Scroll down for the dictionary of thought distortions A to Z.
Introduction
Thought distortions are “techniques”, that, unconsciuos or conscious, are used from an interest in finding ways of getting on in the world, rather than an interest in finding ways of discovering the truth. Thought distortions are the background for poor reasoning, diversionary ploys, seductive reasoning errors, techniques of persuasion and avoidance, psychological factors, which can be obstacles to clear thought.
Introduction
Thought distortions are “techniques”, that, unconsciuos or conscious, are used from an interest in finding ways of getting on in the world, rather than an interest in finding ways of discovering the truth. Thought distortions are the background for poor reasoning, diversionary ploys, seductive reasoning errors, techniques of persuasion and avoidance, psychological factors, which can be obstacles to clear thought.
Critical thinking, or philosophy, is in opposition to thought distortions. Critical thinking is about spotting thought distortions, and examining them by presenting reasons and evidence in support of conclusions. Critical thinking is the only tool you can use in order to explore, change and restructure thought distortions. It is not something psychotherapy should take care of!
The difference between the use of thought distortions and the use of critical thinking is very shortly said, that those who use thought distortions are in the control of one central thought distortion Magical thinking, which is active when you don´t discriminate between image and reality, while critical thinking is active, when you do make this discrimination.
The difference can further be clarified by comparing the so-called Sophists to the philosopher Socrates:
The difference can further be clarified by comparing the so-called Sophists to the philosopher Socrates:
After centuries of successful trading, the local gods and festivals could no longer satisfy the religious needs of the ancient Athenians. Their spiritual hunger was exacerbated by the stress of city life, by the constant threat of destruction, and by the grim vision of totalitarian Sparta: the vision of Greeks living without light or grace or humour, as though the gods had withdrawn from their world.
Into the crowded space of Periclean Athens came the wandering teachers, selling their “wisdom” to the bewildered populace. Any charlatan could make a killing, if enough people believed in him. Men like Gorgias and Protagoras, who wandered from house to house demanding fees for their instruction, preyed on the gullibility of a people made anxious by war.
To the young Plato, who observed their antics with outrage, these “Sophists” were a threat to the very soul of Athens. One alone among them seemed worthy of attention, and that one, the great Socrates whom Plato immortalised in his dialogues, was not a Sophist, but a true philosopher.
The philosopher, in Plato´s characterisation, awakens the spirit of inquiry. He helps his listeners to discover the truth, and it is they who bring forth, under his catalysing influence, the answer to life´s riddles. The philosopher is the midwife, and his duty is to help us to what we are – free and rational beings, who lack nothing that is required to understand our condition. The Sophist, by contrast, misleads us with cunning fallacies, takes advantage of our weakness, and offers himself as the solution to problems of which he himself is the cause.
There are many signs of the Sophists, but principal among these is that they are subjectivists and relativists. Their teachings are about how to get on in the world, and not about how to find the truth. Anything goes: not facts, but the best story wins. And the result is mumbo-jumbo, condescension and the taking of fees. The philosopher uses plain language, does not talk down to his audience, and never asks for payment. Such was Socrates, and in proposing him as an ideal, Plato defined the social status of the philosopher for centuries to come.
No one should doubt that sophistry is alive and well. My concept of the Matrix Conspiracy is permeated with it (see my article The Matrix conspiracy). We see it in the postmodern intellectualism, in the management culture, and in the New Age environment. The Sophists are back with a vengeance, and are all the more to be feared, in that they come disguised as philosophers. For, in this time of helpless relativism and subjectivity, philosophy alone has stood against the tide, reminding us that those crucial distinctions on which life depends – between true and false, good and evil, right and wrong – are objective and binding. Philosophy has until now spoken with the accents of the academy and not with the voice of the fortune teller.
When Plato founded the first academy, and placed philosophy at the heart of it, he did so in order to protect the precious store of wisdom from the assaults of charlatans, to create a kind of temple to truth in the midst of falsehood, and to marginalise the Sophists who preyed on human confusion.
The Sophists were teachers of rhetoric, who against a fee, taught people how to persuade other people about their “truths”. Rhetoric, or sophistry, is the art of persuasion. Rather than giving reasons and presenting arguments to support conclusions, as Socrates did, then those who use sophistry are employing a battery of techniques, such as emphatic assertion, persuader words and emotive language, to convince the listener, or reader, that what they say or imply is true.
The Sophists taught their pupils how to win arguments by any means available; they were supposedly more interested in teaching ways of getting on in the world than ways of finding the truth, as Socrates. Therefore any charlatan is welcome. And the use of thought distortions is seen as the best tool, when practising the mantra: “It is not facts, but the best story, that wins!”
Below I have made a “mini-dictionary” of the most common thought distortions. You can also see it as a “mini-course” in philosophy.
Concepts that are explained elsewhere in the dictionary are marked in bold type.
(Note that this page frequently is being updated with additions and changes. The best way to follow these updates is by clicking into my facebook page (see right sidebar). You don´t need to like or join!)
(Note that this page frequently is being updated with additions and changes. The best way to follow these updates is by clicking into my facebook page (see right sidebar). You don´t need to like or join!)
Ad hoc clauses
Clauses added to a hypothesis to make the hypothesis consistent with some new observation or discovered fact. If your hypothesis is threatened by some inconvenient fact, which it is incapable of explaining, you have two options: you can either abandon your hypothesis and seek a new one which is capable of explaining this new fact; or else you can add a special clause to your general hypothesis, an ad hoc clause. Patching up a hypothesis is a move, which can be acceptable, but often it is not. Most often it is just a way of explaining away the inconvenient fact. Related to Rationalization.
Ad hominem move
Ad hominem move is a Latin phrase meaning “to the person”. The devious move in debate, where you shift attention from the point in question to some non-relevant aspect of the person making it.
Calling someone´s statement ad hominem is always a reproach. This reproach involves the claim that the aspects of the arguer´s personality or behaviour, which have become the focus of discussion, are irrelevant to the point being discussed. Often ad hominem move is simply based on prejudice. It can also be a rhetorical move, for example setting up a straw man.
Ad hominem move is a very widespread, and problematic, move among psychologists and psychotherapists, who can´t limit their theories to clients, wherefore it can be very difficult to have a normal discussion/relationship with these people (read more about the Ad Hominem Move in my article The Sokal Hoax).
Ad hominem move is related to Good Intentions Bias, and Hermeneutics of Suspicion
Ad hominem move is related to Good Intentions Bias, and Hermeneutics of Suspicion
Affect bias
The affect bias refers to our tendency to make judgments based on feelings of liking or disliking with little input from deliberative reasoning.
The affect bias hinders our ability to see the potential negative consequences of our own position and the potential positive consequences of an opponent´s position.
Related to Persuader words, Rhetoric, and Sophistry.
Anecdotal evidence
Evidence which comes from selected stories either of what has happened to you or to someone you know. In many cases this is very weak evidence and typically involves generalizing from a particular case. Often anecdotal evidence is clouded by Wishful thinking. Related to Testimonials
Apophenia and pareidolia
Apophenia is the spontaneous perception of connections and meaningfulness of unrelated phenomena. The term was coined by German neurologist and psychiatrist Klaus Conrad (1905-1961). Conrad focused on the finding of abnormal meaning or significance in random experiences by psychotic people. The term has found a place outside of psychiatry and is used to describe the natural tendency of human beings to find meaning and significance in random, coincidental, or impersonal data. Apophenia may be described as the tendency to find personal information in noise, e.g., happening upon an open safety pin and seeing the arms as a sign indicating the time your son committed suicide.
Pareidolia is a type of illusion or misperception involving a vague or obscure stimulus being perceived as something clear and distinct. For example, in the discolorations of a burnt tortilla one sees the face of Jesus. Or one sees the image of Mother Teresa in the folds of a cinnamon bun or Vladimir Lenin in the soap scum of a shower curtain.
Apophenia and pareidolia can occur simultaneously as in the case of seeing a birthmark pattern on a goat as the Arabic word for Allah and thinking you´ve received a message from God. Likewise, not only seeing the Virgin Mary in tree bark but believing the appearance is a divine sign brings together apophenia and pareidolia. Seeing an alien spaceship in a pattern of lights in the sky is an example of pareidolia, but it becomes apophenia if you believe the aliens have picked you as their special envoy. Seeing Satan in the smoke of a burning building slips from pareidolia to apophenia when the viewer start thinking that Satan is giving the world a sign that he is alive and well.
Under ordinary circumstances, apophenia provides a psychological explanation for many delusions based on sense perception. For example, it explains many UFO sightings, as well as the hearing of sinister messages on records played backwards. Pareidolia explains Elvis, Bigfoot, and Lock Ness Monster sightings. Pareidolia and apophenia explain numerous religious apparitions and visions. And they explain why some people see a face or a building in a photograph of the Cydonia region of Mars. But they don´t explain all paranormal phenomena in relation to sense perception. Paranormal phenomena in relation to sense perception also have to be seen in relation to spiritual crises and mystical experiences (see my articles Spiritual crises as the cause of paranormal phenomena and Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with mystical experiences).
Apophenia and pareidolia are related to Arbitrary inference, Magical thinking and Wishful thinking.
Arbitrary inference
Arbitrary inference means, that you make a causal linking of factors, which is accidental and misleading. Is closely connected to Magical thinking, and Clustering illusion
Argumentum ad populum
In logic, an argumentum ad populum (Latin for “appeal to the people”) is a fallacious argument that concludes a proposition to be true because many or most people believe it; it alleges: “if many believe so, it is so.”
This type of argument is known by several names, including appeal to the masses, appeal to belief, appeal to the majority, argumentum by consensus, authority of the many, and bandwagon fallacy, and in Latin as argumentum ad numerum (“appeal to the number”), and consensus gentium (“agreement of the clans”). It is also the basis of a number of social phenomena, including communal reinforcement and the bandwagon effect, the Chinese proverb “three men make a tiger” concerns the same idea.
Attribution
Attribution is a misleading way to explain incidents, for example one-sided ascribing the reason for, or the responsibility for, negative incidents, to yourself, or to other people or circumstances, without including other elements in the situation. Is closely connected with sense of guilt or anger. Also related to projection.
Availability bias
The availability bias is a cognitive bias involving making quick judgments based on the speed with which memories are aroused and become available to the conscious mind. The main factors influencing the speed with which memories present themselves are recent frequency of similar experiences or messages, or the salient, dramatic, or personal nature of experiences.
In our culture, the mass media play an important role in affecting what comes to mind quickly when we think of the frequency, importance, or causes of things. Rational judgments should be made on the basis of a consideration of all the relevant evidence, but many judgments we consider rational are made based on the ease with which they come to us. For example, a person might decide not to take a cruise to Alaska that she was about to book when she heard about the cruise ship Costa Concordia striking a reef hear the Tuscan island of Giglio, killing more than 20 passengers. The safety of a cruise to Alaska has not diminished because of what happened off the coast of Italy, but the news report and videos immediately bring to the mind the horror of dying on a captized cruise ship. The decision not to take the planned cruise has been biased by the news of the Costa Concordia. Likewise, many people refuse to fly on a commercial airliner because someone they love died in an airplane crash, yet these same people will drive thousands of miles every year rather than fly, even though they are more likely to be killed in an automobile crash than in an airliner crash.
When asked for your opinion on teenage drug use, premarital sex, morals of politicians, good stocks to invest in, the incidence of violent crime, or any other subject that mass media outlets are likely to cover, the odds are that your answer will be based on what comes immediately to mind and that will be heavily influenced by what you´ve read, seen, or heard recently in the mass media. Or, your answer will be heavily influenced by personal experience. What is unlikely is that your opinion will be based on objective or scientific knowledge of the subject. This tendency to make judgments by the ease with which ideas come to mind is called the availability heuristic.
Scientific studies have shown that certain kinds of personality traits make one more susceptible to the availability bias. Scwartz et al. found that people who have great faith in intuition and people who are powerful (or made to feel powerful) tend to be affected more strongly by ease of retrieval than by the content they retrieve, if indeed they even bother with much content.
The way to mitigate the availability bias is to be aware of it and to take the necessary steps to get good data before making a judgment. For example, try to be aware that when the first thing evoked in memory is a stereotype (see Representativeness bias) or is accompanied by very pleasant feelings, it becomes more difficult to overcome the availability bias.
The availability bias is a central issue in my book A Portrait of a Lifeartist.
Backfire effect
The backfire effect is a curious response many people have to evidence that conflicts with their beliefs: instead of becoming open to possibility that the evidence might be correct and one might have to change one´s mind, many people become more convinced that they were right in th first place. Yes, that´s right. Some people´s beliefs get stronger when evidence against their belief is presented to them. You would think that a rational person would base his beliefs on the strenght of the evidence and that evidence against his belief should weaken rather than strengthen his belief, but there is a growing body of scientific evidence that has found most of us are not that rational when it comes to dealing with evidence that conflicts with beliefs we already hold.
I think, that the cause of backfire effect is because a belief has become an ideology. Ideologies are more interested in finding ways of getting on in the world, rather than in finding ways of finding the truth. Ideologies also seem to think black and white. Ideologies always have an anti-ideology, and enemy image, which they attribute on to everyone, who don´t agree. An ideology is therefore characterized by, that it is not able to contain, or direct refuses, rationality and critical thinking. This will of course result in some kind hostility toward the truth.
Backfire effect is related to Motivated reasoning, Ideology and Cognitive dissonance. Also read my articles The difference between philosophical education and ideological education, and The Hermeneutics of Suspicion.
Bandwagon effect
The bandwagon effect, closely related to opportunism, is a phenomenon - observed primarily within the fields of microeconomics, political science, and behaviorism – that people often do and believe things merely because many other people do and believe the same things. The effect is often called herd instinct, though strictly speaking, this effect is not a result of herd instinct. The bandwagon effect is the reason for the bandwagon´s fallacy (see Argumentum ad populum).
As more people come to believe in something, others also “hop on the bandwagon” regardless of the underlying evidence.
The bandwagon effect occurs in voting: some people vote for those candidates or parties who are likely to succeed (or are proclaimed as such by the media), hoping to be on the “winner´s side” in the end.
In microeconomics, bandwagon effect describes interactions of demand and preference. The bandwagon effect arises when people´s preference for a commodity increases as the number of people buying it increases.
Begging the question
Assuming the very point that is at issue. Sometimes this involves incorporating the conclusion of the argument into one of the premises.
For example, in a law case, if someone is being tried on an accusation of murder, and has pleaded not guilty, it would be begging the question to refer to them as “the murderer” rather than “the accused” until their guilt had been established.
Some forms of begging the question occur in the way questions are asked. Complex questions are often question-begging in this way. For instance, the question “When did you start beating your husband?” might be question-begging if the fact that you did beat your husband had yet to be established.
Black and white thinking
Black and white thinking is to classify all situations, incidents or things, as an example of one of two extremes, when the facts actual are, that there between the two extremes exists a complete spectrum of other possible viewpoints.
Black and white thinking is a variation of false dichotomy.
Black and white thinking arises when you try to get the world to fit into very simple prejudiced categories. Words characterized by black and white thinking are words such as must, shall, never, always, as for example ”all of it is hopeless”, ”it cannot possibly succeed”, ”I have to be better than the others”, ”nobody likes me”.
Often the most basic assumptions about yourself and the world, are based on black and white thinking. Black and white thinking is thinking in extremes, and leads to a false and imbalanced way of life. You come to live on postulates, without asking or searching for contra-conceptions and alternatives.
Catastrophe-thinking
Catastrophe-thinking is unrealistic thoughts that are being connected with a harmless fact. For example when you under a dizziness-attack think: ”I am going to die”, ”I am going mad”. Or when you receive a bill a bit larger than expected and you think: ”Everything is lost”.
Catastrophe-thinking is out of proportions with reality, and you don´t ask, or seek for contra-conceptions and alternatives. Follows often from black and white thinking, and is closely connected with anxiety-development.
Classical conditioning and placebo effects
Classical conditioning is a form of learning or physiological change. It is based on forming an association between a stimulus and a response. The association is remembered and affects future similar experiences. Some physiological responses to stimuli are unconditioned: they happen naturally and involuntary, like blinking, flinching, or the salivation response to the taste or odor of food. Other physiological responses are conditioned: for example, a dog can be conditioned to salivate when a bell is rung because the dog has been taught to associate the bell with food (Pavlov´s famous experiment). Dogs injected with morphine begin to salivate and can be conditioned to salivate from any injection, whether with morphine or not.
Relief from pain is often attributed to the placebo effect when no active pain-killer has been administered and the patient reports that the pain has lessened. A more accurate description in some such cases, however, might be that the patient has learned to associate pain reduction with pushing a button that releases morphine or with getting a morphine injection.
Conditioning and associative learning – along with owner or practitioner expectation and self-deception – might explain why some animals appear to get relief from Reiki, Homeopathy, or Acupuncture.
Conditioning can involve much more than obvious factors like getting an injection, taking a pill, or being touched where it hurts. Conditioning can involve the theater of the medical setting and medical rituals, including the medical uniforms worn, medical jargon spoken, and medical gadgetry used. These conditions affect the patient´s expectation of relief from the treatment, as does the manner of the healer. Patient expectation, it turns out, plays a significant role in the effectiveness of many kinds of treatment. Therefore related to Communal reinforcement and Subjective validation.
Classical conditioning is hypothesized to be the primary triggering mechanism for the placebo effect, which must be learned before it can manifest itself. When conditioning is combined with desire and motivation for relief, the placebo effect is boosted for both active and inert substances. Related to Wishful thinking.
So, the next time you are wondering how healers can cure people with a simple touch or by waving their hands in the air over a body part or by uttering some ineffable incantation, think that maybe, just maybe, some sort of conditioned response is going on. You don´t have to call it a placebo effect. There may be other explanations for some placebo responses and the issue may be more complicated than you think. Your first inclination might be to think magic or miracle (especially when you have heard other people say the same), but first inclinations may be responses to the Availability bias. If it is truth you´re after, you might want to consider alternative explanations to what your intuition tells you. Here related to Ignoring alternative explanations
It is important to be aware that the placebo effect doesn´t relate to any facts about an "healing energy", as for example Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and Hypnotherapists often say. The placebo effect should never be seen as a valid "cure" for anything. Furthermore, the placebo effect often involves, as for example in NLP and hypnotherapy, intentional manipulation of behavior and the inducing of certain worldviews (see my articles Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP) and Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT), and Hypnosis, hypnotherapy, and the art of self-deception).
All in all Classical conditioning and placebo effects is specially related to Ego-inflation
All in all Classical conditioning and placebo effects is specially related to Ego-inflation
Clustering illusion
Clustering illusion is the intuition that random events, which occur in clusters, are not really random events.
To some, the occurrence of for example a number of cancers in a defined space cries out for a causal explanation in terms of some unknown environmental hazard (related to Arbitrary inference). To others, familiar with the data and knowledgeable of proper statistical analysis, the number of cancers occurring within the same defined space is expected by the laws of chance.
Sometimes a subject in an ESP experiment or a dowser might be correct at a higher than chance rate over a limited period of time. However, such results do not indicate that an event is not a chance event. In fact, such results are predictable by the laws of chance. Rather than being signs of non-randomness, they are actually signs of randomness. ESP researchers are especially prone to take streaks of “hits” by their subjects as evidence that psychic power varies from time to time.
The clustering illusion is due to selective thinking based on a counterintuitive but false assumption regarding statistical odds.
Cognitive dissonance
Cognitive dissonance is a discomfort caused by holding conflicting ideas simultaneously. The theory of cognitive dissonance proposes that people have a motivational drive to reduce dissonance. They do this by changing their attitudes, beliefs and actions. Dissonance is also reduced by justifying, blaming and denying.
So, dissonance is aroused when people are confronted with information that is inconsistent with their beliefs. If the dissonance is not reduced by changing one´s belief, the dissonance can result in misperception or rejection of the information.
An overarching principle of cognitive dissonance is that it involves the formation of an idea or emotion in conflict with a fundamental element of the self-concept, such as “I am a successful/functional person”, “I am a good person”, or “I have made the right decision.” The anxiety that comes with the possibility of having made a bad decision can lead to rationalization, the tendency to create additional reasons or justifications to support one´s choices.
One situation that may create dissonance is when someone does a favor for a person that they dislike. Here, the dissonance is between those negative feelings for the other person, and the awareness of having expended effort to help them. Cognitive dissonance predicts that people will try to resolve this dissonance by adopting a more positive attitude towards the other person.
A counterpart to this effect is when someone´s actions hurt another person, whom they regard positively or neutrally. In this case, one way to resolve the dissonance is to think more negatively about that person, so that they seem to deserve what happened to them.
Smoking is another example of cognitive dissonance, because it is widely accepted that cigarettes can cause lung cancer. Smokers could rationalize their behavior by concluding that only a few smokers become ill, that it only happens to very heavy smokers, or that if smoking does not kill them, something else will.
The phrase cognitive dissonance was coined by Leon Festinger in his 1956 book When Prophecy Fails, which chronicled the followers of a UFO cult as reality clashed with their fervent beliefs. The book gave an inside account of the increasing belief which sometimes follows the failure of a cult´s prophecy. The believers met at a pre-determined place and time, believing they alone would survive the Earth´s destruction. The appointed time came and passed without incident. They faced acute cognitive dissonance: had they been the victims of a hoax? Had they donated their worldly possessions in vain? Most members chose to believe something less dissonant: the aliens had given earth a second chance, and the group was now empowered to spread the word: earthspoiling must stop. The group dramatically increased their proselytism despite the failed prophecy.
In the Indian Oneness movement there are many examples of cognitive dissonance. The former high-ranking devotee, Freddie Nielsen, is an example of how cognitive dissonance works. For a long time he knew about all the problems and lies within the movement, but didn´t admit it, or was explaining it away (see Rationalization).
Often Oneness devotees have put themselves up on a high position as enlightened persons, and to admit the lies in this is often too embarrassing to be practised (see my article A critique of the Indian Oneness movement and its use of Western success coaching).
I would guess, that when the American self-help guru James Arthur Ray comes out of prison, we will also see an example of cognitive dissonance here. He will probably rise to be more worshipped that ever. If you don´t know the story behind him being in prison, read my article James Arthur Ray and the sweat lodge tragedy.
I would guess, that when the American self-help guru James Arthur Ray comes out of prison, we will also see an example of cognitive dissonance here. He will probably rise to be more worshipped that ever. If you don´t know the story behind him being in prison, read my article James Arthur Ray and the sweat lodge tragedy.
Communal reinforcement
Communal reinforcement is a social phenomenon in which a concept or idea is repeatedly asserted in a community, regardless of whether sufficient evidence has been presented to support it. Over time, the concept or idea is reinforced to become a strong belief in many people´s minds, and may be regarded by the members of the community as fact.
Often, the concept or idea may be further reinforced by publications in the mass media, books, or other means of communication.
The phrase “millions of people can´t all be wrong” is indicative of the common tendency to accept a communally reinforced idea without question, which often aid in the widespread acceptance of urban legends, myths, and rumors.
Related to Ego-inflation
Related to Ego-inflation
Compensation
You are for example trying to maintain a positive self-evaluation by avoiding areas of life where there are chances of fiasco and instead are seeking areas, where the chance of success is largest. This is in itself a compensation.
There is also another kind of compensation, because the unbalance in the above action will by the energylaws of life itself be compensated. Division consists in, that the Ego, through evaluations of the images of time, split the world up in opposites (good and evil, power and powerlessness, perfect and fiasco, love and hate). Thereby is created a line of one-sided and extreme basic assumptions (for example ”I always have to be perfect!”) and rules of living (for example ”unless I always am perfect, then I am a fiasco”). The energylaws of life will seek to balance these imbalances, for example through contrabalances (perfect becomes fiasco) – that is: through a compensation.
Related to Ego-inflation
Related to Ego-inflation
Confabulation
A confabulation is a fantasy that has unconsciously replaced events in memory. A confabulation may be based partly on fact or be a complete construction of the imagination. The term is often used to decribe the “memories” of mentally ill persons, memories of alien abduction, and false memories induced by careless therapists or interviewers.
Continued influence effect
The Continued influence effect is short for ”the continued influence of misinformation.” The term refers to the way false claims enter memory and continue to influence beliefs even after they have been corrected. Unfortunately, many people do not understand how memory works. Worse, they have little interest in the science of memory (In my book A Portrait of a Lifeartist I have worked out a philosophy of memory and time). If a false claim fits with beliefs that more-or-less define a person´s worldview and has a strong emotional component, they instinctively accept the false claim rather than investigate it as a critical thinker would.
It is very difficult to be fair and balanced in evaluating new information when one has a strong emotional attachment to beliefs that conflict with the new information. It should be obvious that most of us are not critical of claims that fit well with our prejudices and emotion-laden beliefs. Still, you would think that we would give up believing something once the evidence shows that we´re wrong, especially since most of us are encouraged in childhood to be truthful and honest. But the thought distortion Backfire effect indicates otherwise.
When you are taught something from childhood that is continually reinforced by one´s family and other communities, it is very difficult to be fair and balanced in evaluating evidence that conflicts with those teachings (see the thought distortion Communal reinforcement). And, with the spreading psychologizing of our culture, where emotions and feelings are considered as the only scale of truth, and where the hostility towards critical thinking and science are growing, it becomes even more difficult (see my article The Matrix Conspiracy, about this spreading tendency).
On the other hand, in areas where emotion is less dominating, when people are faced with overwhelming evidence contrary to what they believe, they correct their errors. This is what happens in science and philosophy again and again, unlike what has occured with fundamentalist religious believers. Critical thinkers want errors corrected. At the very least, getting the facts right might prevent some faulty inferences and prevent one from behaving in ways that could prove harmful.
Contradiction
Two statements, which cannot be true because one denies the other. Is for example seen in self-refutating arguments.
Conversion to the opposite
You can for example convert your insecureness and anxiety for not being good enough to exaggerated self-confidence. Such a conversion is of course a kind of Compensation, escape, self-deceit, and will lead to a false and imbalanced way of life.
Sadly enough, it seems like the movement of positive psychology (see my article The New Thought movement and the law of attraction) directly is using Conversion to the opposite as a central part of its training. Positive psychology is marked by its attempts, through thinking, to eliminate all negativity by converting it into something positive, or simply by ignoring it, or saying it doesn´t exists. But a thought is always defined by its negation; that is: what the thought not is. This means that a thought always contains a pair of opposites. So, you can not by the force of thinking (and therefore not by force of will or choice) convert negativity to positivity. If you nonetheless try to do this you will end up in focusing on the one extreme of a pair of opposites, which is an unbalance. The energy-laws within the wholeness will therefore seek to bring the thoughts back to the balance of middle. They do this through a contra-balancing movement; that is: a swing over in the opposite extreme. That is what is meant with compensatory karma (see my article What is karma?). Existentially seen Conversion to the opposite causes a conflict between what you are and what you want to become, or between being and becoming.
Conversion to the opposite, and the above-mentioned problems, also seems to characterize Byron Katie´s method The Work, in her so-called Turnaround technique, where you always have to look at your thoughts as false (see my article A critique of Byron Katie and her therapeutic method The Work).
In a true spiritual practice the transformation happens, partly through art of life, where you are dancing between the opposites (as in the teaching of Yin and Yang), and through deep meditative-existential inquiry.
Sadly enough, it seems like the movement of positive psychology (see my article The New Thought movement and the law of attraction) directly is using Conversion to the opposite as a central part of its training. Positive psychology is marked by its attempts, through thinking, to eliminate all negativity by converting it into something positive, or simply by ignoring it, or saying it doesn´t exists. But a thought is always defined by its negation; that is: what the thought not is. This means that a thought always contains a pair of opposites. So, you can not by the force of thinking (and therefore not by force of will or choice) convert negativity to positivity. If you nonetheless try to do this you will end up in focusing on the one extreme of a pair of opposites, which is an unbalance. The energy-laws within the wholeness will therefore seek to bring the thoughts back to the balance of middle. They do this through a contra-balancing movement; that is: a swing over in the opposite extreme. That is what is meant with compensatory karma (see my article What is karma?). Existentially seen Conversion to the opposite causes a conflict between what you are and what you want to become, or between being and becoming.
Conversion to the opposite, and the above-mentioned problems, also seems to characterize Byron Katie´s method The Work, in her so-called Turnaround technique, where you always have to look at your thoughts as false (see my article A critique of Byron Katie and her therapeutic method The Work).
In a true spiritual practice the transformation happens, partly through art of life, where you are dancing between the opposites (as in the teaching of Yin and Yang), and through deep meditative-existential inquiry.
Denial
Denial is when you interpret experiences and relations with other people as it suits you. You are for example unaffected by a violent event, ignorant about a critique, without understanding of warnings; that is: denial of the truth.
Dichotom thinking
Dichotom thinking means that you arrange the surrounding world in a pair of opposites (for example life and death, past and future, subject and object, good and evil, justification and condemnation, love and hate, power and powerlessness, perfect and fiasco). This is a degraded and one-sided division, which happens when the Ego, through evaluations, splits the more universal images of time in pieces. These images are in themselves a kind of syntheses, because they always include the opposite pole. But the dichotomous thinking expels the opposite pole, removes it, and by doing so you are coming to live on postulates, without asking or searching for contra-conceptions and alternatives.
Displacement
Displacement of something from its real cause to something else, for example when you defend yourself against anxiety by letting a conflict come into expression towards a person, who you experience as less threatening than the person, the conflict in reality is about.
Ego-inflation
Ego-inflation happens when the ego has embezzled itself energy, which rightly belongs to the collective time. The collective time manifests itself in a widely and indefinite area, for example could a broad spectrum of common human activities and organizations be called manifestations of the collective time: parties, state formations, wars, work communities, concerts, clans, tribes and sects, mass psychological phenomena, religious parishioners, fashion streams, group souls, etc.
When the ego is getting inflated there comes a feeling of, that the “old” ego has been altered, even disappeared. This feeling is sensed a being good, positive, yes it can even be a peak experience. The illusion is that the ego hasn´t disappeared, but instead has been inflated. Therefore the dark side of the ego, the whole complex of thought distortions, also has been inflated.
Ego-inflation is the cause of the sense of improvement, healing, or religious experiences people can have, when for example working with therapy, coaching, healing, clairvoyance, or when they have discovered a new ideology, religious or political. It is closely related to Communal reinforcement, Groupthink, Illusion of control, Classical conditioning and placebo effects.
There are three main forms of ego-inflation: intellectual, identifical and euphorical inflation.
1) Intellectual ego-inflation
Intellectual ego-inflation is extremely widely spread, especially today where so much knowledge is made common, and where practically everybody goes through one or the other form of theoretical education, or at least get knowledge of it through the medias. Intellectual ego-inflation is in fact one of the fundamental hindrances for the opening in towards the source, a malfunction in the mind, which is the crucial cause of the ignorance, conflict and sufferings of Mans (see my article The four philosophical hindrances and openings).
Intellectual ego-inflation has to do with lack of rationality. You take your assumptions, conceptions and values as absolute truths (hereunder subejctivism and relativism), whereby you end up in a contradiction between your thoughts and lived life. It is actually a lack of ground connection.
In general, in intellectual circles, in cultural connections, and in the political life, they have always accepted intellectual ego-inflation – but as mentioned: it is one of the most crucial causes of all the conflict, war and violence, which the world is characterized by. People and their opinions and –isms, political directions etc., all of it is, as a rule, mainly an intellectual play characterized by a contradiction between thoughts and lived life. One is idealist, another realist, one is Marxist, atheist, another Christian, charitable, but if you look these people after in their existence – in their lived life – then you soon discover the contradictions.
Kierkegaard called it “the litany madness”; people can repeat the right doctrines and principles by rote, but when it comes to reality, to their way of living, then you discover all the contradictions.
Within the alternative environmenat of New Age and the self-help industry, intellectual ego-inflation is also extremely widely spread, and when the game, as here, is about the development of Man, about the depths of the mind, about archetypical powers, about the source of life, then intellectual ego-inflation can be a hazardous play. When the intellectual knowledge begins to approach religious areas, wisdom of life, therapy, meditation, spirit, then the ego can misjudge itself by being intoxicated by its intellectual understanding of deep phenomena. It is easy to understand the profound in an intellectual way. Everybody can say: “meditation is to become silent, without thoughts, without words, images”, but try to be silent, try to be awake without thoughts.
Intellectual the whole thing with development, with dream-understanding, with therapy and chakras, is very easy to understand. And very easy to tell others about – and get success on. There is incredible many in the world today, who speaks and talks about energy and chakras without ever really having had experiences with chakras and energy. This is intellectual theft. It is self-deception, it is ego-inflation – and it will unavoidably lead to misguiding of others. Add to this the weird phenomena within New Age and the self-help industry, where most of the followers take an education as therapist, coach, clairvoyant, even spiritual teacher, without having any experiences (there are not many people in New Age, which you could charactierize as disciples, students). Furthermore the many New Age speculators, that constantly are speculating in creating new forms of therapies, techniques and systems, which are deeply filled with scientifical, philosophical and spiritual distortions – precisely because of the lack of training (see my articles Humanistic psychology, self-help and the danger of reducing religion to psychology and Six common traits of New Age which distort spirituality).
Futhermore: a special danger in relation to the self-help industry is, that secularization here apparently has been removed. Personal development has directly been introduced on EU´s project on lifelong learning and education. You therefore meet it everywhere in society: in schools, education, workingplaces, etc. I seriously think this is a sign of the rising of a very dangerous ideology, which I have called The Matrix Conspiracy.
The tool to be used against intellectual ego-inflation is in other words rationality and critical thinking, therefore philosophical training, where you investigate the validity of your assumptions, conceptions and values, and seek after coherence between your thoughts and lived life.
2) Identifical ego-inflation
Identifical ego-inflation is of two kinds: 1) Identification with an outer power, which not belongs to the ego (an institution, a teacher, others´ techniques, meditations-centres, one´s role, etc.). 2) Identification with an inner power, which nor belongs to the ego (God, master, healing energy, the collective time, collective images, etc.).
The tool to be used against this form of ego-inflation is authentic spiritual practice; that is to say: where you understand the difference between the content of consciousness and the form of consciousness – that in neutrality to separate yourself from the content of consciousness, for thereby to direct yourself towards the form of consciousness; discrimination, which again is a central part of critical thinking (see my article Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with spiritual practice).
3) Euphorical ego-inflation
The euphorical ego-inflation is mainly due to up-streaming energy. There are then real transformation-processes in the chakra-system, and the transformed, or released, energy is rising upwards – it feels and is described this way, for then, in the consciousness, to bring about states of ecstasy, spiritual intoxication, exaltation, blissfulness. Oneness-consciousness as a spiritual crisis belongs to euphorical ego-inflation. Mystics in the West have called this euphorical ego-inflation “jubilatio”. It can escalate and completely take the ground connection away from a human being, so that you think, that you can fly, that you will be carried by angels. You fly in Sukavati, in Firdaus, in Paradise, in Elysium, as a balloon in the blue air.
The mystics (for exampel Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Seuse) discriminated between “jubilatio” and “inflammatio”, the ecstasy and the inflammation. And the euphorical inflammation is dangerous, very dangerous (see my articles The awakening of kundalini, Spiritual crises as the cause of paranormal phenomena, and A critique of the Indian Oneness movement and its use of Western success coaching).
The tools to be used against this ego-inflation is partially ground connection (Hara, earth bound work, preferably with other people, for exampel as a social- and healthcare worker), partially again realization work, discrimination, humble separation of the ego and the spirit, between the ego and the rising, bubbleling, jubilant delight. Moreover ethical practice, training of compassion, for example Tonglen practice (in my book Meditation as an Art of Life – a basic reader, I have described both the Hara practice and the Tonglen practice in the supporting exercises The Harameditation and the Heartmeditation).
One of the deep reasons why they in monasteries anywhere in the world are letting the monks and nuns work with dirt, cleaning, cooking, taking care of sick people and dying, was in order to, that they never should loose reality and the ground connection of sight.
People who are being catched by ego-inflation, begin, as a rule, to act like kings and queens, they shall not anything practical do, they shall not be adjusted, they fly.
Enlargement and reduction of elements in the surrounding world
Enlargement and reduction of elements in the surrounding world is for example to make a problem much larger than it is in reality, or to make the number of your life-possibilities much lesser than they are in reality. You overestimate or understate - exaggerate or understate, without asking or searching for contra-conceptions and alternatives.
Endless split of the thought
The endless split of the thought implies the so-called polarization-problem. Reality seems to be an Otherness, which determines and defines the world – that is: a negation-principle. Any concept, any thing, is defined by its negation; that is to say: what it not is. A dream can for example only be defined from what it not is. It is for example not reality. How can you for example assert that life, or reality, is a dream, unless you know what a dream not is? What is the good? This you know if you know what the evil is. This logic seems to be impossible to get around.
The endless split of the thought has to do with the contradiction and split that are lying in, that the expulsion of the polar partners, as well as the negation as such, logical seen not is possible. All images imply the negation. But the more extreme you are thinking, the more you expel the negation, and therefore your contradiction and split are so much larger.
You can see the logical problems manifested in a nightmare. When you in a nightmare are forced to confront the negations, but at the same time don't practise realizationwork and ethical practice in your awaken life, the nightmare will be characterized by contradiction and split. It is this doubleness, which creates the terror in the nightmare.
The paths and the locations in a nightmare can imply two types of terror. The one terror lies in the paths. Each point on a path is determined by the negation of the point, which itself is determined by a third negation etc. The path constitutes in other words a series of points with no end. The points themselves are limited extents. This means, that there never will come a time, where you will get out over the limited points. On the path you become forced from point to point without ever being able to reach the unlimited, this endless, which would bring the path to finish. And yet the path is endless.
The second terror lies in the locations. When each location is determined by the negation of it, this means, that it might well be, that the location is divided from its negation, but nonetheless identical with it. This means, that each location is an endless number of locations, an abyss of worlds, countless, swarming, branching off to all sides in labyrinths, yet without that the worlds ever become mixed together.
You can see these terrors illustrated in the stories by the Argentine author Jorge Luis Borges. You can also see it in M.C. Escher´s works, or in the movies by David Lynch.
Nietzsche is letting his ”Zarathustra” preach the teaching of the ”eternal recurrence of the same”. This teaching contains in its poetic language some complicated considerations over the problem of time, over the perception of time and the understanding of life. But in all briefness it says, that any event repeats itself in all eternity – that is: without change and without any kind of increase. History is a circle, and there isn´t anything, which hasn´t been before, and which doesn´t come again. A nightmarish thought because each event then must be an endless number of events, an abyss of events, countless, swarming, branching to all sides in labyrinths, yet without that the events ever become mixed together. The crucifixion of Jesus Christ has happened an endless number of times before, is happening again right now in an endless number of worlds, and will happen again an endless number of times in the future.
The weak nihilists break down, when they realize the meaninglessness in the eternal recurrence, while the supermans on the contrary ”insatiable shouts Da Capo, not only to themselves, but to the whole play and acting”.
The problem of the endless split of the thought happens because of a lack of discrimination between the thinking and life itself; that is: the problem of magical thinking.
In fact it is the same type of split you can experience, when you are looking up towards the stars and become captured by this wonder over the infinity. How can it just go on and go on? But it is due to magical thinking, the lack of discrimination between the thought and reality itself. Something, which by nature is limitary, namely the thought, seeks to grasp the unlimited. Something, which by nature is expelling, seeks to grasp the all-inclusive. It results in a feeling of endless split, which again results in a lot of logical anomalies, paradoxes and problems. And it is these logical problems which lies underneath the thought distortions, for example Dichotom Thinking and Catastrophe-thinking, and therefore underneath a lot of inappropriate assumptions and rules of living.
It is precisely these logical anomalies, paradoxes and problems, which create Samsara´s wheel of eternal repeating up-cycles which is followed by eternal repeating down-cycles and vice versa (for example life and death, success and fiasco, joy and sorrow) – as well as the ignorance and the suffering when you are caught into this wheel, for example in the experience of nightmare and anxiety. All Jorge Luis Borges´ small stories are about these logical and philosophical problems. His stories are filled with mirrors, masks, infinite series and regresses, labyrinths, doppelgängers, time travel theories, other dimensions, parallel universes, solipsisms and dreams.
We have already examined the concept of endless series. But you must descriminate between the concept of endless series and the concept of endless regresses. An endless regress is an endless series, but an endless series is not necessarily an endless regress. You can very well operate with endless series without being involved in an endless regress, as for example when you talk about the cause of a road accident, which is enough explanation, though the chain of causes goes endlessly back in time. But if your thought is getting involved in such a chain of causes, then it ends as an endless split of the thought. This happens often in regression therapy, psychoanalysis, or self-analysis, where the discovery of the “cause” of, for example anxiety, doesn´t heal the anxiety, wherefore you are in need of new analysis, new discoveries of causes, and so on, in endless series, that are flowering in all kinds of directions. I have investigated this in my book A Portrait of a Lifeartist in the section about analysis.
Anyway, you can use the reference to the endless regress as an argument, when the understanding of a concept or a point of view – or the description of something – presupposes a final reason; that is: that the series of assumptions for the understanding have to end somewhere, but where the concept or the point of view nevertheless implicates, that the series continue endlessly.
In ancient India they meant, that the Earth was a flat disc. When the children asked, how the Earth could keep itself floating in the Universe, then the wise men said, that it was because it was carried by a giant elephant. When the children asked, what the elephant was standing on, the answer was: on a giant turtle. And when the children then asked, what the turtle was standing on, the wise men answered: now you are asking for more than can be answered.
This “explanation” on, how the Earth keeps itself floating, leads into an endless regress. It is no explanation at all, because it ends with a riddle, that is equally great, and which demands as much explanation, as the riddle you started with.
Theories such as solipsism and Theories of Everything always end up in an endless split of the thought.
About solipsism and endless regress, see my article The Dream Hypothesis and the Brain-in-jar Hypothesis. About theories of everything, see my article Quantum mechanics and the philosophy of Niels Bohr.
About solipsism and endless regress, see my article The Dream Hypothesis and the Brain-in-jar Hypothesis. About theories of everything, see my article Quantum mechanics and the philosophy of Niels Bohr.
False dichotomy
False dichotomy is a misleading conception of possible alternatives. A dichotomy is a division in two alternatives. Often seen in the expressions Either/or – If/then, as for example: ”Either you are with us, or you are against us” – ”if I´m not always a success, then I´m a fiasco”. Similarly, someone who says that you must either believe that God exists or else that God doesn´t exist is setting up a false dichotomy since there is the well-known third option of the agnostic.
A false dichotomy appears when somebody sets up a dichotomy in such a way, that it looks like, that there only are two possible conclusions, when the facts actual are, that there are many other alternatives which not are being mentioned. Many inappropriate rules of living and life-strategies are based on false dichotomy. False dichotomy is thinking in extremes, and leads to a false and imbalanced way of life.
In connection with inappropriate basic assumptions such as "If I am not always a success, then I am a fiasco", the false dichotomy is closely related to the development of guilt, shame and depression.
Note, that you can´t think in extremes such as I am a success, I am perfect, I am beautiful, without the opposite extreme. That is: if you for example follow the teaching of positive psychology, which excludes all negativity, then you induce in yourself a false dichotomy, because an exclusion of the opposite extreme not is possible (see my article The New Thought movement and the Law of Attraction).
In connection with inappropriate basic assumptions such as "If I am not always a success, then I am a fiasco", the false dichotomy is closely related to the development of guilt, shame and depression.
Note, that you can´t think in extremes such as I am a success, I am perfect, I am beautiful, without the opposite extreme. That is: if you for example follow the teaching of positive psychology, which excludes all negativity, then you induce in yourself a false dichotomy, because an exclusion of the opposite extreme not is possible (see my article The New Thought movement and the Law of Attraction).
False implication
Berry Berry Kix
Country Time Lemonade Flavor Drink
Cap´n Crunch with Crunch Berries
Dannon Danimals XL (Strawberry Explosion)
Froot Loops
Fruity Cheerios
Juicy Fruit Gum
Life Savers (Wild Cherry)
Nestle Nesquick milk and drink mix (strawberry)
Post Fruity Pebbles
Push Pop (cherry)
Ring Pop (cherry)
Tang
Trix cereal
Trix yoghurt (strawberry kiwi)
Yoplait Go-Gurt yoghurt (Strawberry Splash)
They contain no fruit. But the labels and ads used to attract consumers to these products falsely imply that fruit is one of their ingredients.
Another example of false implication: The law recognizes that reporters, politicians, and anyone with an axe to grind can libel another person by omitting facts that would negate or mitigate otherwise defamatory statements. For example, a television reporter who lets her audience know that there have been some serious allegations of abuse and neglect at a daycare center and that a mother has taken her children out of the center because her son was abused and the daycare center has abused her trust would be guilty of libel by omission if she also failed to report that the alleged abuse involved one four-year-old boy touching another four-year-old boy inappropriately. Commenting on just such a case, an appeals court judge wrote:
A reasonable jury could find that this statement was defamatory, inasmuch as there is material difference between a daycare worker actually abusing a child in his or her care, and a daycare worker negligently supervising a child such that he or she is ultimately responsible for one child´s assault of another child.
Libel by false implication could be a confusing and troublesome area for reporters, who might believe that they´ve done their job well if they report only the truth or the facts as they know them. But it is obviously true that a reporter can get all the facts right but imply something that is totally false by not reporting all the facts. It might be true that Dr. Stanley stuck a knife into Richardson´s belly and that Richardson died soon thereafter, but you might be led to falsely conclude that Stanley murdered Richardson if I didn´t also tell you that Richardson had been brought to the emergency room and had suffered multiple gunshot wounds when Dr. Stanley tried to save his life by cutting into his abdomen.
Generalization
Generalization means for example that you expect, that something, which has taken place in one situation, also takes place in other situations, without asking or searching for contra-conceptions and alternatives.
Good intentions bias
Good intentions bias is a variation of Ad hominem move. It occurs when people confuse a critic´ s attack on a person´s opinions, with an attack on this person´s good intentions (or other nice personality traits), which lead them to blaiming the critic for falsely assigning bad motives to the person´s good intentions. This blaim can then continue into moralizing, even defaming, Ad hominem moves towards the critic´s person.
It is also a construction of a Strawman, because the critic would very likely just answer, that he is aggreeing that the person has good intentions, but that this is irrelevant for the problems he has discovered in the person´s opinions. So, people´s good intentions are irrelevant to whether a critique of the people´s opinions is valid or not. The Good Intentions Bias is a way of shifting attention from person´s opinions to some irrelevant postulates about person´s good intentions.
It is also a construction of a Strawman, because the critic would very likely just answer, that he is aggreeing that the person has good intentions, but that this is irrelevant for the problems he has discovered in the person´s opinions. So, people´s good intentions are irrelevant to whether a critique of the people´s opinions is valid or not. The Good Intentions Bias is a way of shifting attention from person´s opinions to some irrelevant postulates about person´s good intentions.
In other words: a person´s good intentions are not the factor, that makes this person´s opinions valid. It is the person´s argumentation for his opinions that makes them valid or invalid.
The bias is easily seen by looking at the big scoundrels of history, for exampel Stalin, Hitler or Mussolini. These persons had very likely good intentions, and were probably even looked at as nice persons by their family or friends.
You might say that any reasonable person would agree that these persons´ good intentions don´t make their opinions valid. But there are subjectivistic and relativistic opinions, where good intentions are the basic of their ethics, for example in the movement of positive psychology (see my articles Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), and Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT), and The New Thought Movement and the law of attraction), which claim that it is the good intentions that make opinions true. The adcocates are in this way demonstrating a lack of ability to discriminate between critique of opinions and the persons who put forward these opinions. And here they show a real problem with ethics.
You might say that any reasonable person would agree that these persons´ good intentions don´t make their opinions valid. But there are subjectivistic and relativistic opinions, where good intentions are the basic of their ethics, for example in the movement of positive psychology (see my articles Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), and Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT), and The New Thought Movement and the law of attraction), which claim that it is the good intentions that make opinions true. The adcocates are in this way demonstrating a lack of ability to discriminate between critique of opinions and the persons who put forward these opinions. And here they show a real problem with ethics.
Anyway, if you are a reasonable person then remember: Whether you are going to criticize someone, or you yourself are being criticized, or another person, whom you like - or just opinions, which you are in favour for - are being criticized, always remember to discriminate between the critique of opinions, and the persons who put forward these opinions.
Like the ad hominem move Good intentions bias is a very widespread bias among psychologists, psychotherapists and subjectivists, when they are participating in public discussions.
Groupthink
Groupthink is a psychological phenomenon that occurs within groups of people. It is the mode of thinking that happens when the desire for harmony in a decision-making group overrides a realistic appraisal of alternatives. Group members try to minimize conflict and reach a consensus decision without critical evaluation of alternative ideas or viewpoints.
The primary socially negative cost of groupthink is the loss of individual creativity, uniqueness, and independent thinking.
Groupthink is related to argumentum ad populum
Halo effect
The halo effect refers to a bias whereby the perception of a positive trait in a person or product positively influences further judgments about traits of that person or products by the same manufacturer. One of the more common halo effects is the judgment that a good looking person is intelligent and amiable.
There is also a reverse halo effect whereby perception of a negative or undesirable trait in individuals, brands, or other things influences further negative judgments about traits of that individual, brand, etc. If a person “looks evil” or “looks guilty” you may judge anything he says or does with suspicion; eventually you may feel confident that you have confirmed your first impression with solid evidence when, in fact, your evidence is completely tainted and conditioned by your first impression.
James Randi took advantage of the Halo effect when he tested two Russian ladies who claimed to be able to use their psychic powers to determine the personality and life experiences of someone from a photograph. He showed the ladies a picture of Ted Bundy, a handsome, wholesome-looking mass murderer. The results are both amusing and disgusting. See the video in the appendix to my article Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with clairvoyance
Related to Good intentions bias
Hermeneutics of suspicion
The philosopher Paul Ricoeur has referred to the “hermeneutics of suspicion” encouraged by writers such as Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. What people think, and the reasons they produce, may not be the real reasons at work. It then becomes easy to become suspicious of the motives of everyone, whether as the representative of an economic class or the purveyor of a morality, or just as an individual with psychological problems to solve.
This form of analysis (leading us to think of groups or individuals “what is in it for them?”), is not only corrosive of trust in society. It is bound eventually to undermine itself. Why are such views themselves being propagated? What are those spreading them going to gain?
Related to Ad hominem move, Prejudice, and Thought-reading
Read more about Hermeneutics of suspicion in my article The Hermeneutics of Suspicion (the thought police of the self-help industry) and why I am an apostle of loafing
Read more about Hermeneutics of suspicion in my article The Hermeneutics of Suspicion (the thought police of the self-help industry) and why I am an apostle of loafing
Hypocrisy
Advocating one thing, but doing another. Hypocrisy is the charge levelled at those who don´t practice what they preach; for example if you are preaching a simple life, while yourself are living a life in luxury. Related to contradiction.
Ideology
Let me explain with a distinction between two kinds of education: philosophical education and ideological education.
Philosophical education has its basic objectives, first, the disposition to seek truth, and, second, the capacity to conduct rational inquiry. Training scientists, for example, requires the inculcation both of an ethic of inquiry – do not fabricate or distort results, take care to prevent your hypotheses (or desires) from affecting your observations – and the techniques of inquiry appropriate to the discipline.
There are of course many different forms of philosophical education, corresponding to the numerous ways in which truth may be pursued. Nevertheless, these forms of education share two key features. First, they are not decisively shaped by the specific social or political/religious circumstances in which they are conducted, or, to put it the other way around, they are perverted when such circumstances come to have a substantive effect. There is no valid distinction between “Jewish” and “Aryan” physics, or between “bourgois” and “socialist” biology; truth is one and universal.
Secondly, and relatedly, philosophical education can have corrosive consequences for political (and/or religious) communities in which it is allowed to take place. The pursuit of truth – scientific, historical, moral, or whatever – can undermine structures of unexamined but socially central belief.
Ideological education - (today through psychology and sociology) - differs from philosophical education in all these respects. Its purpose is not the pursuit and acquisition of truth, but rather the formation of individuals, who can effectively conduct their lives within, and support, their political (and/or religious) community. It is unlikely, to say the least, that the truth will be fully consistent with this purpose. Nor is ideological education homogeneous and universal. It is by definition education within, and on behalf of, a particular political (and/or religious) order. Nor, finally, does ideological education stand in opposition to its political (and/or religious) community. On the contrary, it fails – fundamentally – if it does not support and strengthen that community.
Ideology altogether is a psychic disease. You are not in doubt about, that ideology is a psychic disease if you look at its collective manifestations. It appears for example in the form of ideologies such as Communism, Liberalism, Conservatism, National Socialism and any other nationalism, or in the form of rigid religious systems of faith, which function with the implied assumption, that the supreme good lay out in the future, and that the end therefore justifies the means. The goal is an idea, a point out in a future, projected by the mind, where salvation is coming in some kind – happiness, satisfaction, equality, liberation, etc. It is not unusual, that the means to come to this is to make people into slaves, torture them and murder them here and now. Ideologies always think black and white, and always have an enemy-image which they attach to everyone, who don´t aggree (see Backfire effect and Motivated reasoning).
In philosophy you focus on, what cooperation and conversation require of you in order to that you at all can exist: that you speak true (don´t lie), that you are prepared to reach mutual understanding and agreement (don´t manipulate), don´t make an exception of yourself (but treat others as equals). From this rises the eternal moral values (as for example that it is wrong to lie), and generally our ideas of right and justice: the so-called human rights, the idea about the individual person´s autonomy and dignity: you shall treat the other not as a mean, but as a goal.
Read more about ideology in my article The difference between philosophical education and ideological education.
Read more about ideology in my article The difference between philosophical education and ideological education.
Ignoring alternative explanations
Ignored explanations of the phenomenon in question. In many situations it is tempting to believe that because an explanation is consistent with the known facts it must therefore be the correct explanation. This is especially tempting when the particular explanation is the one, which we would most like to be true. However, this is wishful thinking and ignores the possibility of plausible alternative explanations of precisely the same observations.
Illusion of control
Control makes us feel powerful, which is a good feeling. And feeling that there is a right order in the universe, that some being, or law of attraction, are in control of everything that happens is comforting to many people (see my article The New Thought movement and the law of attraction).
Is there any harm in this? What´s the harm in obliterating truth and reality in favor of what you want to be true? A great deal of harm can come from deluding yourself that you can control your health or your wealth, or somebody else´s health or wealth, by your thoughts and prayers or other superstitious actions.
In my article The emotional painbody and why psychotherapy can´t heal it, I explain how the painbody, through the inner evaluating ego, is connected with the more dangerous depths of the astral plane´s collective history; you might call it original sin or negative karma. This you can´t control.
In my article The value of having a religion in a spiritual practice I describe that only an intervention from the source (God, Christ, the enlightened consciousness) can basically help Man with a trancendence of the negative karma of the original sin. But in order to be able to receive this help you must do your part of the work: the spiritual practice. Many years. And this means that you need to re-structure the ego´s ownership to things, food, power, sexuality and emotions. First thereafter the mystical process can begin.
The magnet of attraction, which the ego is controlled by – (the ego´s identity with the material world: instincts, sexuality, emotions, desire, collective ideals, ownership, power) – will in a true spiritual practice loose its attraction. Very few people will be willing to do this. On the contrary many people have today done an illusory work of trying to re-define this ancient wisdom, so that the magnet of attraction directly is becoming the object of worship. That´s what the law of attraction movement is about.
Another aspect of the true spiritual practice is that you break the automatic process of compensatory karma, which is closely related to laws of nature, cycles of life, yes actually pure causal regularity of mechanical kind. It would an illusion to connect such things with a superior intentional divine order (see Intentionality bias).
Furthermore you have your free will either to continue to be identified with the area of compensatory karma, or break with it, into the area of progressive karma (where the mystical process begins) – about karma see my articles What is karma, and A critique of Stanislav Grof and Holotropic Breathwork.
Illusion of control is related to Ego-inflation
Illusion of control is related to Ego-inflation
Intentionality bias
Intentionality bias refers to the tendency to see intentions in the movements of both animate and inanimate objects. This bias serves us well in most interactions with purposive agents, such as other humans, but even then we often see intentionality or purposiveness where there is none. A drunk bumps into us at the bar and spills his drink on our back. We´re sure he did it on purpose, though it might well have been an accident.
Several studies on intentionality bias in children indicate that a natural way of perceiving and making sense out of the natural world is to see intentional agents behind the movements of many things that adult scientists attribute solely to mechanistic forces. Some skeptics argue that all that we´re justified in inferring from the natural bias toward perceiving intentional agents as behind the movements of both animate and inanimate objects is that it is natural to think anthropomorphically about natural events and that it´s natural to think that others like us have intentions like we do.
The belief that everything in nature is intentional is sometimes called the teleological view of the universe. This view is opposed by the mechanistic point of view (also called naturalism, or an instrumental view of nature), which claims that everything in nature is controlled by causal regularity of mechanical kind. This materialistic ontology claims, that the only thing which has real existence, is mass entities in motion. The whole of nature can fully be explained from the knowledge of these mechanical principles. All explanations use the cause and effect relation. They are causal. Teleological explanations – that is: explanations from purposes – are rejected.
This point of view often uses the intentionality bias to explain why belief in gods is popular or why religions evolved into the major social institutions they´ve become. It may be intuitive to perceive order as coming about from intentional agents, while disorder can be perceived as coming about with or without the intervention of intentional agents. But in addition to our natural, instinctive way of seeing the world, we also have the ability to reflect on what we observe and overcome our natural instincts. Just because it is natural to see the world as designed doesn´t mean that the world is designed. We need not to be a slave of the brain, which, after all, deceives us about many things. Why should we be surprised if the brain tricks us into believing in gods and other intentional agents as the designers of plants, animals, and the vast expanse we call our universe?
Intelligent Design is a clear example of a pseudoscientific point of view (see my article The pseudoscience of reductionism and New Age).
The problem with the mechanistic view is the often implicated instrumental view of nature, which has caused that many see nature as pure material, or alone as a means for the unfolding of Man.
It is interesting, however, that the more science develops, the more you have to give up backgrounds, which occur evident to mechanistic points of views. In nuclear physics and the quantum mechanics we have learned, that there exist processes, which is not cause determined, and do not follow the old rule about that everything has to be continuous. Processes in nature, and in the human brain, are in a wide extent quantum mechanical, and since the quantum mechanics breaks with the principle of causation and determinism, then nature, and therefore the brain, is not a fully cause determined system (included in this is also the problem of mind – see my article The pseudoscience of reductionism and the problem of mind).
This has led to - and under impression of the discussion about the damage we have caused nature - that there in the later years have been worked out conceptions, that claim, that nature has a value in itself. It is not only means, but ought to be respected for its beauty and richness. There is a beauty and richness in nature, which are of non-causal and non-mechanical kind, and that Man as a natural being has a community with this nature. It is called a communicative view of nature. Through meditation you can enter deeper and deeper into this community with nature, and experience an intentionality (see my articles Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with mystical experiences, and What is karma?) Personally I think, that it is such experiences, that are the background for popularity of religion.
But this doesn´t mean that the mechanistic view of nature has to be rejected. In quantum mechanics the classical physics is still valid, but quantum mechanics has given it a limited scope of application (see my article Quantum mechanics and the philosophy of Niels Bohr).
What is important is to be aware of the intentionality bias, and not end up in Magical thinking, where you don´t discriminate between images and reality. Also see Illusion of control.
In my book A Portrait of a Lifeartist I have investigated the relation between an instrumental view of nature and a communicative view of nature in the sections The Lifeartist as a Natural Being, and The Lifeartist as a Communicative Being.
Magical thinking
In Out of Africa Karen Blixen somewhere describes the magic of the words. The natives named for instance an European after an animal, and a human being, who through many years, by all his surroundings, has been named with one animal-name, finally happens to feel himself Related to the animal, he is named after; he recognizes himself in this animal.
In the natives´ ability to create myths they don´t discriminate between the word and the thing, the name and the named. The white men are really, in the eyes of the natives, both humans and animals. In the same way with their linkage of spirits and machines.
Karen Blixen tells about how the natives, because of this mythical “gift”, can put experiences on humans, which they can´t defend themselves against, and not get out of. They can make humans into symbols. She is telling, that it is a kind of magic, which is used on you, and that you later never completely can disentangle from it. It can be a painfull, heavy fate to be exposed as one or the other symbol.
But also in the Western civilizations we become exposed for such a magic. It is not something, which we have come over. Now it is happening through one or the other kind of religious or political propaganda - and in particular through the media storm, which transforms humans into consumers. ”You are what you eat!” It is also this magic George Orwell describes in his novel 1984, with the language called NewSpeak, a language created by the rulers in order to control thinking. We all know it more or less. If you, by your surroundings, constantly are being induced some kind of image, you will in the end begin to believe in it, even if it is not true. Especially in family relations we see how family members are being induced roles, which are incredible difficult to disentangle from, because family relations also have with love to do.
All this is magical thinking, and there are a lot of thought distortions built into it, for example the thought-distortion arbitrary inference, which means, that you make a causal linking of factors, which is accidental or misleading, and hypnosis, which opens you for the power of suggestion. When you use an ideology (a system, an image), or other limited thought-constructions, to explain everything, you end in an endless split of the thought.
The main reason for the rise of magical thinking is that you don´t discriminate between image and reality, the map and the landscape, subject and object. Such an discrimination is central in critical thinking, but it does not involve an ontological dualism, so that you can´t experience non-dual, mystical states of mind. It involves a so-called epistemological dualism, or gnoseological dualism (read more about this in my article Quantum mechanics and the philosophy of Niels Bohr).
Motivated reasoning
Motivated reasoning takes confirmation bias to the next level. Ordinary confirmation bias makes it cognitively easy to recognize data that support what we already believe. And ordinary confirmation bias makes it difficult for us to perceive data that disconfirm what we believe. Motivated reasoning takes disconfirming data and turns in into confirming data.
When we have a strong emotional commitment to a belief, we don´t just dismiss disconfirming evidence, we rationalize it and twist it so that it becomes confirming evidence. This all happens, of course, at the unconscious level. Conscious, we think we are being objective and unbiased in our evaluations. Unconsciously we are being driven to evaluate data to confirm what we already believe and further disconfirm what we already believe is wrong, regardless of the nature of the evidence.
People who make a living claiming to get messages from the “spirit” world depend on believers ignoring both individual errors from so-called psychics and scientific studies that fail to confirm psychic abilities. There are also those who will appeal to scientific studies to support their belief in psychic powers, regradless of the quality of those studies; these believers will also ignore all the studies that don´t support their beliefs.
Young Earth creationists (YECs) provide an excellent example of motivated reasoning. To maintain their position, YECs must reject nearly all science and confabulate new laws of nature and rules of logic and evidence, and subject themselves to ridicule for their willful ignorance and irrational adherence to the myths of an ancient, pre-scientific people.
Anthropogenic global warming deniers demonstrated motivated reasoning when they put more weight in the views of 31,000 scientists – few of whom were climate scientists – than in the views of the vast majority of climate scientists. It would not take much investigation to find out that what motivates the deniers is not the evidence but their political and economic beliefs. (Here we are not talking about disagreements over policy, but over whether human behaviors and practices are largely responsible for global warming).
Nobody is immune to motivated reasoning. Worse, it is often accompanied by an attitude of mistrust regarding the motives of those who disagree with us. Combine motivated reasoning with our own sense of being unbiased and objective, while being sure that our opponent is biased and not objective, and you have the recipe for predictable obstinacy.
Related to Backfire effect and Ideology
NewSpeak
The name Newspeak is the name George Orwell gave the language, which the rulers in his dystopian novel 1984, had created. The intention with it is to control thinking, to make some ideas impossible to think, including concepts such as good and evil, true and false, beautiful and ugly. In this connection they are using concepts such as old-thinking and new-thinking, so that people get a feeling of guilt, everytime they use concepts within old-thinking. The rulers are doing this by connecting concepts within old-thinking with the word thought-crime.
Is closely connected with magical thinking and hypnosis.
Personalizing
Personalizing means that you see independent incidents, which happen in the surrounding world, as related to yourself. It is to take something personally, without asking or searching for contra-conceptions and alternatives.
Related to attribution and projection.
Persuader words
Words such as “surely”, “obviously”, and “clearly” whose main role is to persuade the reader or listener of the truth of what is being asserted. They are used for rhetorical effect.
Always be aware of the danger of rhetoric and sophistry.
Prejudice
A prejudice is a belief held without good reason or consideration of the evidence for or against its being true. Philosophy – that is: rationality and critical thinking – is opposed to prejudice. We are all riddled with prejudices on a wide range of issues, but it is possible to eliminate some of them by making an effort to examine evidence and arguments on both sides of any question. Human reason is fallible, and most of us are strongly motivated to cling on to some beliefs even in the teeth of evidence against them (see wishful thinking); however, even making small inroads into prejudice can transform the world for the better.
Priming effect
The priming effect is a biasing effect on judgment or action by the cognitive meaning or emotive aura of memories, words, images, or symbols. Most of us have had an experience where we misheard some words in a song, a prayer, or a pledge and then continued to mishear the same words – sometimes for years – until somebody corrects us. We might call such cases examples of self-priming. (This kind of mishearing is called a mondegreen.) Another example of priming comes from backmasking. What at first sounds like gibberish becomes a clear message after somebody tells you what to listen for. Another example of priming comes from allegedly outraged parents and a talking doll: “Little Mommy Real Loving Baby Cuddle and Coo” from FisherPrice. Some folks swear the doll mumbles “Satan is king” and “Islam is the light.” Some might even hear “Palin is a terrorist who is perpetrating voter fraud” once they´re told that´s what the doll is saying.
A person´s prejudices, preoccupations, or vital interests might prime one to mishear or misread words. Many studies have demonstrated that we are influenced in our judgments and actions both by words themselves and by the order in which words, images, or statements are presented to us or which present themselves to us naturally.
Sometimes we see or hear things without being conscious of seeing or hearing them. Evidence of unconscious perception may become clear at a later time. For example, a person may go many years without understanding why a road sign with the words “hidden meadow” in it produces sexual arousal. Then, one day she returns to a place she hadn´t been in many years. She remembers that this was where she met her first lover and the place is called Hidden Meadow.
The priming effect is evident in the unconscious influence of beliefs on actions, such as the hearing of intelligible speech by bird owners and devotees of EVP, and the ideomotor effect on dowsers, Quija board users, table tilters in séances, assistents in facilitated communication, subjects of hypnotic suggestion, and both parties in applied kinesiology. Even more evident is the priming effect in the inquire-techniques in NLP-coaching, and the active listening in Nonviolent Communication, which both praise the neutral approach, while forgetting that they are sitting and using theories, which not at all are neutral (see my articles Neuro-linguistic Programming (NLP), and Large Group Awareness Training (LGAT), and Nonviolent Communication is an instrument of psychic terror).
The priming effect has shown to be powerful enough to create false memories. Priming is especially problematic in hypnotherapy. Many hypnotherapists seem unaware that they are priming their patients. The dangers of this practice are stated by Martin Orne: “The cues as to what is expected may be unwittingly communicated before or during the hypnotic procedure, either by the hypnotist or by someone else, for example, a previous subject, a story, a movie, a stage show, etc. Furhter, the nature of these cues may be quite obscure to the hypnotist, to the subject, and even to the trained observer.” – read more in my article Hypnosis, hypnotherapy, and the art of self-deception.
The priming effect is also evident in the unconscious influence of symbols and metaphors, as Sigmund Freud noted long ago. It may well be true, as Freud allegedly said, that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. But sometimes a cigar may be a symbol or stand-in for something else, and the fondling, licking, and sucking actions of the smoker may represent unconscious desires or portend future actions. There is a reason that presidents pose for photos while sitting at a desk with a library of books in the background guarded by a hanging American flag and fronted by a family photo.
The idea of the priming effect – of the very idea that our conscious choices, decisions, judgments, and behaviors are being biased by unconscious factors – is unsettling to many people. The main moral of priming research is that our thoughts and our behavior are influenced, much more than we know or want, by the environment of the moment. Many people find the priming results unbelievable, because they do not correspond to subjective experience. Many others find the results upsetting, because they threaten the subjective sense of agency and autonomy. If the content of a screen saver on an irrelevant computer can effect your willingness to help strangers without your being aware of it, how free are you? - (in my article The pseudoscience of reductionism and the problem of mind, I investigate the problem of the free will).
What is unsettling is not so much the possibility that all our thoughts and actions might be determined by factors we have no control over, but that they might be determined by factors we are unaware of and are inherently unknowable.
The priming effect is closely related to Magical thinking, where you don´t discriminate between word/image and reality, between subject and object. Central in critical thinking, and spiritual practice as such, is precisely that you begin to discriminate between word/image and reality, and between subject and object. See my article Quantum mechanics and the philosophy of Niels Bohr.
The priming effect is also a central issue in my book A Portrait of a Lifeartist.
Projection
Characteristics, thoughts, feelings, attitudes or wishes, which the person refuses to realize in himself, are attributed to other persons or things. Related to attribution.
Proof by ignorance
Proof by ignorance (argumentum ad ignorantiam, argument to ignorance, argument from ignorance, and appeal to ignorance), is a fallacy in which a lack of known evidence against a belief is taken as an indication that it is true. However ignorance of evidence against a position does not prove that there could not be evidence against it; at best it is only indirect support for it.
Many logic texts list Proof by ignorance as a fallacy of reasoning. Examples vary, but some of the more popular ones refer to Sen. Joseph McCarthy´s justifying a name remaining on a list of suspected Communists because “there is nothing in the files to disprove his Communist connections.” The critical thinker Robert T. Carroll used to call this the “Mike Wallace fallacy” when he was teaching logic courses; he named it after a tactic Mr. Wallace frequently used in “60 Minutes.” He would show up unannounced, confront a surprised person with accusations of some sort of wrongdoing, and then the scene would cut to a slamming door or a grainy film of a car driving out of a parking lot. Wallace would then announce something to the effect of: Mr. X refuses to answer our questions and still has not shown any signs that he is innocent of the charges we`ve made. It should be obvious that not having proof that someone is not a Communist is not proof that he is and not defending yourself against charges is the same as admitting they are true.
Another common example given in text books is from the Salem witch trials of 1692 where some of those testifying claimed that they could see specters or auras around the accused, but these specters were visible only to the witnesses. Such claims are impossible to disprove. They´re in the same class as the claims of mediums who say they are getting messages from the dead (such claims is often used in connection with the though distortion called Truth by authority). One would assume that a reasonable person would require more evidence than just the word of a witness or medium when judging either the cause of the perception or the veracity of the sensations reported. Furthermore, the fact that an accused witch could not prove that she didn´t have a demon´s specter around her or that a skeptic cannot prove that John Edward is not getting messages from someone´s Aunt Sadie does not imply that the accused is a witch or that Edward is really psychic.
It is easy to see why this won´t do, since precisely the same lack of evidence could be used to “prove” the opposite case: that therefore I am not a Communist, and therefore I am not a witch; that is: because you don´t have any evidence against me.
Proof by ignorance is often used by pseudoscientists (see my article The pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism).
Pseudo-profundity
Uttering statements which appear deep but which are not. One way of generating pseudo-profundity is to ask strings of rhetorical questions. Another way is to use jargon, which is the specialist terminology associated with a particular profession or area of interest. The term “jargon” is almost always used in a pejorative sense to suggest that language is unnecessarily obscure.
A third way is the use of pseudoscientifical language, for example 1) the assertion of scientific claims that are vague rather than precise, and that lack specific measurements. 2) Use of obscurantist language, and use of apparently technical jargon in an effort to give claims the superficial trappings of science. 3) Creating scientific-sounding terms in order to add weight to claims and persuade non-experts to believe statements that may be false or meaningless. 4) Using established terms in idionsyncratic ways, thereby demonstrating unfamilarity with mainstream work in the discipline.
Pseudoscience
The sciences ask limited questions about Man, or questions about specific sides of the human life. Such questions are then solved by experimenting, collecting systematical observations and from them draw up theories. The sciences collect systematical experiences and throw out theories, that can be tested through new experiences, or serve as the best explanations.
So, one crucial principle in science is, that a certain theory has to be testable. Another crucial principle is the use of abductive reasoning (inference to the best explanation).
Is it testable whether God exists or not? No. Is it testable, that the human consciousness only consists in some physical-chemical reactions in the brain, or that it only is a social construction? No.
Is the best explanation for crop circles, that they have been made by extraterrestrials? Although it is undoubtedly true, that strange patterns are sometimes found in cornfields (crop circles) - it doesn´t follow that they must have been made by extraterrestrials. There is a wide range of far more plausible alternative explanations of the phenomenon, such as that they have been made by pranksters.
Pseudoscience is philosophical, political, religious/occult theories, that seek legitimacy by claiming, that they are scientifical theories, while the fact is, that they either not is testable, or that they abuse the use of abductive reasoning.
Pseudoscience is for example seen in the New Age environment, where they demand so-called “alternative sciences”, such as Intelligent Design, Cryptozoology, Dianetics, Eugenics, Graphology, Homeopathy, Morphic Resonance, Perpetual Motion, Astrology, Personology, Phrenology, Theosophy, Physiognomy, Pyramidology, Quantum Mysticism, Radionics, Time Cube, UFOlogy, Vitalism, and many more.
New Age pseudoscience is always based on some kind of religious or occult viewpoint.
More accepted pseudosciences is seen in the intellectual environment in form of reductionisms, where they for example claim, that Man fully can be described and explained with the methods of natural science. This happens in various forms of Naturalism, Positivism and Behaviourism. Or they claim, that psychology, sociology or history can give the total and superior understanding of, what a human being is. These viewpoints are described respectively as Psychologism, Sociologism and Historism.
But all this is not testable. Often the reductionisms then claim, that their theories are the best explanations. The reductionisms observe Man from fragmented viewpoints, for example as organism, as physical-chemical system, as society being, as psyche, as producer and user of language and meaning. But what becomes of the wholeness? What unites all this knowledge to a total image of Man? The reductionisms´ explanations of this always end up as philosophical shipwrecks. Reductionisms are philosophical viewpoints, which under cover of being science seek to answer the question of Man, or reality as such. But no single branch of science gives anything else than a limited perspective on Man or reality. If the reductionisms should be taken seriously, then they shall contain a unifying perspective on all knowledge about Man.
It is unfortunate that the reductionisms are so accepted, because it is them that have created distinctions such as “Jewish” and “Aryan” physics; “bourgois” and “socialist” biology; and a lot of other political inferences from science that have had catastrophical consequences.
What can be a serious problem in the future, is that a new kind of pseudoscience is trying to unite New Age pseudosciences with the pseudoscience of reductionism (see my articles The pseudoscience of New Age and reductionism, The pseudoscience of reductionism and the problem of mind, and The Matrix Conspiracy).
Rationalization
Disguising the real reasons for acting in a particular way by giving a self-serving justification, which, even if plausible, is not true (see also wishful thinking). In extreme cases, rationalisers come to believe in their own Rationalizations. Related to Ad hoc clauses.
Reductio ad absurdum
Positions that would have absurd consequences if true. If you for example preach relativism and believe, that everything is relative and for that reason equal true, you have thereby accepted, that nazism, fascism, dictatorship, popular murder, terror and violence, are as equally great blessings for mankind as democracy, negotiation and dialogue. Then you have no basis in order to criticize, because you haven´t got any rational frame to start from. You can´t criticize anyone for argumentation bungling, or to replace arguments with machine guns, because this presupposes, that there is a rational foundation in your arguments.
Reductionism
Reductionism is the attempt fully to understand Man from one or the other single branch of science. They have for example claimed, that Man fully could be described and explained with the methods of natural science. This happens in various forms of Naturalism, Positivism and Behaviourism. Or they have thought, that psychology, sociology or history can give the total and superior understanding of, what a human being is. These viewpoints are described respectively as Psychologism, Sociologism and Historism.
These viewpoints are forms of reductionism; that is to say: they reduce or devaluates Man to a phenomenon of a single type. The problem is then to lead all other sides of Man back to this single type, for example to explain ethics, politics and mathematics as pure historical or psychological phenomena. Here the reductionisms always end in various forms of explaining away, which often is direct absurd. Their main problems are to explain phenomena such as consciousness, personal identity, free will and personal responsibility. Reductionisms also end up in self-refutating arguments, and the endless split of the thought.
The reason why reductionisms are so seductive are, that they often are based on ideological viewpoints, and therefore vested interests.
The reductionisms observe Man from fragmented viewpoints, for example as organism, as physical-chemical system, as society being, as psyche, as producer and user of language and meaning. But what becomes of the wholeness? What unites all this knowledge to a total image of Man?
The reductionisms view themselves as scientific approaches, but they are not. It is here the fundamental invalidity in the reductionistic viewpoints arises, since their basis not is building on argumentation, but on the claim, that they are founded in science. But science is not able to answer problems of lifeviews and values. Reductionisms are philosophical viewpoints, which under cover of being science seek to answer questions of values or moral standards. No single branch of science gives anything else than a limited perspective on Man or reality. If the reductionisms should be taken seriously, then they shall contain a unifying perspective on all knowledge about Man.
Reductionism is a form of pseudoscience. Also see my article The pseudoscience of reductionism and the problem of mind.
Representativeness bias
Many of our judgments involve classifying or categorizing individual persons or things. The representativeness bias manifests itself when we take a few traits or characteristics of someone or something and fit them to a stereotype or model.
The key to avoiding the representativeness bias is to open to the possibility that the case before you isn´t typical. Force yourself to consider other possibilities.
Related to Prejudice.
In organized form the representativeness bias is active in all forms of personality typing systems (see my article Personality typing is a refined system of prejudice)
Research has shown that...
Within pseudoscience there has gone inflation in the phrase Research has shown that… Pseudoscience is seen in the New Age environment, where they demand so-called “alternative sciences”, and in the intellectual environment in form of reductionisms.
Research has shown that... is a phrase, which often is used to convince the listener about, that the one who talks can reason what he says with concrete empirical proof. But this is often just an example of subjective argumentation, a kind of unethical manipulation (often based on wishful thinking), because it is extremely vague to claim that ”research has shown” anything, unless you can reason the assertion with specific details about the claimed research. Who has carried out this research? Which methods were there used? What exactly did they found out? Have their results been confirmed by others who work within the area?
Related to rhetoric and sophistry.
Rhetoric (subjective argumentation)
Rhetoric (subjective argumentation) is an unethical way to convince others about your opinions, because it doesn´t show, what in reel sense is appropriate or inappropriate about a case, but manipulates with it. Contains some of the following elements: innuendoes, distortions, generalizations, over-/understatements, sarcasm, satire, irony, postulates, emotional affections, coloured diction, choices and exclusions, subjective style.
Objective argumentation is always a more ethical way to convince others about your opinions, because it actually shows, what in reel sense is appropriate or inappropriate about a case. It also trains you in thinking more clearly. Contains some of the following elements: summary or abstract, information, description, reasons, concrete diction, nuanced objective statement.
Rhetoric is related to sophistry.
Rhetorical questions
Questions, which are asked purely for effect rather than as requests for answers. The questioner can for example assume that there only is one possible answer to the question, in which case the rhetorical question functions in precisely the same way as persuader words. In this form rhetorical questions are simply substitutes for straightforward statements.
It is comparatively easy and certainly unhelpful to raise a large number of seemingly deep questions on almost any topic (see also Pseudo-profundity); what is difficult and important is finding answers to them.
Byron Katie´s The work is an example of how a one-sided and simplified version of Cognitive Therapy ends up as rhetorical questions.
Selective abstraction
Selections and exclusions - which means that you, usually unconscious, choose to perceive special parts of reality and leave out other.
Self-refuting arguments
Is for example seen in relativism, which considers all views as relative, and therefore equally good. Relativism is logical fallacious, because it of course considers itself as being true. But it can precisely, in accordance with its own built-in relativism, not itself be regarded as more true than for example absolutism. For that reason it is followed by a long line of self-contradictions.
The self-contradiction is that relativism makes an exception of its own position: the very assertion of relativism is itself nonrelativistic.
Related to contradiction. Read more in my article The Sokal Hoax
Solipsism
Solipsism (of lat. Solus ipse, I alone), is the opinion, that I alone, and my states of consciousness, exist, or that I, and my states of consciousness, are the only things, which really can be realized. Everything else, for example other people´s consciousnesses and material things, which are claimed to be outside my consciousness, are problematic things.
Solipsism can for example only be stated in first person. There are not two persons who can agree about it, because all other persons than the person, which put forward the statement of solipsism, ex hypothesi only are phenomena in his cosciousness. When I – in first person – analyzes the eventual arguments against solipsism, I realize, that I don´t need to take them seriously, because they ex hypothesi only are phenomena in my cosciousness, which can´t be compelling. But at the same time I realize, that all my arguments for solipsism for the same reason nor can be considered compelling. I have ended up in a self-contradiction (see contradiction).
Solipsism ends in the problem of the endless split of the thought. Read more in my article The Dream Hypothesis and the Brain-in-jar Hypothesis
Sophistry
The Sophists were teachers of rhetoric, who against a fee, taught people how to persuade other people about their “truths”. Rhetoric, or sophistry, is precisely the art of persuasion. Rather than giving reasons and presenting arguments to support conclusions, as Socrates did, then those who use sophistry are employing a battery of techniques, such as emphatic assertion, persuader words and emotive language, to convince the listener, or reader, that what they say or imply is true.
The Sophists taught their pupils how to win arguments by any means available; they were supposedly more interested in teaching ways of getting on in the world than ways of finding the truth, as Socrates. Therefore any charlatan is welcome.
Straw man
A caricature of your opponent´s view set up simply so that you can knock it down. Sometimes it is a deliberate ploy; in which case it is a disreputable form of rhetoric. More often it involves a degree of wishful thinking stemming from widespread reluctance to attribute great intelligence or subtlety to someone with whom you strongly disagree. Over-confidence in your own position may lead you to treat dissenting views as easy targets when in fact they may be more complex and resistent to simple attacks.
Subjective validation
Subjective validation is active when people will validate a set of statements allegedly about themselves as highly accurate even if these statements not are accurate.
This tendency to find personal meaning and significance in statements not based on personal knowledge extends to words, symbols, initials, and objects as well.
Some of the statements or other items we find personally meaningful – even when they´re not – seem meaningful because of our desires (see the chapter The Lifeartist as a Desirous Being in my book A Portrait of a Lifeartist).
One reason for that people rate impersonal statements as highly significant to them – even when they´re not - is because they´re gullible. People tend to accept claims about themselves in proportion to their desire that the claims be true rather than in proportion to the accuracy of the claims as measured by some non-subjective standard. We tend to accept questionable, even false, statements about ourselves if we deem them positive or flattering enough.
Being gullible and prone to wishful thinking may partially explain the tendency to subjective validation. Another key element is selective thinking, the tendency to focus on and remember evidence that supports one´s beliefs, while ignoring or forgetting the evidence that conflicts with one´s beliefs. Some of the statements in the drugstore astrology reading may be false for you, but you ignore, downplay, or forget those statements when making your overall assessment of accuracy. Subjects who seek counseling from psychics, mediums, fortune tellers, mind readers, graphologists, etc., will often ignore false or questionable claims and, in many cases, by their own words or actions provide most of the information they erroneously attribute to such counselors (the explanation of why cold reading works). Many subjects will often believe that information they provided the counselor was profound and personal information that the counselor couldn´t possible have known.
Another important element in subjective validation is the natural human tendency to find meaning and significance. We will often give very liberal interpretations to vague, ambiguous, or inconsistent claims about ourselves in order to make sense out of the claims. In fact, we will often work hard to figure out some significance or meaning for statements that aren´t even about us when told that they´re somehow important. Mentalists and unscrupulous people claiming to be psychic take advantage of our desire to find meaning everywhere (see my article Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with clairvoyance).
There is at least one more key to understanding subjective validation: motivation. Many people seek fortune tellers of all sorts or psychic mediums because they desperately desire to have someone tell them what lies in store for them or they desperately wish to make contact with a dead love one. The sitter must be willing to validate. The stronger the desire to make contact, the harder the sitter will work to find meaning and connections in the medium´s items.
There may also be another mechanism at work here: the desire to please the medium. This may be due partly to the consideration that by pleasing the medium, the odds increase that the medium will make contact. But it may also have to do with a strange phenomenon that occurs in settings where a person gives up control of the situation to another, as in hypnosis or when being asked to assist a magician do a trick (see my article Hypnosis, hypnotherapy and the art of self-deception). There is sometimes a kind of loss of self in those situations, and combined with a desire to please, a kind of submission to the will of another, up to a point. If such a mechanism is at work in psychic readings, the sitter may acquiesce to the suggestions or items thrown out by the medium, not because they are true or truly significant, but out of a desire to please (also see my article Paranormal phenomena seen in connection with channeling).
When the motivation of the sitter is high enough it might lead her to validate false or ambiguous statements.
Also the Clustering illusion can be a key to understanding subjective validation: the intuition that random events, statements, or items, which occur in clusters are not really random events, statements, or items.
Finally, the drive to find personal meaning or significance in impersonal or insignificant coincidences may be related to the powerful natural drive to create stories, narratives that string together bits and pieces of information into a tale. Of course truth matters much of the time, but many of our narratives satisfy us regardless of their accuracy. This tendency to connect things and create plausible narratives out of partially fictitious items is called Confabulation.
Testimonials
Testimonials can for example be used by individuals, groups, organizations, etc., as a “proof” of, that some kind of theory is correct.
They do this by pointing to the many “successes.” They can demonstrate that their programs “work”. They can bring forth to testify on their behalf hundreds, if not thousands, of satisfied customers.
But it is important to know, that testimonials do not validate, for example a self-help program. Scientifical seen this is pure nonsense, and deeply manipulative. All talk about that testimonials are a proof, is a sign of pseudoscience.
Furthermore, the sense of improvement, for instance peak experiences, might not be matched by improved behavior. Just because they feel they have benefited doesn´t mean they have. Often they simply have become a nuisance to their non-initiated surroundings. Related to Anecdotal evidence.
Thought-reading
Thought-reading means for example, that you are convinced, that you know, what others think about you. You don´t investigate whether you are right by asking or searching for contra-conceptions and alternatives. Without deeper reflection you just conclude, that others for example are critical.
A variation of this is the thought distortion Hermeneutics of Suspicion, where your own theories make you convinced about what people in reality think, while at the same time are ignoring what they actually are saying.
A variation of this is the thought distortion Hermeneutics of Suspicion, where your own theories make you convinced about what people in reality think, while at the same time are ignoring what they actually are saying.
Truth by authority
Truth by Authority is about taking statements to be true simply because an alleged authority (experts, teachers, states of enlightenment, divine sources, paranormal abilities, etc.) on the matter has said/justified that they are true. A level of critical thinking is always appropriate, because the statement may be based on magical thinking, false premises, faulty reasoning, thought distortions, wishful thinking or vested interests.
Vested interest
Having a personal investment in the outcome of a discussion: standing to gain if a particular conclusion is reached. People who have vested interests in particular outcomes often distort evidence or are economical with the truth in order to achieve their desired end.
Wishful thinking
Wishful thinking is to think, that because it would be nice, if something were true, then it actual must be true. This thoughtpattern is very common, and very seductive because it allows us to avoid unpleasant truths. But it is a form of self-deceit. Wishful thinking for example often ignores the possibility of plausible alternative explanations on exactly the same observations (see ignoring alternative explanations).
