Read Online A Manual for Creating Atheists by Peter Boghossian - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Peter Boghossian
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a pathogenic belief is self-sabotaging and leads one away from human well-being. Examples of such beliefs are, “I’m unlovable, I’ll always fail in romance,” “I’m pathetic, weak, and worthless, and without Christ’s love I couldn’t quit drinking on my own,” and “Without Scientology and auditing, I’ll never be able to limit the effects of the trauma ruining my life.”
Based upon data with human subjects, psychiatrists have posited that therapeutic interventions work by creating an environment where the therapist continually frustrates a pathogenic belief; this causes the patient to redouble their efforts to prove the pathogenic hypothesis. For example, a patient’s pathogenic hypothesis is that people don’t like her. She goes to her therapist, sits down in her office and says, “It’s such a cold room in here. You never have flowers. My other therapist had cut flowers.” She expects or even wants the therapist to confirm her pathogenic hypothesis and respond, “Well, I don’t like you either,” but instead the therapist says, in proper psychoanalytic technique, “Tell me more about your feelings of coldness here.” This response causes the patient to further redouble her efforts to seek a rejection, and she becomes even more wedded to her pathogenic hypothesis. Consequently, the patient might say, “I’m really disturbed by the fact that you don’t have flowers. That’s incredibly thoughtless of you.”
The patient’s verbal behavior makes it appear that she’s getting worse, but actually she’s getting better. While she appears to double down and become more strident, she’s actually becoming more self-aware. (We see this in Book I of The Republic with Thrasymachus, toward the end of the Meno with Anytus, in the Hippias Major with Hippias, in the Gorgias with Polus and Callicles, and in the Euthyphro with Euthyphro. In the Clitophon , often rejected as non-Platonic because it’s so uncharacteristic, Clitophon denounces Socrates for not really making people virtuous. In the cave allegory at the beginning of Book VII of The Republic , Socrates says that those in the cave will become angry at the one who tells them that all they see are shadows—and will try to kill him if they can lay their hands on him. Through Socrates’s questions people become more assertive the more they doubt, or rather the more assertive they become the more reason one has to suppose they are unsure.)
For the Street Epistemologist, the conclusion to draw from increasingly resolute verbal behavior is that if you make headway into someone’s epistemic life—in helping them to question their beliefs, and the way they come to acquire knowledge—you may observe the opposite in their utterances and behavior. Once you expose a belief or an epistemology as fraudulent, you’re likely to hear statements of greater confidence. It seems that Street Epistemology has made your client more doxastically closed, when in fact this strident verbal behavior indicates a glimmer of doxastic openness.
If you’re worried that your intervention has made someone’s epistemic life more disconnected from reality because they seem more resolute after treatment—don’t be. Their verbal behavior is a natural and expected consequence of Street Epistemology. What appears to be doxastic closure is really doxastic openness.
BELIEF, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND “ACTING ACCORDINGLY”
“No one goes willingly toward the bad.”
—Socrates in Protagoras
Helping someone value and use an epistemology that brings their beliefs into alignment with reality is no guarantee that their behavior will follow suit; this failure to see behavioral change can dishearten nascent Street Epistemologists. You’ve invested time and energy helping someone abandon their faith, and then to your surprise they mention they were just at temple last week. How is it someone can recognize they have a flawed epistemology but fail to act by not changing their behavior? (An
Based upon data with human subjects, psychiatrists have posited that therapeutic interventions work by creating an environment where the therapist continually frustrates a pathogenic belief; this causes the patient to redouble their efforts to prove the pathogenic hypothesis. For example, a patient’s pathogenic hypothesis is that people don’t like her. She goes to her therapist, sits down in her office and says, “It’s such a cold room in here. You never have flowers. My other therapist had cut flowers.” She expects or even wants the therapist to confirm her pathogenic hypothesis and respond, “Well, I don’t like you either,” but instead the therapist says, in proper psychoanalytic technique, “Tell me more about your feelings of coldness here.” This response causes the patient to further redouble her efforts to seek a rejection, and she becomes even more wedded to her pathogenic hypothesis. Consequently, the patient might say, “I’m really disturbed by the fact that you don’t have flowers. That’s incredibly thoughtless of you.”
The patient’s verbal behavior makes it appear that she’s getting worse, but actually she’s getting better. While she appears to double down and become more strident, she’s actually becoming more self-aware. (We see this in Book I of The Republic with Thrasymachus, toward the end of the Meno with Anytus, in the Hippias Major with Hippias, in the Gorgias with Polus and Callicles, and in the Euthyphro with Euthyphro. In the Clitophon , often rejected as non-Platonic because it’s so uncharacteristic, Clitophon denounces Socrates for not really making people virtuous. In the cave allegory at the beginning of Book VII of The Republic , Socrates says that those in the cave will become angry at the one who tells them that all they see are shadows—and will try to kill him if they can lay their hands on him. Through Socrates’s questions people become more assertive the more they doubt, or rather the more assertive they become the more reason one has to suppose they are unsure.)
For the Street Epistemologist, the conclusion to draw from increasingly resolute verbal behavior is that if you make headway into someone’s epistemic life—in helping them to question their beliefs, and the way they come to acquire knowledge—you may observe the opposite in their utterances and behavior. Once you expose a belief or an epistemology as fraudulent, you’re likely to hear statements of greater confidence. It seems that Street Epistemology has made your client more doxastically closed, when in fact this strident verbal behavior indicates a glimmer of doxastic openness.
If you’re worried that your intervention has made someone’s epistemic life more disconnected from reality because they seem more resolute after treatment—don’t be. Their verbal behavior is a natural and expected consequence of Street Epistemology. What appears to be doxastic closure is really doxastic openness.
BELIEF, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND “ACTING ACCORDINGLY”
“No one goes willingly toward the bad.”
—Socrates in Protagoras
Helping someone value and use an epistemology that brings their beliefs into alignment with reality is no guarantee that their behavior will follow suit; this failure to see behavioral change can dishearten nascent Street Epistemologists. You’ve invested time and energy helping someone abandon their faith, and then to your surprise they mention they were just at temple last week. How is it someone can recognize they have a flawed epistemology but fail to act by not changing their behavior? (An
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