was clearly going places, and the rain was always dancing.

Writing simply organised and ossified the relationships, aided by politics, whereby whoever wins the battle has the better gods on their side.

Philosophers now pour scorn on these ideas, as if they have proved that it is not so, and that the universe is dead. And we all lived happily ever after.

Am I right in thinking you see the genesis of identity as some kind social trauma, whereas character is something innate? — fdrake

Yes. I'm saying that Any combination of male/female/no-sex brain and body, along with any combination of hormone regime that naturally occurs is bound, short of physical pain resulting, to be accepted as 'just the way I am' unless there is an induced conflict between that and 'the way I ought to be'.

In short the only possible source of conflicted identity is social. I mean who d'you even think you are, fdrake? That's just a duck! :razz:

Or is it?? — Baden

Like I said, it's a meta-theory. It describes how psychological thinking goes on, and so each psychologist thinks it describes his own theory - quite rightly.

I’d be careful in relying too much on the rep grid in trying to understand the main thrust of Kelly’s work. Here’s what Kelly had to say to an interviewer. — Joshs

Yes indeed. the statistical complexity lends a comforting air of scientism to what is a fundamentally philosophical, social-democratic, and conceptual approach. Nevertheless, I think the grid is an interesting way of self- exploration, and that exploration gives a more visceral insight into the concepts of personal construct theory. It's interesting to hear that quote though. Back in the day, people like R.D.Laing were definitely not on the syllabus, whereas Kelly was, in a slightly isolated from everything else way. He definitely got credibility from being really advanced in the statistical analysis,* without which he would almost certainly been banned for heresy.

*Those were the days when computers took up a whole building and there was one in the university and mere undergraduates were not allowed in.

So, conceptualising individuals as naive scientists or more malleable social units does not prescribe results but processes, processes which are dependent on social contexts for their functioning. — Baden

If you substitute 'psychologists' for 'naive scientists' it becomes apparent that personal construct theory is a meta-theory of psychology. It concerns itself with the terms and dimensions by which the individual understands themself and other people.

The usual tool is called a repertory grid. Imagine a grid of squares; down the side is a list of people you know fairly well: yourself, your ideal self, your partner, your fantasy partner, your child, your ideal child, mother, father, boss, work-mate, uncle, granny, mother-in-law, first lover, best friend, worst enemy, whoever, the more the merrier. So each person has a row in the grid And along the top each column has some feature of personality that has some importance to you. niceness, sociability, religiousness, selfishness, intelligence, honesty, virtue, dominance, aggression, sensitivity, sanity, fidelity, whatever you can think of. And then you fill in for each person a score for each attribute - 0 to 10 maybe.

Then, these scores are subjected to an incredibly tortuous statistical analysis that I did a few times by hand with a mere calculator to help, and have completely forgotten, and you arrive at some interesting information about the number of dimensions that you analyse people under, how extreme your self image is (by your own standards), how close you are to your ideal self, and so on. If you want to try it, https://openrepgrid.org will save you hours of calculations.

Anyway, the takeaway from all this is that one's identity, being represented by the score one gives oneself in relation to significant others, is one aspect of the way one identifies humanity psychologically. The personal construct is the way one constructs both oneself as a person and the other as a person. There is no question here of there being a truth of the matter, as in a right way to understand people, but rather the depth or shallowness of the ways we understand ourselves and each other is itself a significant aspect of such understanding. This is psychology as a way of social being in the world. Is your world full of goodies and baddies like a cowboy film? That's interesting!

Do you watch commercials? — frank

I watch them like a fucking hawk. Otherwise you end up believing in better, and thinking your worth it, and that your house is full of nasty germs and smells that you can't smell, but everyone else can, and that's why yo have no friends.

Remember the shoutbow?

The difference between men and women is a social construct in relation to a biological foundation — Possibility

I agree.

I understand your preference for ‘good grounds’, but what constitutes ‘good’ is socially constructed, — Possibility

I disagree.

Having been brought up watching the Simpsons, I conclude that my skin is not yellow enough, and I have too many fingers. Can I get some medical help?

I claim the Simpsons as a society, and three fingered yellowness as its norm, and how can anyone dispute? One has to say that some social constructions are repugnant, invalid, reprehensible, ridiculous, dysfunctional. But if one says it only relative to the current fashion, it has no moral force at all. Next year it may be absolutely the thing to have a finger removed and yellow stained skin, and unpatriotic to remain encumbered with four fingers and that disgusting pasty white or brown skin.

This is essentially an admission of incompetence on the part of the moderators. — alan1000

Yes it is. moderators here are unpaid volunteers, and they don't catch everything. It is an art anyway, not a science, because one has to have an eye for the members as they are. There's no point in deleting, stuff all the time and alienating folks. They'll just go somewhere else. At the same time an unmoderated site is inevitably shit. Here of course we manage the perfect balance of alienating shit-posters, and allowing different levels of wisdom to interact fairly freely. I have been conditioned to think so anyway.

Your suggestion does not appeal to the intellect. Philosophers are also humans and like to socialise and go off topic. If there were not suitable places for such activity, it would happen more in the philosophical threads where it really does not belong.

( 1 ) While I'm not sold on this one. I think it's worth considering that while a given identity is socially constructed, we do have these psyche generative mechanisms/capacities which apply at the individual level. They're shared capacities to be sure, they apply to everyone. I intuit that those capacities are manifested by bodies in different ways, though. How I am rendered social is different from how you are rendered social - our tendencies for psyche-genesis will have been different. E xamples there might be synesthesia, neurological conditions and disabilities. Bodies have some say in the psyches which may dwell within them. — fdrake

Thank you for engaging with me on this; I'm not used to it. I am not saying that brains are all exactly alike. I am not saying that they are not affected in their development in the womb by the experiences and diet of the mother, I am not saying that there cannot be a brain that is, to put it crudely female-like in structure in a male body, or vice versa. Brains are plastic from the beginning, and are moulded by the environment from the beginning, and as the individual grows up, with luck, the brain becomes more and more able to reciprocally mould the environment.

But the question of identity is not the question of individual character. Every zebra has a unique bar code, but no bar code gives rise to an identity problem.

So if there is a male with a female brain, this might give rise to some odd behaviour and some odd feelings. They might be 'effeminate', they might be homosexual, they might be particularly nurturing, less aggressive than most males, and so on. But why should any of this be problematic in any way or cause them to be unhappy with their condition? "I am what I yam!" being the default.

The challenge to anyone who wants to reject my thesis is to come up with an answer to this question that is not based on relations with society.

( 2 ) More broadly, I think your comments apply (and perhaps are even designed to apply?) to other identity categories. — fdrake

Certainly. I start from a completely general idea of identity, as distinct from what I can call 'character'.
One's character does not require any thinking about or effort. My hands are unsteady, so that my handwriting is almost illegible and my drawings scribbles. I am good at maths, terrible at recognising faces or remembering names, I am rather passive and quiet, but can get angry and passionate too. I am a hetero male. This is more or less a description of character, but by comparison still with some vague 'normal' or average, and descriptive of social activities. But it is an attempt to describe something like my innate being rather than the way I think of myself. That is not really possible without some hand-waving.

When that character interacts with the education system, quiet passivity becomes laziness, unsteady hands become carelessness, forgetting names and faces is inattention and rude, and so on. I become moralised, and these things become 'wrong' with me rather than mere facts about me.

Otherwise than through they eyes of convention, how could there be anything wrong, uncomfortable, conflictual with being a man with a vagina, or a woman with a penis? One's physicality can only possibly be in conflict with an image of an ideal, which necessarily must come from others.

A hurricane forms, storms about here and there making its presence felt, and then dissipates and loses its identity. There is no problem for a materialist in this, although a hurricane has no skin that separates it from the rest of the atmosphere. So what's the problem with a self being a pattern of energetic movement that arises and persists in a semi-permeable skin bag for a while, and then dissipates? Nobody says a hurricane doesn't exist because the air it is made of keeps changing...

It sounds like you're saying that social fragmentation ends up being reflected in individual psyches. — frank

That is one of the things I am definitely saying, yes. I think unenlightened said something similar in a recent thread that may partly be responsible for me thinking about this. — Baden

I just watched White Noise last night, and now this. I was struck by the close similarity posed between Hitler and Elvis. The mass adoration. And the obsession with death; the nature of narrative plot as a movement towards inevitable death (ineffectually denied by the 'happy-ever-after' ending). Recommended watch for philosophers and pretenders.

I'm not going to participate here though more than this, as long as I have other stuff on the go. I just want to clarify my own position that identity is always fragmented; it is something one does in thought, to reflect on oneself, that divides one between the identifier and the identified - the reflection and that which sees it - and simultaneously divides one from the world, which becomes 'other'. Death is always the loss of identity. One does this because in learning from those one is dependent on for one's existence, one is instructed to "be good". That is to say, to be what one is not, and thus identity is performance from the beginning, and the necessary negation of oneself for the [M]other.

So I cannot even distinguish between the social and the psyche.

Thus there is much resistance to someone who undermines identity by denying the dichotomies: human not animal, white not black, male not female, and so on. There is, extraordinarily you might think, resistance from women to women having the vote, joining the army, having control of their own fertility, because "it undermines the family" or some such.

The need for acceptance is so fundamental that more than one psychologist, can think it insane for even a slave to resist their identification as such. And more than one slave can accept the identity in order to be accepted. We go back again and again to our abusers, because to be abused is to be confirmed and accepted as part of the society. To be alone is death.

But again, all this must be denied, and the identity of the self-interested rational responsible man who is the captain of his fate etc must be affirmed, because to be so dependent and fragile in one's identity is also death.

There is a third possibility, which I think unenlightened is close to (though please correct me if I'm wrong), in which all identity works like passing, and passing is nevertheless expressive. — fdrake

Indeed. I have never thought of it quite like that, but yes. Or I could say that narrative identity is always fiction. Or if you can stand the Freudian terminology, that identity is always a dual act of introjection and projection. That is the answer to why people are exercised about each other's identifications. If a woman is more muscular than me, it is an attack on my masculinity, and contrariwise, as a woman, a muscular woman is an attack on my femininity.

The confusion continues.

Try it like this: instead of "if" always use "if in a possible world"

Then one can say "If in a possible world Hesperus didn't exist, x,y,z.
This is the same meaning as "If Hesperus didn't exist, x,y,z.

But when the substitution is made in your sentence, we get

"If in a possible world, Hesperus didn't exist in this world, ..."

That's already a contradiction, whatever comes after. my reply above makes no sense, and neither does your post that it replies to; but my reply at least has the merit of being a feeble joke.

If Hesperus didn't exist in this world, it could exist in a possible world. — RussellA

If Hesperus didn't exist in this world, it wouldn't be this world, it would be that world.

"The sensation of heat" they say, as if there were only one. The heat one feels on a hot day is not exactly like the heat one feels coming from a radiator or the heat one has when feverish. One tests the temperature of baby's bottle on the sensitive wrist, not the calloused hand. And if you want to try fire walking, make sure there are no nails in the wood, because the conductivity of iron makes it feel much hotter than charcoal at the same temperature, in the short run, and also in the short walk. Warm socks and gloves do not have to be warm to be warming, and nor does chilli sauce. Why is life so complicated? Time for a song.

I proposed that if in this actual world, — RussellA

Pardon me, but it seems to me that this locution is misleading; as soon as the word 'if' appears, you are talking about a possible world, but then you doubly return us to 'this' and 'actual' world. But this actual world is necessarily the way it is, and not the way it would be if anything was different.

If you see what I mean. Or indeed, even if you don't.