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?

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.”

1. Mises and Chomsky both thought of the “unfreeness of the mind” as the same across people. This “unfreeness” is much of what both of them spent their careers—one of them in economics and the other in linguistics—thinking and writing about.
2. That is: On the doctrine of the physical may be unfree but the mental is certainly free, both Mises and Chomsky made the (seemingly!) controversial move of saying: “No, the mental is no less unfree. But that unfreeness is the same for all people.” Those constraints on the mind are what they both analyzed: Both Mises and Chomsky analyzed what they thought of as the fundamental and unchangeable structure of the human mind. They looked into what necessarily delimits our powers as human beings, what necessarily constrains our minds in a way analogous to the physical laws constraining our physical bodies. The move here is: “The mental is no less unfree. But that’s not dangerous to say because that unfreeness is the same for all people. It’s the humanity that we all share.“
3. Actually, Mises talked about some of the differences between the male and female minds in his book Socialism. Chomsky, a much more thoroughgoing leftist in this respect, wouldn’t have done that.
4. There’s human nature, which both Mises and Chomsky were comfortable investigating. But there’s also the nature of the male mind vs. the nature of the female mind. And beyond sex, there’s also race. Mises talked about sexual difference but not racial difference; Chomsky talked about neither.
5. It may be worth looking into how Kant influenced both Mises and Chomsky.
6. Some attributes are (relatively) changeable, e.g. fashion. You can just put on a different shirt. Others are (relatively) changeable, e.g. sex, race.
7. In American culture, you’re supposed to draw attention only to the most changeable of attributes. While an American may say something like “I like your shirt,” a Japanese person may instead say something like 鼻が高いですね. It’s a lot easier to change your shirt than your 鼻.
8. In some cultures, being masculine is thought of as “becoming” of an adult male and being feminine is thought of as “becoming” of an adult female. To get to the general principle: Your role in the social order—and this is true of any traditional or conservative culture—is a function of certain (relatively) immutable characteristics. You just find yourself to be an adult male, which is a physical fact about you (that’s not easily changeable); the culture then expects masculinity out of you, which is a mental way of being. Identities bundle the changeable and the unchangeable, the malleable and the unmalleable, together; an adult male is expected to be masculine, and in the image of the archetypal masculine-adult-male of a culture is found the culture’s image of a “man,” of “manhood.”
9. An identity, for it to have any kind of social effect (and in its social effect is found its only effect, of course), must present with some kind of “visible” manifestation, e.g. wearing a suit rather than something else, being one race rather than another. Some identity-related signals, then, are choosable; others are unchoosable.
10. The more traditional or conservative a culture, the more the culture expects that you’ll combine certain choosable identity-related signals with certain unchoosable ones.
11. If you dress a certain way, talk a certain way, etc., then people will “expect” of you certain other things as well. And this “expectation,” with its description-prescription ambiguity, turns prediction into social pressure. It’s possible, though, to use this to your advantage: If you signal in a certain way, thus giving people information about what you’re likely to be like or do, then you in effect give yourself motivation to live up to those expectations. For example, if you dress and talk like an intellectual, then you’ll disappoint people unless you live up to the expectations of an intellectual.
12. That is: Identity—well, insofar as identity is choosable, for some of identity is unchoosable—is about giving people information about what kind of person you are in order to use to your advantage the phenomenon of description-prescription ambiguity, i.e. in order to harness the phenomenon of people expecting things of you starting out as dry prediction but ending up as motivationally useful social pressure to live up to those expectations. Modern American culture, being anti-traditionalist/conservative, plays up the choosable, and plays down the unchoosable, as much as possible.
13. If you take on an identity willingly, then you pigeonhole yourself into the exact place that you want to be.
14. It’s possible to argue about identity in that what, e.g., a man “is,” depends on the question of what attributes would be most useful when embodied in an adult male.
15. Modern Western culture is such that it’s not the “form” of the person, but the “substance,” that’s important. We all have inside of us, deep down, our own unique spark of consciousness or sentience. We all have inside of us something unique to us as an individual, something worth protecting.
16. Why is it that interpreting the proposition “no Scotsman puts sugar on his porridge” such that “Scotsman” is an identity results in a feeling of prescriptiveness? The answer is: Being included in a group that you’re supposed to be included in feels good, and being excluded from such a group feels bad. To continue with the above example, and to be concrete: An adult male born and raised in Scotland is expected to have the identity of a Scotsman. In fact, that’s why “Scotsman” is in its meaning ambiguous between the relatively “hard” facts, which are all but socially unnegotiable (e.g., whether you have a Scottish passport), and the relatively “soft” facts, which are much more socially negotiable (e.g., whether you have inside of you the national spirit of Scotland). If you have the “hard” side, in that you have a Scottish passport, but not the “soft,” then you’re a Scot in the statistics, sure, but you’re not a real Scot, you’re not a Scot in spirit.
17. It’s possible to identify differently than you’re identified as. For example, a person may identify as a man even though most of the people around them would identify them as a woman.
18. To identify as X is to take on the role of X, not only outwardly, in your action, but also inwardly, in your thought. And to be identified as X is to be encouraged to take on the role of X.
19. Identity is a two-way negotiation. If a person decides to identify as X, then the people around them can decide to accept or reject that identity. For example, the identity “Japanese” is not only linguistic and cultural but also racial. If a white person, even a white person born and raised in Japan, identifies as “Japanese,” then they’ll almost always be rejected. Interestingly, and this gets into the difference between Japan as a traditional or conservative nation and America as being the opposite: The linguistic and the cultural are choosable, at least to some extent—even a person who wasn’t born and raised in a certain sociolinguistic system can immerse in that sociolinguistic system and end up passing as a native—but the racial is unchoosable. In Japan, identity is more likely to be an inextricable mixture of the choosable and the unchoosable. Japan gives people roles, which are changeable, based on their race and other unchangeable attributes. America, on the other hand, doesn’t like doing that: Anybody, regardless of their race or any of their other unchangeable attributes, can be or become an American, in fact can be or become anything.
20. Another angle: In the aforementioned two-way negotiation of identity, who does the culture give priority to? The person who says what their identity is, or the people around them who agree or disagree?
21. In a traditional or conservative nation: A person born male is supposed to grow up and become a man, and a person born female has the opposite destiny, i.e. to grow up and become a woman. Anything outside of those two boxes is rejected out of hand. Sex determines gender; the immutable, and essential, determines the immutable. You won’t be accepted as a feminine male or a masculine female any more than you’d be accepted as a white Japanese person. On the other hand, in a progressive or liberal nation: The immutable doesn’t matter as much. Whether you’re one sex or another, or one race or another, you can decide on any identity or role that you want. It’s only your propensities and talents as an individual that matter.