It’s useful to have philosophy people on the scene.

The reference to the ‘how many fingers?’ torture bit towards the end of 1984 is very interesting. There’s a similar case in Severance, where Holly has to read out an apology script over and over again, ‘until she means it’. It’s a kind of set piece in epistemology texts, about ‘doxastic in/voluntarism’. Can I *will* my beliefs (doxa)? Can I believe something just because it’s in my interests to do so, and hence something I want to believe. Doxastic voluntarists think you can do this, doxastic involuntarists think you can’t. Doxastic voluntarists often point to torture cases, because they – torturers, not doxastic voluntarists – try to induce a breaking down of the structure of the will, together with the structure of the Self. Once the structure of the Self is dismantled, the victim can reconstruct their beliefs in a way that coincides with their interests, and end their pain. So the claim is that, if you can put people under enough pressure, you can make them believe that four is five, that black is white, that a man is a women. (None of this is terribly supportive of the NHS Fife position)