1. If a Christian rejects Christianity, then he’s no longer Christian. But it’s different for the Jews. Some Jews go so far as to hate Judaism, but that doesn’t make them any less Jewish. A born Jew is inescapably Jewish. Consider Sigmund Freud: He had little respect for Judaism, but he had a lot of pride as a Jew, which led him to Zionism. He was part of the trend that started in the 19th century of making Jewish identity less about being a believing, practicing Jew, which is how Jews have traditionally identified with each other, and more about identifying with each other like any other national group.
2. There are strong biological patterns in the Jews. For example, the Ashkenazi Jews were so endogamous for so long that they’ve become biologically distinct. The Ashkenazi bloodline is unique. But it’s not the biology that makes the Jew. It’s possible for two people to have the same amount of Ashkenazi blood but for one of them to be Jewish and the other not.
3. The Jews are neither strictly an ethnoreligious group (for having a Jewish identity doesn’t necessarily mean being religious or making Judaism part of your identity) nor strictly an ethnonationalist group (for having a Jewish identity doesn’t necessarily mean being nationalist or making Israel part of your identity). There’s also nothing biological or racial that distinguishes every Jew from every non-Jew. There are “white” Jews, “black” Jews, etc. There are Ashkenazi Jews (with some European blood of one kind), Sephardic Jews (with some European blood of another kind), etc. Most Jews descend in part from the Ancient Israelites, but there are some exceptions: the converts with no Jewish ancestors. Etc etc. So what kind of group are the Jews? They’re a quasi-ethnoreligious, quasi-ethnonationalist group with strong biological/racial patterns. There are (1) believing, practicing Jews, (2) Zionist Jews, (3) believing, practicing Zionist Jews, and (4) Jews who want nothing to do with Judaism, Zionism, or anything else Jewish. There are the Jews who were born into the Jewish extended family, and there are the Jews who were “adopted” into the Jewish extended family: the converts. Etc.

Technically speaking, the term “ethnicity” is defined as a group of individuals who identify with each other on the basis of any shared aspect (e.g., language, culture, religion, race). That’s the standard definition in anthropology and other fields. But most people, scientists and laymen alike, at least associate the term “ethnicity” with biology, despite its technical definition not necessitating that. All in all, the term “ethnicity” means a group of individuals who (1) identify with each other because of any shared aspect—that’s the technical definition—and (2) probably share ancestry.

The term “ethnicity” is perfect for the Jews because (1) the Jews have traditionally identified with each other on the basis of shared religion—that’s true no matter how technical you want to be—and (2) the Jews by and large share blood from the Ancient Israelites, with some exceptions, and thus the association with biology/ancestry isn’t far off the mark.

However, Jewish ethnic identity is in transition. The Jews are traditionally an ethnic group whose most fundamental distinguishing criterion is religious: the Torah. But in modernity, ethnoreligion is giving way to ethnonationalism. There are countless Jews who identify strongly with their Jewishness while rejecting Judaism and accepting Zionism. The Enlightenment push for secularization has resulted in a partial replacement of the religious criteria of old with the national criteria of new. Judaism and Zionism cooperate and compete with each other for modern Jewish identity. That’s part of why the question of Jewish identity comes up so often. Jewish identity is a confusing mixture of the old and the new: of the religious and the national.

1. Converting into Judaism makes you a Jew, but converting out of Judaism doesn’t make you a non-Jew. In fact, Judaism is such that conversion into is possible but conversion out of is not. That is: Believing in and practicing Judaism (as long as you have a rabbi giving his consent and working with you) makes you Jewish, but not believing in or practicing doesn’t take that away from you.
2. The Jews are an “ethnoreligious” people in that the “ethnicity” and the “religion” go hand in hand. They move together. By contrast: Most Italians are Catholic, but converting to Catholicism doesn’t make you Italian. Catholicism is the religion of more than one people. That is: Unlike the strong or even inseparable connection between Jewish ethnic identity and Jewish religious identity, the connection between being (ethnically) Italian and being (religiously) Catholic isn’t so strong. But there’s something missing in my description of Jewish ethnoreligious identity so far: There’s the distinction between (a) whether a given individual identifies as part of a given group, e.g. whether a given individual identifies as “Jewish,” and (b) whether a given individual is identified as part of a given group, e.g. whether a given individual is identified as “Jewish.” A Jew by birth can stop identifying as “Jewish,” but that doesn’t mean that the Jews won’t keep thinking of him as a prospective proselyte. The Jews (along with everybody else) will keep thinking of him as “Jewish.” Thus, the connection (between Jewish ethnic identity and Jewish religious identity) is strong/inseparable only on the level of the group (and even then only traditionally): The ethnically Jewish are (traditionally) expected to be religiously Jewish.
3. Zionism, which is Jewish national identity (albeit an identity also open to non-Jews in that, say, “Christian Zionist” isn’t a contradiction), has to some extent replaced Judaism, which is Jewish religious identity. Nowadays it’s not as much that the ethnically Jewish are expected to be religiously Jewish (and not proselytize outside of the family). It’s more that the ethnically Jewish are expected to be nationalistically Jewish (and proselytize outside of the family).
4. Judaism isn’t a non-proselytizing religion, but a non-indiscriminately-proselytizing religion. Jewish outreach extends only as far as the Jewish extended family. Judaism wants born Jews to be believing, practicing Jews.
5. Consider the proposition: “Jews should get Jews to be Jews.” That proposition equivocates in a socially useful way. With the logic made explicit: “Believing, practicing Jews (or at least Jews who identify as Jewish, whether through Judaism, Zionism, or anything else) should get born Jews to be believing, practicing Jews (or at least identify as Jewish in one way or another).”

1. Ethnoreligious group. An “ethnoreligious group” is an ethnicity with religion as its distinguishing criterion. It’s a group of individuals who identify with each other primarily because of their shared religion (which is one of the possible ethnic distinguishing criteria) and secondarily because of, say, their shared language, culture, and race (which are some of the other possible ethnic distinguishing criteria). In turn, an “ethnicity” is a group of individuals who identify with each other for any reason (whether religious, linguistic, cultural, racial, or any other reason). For example, the Jews are an ethnoreligious group in that they identify with each other primarily on the basis of religion, with everything else being secondary.
2. It’s important to distinguish between (a) identifying with each other and (b) being identified with each other. The Jews identify with each other, but they’re also identified with each other. Jewish “self-identity” is such that the matrilineality principle dominates: If your father is Jewish, then you’re not necessarily Jewish. But if your mother is Jewish, then you are necessarily Jewish. However, Jewish “other-identity,” especially as it was during the Nazi era, is such that it’s not matrilineality but blood that matters: You can be Jewish, half-Jewish, quarter-Jewish, etc. That’s not the non-racial categorization scheme of Judaism, but the racial categorization scheme of something non-Judaic.
3. Connotation and denotation, intension and extension. The Jews have long been such that they “define”—here I should actually use the term “connote,” for that gets at exactly what I mean—themselves as the group of individuals who are either Jewish by choice or by birth. A Jew is an individual who either converted to Judaism (himself or herself) or was born to a mother who either converted to Judaism (herself) or was born to a mother who either converted to Judaism (herself)… However, that connotation, which distinguishes between the in-group and the out-group, in turn determines the denotation of the in-group: the individuals who make up that in-group, with their Jewishness being only one of their characteristics. It’s possible to take that set of individuals and then study their other characteristics: their psychology, biology, etc.
4. Why is Judaism such that Jewish identity is passed down matrilineally instead of patrilineally? Some possibilities: (a) Mothers more reliably pass down tradition than fathers. (b) Judaism is a “sexually defensive” religion, which goes along with matrilineality. By contrast, a “sexually offensive” religion, with the men invading other peoples and taking wives along the way; that goes along with patrilineality, and that’s not Judaism’s strategy.
5. (a) Across the West: If both of your parents are “white,” then you’re “white.” (b) Also across the West, although perhaps more so in America: If one of your parents—it doesn’t matter who—is “white” and the other is “black,” then you’re “black.” For example, Barack Obama is black despite his white mother. (c) In Judaism: If your mother is Jewish, then you’re Jewish. (d) In Japan: If both of your parents are “Japanese,” then you’re “Japanese.”
6. When the Jews left their homeland almost 2,000 years ago, they went in many different directions. Presumably, they all looked similar to each other at the time. However, in diaspora they all intermarried more or less with their respective local populations. Judaism not being bilineal, like whiteness or Japaneseness, but instead being matrilineal, means that the Jews gradually turn into their host population, racially speaking (even without taking conversion into account). A 100% Ancient-Israelite descendant can intermarry, and if that 100% descendant is female then any children from that marriage are Jewish despite being 50% descendants. Theoretically speaking, the Ancient-Israelite blood can halve from one generation to the next, over and over. That’s why, say, some of the European Jews, look European. The Ashkenazi Jews are white insofar as they’ve intermarried enough.
7. Converts. There may be a phenomenon of converts in Judaism being analogous to 日本人より日本人. They’re “more Catholic than the pope.”
8. The hurdle to get into the Amish is higher than the hurdle to get out of the Amish. Apparently the ~400,000 Amish in America descend by and large from ~200 18th-century immigrants. And apparently <100 people—whatever the true number, the number is almost definitely so small as to be for the purpose of the present analysis none—have joined the Amish in that time. That’s despite the fact that (apparently) >10% of the born Amish leave the Amish each generation. Metaphorically speaking, the Amish is a sauce that’s getting boiled down. The Amish’s Amishness gets thicker and thicker. The most adventurous >10% leave each generation, and as a result more and more adventurousness gets boiled off. The Jews have something analogous.
9. Evolution. If a human dies before reproduction for any reason, then the human’s genes don’t go onto the next generation. One of those kinds of reasons is sexual selection. For example, a man may not be attractive enough to get a woman. But even if a human doesn’t die before reproduction, any recategorization such that the human’s lineage is no longer part of the same group means that the human’s genes, while they do go onto the next generation of humans, don’t go onto the next generation of humans of that group. For example: If a Jewish man has children with a non-Jewish woman, then the man passes on his genes, yes, but not to the Jews. Thus, Judaism has a kind of sexual-selection mechanism. The matrilineality principle is a lineal categorization principle, and with endogamy that categorization (of whether a given person is categorized as being in the Jewish lineage) determines in-group marriage eligibility, which in turn has a sexual-selection effect: interestingly, a group-level sexual-selection effect.

The logical order of primacy in an argument isn’t necessarily the same as the historical order of primacy. For example, Morris Cohen argued in An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934) that the axioms of a system are often discovered after the theorems. According to Cohen, many of Euclid’s theorems were already known to the Ancient Greeks for hundreds of years before Euclid did his groundbreaking work. Euclid’s contribution wasn’t as much to discover the theorems as to discover the axioms for theorems already known. His contribution was largely to systematize already-existing knowledge.

In other words: What was in the history of ideas come up with and made known before and after doesn’t necessarily match up with what’s logically precedent and antecedent.

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 has led me to study 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, many or even most people, at least in the modern West, find it uncomfortable to generalize about people. The problem with that is: Science, whether it’s about people or things, is about generalization. Thus, to find it uncomfortable to generalize about people is to find it uncomfortable to do science about people. In other words: To my surprise, the controversies in the sciences of human action and the human mind aren’t only about what the best models are but are also about whether models are even possible.

See below for some of what I’ve written on the psychology and sociology of that debate:

1. Is the mental subject to scientific law?
2. The Enlightenment and Romanticism

In Christian cosmogony, it was God who (1) made something out of nothing and then (2) gave that something the order that it has. In Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779), David Hume argued for “a new hypothesis of cosmogony,” which was a challenge to the latter doctrine: that without God, the order in the world of matter has no good explanation. In essence, he argued that the order in the world of matter can be accounted for without hypothesizing supernatural intervention, for that order is the natural result of something that everybody knows: that some configurations of matter are more stable than others. If some matter in an unstable form by chance falls into another unstable form, then by definition (i.e., by definition of the term “unstable”) it’s unlikely for the matter to stay in that form for a long time. It’s when matter instead by chance falls into a stable form that it’s likely to stay like that. Chaos falls into chaos until it settles into order.

Interestingly: In The Selfish Gene (1976), Richard Dawkins used that Humean argument in order to contextualize biological evolution. Hume explained how chaos naturally settles into order (which is an explanation of any kind of evolution, whether biological or not), and to that explanation Dawkins added the idea of a replicator (which is how biological evolution works in that context).

Why are there so many rocks? Because rocks are especially stable. If some matter by chance falls into the form of a rock, then it’s likely to stay like that. And why are there so many birds? Not because birds are especially stable on the level of the individual, like rocks, but because birds are especially stable on the level of the group. They’re especially good at replicating themselves, and thus keeping the group in existence, before themselves falling out of existence.

That Humean argument, however, falls to thoroughgoing subjectivism. The difference between chaos and order isn’t inherent to the world of matter. The difference instead comes out of something subjective: categorization.

Rocks are stable because rocks are rocks whether they’re big or small, rough or smooth, etc. But why categorize like that? A big “rock” can fall and break into small “rocks,” and a rough “rock” can be made into a smooth “rock” after enough time in a river. Our categorization scheme is such that through those transformations they’re all still “rocks.” How stable! Theoretically speaking, though, it’s possible to use any categorization scheme that you want. Anything can be thought of as staying the same through any transformation, and anything can be thought of as not staying the same through any transformation. It’s possible to imagine a categorization scheme that puts even rocks into chaotic flux.

In the late 2000s and early 2010s, I put a lot of effort into studying David Hume’s work and building a phenomenalist foundation for linguistics with the help of his work. I shelved the project after a while (not because it wasn’t going well but because I got sidetracked). And then in the early 2020s, I happened to go back to Friedrich Hayek’s book The Sensory Order (1952), which I had read long before that but without getting much out of it. Suddenly, though, it all made sense. And with Hayek’s orienting influence, I got to work putting into writing my late-2000s, early 2010s work on Humean linguistics, now Humean-Hayekian.

There’s something else that I should also mention that influenced me between my original late-2000s, early-2010s work on Humean linguistics and my recent work on Humean-Hayekian linguistics: Around when I went back to The Sensory Order, I spent a lot of time and energy on logic. Besides doing my own thinking, I studied with great interest John Stuart Mill’s 1,000+ page textbook A System of Logic (1843) and Morris Cohen’s more concise and eloquently written textbook An Introduction to Logic and Scientific Method (1934). Thus, between (1) my late-2000s, early-2010s work on adapting Humean phenomenalism to linguistics, (2) my newfound appreciation, as of the early 2020s, for Hayek’s effort to reconcile phenomenalism, which is a traditional doctrine in philosophy, with 20th-century science, and (3) my newfound understanding of logic, I found myself better oriented than ever in all of the ways that mattered for building the phenomenalist foundation for linguistics that I envisioned first in the late 2000s. That project had turned into Humean-Hayekian logico-linguistic system building.

See below for what I’ve written so far on that system:

1. Sensation as such vs. sensation of
2. From linguistics to logic
3. The mental vs. the physical
4. The subjective vs. the objective
5. The self vs. the other
6. Words as sets
7. Form and substance
8. Semantics and syntax
9. Word-thought overwriting
10. An analogy to word-thought overwriting
11. The phenomenalism of categorization
12. The a priori and the a posteriori
13. The branches of linguistics
14. The reification of words and money

When two people are talking to each other, each utterance is such that there’s a speaker and a listener. Furthermore, there’s everybody who’s neither the speaker nor the listener.

When a first-person pronoun is used (e.g., “I,” “me”), the speaker is referring to themselves. But it’s also possible for the speaker to refer to something close to themselves (e.g., “this,” “these”) or somewhere close to themselves (e.g., “here”).

In deixis, there’s:

1. The speaker
2. The listener
3. Neither the speaker nor the listener
4. The location in space of the speaker, the listener, or neither the speaker nor the listener
5. The location in time of the utterance

Thus, it’s possible to refer to:

1. The speaker of the utterance
2. The listener
3. Neither the speaker nor the listener
4. Something near the speaker of the utterance
5. Something near the listener
6. Something near neither the speaker nor the listener
7. Somewhere near the speaker of the utterance
8. Somewhere near the listener
9. Somewhere near neither the speaker nor the listener
10. The past with respect to the utterance
11. The present with respect to the utterance
12. The future with respect to the utterance

There’s also:

1. Male vs. female
2. Singular vs. plural

My interest in using notation in logic (e.g., ~ for “not,” strictly defined) is in part a result of often finding it useful to keep track of how I would notate the logical skeleton of what’s fleshed out as natural prose. For example, in natural prose the word “not” doesn’t always mean ~. In natural prose, there’s no 1-to-1 correspondence between the linguistic form and the logical substance. With the symbol ~ strictly defined, you can, whenever doing so would be useful, ask yourself: “Is the present usage of the word ‘not’ equivalent to ~?”

When I’m reading or writing, my internal experience is often such that I visualize ~ and other symbols as furigana. That is, I often ask myself whether I could justifiably put a certain logical symbol above a given word or phrase.

When writing, that technique helps you get the best of both worlds of the artificial and the natural: the artificiality of scientific writing and the naturalness of artistic writing. It helps you keep track of the logic without there being any need for you to artificially limit or regiment how you use natural language.