I wrote in a Technician article about Performative truths. A performative truth is when performing an action is what makes the truth of the proposition. So when I say, "I now pronounce you man and wife," it means that "the couple is man and wife" is false still after I say it.
But when a Priest says, "I now pronounce you man and wife," it means that the proposition "the couple is man and wife" is true after he said it, and because he said it.
Another example: We give an umpire the authority to say a ball going over is a strike. It's something about his authority that makes it true.
It's a matter of authority, and the authority that we give to people in our society. Philosopher Jamie Whyte has more to say about this, in fact saying that having one's right to her opinion is false and even dangerously wrong. Let's point him out later and maybe retype his argument from the Popular Philosophy Book Crimes Against Logic.
All of this has been said on this blog before. I even said that I got all of this from my philosophy of language class, which wasn't so worthless after all.
My friend Rick says that Performatives existed before the Analytic-Continental divide in philosophy; maybe even Kant did them (we know that we have him and Leibniz to thank for all of this proposition garbage).
My big rant here; my insight is this: Performative truths are a Nexus between objectivity and subjectivity. I was saying this in my article and blog posts before this, but I never really caught it in this way.
I've been posting a lot about Spinoza's Attributes (Thought and Extension) and Feuerbach's divinity of Nature (almost identical to Spinoza, but talking and explicating in his own Feuerbachian way).
This is perhaps where the two planes interact. Spinoza thought that thought is parallel to reality, and that the two were too unalike to interact. Some scholars think of this in terms of listening to music and the production of music. Or, you might consider the stream of consciousness as you are feeling it versus the stream of consciousness, as it exists as a billion's billion chemicals popping and whizzing in your brain, right now. These four things are their pair's two things, and that's what Feuerbach and Spinoza have in mind. FOOTNOTE: George Eliot (Female British Novelist and Philosopher) translated both Spinoza and Feuerbach. Coincidence?
Bring it on home: so the point is this: thought, while seeminlgy subjective (and we can talk about this for a while and try to erase all subjectivity, but until we have the neuroscience to say otherwise will have a difficult time fully unlocking; I personally doubt we will ever eliminate subjectivity (but that is only my belief? (meta-humor people stay with me))) has this foothold in the objective world.
On the other hand; if we reduce all of this business to objectivity, in other words see it in terms of x amounts of chemicals firing in the brain and on and on, everything is completely objective. It works just the same way: objectivity has a foothold in the subjective world.
Wray Herbert
The Lure of Tomorrow
New research on why we procrastinate and what we can do to follow through on at least some of those plans for the new year.
Dec 10, 2008 | Updated: 9:55 a.m. ET Dec 10, 2008
Late holiday shoppers will soonbe rushing out to get the things they'd planned to buy way back in November, when they made those well-intentioned lists. And by New Year's, people will start thinking about projects: updating that resume, cleaning out the attic, starting that exercise routine. But the sad reality is that most of us will not follow through on these commitments, and not because we're insincere. We'll just never get to day one. Tomorrow is always a better time to get going.
And tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. Procrastination is a curse, and a costly one. Putting things off leads not only to lost productivity but also to all sorts of hand wringing and regrets and damaged self-esteem. For all these reasons, psychologists would love to figure out what's going on in the mind that makes it so hard to actually do what we set out to do. Are we fundamentally misguided in the way we think about plans and effort and work? Is there some perverse habit of mind that automatically dampens our sense of urgency? Are we programmed for postponement and delay?
An international team of psychologists has begun exploring these questions in the laboratory. Led by Sean McCrea of the University of Konstanz in Germany, the researchers wanted to see if there might be a link between how we think of a task and our tendency to postpone it. In other words, are we more likely to see some tasks as psychologically "distant"—and thus to consign them to some vague future rather than tackle them now?
Psychological distance is a well-documented idea. It's been shown that people think of geographically distant events and ideas as less detailed and concrete than things taking place nearby. So for example, "locking the door" means simply turning the key here at home, but locking the door 3,000 miles away means security and personal safety. McCrea and his colleagues suspected that this same cognitive oddity might show up in the way we think about time and tasks. That is, vague, abstract tasks might be easier to mentally postpone into the future than concrete tasks. They decided to test this notion in a few simple experiments.
Here's an example. The psychologists handed out questionnaires to a group of students and asked them to respond by e-mail within three weeks. All the questions had to do with rather mundane tasks like opening a bank account and keeping a diary, but different students were given different instructions for answering the questions. Some thought and wrote about what each activity implied about personal traits: what kind of person has a bank account, for example. Others wrote simply about the nuts and bolts of doing each activity: speaking to a bank officer, filling out forms, making an initial deposit, and so forth. The idea was to get some students thinking abstractly and others concretely.
Then they waited. And in some cases, waited and waited. They recorded all the response times to see if there was a difference between the two groups, and indeed there was—a significant difference. Even though they were all being paid upon completion, those in a what-does-it-all-mean mentality were much more likely to procrastinate—and in fact some never got around to the assignment at all. By contrast, those who were focused on the how, when and where of doing the task e-mailed their responses much sooner, suggesting that they hopped right on the assignment rather than delaying it.
This makes sense in an odd sort of way. When you first think about the possibility of trying something new, you're focused on why: What's the purpose? Does it make sense for me to do this? It's still just a distant possibility, and these are the things that matter. Only as you get closer to actually taking on the task do you start to think of the more immediate how-to details. So conversely, thinking about the how-to of a job gives it immediacy—and urgency.
Even so, the scientists decided to double-check their initial findings with a different kind of laboratory technique. In this experiment, the task was to complete sentence fragments, either in an abstract or a concrete way. For example, some might complete this fragment: "An example of a bird is ______." Others completed this kind of fragment: "A bird is an example of ______." The first requires a concrete example—an indigo bunting, for example, or scarlet tanager—while the second asks for an abstract category—warm-blooded vertebrates, say. So again the experiment primed one cognitive style or the other, and again the psychologists logged in the e-mail response times.
The findings, reported in the December issue of the journal Psychological Science, were very clear. Even though the sentence fragments really had nothing to do with the actual task, those primed for concrete thinking were much less apt to delay and postpone than were those primed for abstract thinking. They saw the task as more immediate and acted with more urgency. Those prompted to give vague and amorphous answerswere indecisive.
Lots of psychology experiments don't have a practical take-home message, but these do. You know that exercise routine you've been talking about starting up in January? Well, forget about how virtuous it is, or how healthy, or how it might boost your confidence. Instead, think about putting on your sneakers and tying them, one at a time; entering the front door of the gym and walking to the first treadmill you see; stepping aboard and starting to move your legs, right leg first.
Wray Herbert writes The We're Only Human blog at www.Psychologicalscience.Org/Onlyhuman .
© 2008
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