Ray Scott Percival

In 2022 the Belgian clinical psychologist Mattias Desmet went viral when he identified official government policies on the Covid Pandemic as a kind of collective insanity he calls Mass Formation. Desmet points out that official policies were not modified to conform with scientific findings, instead the findings were ignored and seriously harmful policies were fanatically promoted regardless of the evidence. Many thousands have died because of the lockdowns and the adverse effects of the vaccines. Meanwhile critics and dissenters were demonized and persecuted by methods normally associated with the Salem witch trials or Stalin's purges. Desmet's bold new theory was greeted by Covid skeptics like Robert Malone, Bret Weinstein, and Tucker Carlson with enthusiastic agreement. Desmet's numerous social media videos racked up millions of viewers, even before his book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, became an instant best-seller in all major world languages. Desmet's theory of mass formation (sometimes called mass formation psychosis, a label he disavows) explains the official ideology of the lockdowns and vaccines along the same lines as historical pogroms and totalitarian regimes, drawing upon the insights of thinkers such as Gustave Le Bon, Hannah Arendt, and Michel Foucault. In 1951, Hannah Arendt predicted that the totalitarianism of Stalin and Hitler would be succeeded by the totalitarianism of faceless bureaucratic 'experts'. This prediction, Desmet claims, is now fulfilled by the fear-mongering and deliberate encouragement of popular ignorance and mass hysteria associated with the Covid lockdowns and vaccines. Ultimately, argues Desmet, we are vulnerable to the craziness of mass formation because we place too much reliance on a mechanistic view of the world and the cosmos and too much trust in the judgment of politically appointed authorities. In Mattias Desmet: Critical Responses, an interdisciplinary group of distinguished writers give us searching criticisms of Desmet's theory and world-view, from a variety of political and scientific perspectives. In different ways they call into question many of Desmet's methods, assumptions, and conclusions. Sandra Woien is Senior Lecturer in the School of Historical, Philosophical, and Religious Studies at Arizona State University. She edited the highly-acclaimed anthologies, Jordan Peterson: Critical Responses (2022) and Sam Harris: Critical Responses (2023).

In what way might the new classicism gain support from evolutionary theory? My rough answer is that evolutionary theory can help defend a return to more classical artistic standards and also explain why classical standards are not simply imposed by social conditioning or by powerful elites, but arise naturally from something more fundamental in the human constitution. Classical standards and themes are an expression of our evolutionary history. The mind can be seen as a biological organ or function, produced by evolutionary selection pressure. The most arguable and interesting expression of this point of view is that which says that the human mind is more like a Swiss army knife than a general-purpose computer or sponge for information. Our minds are modular. First propounded by Jerry Fodor, the idea was taken up by evolutionary psychologists and fleshed out with a history. Evolution has given us cognitive modules, partly self-contained mental “machines” that are attuned to solving problems with a narrowly defined domain. Darwinian evolution has shaped our minds in particular ways that fundamentally affect our evaluation of everything we perceive and therefore our appreciation of art. I draw out a surprising implication of combining the modular view with evolution: that our aesthetic standards may, to some extent, be fragmented and not quite as universal as held by the orthodox defence of classical art.

Justificationism is the epistemology that enjoins us to choose our beliefs according to this principle: choose all and only those beliefs and at an appropriate degree of confidence that one can justify, either by an intellectual certificate or empirical warrant. My article argues that most forms of justificationism require the truth of doxastic voluntarism, the doctrine that one may choose ones specific beliefs. However, since belief is involuntary, justificationism is severely undermined. Justificationism as stated couldn’t be practised; since believing is not something we can do at will as a basic action. Although devastating to any subjectivist justificationism, it does not undermine our ability to cultivate, through long-term choices, the most rational attitude in the search for truth and the growth of knowledge. A major rival of subjective justiticationism (SJ) is critical rationalism (CR). CR is the doctrine that progress in the growth of knowledge occurs through the unrelenting criticism of competing unjustified conjectural attempts to solve problems. The objective methods and standards involved in CR are unaffected because following (or not) an objective method is something we can do at will.

Is the web out to get us, or is it a force for autonomy and flourishing? Is it another instrument for the governing elite to channel the masses for political or business purposes? Is it a means for our baser nature to entrench everlasting fake news stories, political narratives, and even whole ideologies? In her tome Surveillance Capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff details what she regards as the dangers of losing our freedom, dignity, and democratic control to business by being “conditioned”, “tuned”, “nudged” and otherwise shaped in unconscious ways to serve big-tech and its business associates. Echoing many of her fears, the popular documentary The Social Dilemma portrays algorithmic tracking of our behaviour by Facebook and Google as a Frankenstein monster. The documentary has the endorsement of the historian Yuval Noah Harari, best known for his Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind. He argues that the web has become a tool to further reinforce the survival of fake news, to which he thinks humans already have a strong proclivity. Who is going to tame this Frankenstein?

How poor are they that have not patience! What wound did ever heal but by degrees? Thou knowest we work by wit and not by witchcraft, And wit depends on dilatory time. —Othello II: iii. Have you abandoned your engagement with the project of enlightenment, liberty, and progress because you have grown cynical about the effectiveness of sound argument? When someone tells you you’re wasting your time arguing with them because argument is an illusion, do you have an answer? Today, it’s popular to depict people as irrational puppets of charismatic leaders, drawn unwittingly along by the emotional tides of crowds, mesmerised by the visual propaganda of flag-waving parades and historical statues glistening in the light of ideological firework displays. Witness the otherwise excellent periscopes of Scott Adams. We are told that we are living in a Post-Truth society. Logic and truth are irrelevant. Facts and logic don’t persuade, and “master persuaders” such as Donald Trump avoid them. Adams writes: “A good general rule is that people are more influenced by visual persuasion, emotion, repetition, and simplicity than they are by details and facts…If you’re using super-strong persuasion, you can be wrong on the facts, and even the logic of your argument, and still win.” Scott Adams is in the same tradition of thought as Danielle Kahneman, author of Thinking, Fast and Slow [2011], and winner of the Nobel prize in bias-research. This tradition emphasises the irrational and assumes that biases expose the irrational in humans. Kahneman carefully refrains from saying that humans are robots or 90% irrational, as Adams is inclined to say, but his emphasis still lies on the irrationality of humans. This now fashionable line of thought — though full of fascinating research — can be deeply misleading and demoralising for those committed to sound argument. Fortunately, there is no cause for despondency.

A mendacious conspiracy theorist posts a staged interview with a bogus researcher on YouTube claiming COVID-19 was intentionally released to sell vaccines. Some people believe this immediately and post to others, who believe the story immediately and pass it on. It goes viral. Posting such a fake report is unethical, of course. But is it stupid and irrational that people believed the fake report? How can we minimise the spread of false or misleading information? Is it by entrusting to a supervisory ministry or organisation the task of adjudicating on what content in the public sphere is true and educating people to willfully refrain from believing the first thing they hear? Currently, such a task is attempted by Facebook, Google and Twitter by ostracising people from social media platforms that have for most people become their community. But is there a possibility that this could be genuinely systematic?

No evangelistic erroneous network of ideas can guarantee the satisfaction of these two demands : (1) propagate the network without revision and (2) completely insulate itself against losses in credibility and adherents through criticism. If a network of ideas is false, or inconsistent or fails to solve its intended problem, or unfeasible, or is too costly in terms of necessarily forsaken goals, its acceptability may be undermined given only true assumptions and valid arguments. People prefer to adopt ideologies that (i) are logically consistent, (ii) are more truth-like and of higher information content than their rivals, (iii) are systematically organised, (iv) solve their problems better than their rivals, (v) do not contain unfeasible demands, and (vi) do not contain uneconomic demands. Truth and validity therefore act as Darwinian-like filters on ideologies. Using Popper's notion of situational analysis and with reference to Darwinian evolution, considered as a special case of the former, and Bartley's theory of comprehensively critical rationalism I argue that a propagandist cannot guarantee his message or his movement from sound criticism. All positions are in a methodological sense open to argument. Moreover, the logic of a propagandist's situation constrains him into making his message and himself open to criticism in order to maximize its chances of being propagated through the population. But he then loses control of the message in two respects. Firstly, his audience are disposed to select from the competing ideas they encounter those that satisfy (i) to (vi) because of man's evolutionary history. Secondly, he cannot guarantee protection from criticism even a privileged section of his message because he cannot predict in a systematic way what logical repercussions each protective reformulation of the ideology will have on other sections of the ideology and what criticism the ideology will encounter. He cannot do the latter because of certain logical properties of theories that endow them with unfathomable depths. Marxism and Freudianism serve as case studies, especially for the analysis of Popper's notion of the immunizing stratagem, a methodological/logical device that is supposed to save theories from criticism. "Immunizing stratagems" either abandon the ideology they are meant to protect or seriously lower its chances of being reproduced.

Geoffrey Stokes's introduction to Karl Popper's work portrays it as an evolving system of ideas and aims to explore the little-understood intricate logical relationships between Popper's work on scientific method and his philosophy of politics. It is one of the few books to cover the debate between Popper and the Frankfurt School. Characteristic of many of Stokes's "criticisms" is that they are presented as Popper "admitting" or "granting" them - as if Popper was not the one who originally raised and dealt with them in the systematic elaboration of his philosophy. A refreshing exception is that Stokes acknowledges (but only in a footnote) that the idea that Popper was originally a "dogmatic falsificationist" is merely a Lakatosian myth.

It is facile and factually incorrect to represent suicide terrorists as simply seeking mass destruction, as demented or believing that they will be rewarded by "seventy-two virgins in paradise". In my book The Myth of the Closed Mind: Understanding How and Why People are Rational I felt it was important to deal with the issue of terrorism by consulting explanatory theories of human behaviour and the substantial research on the strategic pattern of terrorist incidents over the decades, led principally by Professor Robert Pape of Chicago University. To defeat your enemy, you must first understand him. Strangely, we must first grant that, though morally depraved, terrorists are rational: they concoct and execute detailed plans with definite strategic goals in mind. Only once we have granted the terrorist a rational mind can we, in the end, create peace. My argument is that while religion may have a small role in terrorism, it is principally politics, or the logic of territorial control, that is the key to understanding the threat we face. This extract from my book is principally about Al Qaeda, but a similar analysis applies to ISIS, the current greatest threat to our peace in the west. The strategic goal of Al Qaeda was simply to repulse what they saw as foreign intervention. ISIS has the same goal, but in order to continue its growth as a state in the sense of a monopoly of coercion over a given geographical area. ISIS, a rogue state that arose in ungoverned space created unintentionally by foreign intervention in Iraq, is now lashing out at foreign governments that have severely shrunk the territory ISIS occupies. Before October 2015, ISIS confined its terrorism to the goal of extending its territory in Iraq and Syria, and there were no significant ISIS-led or inspired suicide terrorist attacks outside Iraq and Syria. But now, as their territory collapses, they are attacking the countries that have strangled their control of territory in Iraq and Syria: the coalition of western governments – Britain, Belgium, Canada, France, Morocco, Turkey, Russia, the U.S.A. and others – exactly the countries that have recently seen an explosion of suicide terrorism.

Michel Haar supports the natural, but he fails to see that the drives behind technology— people's curiosity, exploration and desire to control—could not be more natural. They are, after all, part of our evolutionary heritage. As Konrad Lorenz, the famous ethologist, shows in Behind the Mirror. In his discussion of alienation, Haar also overlooks the work of Friedrich Hayek, the Nobel prizewinning economist, who explores the emergence of the extended society of worldwide markets in his book Fatal Conceit. Hayek predicts that there will always be a tension between our instinctive need for the closeness and familiarity of the tribal-like grouping and the extended market. I contrast Haar also with the perspective of William Warren Bartley III in his book Unfathomed Knowledge, Unmeasured Wealth, in which a Bartley expounds a logical/epistemological argument to the effect that alienation of our products is insuperable.

How do you put both physicists and biologists on their guard? Answer: propound a philosophical theory that ignores Darwin's demolition of essentialism in species and brands any physicist who denies your theory of natural kinds as an anti-realist. A traditional division in philosophy is between metaphysics (what sorts of things exist) and epistemology (what and how we know). Some think that the core of realism is the metaphysical assumption that there is a world independent of our minds. But this core assumption is sometimes clothed in other assumptions, such as theories of truth, truth-likeness, meaning and knowledge. Scornful of what they see as an unnecessary retreat from a fully clothed realism to the naked postulate of a mind-independent reality, Harre, Aronson and Way present a realism that also embraces truth and truth-likeness, as well as their own conception of scientific method and the structure of the world. I argue that this approach, while intriguing and worth reading, leads to some insuperable difficulties.

Mary Midgley's book Utopias, Dolphins and Computers will be needed to recharge our more philosophical approach to life as new problems present themselves to humanity at an accelerated rate. The most dangerous attitude to these challenges, Midgley argues, is an anti-intellectualism that fails to see that all approaches presuppose tacit or hidden assumptions, that is a philosophy. One part of our tacit philosophy that is now breaking up is the social contract, according to Mary Midgley in Utopias, Dolphins and Computers It needs tempering with a vision of people in relationships bordering on the organic—ideas with their roots in ecology—rather than as fundamentally isolated atoms in contractual union.

Henri Bergson is perhaps most remembered for his bold challenge to Einstein's theory of the relativity of simultaneity. Bergson maintained that Einstein's theory did not cope with our intuition of time, which is an intuition of duration. Einstein retorted that there may be psychological time, but there is no special philosopher's time. For Einstein, time forms the fourth dimension of a so-called Parmenidean "block universe". I argue that we must be on our guard not to read into the work of even greatest intellectual predecessors ideas and levels of sophistication that we take for granted in modern theories. For example, it would be silly to suggest that Democritus's atomic theory - though important in the development of the testable modern atomic theory - has anything new to say about modern quantum theory.

It’s often claimed that some people—fundamentalists or fanatics—are indeed sealed off from rational criticism. And every month new pop psychology books appear, describing the dumb ways ordinary people make decisions, as revealed by psychological experiments. The conclusion is that all or most people are fundamentally irrational. Ray Scott Percival sets out to demolish the whole notion of the closed mind and of human irrationality. There is a difference between making mistakes and being irrational. Though humans are prone to mistakes, they remain rational. In fact, making mistakes is a sign of rationality: a totally non-rational entity could not make a mistake. Rationality does not mean absence of error; it means the possibility of correcting error in the light of criticism. In this sense, all human beliefs are rational: they are all vulnerable to being abandoned when shown to be faulty. Percival agrees that people cling stubbornly to their beliefs, but he maintains, first, that not being too ready to abandon one’s beliefs is rational, and second, that people do not cling to their beliefs indefinitely or “come what may.” The illusion that they do can be dispelled by examining what really goes on in the formation and abandonment of beliefs, and here we need to observe the high rate of turnover in membership of ideological movements, as well as their numerous splits and schisms. Percival examines and refutes the arguments of writers who have upheld the Irrationality or Closed Mind thesis, including Raymond Boudon, Serge Chakotin, Richard Dawkins, Jon Elster, Ernest Gellner, Adolf Hitler, Leszek Kolakowski, Walter Laqueur, Gustav Le Bon, Karl Popper, and Max Weber. A key aspect of Percival’s approach is to identify “the persuader’s predicament,” the situational logic of the propagandist. Percival contends that a propagandist is faced with a trade-off between his message being closed to criticism and the message reaching and converting as many people as possible. It is possible to make a belief system more closed to criticism, but only by limiting the wide dissemination of the system. Percival illustrates the way belief systems adapt to criticism by an examination of two ideologies, Marxism and Freudianism, and by various examples drawn from the history of religion.

Philosophy and economics of Malthusianism. An optimistic view of human population growth and a critique of The Club of Rome and Paul R. Ehrlich, author of The Population Bomb. I apply Julian Simon's perspective to the malthusian debate, inspired by his book The Ultimate Resource. When a child is born he brings into existence not just an extra mouth to feed, but two hands and - more importantly in the long run - an extra brain with which to solve any problems that an increase in population brings. In the long run, and given enough freedom, there in a propensity for humans to produce more than they consume. We are not just like flies in a bottle with a limited amount of resources, but creative creatures that can in principle engage in continual, never ending economic growth. More Info: Multiple publishers: National Review; Clashing Views on Controversial Social Issues; Libertarian Alliance, UK.

There is nothing more important in the evolution of culture than the evolution of its abstract thought, and philosophical thought dominates all other thought in the long run. It is often the musings of some recluse abstract scribbler that open opportunities for a society or erect its mental prisons. This is why the history of philosophy is important. To understand a culture is to understand the abstract products of its thought and how that culture interpreted them. But this should not be confused with philosophy itself, which is the attempt to solve some abstract problem.

THE MIND-BODY PROBLEM: A GUIDE TO THE CURRENT DEBATE (EDITED BY RICHARD WARNER AND TA D E U S Z SZUBKA) contains recent essays by the key players in the the field of the Mind-Body problem: Searle, Fodor, Problem Honderich, Nagel, McGinn, Stich, Rorty and others. But there are a few interesting exceptions, for example Edelman, Popper, Putnam and Dennett. Nevertheless, these thinkers do get a mention here and there, and nearly all the exciting topical issues are dealt with, including externalism, functionalism, intentionality, Turing computational models, and the relationship between these philosophical problems and psychology. I am particularly struck by the tendency to engage in an evasive stratagem when it comes to stating the physicalist thesis. Instead of a clear definitive position about what kind of physical science would achieve the hoped-for reduction, what I found was variations on Lewis's claim that the reduction would be effected by a "unified body of scientific theories of the sort we now accept". Materialism used to be a clear doctrine: a clockwork Universe of impenetrable particles. But materialism transcended itself. First through Hobbes' and Leibniz's criticisms of Descartes, then Newton's demolition of the Cartesian idea that matter was essentially extension by introducing gravity (action at a distance) and then through the field theories of Faraday and Maxwell, and more recently through Einstein's work, which undermined the "substance" view of matter, something that remained permanent while other changes occurred. I contrast the perspectives of the Churchlands with those of Donald T. Campbell, Karl Popper and other evolutionary and emergentist views.

MICHAEL Ruse aims to describe what scientists actually do in their research and how they arrive at their theories — a mixed bag of false starts, fallacious reasoning, the cultivation of followers, the marketing of ideas and so on. His approach, evolutionary naturalism, rejects the traditional distinction between the normative and the descriptive analysis of science. For him the path of discovery to, say, Darwin's theory of natural selection makes a difference to the theory itself, whereas for the normative analyst it is just history. Normative analysts (who probably include most readers of Nature) would say that the logical structure of the theory, its truth or falsity and its relevance to the objective problem can all be assessed independently of the route of discovery. I defend the normative analysis of scientific method against philosophical naturalism. I defend the role of objective standards and logical rules of argumentation.

In the film classic Blade Runner, the story explores the notion of personal identity through that of carefully crafted androids. Can an android have a personality; can androids be persons? The title of the original story by Philip K. Dick is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The story suggests that our sense of being a person depends on our having memories that connect us with our childhood. In the movie, the androids are only a couple of years old, but have adult bodies. To complete them as persons they are given simulated memories of childhood. Some psychiatrists have decided that even humans dream only of electric sheep. I explore how Popper’s world 3 can help to defend a notion of personhood that can be used to criticize the thesis that persons are simply complex physical processes and that all their serious life-problems can be conceptualised as a form of physical illness.

The authors of this collection fail to make clear the distinction between naturalistic and purely logical/methodological approaches to the philosophy of science. I also criticise Thomas Nickles's attempt to devise an explanatory method for discovery in science using programs that produce trial and error explorations of a domain, which he thinks replaces the need for a conjecture a refutation approach (cf. Popper and Campbell). Such programs embody undeclared conjectures in the way they are set up.