Cognitive Dissonance

 Cognitive Dissonance and Psychoanalysis

The theory of ‘cognitive dissonance’ arises from a common sense belief that, if someone holds two ideas or desires or opinions that conflict, this conflict should cause mental discomfort and that the holder of the opinions will do something to lessen the discomfort. 

He or she may abandon one idea, possibly, or gain new information or beliefs to lessen the dissonance; if there is commitment to an idea, the person may adapt their belief or behavior, by forgetting, by reducing the importance of one of the dissonant elements or—in particular—by seeking to convince others whose adherence will confirm the cherished belief.

The "convincing" or persuading occurs by force of attitude or inner state versus by words, or rhetoric.

When people with strongly held beliefs are confronted by evidence clearly at odds with their beliefs, they will seek to resolve the discomfort caused by the discrepancy by convincing others to support their views rather than abandoning their commitments. They will seek, for instance, some means of re-establishing cognitive consonance without sacrificing their religious convictions or metaphysical ideas.

The psychoanalyst Langs felt strongly about this problem and presented the methodology of interpreting the interactions with a patient - verbal, behavioral, psychological - by hypothesizing an interpretation based on given evidence, and then wait for validating evidence later in the therapeutic situation before offering the interpretation. This kind of double checking provided a way of self-refuting interpretations based on counter-transference and establishing convincing evidence for the interpretation.

What Langs does, and what Popper exclaimed about, is to seek to falsify or disconfirm hypotheses that are primarily growing within the inner-dialogue between analyst and analysand on the basis of interpretations of talk.

I suppose however that over the time of a psychoanalysis a long series of hypotheses are generated, some are remaining without being falsified, and the gambit is to consider these as true or false, or as meaningless. But, the main issue of dissonance - convincing others on the basis of your own commitments - is avoided.

Propaganda is the sole substance of politics

 Propaganda is the Sole Substance of Politics -

Walter Lippmann (1889-1974) on Propaganda and Journalism

Lippmann is best known for his 1922 “Public Opinion” which is considered the founding document of journalism and media studies. Lippmann wrote continuously about democracy and freedom.

Lippmann (Preface to Morals, 1929) defined propaganda as deception: half-truths, lies, ambiguities, evasions, calculated silence, red herrings, unresponsiveness, slogans, catchwords, showmanship, bathos, hokum and buncombe. “They are one and all,” he said, “methods of preventing a disinterested inquiry into the situation.”

Lippmann (1929, Preface to Morals) distinguishes the politicians from the statesmen. “Candor is a bitter pill when first it is tasted but it is full of health, and once a man becomes established in the public mind as a person who deals with habitually and successfully with real things, he acquires an eminence of a wholly different quality from that of even the most celebrated caterer to the popular favor. His hold on the people is enduring because he promises nothing which turns out to be a fake. Sooner or later the politician, because he deals in unrealities, is found out.”  Lippmann goes on, “The words of a statesman have value because they express not the desires of the moment but the conditions under which desires can actually be adjusted to reality.”

Lippmann called the ‘technic of propaganda pernicious,’ and ‘pure democracy a mistake.’ He felt strongly that democracy will work if it is accurately representative. “The propaganda, the pressure groups, the formulation of a law that is higher than the Constitution, and the breaking down of the checks and balances (on the people’s will) are evidences of a radical defect in the conception of democracy” (How Liberty is Lost, 1938). 

Resistance to mass propaganda depends on individualism, on the independence of individuals. Lippmann addresses education as insufficient to protect the people from the media: the propaganda, the journalism, the lobbyists and pressure groups, and the corporations – what is required is self-education.

In “Mr. Strachey’s Case and the Law,” 1938, Lippmann discusses how the democrats believed they could tolerate any form of agitation short of open incitement to violence. However, since WWI, democrats have come to believe that an active defense of democratic institutions, e.g. elections, is an absolute necessity. He points out that the European nations have enacted laws making it a criminal offense to conduct propaganda which incites extreme hatred and thus leads to violence as when the right to meet and parade incites trouble. The democracies of Europe have turned away from the tolerance of agitation and now restrict free speech and freedom of the press when they are used to defame public authorities and to destroy the dignity of democratic institutions. Some nations have specially trained political police. 

William F. Buckley in 1974 said that free speech should be limited when it becomes licentious. Lippmann states the problem of democracy is when others come saying, “I demand from you in the name of your principles the rights which I shall deny to you in the name of my principles.” He addresses the problem of free speech as license to say whatever you like!

In 1957, The Portent of the Moon,” Lippmann contrasted two options for dealing with the Russian technological advance, “One response could be to think of it in terms of propaganda, and to look around for some device for doing something spectacular to outmatch what the Russians have done. The other response would be to look inward upon ourselves and to concern ourselves primarily with our own failings, and to be determined not so much to beat the Russians as to cure ourselves.” 

He goes on to specify our failings as the underfunding of education, a primary democratic public institution, and the scandals of racial inequality, the segregation and separation that contradicts our democratic principle of equality.

Lippmann frequently uses the term ‘propaganda’ as Communist propaganda, war propaganda, unprofessional journalism and the problem of licentious free speech. In 1943, “The Fascination of Greatness,” Lippmann praised Winston Churchill as a great statesman. He contrasts Churchill’s eloquence and magnanimity with this state of affairs: “That is why our spirits languish when their daily food is only the military communiques (the credibility gap), press releases, and an absolutely intolerable flood of gossip journalism, pipe-line journalism, and intrigue journalism about who is in the doghouse now, and how the courtiers (advisors and appointees) at the palace (White House) are planning to cut one another’s throats, and how the misunderstood and underappreciated are those who hand out the dope (the fake news) to those who then lick their boots.”

“The air is foul and stale with it all.”

Problem in the philosophy of meaning

 The Problem in the Philosophy of Science - Meaning

Economics, political science and the other social sciences imitate the natural sciences.  The differences between nature or natural objects, and human beings who can use information to adapt or adjust to ongoing concepts and language does not however get discussed. Natural objects - the sky, clouds, soil, oceans, etc., cannot internalize or accommodate human concepts like truth, logic, or understanding.  Philosophy of science, i.e. philosophy of biology or philosophy of sociology, evaluates ideas and knowledge in the context of the differences between natural science and social science. 

The philosophy of science and the philosophy of the social sciences both address the problem of the difference between our language or statements about natural and social objects - object being whatever is intended - and our experience, perceptions, or how we construct and produce knowledge.

Wittgenstein’s leading idea in the Tractatus was that propositions – that is, statements asserting facts, such as ‘it is raining’ – are a picture of what they describe. This is Wittgenstein’s ‘Picture Theory of Language’, or as he himself called it, his ‘Theory of Logical Portrayal,'

“We can say straight away: Instead of: this proposition has such and such a sense: this proposition represents such and such a situation. It portrays it logically. Only in this way can the proposition be true or false: It can only agree or disagree with reality by being a picture of a situation” (Notebooks)

He added later: “The great problem round which everything I write turns is: Is there an order in the world a priori, and if so what does it consist in?” (Notebooks p.53)

By “an order in the world a priori,” Wittgenstein meant an order that we could know to exist in the world without reference to our experience of the world. He felt forced to conclude that there is such an order, for it is this order that is pictured or logically portrayed by the relations between the symbols of a proposition.

The second big idea in the Tractatus – which the logical positivists ignored - was the thought of an unutterable kind of truth that ‘makes itself manifest.'  Hence the key paragraph 6.522 in the Tractatus,

“There are indeed things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”

In other words, there is a categorically different kind of truth from that which we can state in empirically or logically verifiable propositions. These are instances which indicate what something is not.

Wittgenstein’s intention in asserting this is precisely to protect matters of value from being disparaged or debunked by scientifically-minded people such as the Logical Positivists of the Vienna Circle, and later the technologists and technocrats.

He put his view beyond doubt in this sequence of paragraphs:

“6.41 The sense of the world must lie outside the world. In the world everything is as it is and happens as it does happen. In it there is no value – and if there were, it would be of no value. If there is value which is of value, it must lie outside of all happening and being-so. For all happening and being-so is accidental. What makes it non-accidental cannot lie in the world, for otherwise this would again be accidental. It must lie outside the world.”

In other words, all worldly actions and events are contingent  - ‘accidental’ or senseless, but matters of value are necessary, for they are ‘higher’ or too important to be accidental, and so must be outside the world of empirical propositions.

“6.42 Hence also there can be no ethical propositions. Propositions cannot express anything higher.

6.421 It is clear that ethics cannot be expressed. Ethics is transcendental.”

You should be aware that the Vienna Circle appropriated LW’s Tractatus which caused a conflict. LW quit Cambridge and took up as a school-teacher! Not until 1926 did LW agree to meet with only certain Vienna Circle members: Schlick, Neurath, and Waisman. Once Karl Popper was invited, there was a breakdown. 

Popper took up several questionable positions, namely, falsification - the notion that verification or confirmation of statements could never prove the truth of the statement; however, a falsifying instance could negate the truth of the statrement. Underlying this key idea of Popper's was the rejection of induction, that is, that no repeatable observation or measurement could justify a generalization or uniformity. Popper proposed instead a form of eliminative induction, or deduction where principles might predict an observalbe instance, or peferably, be falsified!

Science does not accept any necessity or certainty, we must instead acknowledge error and interpretation.  The field where natural science and the social sciences intersect is at Evolution. Evolution is empirical but incomplete. The meaning of the term evolution is indeterminate.  Those who reproduce form offspring that might adapt to new environmental and social conditions.

Where Wittgenstein posited a field where values did not count was opposed by Popper who interpretted evolution as circular reasoning but who did hold a values orientation.

Evolution is not about morality or religion. It is simply a matter of who reproduces in the competition of the sexual market.

Evolutionary biology tries to modify the ‘red in tooth and claw,’ the mating practices that tend to exclude many people.

Evolutionary biology posits notions like adaptation and altruism,  memes or cultures that defend reproducers. Political science posits societal learning processes as advancing cultural and international integration and modifying intergroup conflict.

The wars, hostility and hatred continue however; aggressive practices collide against legal and democratic social organization.  Adaptation and altruism seem like moral accommodations that encourage reproduction, but people who are amoral, manipulative, selfish and authoritarian reproduce more than the moral and ethical.  The wealthier reproduce more than the impoverished which speaks to the (im)morality of population control and the normalization of sex.

The criteria of interest is ‘meaningfulness.’  Therefore, ‘change’ is an essential attribute of reality for scientists.  To understand what has happened during the history of man and science from the 19th century’s positivism, to mathematics and logical empiricism to the linguistic turn, the interpretation of meaning and the analysis of the sociology of science are the current frameworks.

During the linguistic turn, the study of language, the language of description in relation to reality, the standard became ‘meaning.’