Guest post: Propositional belief and the other kind
Originally a comment by Bjarte Foshaug on The moment when we stop.
Daniel Dennett once made a useful distinction between two very different types of “belief”:
1. You can believe in the actual descriptive content of a proposition, e.g. I believe that the sun will rise in the East tomorrow morning (as seen from my frame of reference).
2. You can believe in whatever a proposition happens to mean, e.g. I believe that E = mc².
The first kind of belief requires you to actually understand the proposition in question (you cannot believe in the content without knowing what the content is), whereas the latter does not*. I have a vague, general notion what “E = mc²” means, but nothing that merits the label “understanding”. I simply trust that physicists know what they’re talking about. Dennett made the point that most religious “beliefs” seem to be of the latter kind, i.e. even the believers themselves don’t have any clear idea of what it actually is they believe in except that “whatever it happens to be” is called “God” etc. I think the same goes for the “beliefs” required by gender ideology which is why even asking TRAs to define what they mean by words like “woman”, “gender”, “trans”, “cis”, “(non-)binary” etc. is now considered a “transphobic dog-whistle” etc.
* In fact there doesn’t even have to be anything to understand. E.g. it’s perfectly possible to “believe” that “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe: All mimsy were the borogoves, and the mome raths outgrabe” even if there is no content to believe in.
Just because they call someone a gestation receptacle doesn’t mean they don’t know what a woman is, and if they say that the term woman is ambiguous, or that it’s a fluid or undefinable concept, then they are lying. Men can never be women. It’s not our responsibility to validate liars. We can play along for the sake of civility, but that is all. I can choose to participate in a fantasy for whatever purpose, but in the end, there are four lights.
I remember most vividly as if it happened just yesterday. I was a late teenager in a group of (male) late teenagers (as it happened, all fellow trainee soldiers) and the argument was over religion; specifically between adherents of the various Christian churches. One of our number, a Catholic, was asked about some doctrinal issue or other, and I found his reply to be most revealing. It was simply “I’m not sure what we believe about that.” The Protties in our number: Methodists, Anglicans, Calathumpians etc, immediately grabbed that and ran with it. But it got me thinking: how can you believe some doctrinal proposition or other, and not know what it is?
The best answer I found was in the writings of the French sociologist Emile Durkheim: in any religious ceremony, the group is actually worshipping itself. So believing becomes the means to belonging. It does not really matter what we believe. We don’t even have to know too much detail on that score at all. What is important is that we all believe it together, and in its entirety. No exceptions or heresies allowed.
On further refinement: I think that the Chinese got it right. Religion is at heart ancestor worship, as in ‘Faith of Our Fathers.’
Which reminds me of the story told by Alan Watts about a Japanese Zen Master, who was given a copy of Yeshua bar Joseph’s (ie Jesus Christ’s) Sermon on the Mount and asked for his opinion. He read it through and then said: “This is good. This is very good indeed.! I tell you truly. Whoever it was who said this is not far from enlightement!”
twiliter
They certainly used to know it less than ten years ago, as we can tell by their own words back then. Of course, in the absence of telepathic abilities, it’s always risky to make any sweeping claims about what others do or don’t believe. There is certainly no shortage of outright dishonesty, but I strongly suspect there is also an awful lot of doublethink (a.k.a. compartmentalization) and self-deception going on. Once again, I wouldn’t underestimate people’s ability to make themselves believe things for self-serving reasons. We all like to think we arrived at our current beliefs and opinions through a fair, impartial, perfectly rational assessment of the available information, when, in fact, what most of us are doing most of the time has more to do with rationalizing pre-held beliefs, rooting for our “team”, booing the other team, tribal loyalty, ideological conformity, “identity”, self image, old habit (“I believe it today because I believed it yesterday”), etc. than controlled experiments or Bayesian statistics. I think Thomas Gilovich sums it up nicely in How We Know What Isn’t So:
Along the same lines, I once made a distinction between reasons to believe and excuses to believe (pretty much the definition of rationalization). All the usual talking points about “clownfish” and “intersex” may not constitute intellectually compelling reasons for believing in gender ideology, but if you are motivated to believe it anyway they may represent a good enough excuse. As Sastra has pointed out on several occasions, skepticism offers plenty of truisms that can be appropriated in service of the TRA agenda “science is often counter-intuitive”, “insisting that reality must fit into nice tidy categories is a sign of sloppy thinking” etc.
Omar
I like the analogy others have drawn between religion and software: People typically skip right past the terms and conditions and jump straight to “I agree”.
It’s perfectly reasonable to change a belief when new data becomes available. That’s Dennett’s belief in content. Someone could say that they used to believe a “woman” was an adult human female, but the existence of males with Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome and males who are convinced they’re women are hard cases which forced them to modify their view. TWAW. That’s certainly debatable, but they’re still operating in Belief #1.
But the fervor with which the view that TWAW is held shows something else matters besides the rational analysis. What that is, is obvious in their rhetoric. Moral Outrage. Trans people are suffering. They are dying. They are suffering and dying because of people who don’t believe they’re the sex they say they are. Lack of belief kills. Believe then what the proposition means: it means life.
It’s hard for me to imagine that the belief in the concepts around trans would have gained much traction if self-identified trans people were on the whole a well-adjusted bunch, casual about what bathrooms they use and not particularly interested in what other people think of them. Connecting a moral crisis to a belief is a huge red flag that we’re dealing with Dennett’s second example. It’s like when Christians argue for the existence of God by invoking Heaven, Hell, and/or the comfort faith can give. None of that should matter — if the concept is good enough. When someone keeps bobbing up during discussions waving emotional emergency around, however, they’re probably believing in the proposition, not the content.
It’s very much Tinkerbell territory, isn’t it. Believing is enough to save them, but only if enough children believe with all their heart. If we don’t clap, they die.
Because logically, becoming the sex that:
1. Is subject to the large majority of domestic abuse and violence
2. Is discarded at birth in countries where low birth rate is the goal
3. Is sold without agency for dowery by their parents in order to bear childen
4. Is subject to honor killing for loving someone other than who their parents choose
5. Must wear stultifying covering in order to be hidden from view
6. Had no say in their own financial lives until the late 20th century in the United States
7. Could be legally raped by their husbands until only very recently in the United States
8. Is not allowed to decide when they should be able to have an abortion
8. a. Is considered of lesser value to society than a clump of cells that may one day be a person
9. Is told that in order to supplement their college tuition they should be fucked by men for money
10. Are told that if they don’t have sex they are frigid, but if they do have sex they are sluts
11. Are threatened with rape and murder for not believeing that gender identity is the true measure of their own sex
12. Have to face the fact that the word Women is exclusionary now when it comes to women’s health care (that only applies to their bodies.)
13. Are the targets of men (sometimes even the police sworn to protect them) who would kidnap, rape, and murder them
14. Are depicted in pornography as wanting to be degraded, put in harms way by choking, or other means in order to excite men
15. Are not accepted into political leadership (except very begrudgingly and when they do are subject to even more intense misogyny than women who aren’t leaders
16. Are considered not treatable by male doctors under the Taliban due to “modesty” rules, even though women in Afghanistan are not allowed to be doctors
17. Are compelled into polyamorous marriages to old men in order to multiply the FLDS and other cult religions
18. Are considered to be the only ones who should make the sandwiches (I mean, really, guys?)
19. Harassed and teased as teens for developing breasts
20. Harassed and teased as teens for not developing breasts
21. Subject to rape and harassment in the military only to find that they often have to report the rape to their own rapist if he is in her chain of command
22. Used by soldiers raping them as a spoil of war
23. Trafficked and sold so that men can use them without any recourse to justice
24. Kidnaped by jihadists to make new jihadists
25. As a Saudi man told me “to keep the home and care or the children is the highest calling for women.”
Can’t be seen as a step up in social class to them.
I could do this all day, and I think you get the picture. It makes no logical sense for men to be acknowledged as women in order to make them more empowered, or happier. So why the insistence? Why this article of faith that must be honored by everyone to please such a noisy few?
As has been said before, it’s down to validation. These men must be seen as women, in order to do so we must recite the litany, recite not only their pronouns but our own, clap for TinkerBell, or they can’t get their gender euphoria.
And/or it’s a paraphilia and/or it’s because they have such profound contempt for us that they think they do Being A Woman better than we do.