People care
I am brewing on a big old conceptualization of what “politics” is and why I think it is extremely underrated. I do not mean politics only at the level of government issues. I mean the act of playing social games in order to achieve desired outcomes through organization and cleverly considered action.
When I argue for politics, I often start by trying to convince people that they already engage in politics, and that the vast majority of people they know engage in politics too. That this is normal and healthy, becuase it is a way of emergently deciding what will happen by people pusing their interests in the ways they consider valid for themselves.
I will not defend any of these claims here.
Instead, I will make a much smaller point: when I try to convince people about the politics they are already entrenched in, they often show me instances of what they consider to be altruistic or at least apolitical behavior: people helping someone who cannot help them “just because they care”, people choosing to dedicate time to things that serve as a weight on their ambition because it makes them feel happy, or people who things just because, as in this line from The Stranger that always touches me in a way I find difficult to explain:
I told Marie all about the old man and she laughed. She was wearing a pair of my pajamas with the sleeves rolled up. When she laughed I wanted her again. A minute later she asked me if I loved her. I told her it didn’t mean anything but that I didn’t think so. She looked sad. But as we were fixing lunch, and for no apparent reason, she laughed in such a way that I kissed her.
I want to make it clear: if your explanation of human action and endeavor, doesn’t capture the fact that “people care about things” then you’re doing it wrong. This is very similar to the strawman often given for hedonism: that people will “just end up donig heroin and dying” because of the assumption that people in pursuit of pleasure will not understand how to balance short-term and long-term payoffs.
People care about things. Some of those things look “shallow” like wanting to live in a mansion and eat enormous quantities of food. But they also care about making their dogs happy. They care about seeing people smile. They care about getting enough hugs.
Not only would it be foolish to throw these things away as parts of our explanation of human behavior, but it would be equally foolish to think that people don’t politic in the pursuit of these things. Many, many great figures have assumed that worthiness comes from the use of power, and there is non-trivial element of truth in that. And many politicians have wanted to ring bravery into the hearts of their constuents just as much—and often more—than anything else.
People care about things. If you feel that previous attempts to explain things through pragmatic, game theoretic tradeoffs are thin then let me tell you: I agree. But I think it is less the basic tenets of these frameworks that are failures, but rather that they failed to account for how complex, heteregonous, and overlapping the games we play and the feelings we pursue are.
We contain multitudes, and we politic in the pursuit of their mutually exclusive desires.
Signals and subtlety
People care a lot about the strength with which messages are sent. Subtle messages are often seen as more polite and tactful; explicit messages as rude.
But subtle messages require receivers to already be much in the know. If you are attempting to criticize or police behavior, you will need to be subtle in bringing it up, and yet they must already have some sense of the sins in order to pick up on your subtle message.
How does this work? Information-theoretic differentiation. Recall our pyrite scratch test. The more possible options one needs to distinguish between, the more rigorous and extensive the tests necessary for distinction.
When people walk around already with models of what they might be doing wrong, ways they might be erring or violating norms, it may only take a cough or “ahem” to alter their behavior in the desired direction. But when there isn’t already a “spot” in their brain for being conscientious about a possible error mode, when they didn’t even know they could make that kind of error, that that the behavior could be erroneous in that way, we must be more explicit if we wish them to understand.
(This is also why couples who have been together a while can communicate across the room with eyes and eyebrows: Their models of what’s going on in the room are synchronized enough that specifying and confirming between a relatively small number of understood senses is possible.)
difference distinction subtlety communication strategic interaction etiquette information theory
Knowledge is a skill
When I was in college and through my early twenties, I had a little catchphrase I’d say pretty frequently: “I’d rather have skills than knowledge”. As a classically bookish autist, I seemed pretty strongly bound for academia, but around my junior year I realized I wanted to be doing things and not just learning them, and I ended up ditching school for industry after getting my bachelors in math. Nowadays, I agree with the decision, but not that frame — I think the idea that “skills” and “knowledge” are strongly separable is a mistake.
Games are probably a big culprit of why I used to feel this way. A well-designed game is a great way to improve your capacity for agency and problem-solving by letting you mainline the experience of climbing a heuristic tree with clear and objective feedback. But a big reason why games let you do this is that they’re very clear about setting the bounds you’re working in. Your affordances are totally given to you. You might find a new strategy after hundreds of hours of play, but only a particularly gormless person is going to find a new system they hadn’t interacted with yet.
And when this is the ruler you’re measuring yourself with, what good is “knowledge”, anyhow? Anything you need to know can be found on a wiki or a tooltip; memorizing that stuff is for suckers. Let the system itself be your extended memory and enter a flow state of competence. This is a genuinely useful thing to get good at, and games are a cheap, accessible, and fun way to do it — but this idea of “skill” depends on what’s knowable being a well-defined, easy to access list.
In real life, that usually isn’t the case. You can invent new ways of seeing, bring in an insight from a seemingly-unrelated domain, change the bounds of the problem itself. The kinds of practical successes you’d expect from “skilled” people, but totally reliant on the knowledge that you’re able to act that way. Knowledge is only trivial on a well-maintained garden path; in the wilderness, the skill to call up a bit of knowledge and the knowledge to call on a certain skill reveal themselves to be helplessly intertwined, pulling each other forward like an electromagnetic wave.
Arguments from history, pt 1
Ultimately, intent (like all concepts) is pragmatic. We constructed and continue to use the category because it serves a purpose, because we update behavior on its basis.
The broad purpose of “intent” is to assist us in our future forecasting of other actors. If an action was performed intentionally, then it tells us something important about the goals, capacities, and desires of the actor. This ties in to attributions of moral blame, and to variable outcomes in judicial/regulatory systems, etc.
Humans are often ignorant of their real motivations. They have incentives to fabricate motivations, both to themselves and others. There is no good reason to believe that our motivations “exist” in some identifiable, transparent form as verbal representations, stored in our minds, which can be discovered by “being honest” with ourselves, or by “listening to our feelings.”
If we wish to understand human motivation and rationale, we cannot rely on testimony from actors as to their motivations. (Although occasionally this self-conceptualization or narrativization may be a useful datapoint.)
If Y outcome only happens, or is only likely to happen given X intentionality of a superorganism, then we can attribute X intentionality to that superorganism. Thus “The US hasn’t been invaded” tells us about the US’s goals. (Any “negative” event—i.e. lack of occurrence—can be equally conceptualized as a positive.)
In ethology, there is a similar need to treat animal motivation and intent as a black box. However, scientists studying animal signaling have the advantage of a relatively close coupling between base- and mesa-optimizer: less creative intelligence and a cultural compounding/accumulation in non-human animals makes the division between adaptive and non-adaptive behaviors stable and straightforward. In human beings, behaviors which we would consider clearly intentional (repeated, deliberate, and performed with the sanction of the conscious mind) are often deeply maladaptive, both from an evolutionary (base optimizer) perspective and also from the hedonistic (mesa-optimizer) perspective.1
From here on out, I’ll use “hedonism” and “hedonistic” to refer to behavior that maximizes reward, and the perspective on behavior that wishes to maximize reward.↩︎
intentionality argument from history ethology signaling theory functional pragmatism self-deception conceptualization hedonism mesa-optimization strategic interaction generalized reading
How to answer a question
I’ve been enjoying watching Les Stroud’s directors commentaries of old Surviorman episodes. For the uninitiated: Survivorman is a survival show where Les Stroud goes out in the wilderness geared for a “typical scenario” (e.g. “scuba diver whose boat floated away”) and he survives for a week while filming himself. Strong encounters with the real: if he fails as surviving, he doesn’t eat, and if he fails at filming, he doesn’t have a show.
His reflections on this experience are exactly the information-rich, unsystemized anecdotes we’re all about here. And I want to pull out one particular answer that really emphasizes how an expert will properly answer a question to transmit their experience without going too far. When asked whether eating right before bed makes you cold (as some survival experts say) or warm (as he does), he answered:
I cannot speak to the physiology. It may be very true that eating before bed draws heat from your extremities - after all, the blood goes to the stomach to aid digestion. However, what I can say from a true experiential perspective is that for me, when I bed down in a survival situation and I know I’m going to be cold, then I put in a chunk of fat into my body. My trick when I go camping, and I have done this time and time again with friends of mine who — we’ll go camping, canoe trip, that sort of thing. Backpacking. And I will always reserve a block like the size of a pat of butter, maybe, a little block of cheddar cheese. I say ‘Here, eat this, tell me how you are when you get up in the morning’. And they always say the same thing: “I was so hot I had to put my sleeping bag down a bit to get some cool air in.” So I find that whether or not physiologically it’s true — and any doctor watching this, they can answer that question, I cannot speak to the physiology of it. I can speak to the survival experience and say: absolutely, I always eat before bed, but especially if I can, it’s going to be something high in fat content. And I feel what’s happening is the stomach is churning, working hard to digest that rich fat, and the heat just emanates from my stomach to my extremities, and I’m quite warm.
Les plays a clever trick with the word “physiology”. From a strictly literal perspective, the subjective experience of heat is still a physiological one. What he really means when he says “the physiology” is “the non-experiential” — I have no broader framework beyond the literal sensory experience I am about to recount. He’s preemptively ceding representational privilege to anyone who knows enough to wield it, being careful to only talk about his signal. But because the signal itself is valuable — the subjective experience of being cold is usually what people want to minimize! — he goes from emphasizing the modesty of the representation to emphasizing the resilience of the signal. It’s multiple friends, it’s multiple circumstances, it’s only as little cheese as a pat of butter, it’s a big enough effect that you have to put your sleeping bag down a bit.
He ends with a plausible reason why - “my stomach is churning” - but he doesn’t spend much time on it, because he doesn’t need to. Hypotheses are prone to all sorts of errors and biases and replication problems, and you only need a hypothesis if you’re going to change the circumstances of the signal and want to know if the pattern will still hold in that new context. If you just want to feel warm at night, then knowing something that reliably makes people feel warm at night is enough, no “why” needed. These consistent, theory-free observations are what skilled practitioners are on the hunt for; centering your explanation around them is the sure sign of an expert.
Les Stroud Survivorman examples pragmatism stamp collecting communication
Controller controversies
In Super Smash Melee, controversies have long existed over the legality of modifying controllers, with different tournaments and cultures making different restrictions and allowances.
Brian Funes 2017, “Controller Mods: What They Are, and Who Uses Them”:
While most sports like basketball and football have a standard sized ball, other sports like baseball and tennis have a general regulation for their bats and tennis racquets, giving the players some wiggle room in customizing their equipment. Melee falls into this second category, albeit rather unintentionally. The line is clearly drawn concerning features that are banned in competitive play such as having macros or a turbo button, but when it comes to features a player is allowed to have on their controller, the standard is not defined. Modifications such as button feel and control stick gate modification fall into a grey area which haven’t been adequately addressed as of yet.
Not everyone is happy about these modifications though, seeing some of the notches as an unfair advantage — the “perfect wavedash” notch being one of them. The issue of fairness and having access to unfair resources compared to other contenders competing with a standard setup is another concern. If certain types of modifications are allowed, where is the line drawn?
This discourse is complicated by the fact that manufacturing defects on out-of-box GameCube controllers makes some of them inferior devices, such that modification can perform a leveling function, as much as giving an advantage.
Super Smash Bros cultures of play generalized hacking examples sports competition games
Sow, so reap
I drove past a sign several days ago “whoever sows sparingly, also reaps sparingly.”
This formulation subverts the standard proverb, “as ye sow, so shall ye reap” in such a way that it’s stuck with me.
“so” provides a neutral frame. Somehow, my mind had filled in the blank generously: “work hard; get good results.” “be kind; others will be kind to you.” “plant a big garden; get a lot of crops.” “pay attention; gain knowledge.”
Until presented with a directly negative example (“sow sparingly; reap sparingly”), I had never considered the proverb “in its inverse”–I type, though the negative reading isn’t ‘its inverse’ at all! It’s equally implied by the original construction.
Hearing “sow sparingly, reap sparingly” repainted the proverb in a context that I hadn’t considered before. My immediate leap was “sow generously, reap generously.” I’ve now been spurred to plug in heretofore un-thought-of adverbs, and am finding unexpected riches in what I’d previously considered to be a well-worn phrase.
White Collar
A lot of attention has been paid to USA’s “blue sky” programming. But there’s another ideology present in their early 2010s shows, which I’ll call “good life through fine living” ideology. Suits and White Collar are maybe the best examples.
The male protagonists of these shows are charismatic, handsome, and sophisticated. They dress sharply (in suits natch) and can eye-ball identify designer ties. They have a “timeless” sense of fashion and aesthetic taste. Fine clothing but also food, wine, espresso, runway models, high-rise Manhattan apartments with sheet-glass walls and views of the city.
The show makes this taste appear “objective” in two ways. One, it is legitimized by the shows’ women. White Collar’s art counterfeiter Neil Caffree is paired off against his FBI handler, Peter Burke—the former flamboyant and high-class, the latter modest and middle-class, a bureaucrat to the core. Neil enjoys the finer things of life; he drinks cappuccinos on UWS rooftops, forges art like an old master, and could out-somelier a pro. And each time he makes an aesthetic or taste-based judgment call, Peter Burke is there, skeptical and American and vaguely working class. Who breaks the tie? Burke’s wife Elizabeth, who consistently sides with Neil. (Or else the gorgeous young art curators, jewelers, and rare book collectors Caffrey flirts with.)
The second tactic for legitimation comes from the protagonists’ smarts. Both Neil and Suits Michael Ross are off-the-charts geniuses (to the point of caricature). Ross gets perfect scores on the BAR without going to law school; he has a photographic memory, can speed-read 12,000pg legal tomes in an evening, and outsmarts every Ivy-educated lawyer he crosses paths with. Caffree schools the FBI agents with his lightning-fast mental math; he can recognize a microfiber from a new, unreleased EU $100 bill at fifteen feet; and he’s both artistic and strategic prodigy bar none. Did I mention both these characters are handsome and charismatic, able to pull tail at levels only paralleled by a certain MI6 agent? And indeed Bond is one of the clearest models here: suave, with the correct opinions about cocktails, his coiffed hair never ruffled by high speed chases. Sherlock Holmes completes the picture, with his fantasy of perfect inference. It’s a teenage wet dream that hits every target demo: the nerd, the ladies man, the wannabe artist all wrapped in one.
This isn’t actually what interests me in White Collar. What interests me is that most media representations of con-men look like House of Games or Oceans 11. There’s a con, and then there’s a reveal. Game over. In White Collar, it’s unclear—to Neil included—what his actual aims are, and whether he is conning Peter. His best play is intrinsic empowerment, aka becoming Peter’s friend, becoming likeable. And so he dives into this, and it’s impossible to tell, at least for much of the first season, whether he actually likes Peter or not. In some sense, whether he likes Peter is irrelevant. Liking Peter may mean that he goes to lengths to prevent Peter taking the hit, or getting to hurt, in whatever con Neil pulls for his freedom.
So you have a friendship forming, a working romance, but each party has its own motivations and suspicions towards the other. The show consists of a series of trust falls, of suspicions advanced and then contradicted, each party revealing itself to be trustworthy. And what you also see is what it costs, staying on someone’s good side, becoming their friend. The sacrifices Neil makes, the bullets he takes. Instead of taking opportunities for credit, on jobs well done, he redirects the credit Peter’s way. When Peter has marriage trouble, Neil bends over backward to help—lending out his rooftop, giving him anniversary ideas, helping troubleshoot and brainstorm. There are favors Neil could ask which he doesn’t, because the short-term gain of asking the favor undermines the long-term project of not making Peter feel the relationship is instrumental, that he’s being used. “I don’t want her to think I want anything from her,” Emma Stone’s handmaid character says of her Queen, in The Favourite.
And like all good serial television, side missions swerve weekly play in a new direction, while always somehow looping back to, and contributing to the main mission, which for Neil is freedom + a chance to see Kate, his girlfriend who appears to have fled the country, perhaps not of her own will. Like a Rockstar game, new crises emerge, NPCs beg for your help, dangling a carrot of reward so you give a shit. Goals that are instrumental towards one greater goal become fungible, convert out to point scoring.
White Collar television taste legitimation cultural capital strategic interaction trust cons deception friendship
Drinking steel and zapping urushiol
It was a night like many other nights—I transferred stock into ice cube trays for the freezer, had a friend over for coffeecake, brought some leftover rolls to my parents’ house on my way to drop my friend off, and wrote a quick terminal response to Possible Modernist on our discussion of the motivation of self-experimentation in science. “We’ve taken this as far as we can,” I wrote, “I can’t know whether Boyle was seeking fame, adrenaline, or the betterment of humankind, and in Year of our Lord 2022, nobody else can know about Boyle either.”
Little did I know, less than 36 hours later, I’d be penning a new post in the Drinking Steel series. This because I heard my own self say “next time I get poison ivy, I might try giving myself a tattoo, and then zapping it with a neodymium-doped Yttrium-Aluminum-Garnet laser.”
So, what’s going on here? I don’t want to dox myself, but I’m the opposite of Hunter S. Thompson. I’m a salary worker who always shows up early and prefers to avoid attention. I read weird books and I think a lot, but I usually think about dirt and plants, sometimes chickens and sometimes dog training. I’m averse to drugs in general, and yes that means I’m unlikely to take ibuprofen or benadryl. I’m exceedingly boring, I drink plenty of water, I’m in very good health, I go to bed at 9:30, I do my chores, and you never have to wonder where I am.
But I want to recreationally give myself a jailhouse tattoo, then zap it with a laser?
Yes. See, I get poison ivy really badly. The worst I’ve had it was in undergrad—I had an outdoor job and I shared a car with a coworker who didn’t get poison ivy, didn’t see it, so walked through it and smeared it all over the car every weekend. I figured “well, this isn’t fun,” and I’d put calamine lotion on myself and then wrap up the ooziest parts of myself with saran wrap so I wouldn’t ooze on the car seat, and I’d take oatmeal baths when I got home, and even though my job ended in October, I still had poison ivy in January when I went in for my annual checkup. “You, uh, know we can DO something about poison ivy that’s lasted 5 months, right?” asked the doctor. “Well, no, I guess I didn’t.” So the doctor gave me a prednisone prescription, and after 12 days my skin had stopped oozing.
But they were a hellish 12 days. Prednisone makes one’s heart beat too fast, one feels one’s heartbeat in one’s ears for the first several days of the dose, and one (or at least I, who am very rarely angry) winds up angry the whole time.
Now that I know there’s something I can do to surmount ‘contact dermatitis from urushiol,’ I find a nurse hotline to get me a prednisone rx as soon as I find out I’ve been exposed. When I haven’t been oozing for 5 months, a simple 7-day course of prednisone gets the job done. And the cure (pounding heartbeat and angry) is a lot more unpleasant than the disease—but the cure only lasts 7 days and the disease untreated would last months. So when I’ve had the misfortune of petting a dog that had run through poison ivy, I regretfully cancel my social engagements for the week, and take prednisone.
Up until last week, I thought my poison ivy response (and having low durability tooth enamel) were my only two medical flaws of interest. But last week I got a bee sting, and instead of the usual “10 minutes of acute pain, 40 minutes of low-grade pain, 10 minutes of itching, then you forget it ever happened,” I had acute pain that needed ice for 36 hours. I had pain from my finger to my neck, and (though I was stung in the finger), my armpit swelled up like a tennis ball. After 3 days the pain and swelling were gone everywhere except the finger itself. But at sting + 6 days, the finger still ached and was about 25% swollen.
Until! I had my friend over for coffeecake—coffeecake I had made as a thank-you for giving me a cosmetic laser treatment. About 15 minutes of laser zapping mixed with icing, and then an application of ointment, then the rest of my evening as described above. And when I woke up the next morning, my pinky was 50% more swollen again, and it finally itched! It was finally getting better!
It itched all morning and then all the swelling receded, and I finally am relieved of the pain that had been constant for a week.
Wait, why do you have a laser in the first place?
I was recently in Mexico, where I found out (a) that tattoos can be removed with laser treatments and (b) you can just make an appointment at a salon and receive a laser removal treatment. Full tattoo removal takes 6-10 sessions, I have a tattoo I’ve been regretting for the bulk of my adult life, so I got a treatment before returning home.
Six weeks later and back in the US, I tried to make an appointment for a second treatment. “One laser session please.” “Sure, that’ll be $2700 for the 10 session package, payable upfront.” “No, you see, I don’t know when I’ll be near your studio, and so my sessions might be longer than just 6 weeks apart, can I just pay for this session this time, and next session next time?” “We don’t do that.” “What if it only takes 9 sessions for me, since I already had a session in Mexico?” “Well I guess you could get a six-session package, but if your tattoo wasn’t gone yet you would have to get another six-session package.” “Huh. I can’t just show up and give you $270 and you laser my tattoo?” “No.” “I see.”
I relate this frustration to a friend, who says “ebay sells hair removal lasers, I bet you can find a tattoo laser too.”
And, indeed, I could. And $500 later, I have my own nd:YAG laser. It’s not as nice as the salon models, it runs at 10 pulses per second as compared to the picosecond professional models. So it hurts more, but I don’t have to feel beleaguered by the rigid billing structure of the pseudo-medical industry. Laser tattoo removal probably requires some weekend certification, but I played around with some sakura pigma pens on card stock until I’d developed a technique I could teach to friends. I did buy some fairly spendy, made-in-the-USA safety goggles for the laser wavelength I purchased, because I don’t want to be cavalier with eyesight.
So here’s my hypothesis1 of why getting a tattoo removal treatment cured my beesting. Note that after cooking up the hypothesis, I’ve changed it 3x before even running the test. I clearly have no idea what I’m doing, and it is very good that I am not allowed near any test subjects other than myself.
A tattoo is made by injecting pigment particles too large for the human lymphatic system to remove, into the skin. A macrophage engulfs the pigment particles, the macrophage is nestled in a collagen matrix, and the pigment is held in place ad mortem. A neat property of pigments is that they are intense and uniform in their color (that’s why they’re chosen, after all) so they respond uniformly to energy delivered at their absorptive wavelength. Hit a large black pigment particle with concentrated light at 1064nm, and it will shatter into a bunch of smaller black pigment particles. And the human lymphatic system can come around and “garbage collect” these small pigment bits, and send them out as waste.
So, all right, maybe my lymph system had phoned it in and stopped caring about the bee sting. But upon receiving the laser zap, it drummed up a robust response, shuttling pigment particles away toward my kidneys, and some extra white blood cells noticed “oh hey we could keep processing this bee venom while we’re on the clock.”
In conclusion! in order to avoid the unpleasant week of prednisone, next time I get poison ivy, I’m going to see whether I can’t stimulate a correct immune response using lasers v pigment.
I realized as soon as I said it out loud, that this makes me look like a madman. But it’s trivial to see that I’m not seeking fame or adrenaline. I’m just using the tools around me to test weird hypotheses in an attempt to improve my life. I still can’t judge Boyle, but I can decisively tell Possible Modernist that SOME batshit self-experimenters are only in it for the knowledge.
(This hypothesis is nearly certainly crazy and wrong. Used to thinking about plants, I originally typed ‘a cellulose matrix,’ then went back to correct myself, called it a collagen matrix, did some actual research, and found out that tattoo pigments are held in place by a succession of macrophages (Baranska 2018, Tamoutounour 2012).↩︎
A problem of self-interpretation
by Neil
People often misinterpret themselves. I think I’m angry, but actually I’m hungry; I think I have a justified, rational distaste for someone, but actually I’m jealous of them; I think it’s very urgent that I clean my room, but I’m actually just avoiding another task. You know how it goes. (Hazard has some great examples here, too.)
Sometimes, I realize that I’ve misinterpreted myself. Someone else asks me, “are you sure you just objectively dislike that person? Because it seems personal.” Sometimes, this alternate explanation — often a less flattering explanation — rings true. Sometimes it doesn’t.
But “ringing true” is also a feeling. How can I know I’ve interpreted that correctly?
Conversational confirmations
There’s an interesting parallel between “circular analyses of concepts” and the way people figure out whether they understand each other, in conversation.
If I repeat back ~the exact same words, there’s no guarantee I’m picking up your intended sense, because I’m simply repeating the same surrogates back (the letter that represents the spirit of the message).
If I repeat back very different sorts of words or descriptions, and you read them and say, “yes this is another valid way of expressing the spirit of what I was saying in different letters,” then you know we’re aligned on the “spirit” of meaning.
This seems roughly analogous to the multilateration/hyperbolic positioning thing (“triangulation,” loosely/generally) that Beiser recently mentioned.
Another way of conceptualizing it is: there is some “thing” being referenced, and a given description specifies some of that thing’s properties explicitly, and then other of properties are only “implicitly referenced”: they’re aspects of the thing which are not mentioned in the map but are instead part of the territory. If you are able to describe parts of the referenced territory that are not mentioned in the original referencing map, you are able to ~confirm that you understand which sector your interlocutor’s referring to.
hyperbolic positioning multilateration map and territory surrogates spirit letter meaning
Concepts and circularity
Concepts (categories of objects) are simplifications of an underlying, continuous/fluid reality, for the purpose of procedure (regular actions in response to regular perceptual cues that yield regular outcomes).
They consist of the visible-observed (that is, of surrogates used to identify categorical belonging in the first place), and also those unseen properties which can be deduced with some reliability from the categorical belonging decided, properties whose pragmatic value underlies (“pays for”) the creation and upkeep of the concept in the first place.
Circularity emerges when the properties used to determine membership are the same properties deduced from belonging. To define a set as possessing X property, and then remark (as if insightfully) that all members possess X property, is to say nothing at all. Such investigations are solely lexicographic.
“Is” the concept the inferred properties depended upon for practical activity, or the surrogates used to identify belonging? Neither/both.
Sometimes we get confused what we care about: Are we speaking about “class” as the composite of surrogates which signal and communicate class, or as the abstract processes and individual realities which give rise to the expression of these surrogates?
Wrinkle (for the author or readers to solve): Cases where the category exists for coordinative purposes, and the surrogate is arguably “the point” (to ensure synergistic behavior and the ability to communicate about the thing itself).
concepts surrogation class coordination object-oriented ontology pragmatism functional pragmatism