I’ve always been interested in the questions of why people do what they do and why people feel and think as they do. Being of a philosophical and scientific orientation, my interest in those questions led me to wander on my own until as a teenager I found and started studying the most philosophically deep schools of thought in economics, linguistics, and some of the other sciences of human action and the human mind.

To my surprise, though, it turned out in my experience—I was born and raised in America in the 1990s—that many or even most people that I shared my insights with, whether they were intellectual or not, found my insights uncomfortable. Why? Because they found it uncomfortable to generalize about people.

But the fact of the matter is that science, whether about people or things, is about generalization. To find it uncomfortable to generalize about people is to find it uncomfortable to do science about people. I was shocked, bewildered, at my experience with the people around me, until I looked into the history of the epistemological and methodological controversies in the social sciences. There’s a long history to being uncomfortable generalizing about people—indeed being uncomfortable in that way is natural to the leftist temperament. That revelation led me to take a step back from the debate and look at it from the outside, to go meta. It helped me not only clarify my side of the debate but also stop being shocked that the other side exists.

The leftist infection, which started in the 19th century, spread to the heart of the West after the World Wars, and part and parcel to the leftist temperament is social-science denialism.

My definition of the term “conjuration” in the context of extending logico-linguistic analysis to the social is the phenomenon of using descriptive phrasing in order to prescribe. That is, descriptive phrasing used descriptively informs the interlocutor that X is true, but descriptive phrasing used prescriptively directs the interlocutor to make X true. For example, imagine that your boss says to you about your upcoming trip to Japan: “You’ll land in Osaka on the 15th, and then you’ll take the train to Kyoto on the 20th.” Is that a description of what you’ll do, a prediction? Before I answer that question, imagine instead that your boss says (again to you): “John will land in Osaka on the 15th, and then he’ll take the train to Kyoto on the 20th.”

The key insight: The former utterance is such that the utterance itself is what makes the utterance true. It’s only in your boss saying to you that you’ll do X that you’ll do X. By contrast, the latter utterance isn’t like that—well as long as John isn’t there to hear it.

So yes, the former utterance is a description of what you’ll do, a prediction, but only under the assumption that your boss has the right kind of power. That is, the former utterance, which uses descriptive phrasing prescriptively, is an incantation, a conjuration. The words conjure up what they describe.

It’s important to stress that the same linguistics forms (e.g., “X will Y”) are used both descriptively and descriptively-prescriptively. The linguistic forms are the same between the typical usage of “John will go to Kyoto on the 15th” (which is informative) and the typical usage of “you will go to Kyoto on the 15th” (which is directive), but the substances are different. It’s also important to stress the linguistic universality: That descriptive-prescriptive ambiguity, which I’ll give more examples of below, is shot through English, Japanese, and every other natural language.

Examples:

1. Uttered from father to son when the son is crying: “Boys don’t cry!” (Stop crying!)
2. Uttered from mother to daughter: “Men are the breadwinners, and women are the homemakers.” (Become a homemaker.)

If person A gives a generalization about a category of people, person B gives a counterexample (which is an exception to the supposedly exceptionless generalization), and then person A defines away the counterexample, then that’s the famous no-true-Scotsman fallacy: “No Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge,” person A says. “But my uncle Angus is a Scotsman, and he puts sugar on his porridge,” person B replies. “But no true Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge,” person A replies to the reply.

Contrary to the mainstream, though: Whether person A’s no-true-Scotsman move is fallacious depends on their definition of the term “Scotsman.” If their definition is, say, “has a Scottish passport,” then yes, their move is fallacious: Person B’s uncle Angus, who puts sugar on his porridge—that fact isn’t in contention in the dialogue given above—either has a Scottish passport or not. And if he does, then he’s an exception, a counterexample. He disproves the generalization. But what if person A’s definition isn’t like that? What if person A’s definition is instead identity-related? For example: “No Christian believes in polytheism.” “But my uncle John is a Christian, and he believes in polytheism.” “But no true Christian believes in polytheism.” There’s nothing fallacious about that. Put differently: “Your uncle John believes in polytheism? No Christian believes in polytheism, definitionally speaking, and thus he’s not a Christian.” The term “Christian” in that context is a group identity that’s defined in part as excluding polytheists from the group.

The question of whether to believe in polytheism is of course much more profound than the question of whether to put sugar on your porridge—that’s why the idea of denying polytheists the right to identify as Christian is so much easier to take seriously than the idea of denying people who put sugar on their porridge the right to identify as Scotsmen—but the logic is the same: The no-true Scotsman (or “no-true-Christian”) move is fallacious only insofar as the definition of the term for the category of people isn’t an identity. Otherwise it’s just person A being inclusive and person B being exclusive.

In The Poverty of Historicism (1944), Karl Popper argued against “historicism,” which is a term that he popularized for an influential system of arguments among the social scientists of the 19th and 20th centuries—(at least the spirit of) historicism is still influential in the 21st century, which is why I’m motivated to write about it, but Popper himself lived from 1902 to 1994 and in writing about historicism he was pushing back against an influential way of thinking among his 20th-century contemporaries that came from Hegel, Comte, Marx, Spengler, etc.

In explaining one of the aspects of historicism, Popper brought up an insight that I’ve long considered to be of great importance: that when met with a generalization about, say, men or women, whites or blacks, most people interpret the generalization not scientifically, but socially or politically. That is, most people interpret generalizations in the social sciences not descriptively, but prescriptively: not as scientific propositions, but as rightist or conservative social or political moves. For example, if you make the dangerous argument that the most brilliant, ambitious philosophers and scientists have always been and will always be men, that no woman can match what the best men do in that regard, then most people will interpret you not as arguing for a scientific proposition that’s either true or false, but as making a social-political rightist-conservative move that’s either good or bad. “You obviously want to keep women in their place,” the typical leftist-liberal modern pushback goes against what’s interpreted as your reactionary move against the threat of female power. “Being a misogynist, you obviously don’t want to let women get to the top.”

Let’s imagine that a father says to his son: “When you get from your year in Europe, I expect that you’ll go to college.” Is this just a dry prediction? No, in saying that he “expects” his son to go to college, the father is using social pressure to hopefully tip the scale in the direction that he would be happy with. It’s equally natural, though, for a person to use that same word for something that’s indeed just dry prediction: “We expect that the hurricane will show up on our shores no later than tomorrow evening.” Interestingly—and this is my point—there are countless examples in natural language of words that are ambiguous in this way. This I can personally attest to in English and Japanese, but theoretically speaking I’m convinced, at least for the time being, that this pattern is universal.

Why, though, is natural language such that there’s often this ambiguity? The answer is related to the coordination of action, to the cooperation of agents. That answer is: The more consistent a pattern of action becomes, the more that pattern of action comes to be relied upon as an assumption for other patterns of action. That increasing consistency, which increasingly justifies even the driest and most socially detached of prediction, becomes (by virtue of its increasing consistency) a stronger and stronger bedrock for other kinds of action, which in turn makes a stronger and stronger case for using social pressure to keep people from breaking that consistency. For example, consider: “Japanese people take their shoes off when they go into the house.” Is this just a dry prediction about what’s to be expected of a Japanese person? Or does this expectation also bring with it social pressure to conform to the pattern, to the consistency? Obviously it’s both prediction and social pressure. The more empirically true the proposition becomes as an observation, the more reasonable it would be for the people who build houses in Japan to not worry about making the floors able to withstand the abuse of walking on them with shoes for years and years. Eventually, anybody who’s an exception to the rule finds themselves living in a society that’s no longer made for them.

Before I go on, I should be clear about what my goal is in this essay. My goal is to explain why it is that many people, especially nowadays, reject scientific thought and communication about human action and the human mind.

What I’ve written so far suggests that at least one of the reasons is that science, although ideally a purely descriptive mode of thought and communication, makes propositions that come off to many people as no less prescriptive than descriptive. In natural language, which is a reflection of natural psychology, there’s systematic equivocation between description and prescription when talking about the human mind and human action. That is, the same linguistic “form” is used for two distinct “substances,” one logical and one social. Science, by contrast, does its best to untangle description from prescription and give a prescriptionless description. And this, being artificial (in the best of ways), is difficult for anybody without a talent for science or enough instruction in science.

This natural description-prescription ambiguity makes it so even the most prescriptionless description about, e.g., how attraction works between men and women, is likely to make many people, again especially nowadays, uncomfortable. This uncomfortable feeling is something like: “Don’t tell me who I’m supposed to be attracted to and who I’m not!”

1. Just as a businessman can choose, by their own free will, to set a price in a way that conflicts with the law of supply and demand, in the same way an adult male can, by their own free will, reject masculinity (or an adult female can, by their own free will, reject femininity). However, such people quickly make themselves irrelevant to the analysis—and that’s the point to be made here. That is, such people quickly select themselves out of relevance: To succeed on the market, businesses must by and large set their prices in accordance with the law of supply and demand. Analogously, to succeed on the “sexual market,” if I may use that term, men and women must by and large be masculine (if a man) or feminine (if a woman). The economic law of supply and demand, then, along with the “sexual law of masculinity and femininity,” then, aren’t, like in physics, thoroughgoingly deterministic laws. They’re laws about what you must do in order to win (e.g., in the game of the market, in the game of the “sexual market”). The quasi-determinism comes in because the losers disappear from the analysis. It looks, at least when looking through a very abstract lens, like businesses must follow economic law, like a planet orbiting the sun must follow physical law, but actually it’s just that the non-economic-law-obeying businesses quickly disappear from the market. There’s something of evolutionary logic here: The winners are, let’s say, the persisters.
2. One of the key conclusions, perhaps, is that we’re more free to do what we want on the micro level than on the macro level.
3. There’s also the question of how to set the preconditions for the flourishing of the market. Analogously, perhaps, it may be worth asking what the preconditions are for the flourishing of the “sexual market.” What gets in the way of a healthy economy? A healthy “sexual economy”?
4. The game of sex rewards masculinity in men, rewards femininity in women, punishes femininity in men, and punishes masculinity in women. Analogously, the game of the market…
5. Many people in feminism and social justice argue that “just having a penis” doesn’t mean that you’ll be a certain way personality-wise, and “just having a vagina” doesn’t mean that you’ll be a certain different way personality-wise, as if it’s trivial to you as a person what genitalia you just so happen to have. But “just having a penis” means, among other things, that the sex is over, and your sexual partner is potentially disappointed, when you orgasm. As a result, men are incentivized, sexually, to train a kind of self-control that women aren’t incentivized to train. That air of self-control even manifests socially: Women look for men with that air to them, whether they know why or not.
6. A society without a law against murder quickly becomes no society at all. Thus, it’s a “law” of society (evolutionarily speaking) that there must be a “law” against murder (legally speaking).
7. It’s reasonable to use an object for your own self-interested purpose, for the object has no such purposes of its own. Furthermore, objects aren’t free to do anything other than mindless obey physical law. Thus, for a man to “objectify” a woman—and here I hope to give a documented definition of this term—is for the man to use the woman for his own self-interested purpose, as if she’s an object with no such purposes of her own, and to control the woman so thoroughly as if to take away her free will, as if to make her mindlessly obey. Built atop the metaphorical substructure of English is the term “objectify” (as in, e.g., “to objectify a woman,” “the objectification of women”).
8. The “laws of physics” are naturally thought of as exceptionless, for objects have no will of their own; they have no choice but to mindlessly obey. The “laws of economics,” however, along with the “laws of attraction and sex,” are naturally thought of as having exceptions. But there must of course be plenty of free-will-challenging regularities to be found in human action and the human mind.
9. What’s universal about what women find attractive? For example, is it possible, psychologically speaking, for a woman to not lose attraction if focusing all of her attention on the fact that her hand is bigger than her husband’s hand? Probably not, but that doesn’t mean that a woman can’t just systematically avoid focusing on that fact. There’s no straightforward determinism in attraction because the woman (or man) can choose to ignore some aspects; what’s focused on, rather than what’s actually there, is what determines attraction.
10. A man may be free to marry under his potential and even be sexually satisfied, but he may not be free to do so without training a kind of selective focus that bleeds over into the rest of his life.
11. Even two people with a very high level of attraction for each other won’t necessarily follow through sexually, for it’s possible that one or both of them will override their feeling(s) with willpower.

1. I may want to write a treatise on attraction and sex. Principles of Attraction and Sex may be a good title—the analogy here being with Principles of Economics, which is a title often used.
2. In the treatise, first I’d explain that, psychologically speaking, it’s natural for people to reject propositions purported to get at the laws of human action and the human mind, because such propositions, even if they’re meant to be purely descriptive, seem like they’re sneaking in prescriptiveness through the back door. Second, I’d explain how to formulate purely descriptive propositions about human action and the human mind, taking special care to also clarify the epistemological status of such propositions. And third, I’d actually use the foundational work then done: I’d actually build a properly scientific system of insight about attraction and sex on that foundation.
3. Description and explanation. The former is the most elegant possible generating function, and the latter is why that generating function is there in the first place.
4. An example of a law of attraction and sex, which is a subset of the laws of human action and the human mind, is the law that men approach and women wait to be approached. Sure, there are exceptions (cf. 逆ナン). But like any law, breaking it brings with it the potential for punishment. A woman who takes the initiative will be significantly more likely to end up with a man who’s not sustainably interesting (to them) or interested (in them)—the mechanism of which to be explained elsewhere.
5. Some laws in economics, and in the study of attraction and sex, aren’t deterministic laws of cause and effect constraining the possible action of people on the micro level. Instead, they’re laws constraining what’s possible for the great majority of winners on the macro level. For example, the individual has the free will to price their goods and services however they want, but the businesses which grow bigger and bigger, and more and more influential, by and large won’t contradict the law of supply and demand (or any of the other laws of economics). In short: The type of game “determines” the type of winners, which is a different kind of “determinism” than the cause and effect of, say, Newtonian physics. Individuals who consistently break the laws of economics simply select themselves out of further consideration on the group level.
6. Are there any properly deterministic laws on the micro/individual level, though?

Getting people to identify you as X is a powerful way of increasing your motivation to do what’s expected of X. That is, (1) signaling that you’re a certain kind of person will cause people to expect you to do certain things which are associated with those signals, and (2) such expectations will act as social pressure for you to conform to those expectations. For example, if you look like an intellectual then people will expect you to be an intellectual. They’ll expect you to have interesting or insightful things to say.

Thus, finding an identity which is associated with being the kind of person that you want to be, and then figuring out how to signal that identity, is a powerful way of getting even more motivation for being that kind of person than you already have.

There’s also the social motivation that comes from feeling like you’re part of a group that you respect, especially if you think of that group as being in conflict with another group. That is: If you feel like you’re part of an in-group, then you get extra social motivation. And if you feel like that in-group is on the side of good fighting against an out-group that’s on the side of evil, then you get extra-extra social motivation. To summarize: If your in-group is internally harmonious, with you playing a certain role for that in-group (which is in harmony with the other roles), and your in-group is externally in conflict with an out-group, then from that combination of harmony and conflict comes an intoxicatingly powerful source of social motivation.

In modeling the regularity in human action or the human mind: It’s possible to (1) think in terms of an individual as part of a group. For example, you can say: “Japanese people are honest, and Mr. Takahashi is Japanese. Therefore, Mr. Takahashi is honest.” It’s also possible to (2) think in terms of the individual alone. You can say, simply: “Mr. Takahashi is honest.”

Interestingly, both of those ways of modeling regularity are such that the resulting propositions can feel suffocating. To use an example from my own life: As a white American who spends a lot of time in Japan, I find it frustrating when a Japanese person assumes that I’ll think or act in a certain way just because I’m a “foreigner.” Whether what’s attributed is positive or negative, it feels like being boxed in arbitrarily; my personality isn’t just an outgrowth of my nationality or race. But it can also feel suffocating even when the purported regularity is thought of as an outgrowth of you as a unique individual. Consider: If you want to put your past behind you, move on from it, and invent yourself anew, then most radical, and thus most useful in that regard, would be to move somewhere new and cut all of your old ties to the people from your past. The people around you knowing what kind of person that you’ve been up until now can trap you into staying like that indefinitely. Moving somewhere new can get you out of that trap.

If you model a person as part of a group, then you challenge their free will to deviate from the past pattern of action of the people in that group. You bind their future to the past of others. And even if you model the person as a unique individual, then you do the same thing, just according to their own past rather than the past of others.

Thus, any attempt at scientific description of the regularity in human action or the human mind is easily taken as suffocating to free will, i.e. binding of the future of action to the past.

1. To most Japanese people, a person who looks American is expected to be an “English-only extravert.” Thus, when a Japanese person goes out of their way talk to an American-looking person—well, at least a person who looks American to them—the selection bias is such that the Japanese person is likely to be looking for a stereotypically American interaction. Exemplified here is the general principle that outward signals of the kind of person that you are inwardly, whether choosable or unchoosable outward signals, bring into your awareness, systematically, the kind of people whose expectations would be disappointed if you’re not stereotypical in the regard expected. Being white or black; these aren’t choosable outward signals. If you’re a white or black introvert who can speak Japanese, then in Japan you’ll constantly run into Japanese people who are surprised or even disappointed unless you pretend that you’re somebody that you’re not. Your look pulls them in, but then what you’re actually like is unrelated to that.
2. Expectation is thus turned into social pressure, for the kind of people who want you to fulfill the expectation will be (1) pulled into interacting with you and (2) disappointed if you don’t fulfill that expectation, and the kind of people who don’t want you to fulfill that expectation won’t be pulled into interacting with you; the latter kind of people will be by default more hidden to your awareness than the former.
3. Words like “white,” “black,” “American,” “Japanese,” “man,” and “woman” can be charged with more or less identity, but words like “lightning” and “thunder” can’t. It would be useful to have separate terminology, e.g. (1) “man” as identity-laden and “adult male” as identity-free, (2) “Scotsman” as identity-laden but “adult male born and raised in Scotland” or “adult male with a Scottish passport” as identity-free.
4. Interestingly, a lot of the language used among feminists and in social justice involves stripping away the identity, e.g. “people with a cervix” as opposed to “women.”