Psychologically, the rejection of tobacco could consist in imagining rotting yellow teeth, cancerous black lungs, etc. But sociologically, those negative associations may be widespread on the group level for reasons not necessarily known on the individual level, reasons related not to health but to culture.

Why did American culture turn on tobacco after the Second World War? The most accurate psychological explanation won’t necessarily match up with the most accurate sociological explanation. That is, the question of what’s happening in the mind of the individual (e.g., the vivid imagination of somebody with rotting yellow teeth smoking a cigarette) is separate from the question of why those negative mental associations are widespread in the group. The “real” reason that America culture turned on tobacco—if I may for a moment think of the sociological explanation as more “real,” which is contra to what Roger Scruton argued in his book The Soul of the World (2014)—is that tobacco’s effect on the mind is more compatible with rightism than leftism. Tobacco is the drug of the right, and the left has increasingly taken control of American culture since the Second World War.

I used to make a distinction between the phenomenalist intension and extension, on one hand, and the physicalist intension and extension, on the other hand:

1. The “phenomenalist intension” of a set distinguishes between the possible-to-imagine sensory complexes belonging to the set and the possible-to-imagine sensory complexes not belonging to the set. For example, the phenomenalist intension of the word “fish” is such that anything possible-to-imagine is taken as possible input, and it tells you, as its output, yes or no: It tells you whether any given possible-to-imagine sensory complex is, or is not, a “fish.”
2. The “phenomenalist extension” of a set generates, one by one, all of the possible-to-imagine sensory complexes belonging to the set and none of the possible-to-imagine sensory complexes not belonging to the set. For example, the phenomenalist extension of the word “fish” would generate 🐟, 🐡, etc., endlessly—for there are, presumably, an infinite number of possible-to-imagine sensory complexes belonging to that set.
3. The “physicalist intension” of a set distinguishes between the physically existing beings belonging to the set and the physically existing beings not belonging to the set. For example, the physicalist intension of the phrase “university professor” tells you whether any given person, actually existing physically (whether in the past, present, or future), is, or is not, a “university professor.”
4. The “physicalist extension” of a set is all of the physically existing beings (again, whether in the past, present, or future) belonging to the set. For example, Hayek was a university professor but Hume wasn’t.

Originally, I thought that I was just naturally falling into a phenomenalist perspective, which is the more fundamental perspective, and the mainstream was just naturally falling into the physicalist perspective—obviously the mainstream doesn’t use definitions #1 and #2. But I now understand why the mainstream defines the terms “intension” and “extension” as they do: The work that my system does elsewhere, the mainstream does here. The word “Hemingway,” as a set, has a different intension, but the same extension, as the phrase “the author of The Sun Also Rises.” Those two words/phrases, then, can be freely interchanged in a proposition without there being any way that the truth value will change: If “Hemingway committed suicide at age 61” is true, then “the author of The Sun Also Rises committed suicide at age 61″ is also true—well, assuming that Hemingway is indeed the author of that book.

Interestingly, though, interchangeability can be lost: While—as I wrote above—”Hemingway committed suicide at age 61″ implies “the author of The Sun Also Rises committed suicide at age 61,” adding the subjectivity of a phrase like “John knows” causes the interchangeability to be lost: “John knows that Hemingway committed suicide at age 61″ doesn’t imply “John knows that the author of The Sun Also Rises committed suicide at age 61.” Why? Because John may not know that Hemingway is the author of The Sun Also Rises.

1. 箸 and はし both have the power of bringing to mind 🥢. That is, when a writer intends to get a reader to think of 🥢, both 箸 and はし work for that purpose.
2. Of course ハ↓シ, which is the phonemic form of the same word, also has that power.
3. The (formal) graphemic categories 箸 and はし, and the (formal) phonemic category ハ↓シ, are all different forms of the same word, which is in turn associated with the (substantial) category 🥢.
4. Logic is the explicit study of the always-explicit, and linguistics is the explicit study of the often-implicit.
5. Intension and extension, connotation and denotation, Sinn and Bedeutung. Each pair of terms has the same stipulated definitions as the other pairs.
6. The intension of a set is the input system that can tell whether any given thing is a member of the set. The extension of a set, on the other hand, is the output system that can give you, one by one, everything that’s a member of the set—in theory that’s possible, but in practice that’s of course impossible (well unless you’re a powerful enough computer).
7. How do those logical concepts relate to linguistics? With a representative enough sample of Japanese people saying ハ↓シ (in various ways) while using 🥢 (of various kinds), you’d then understand the word and be able to use it. How does that relate to the intension of the word? To the extension? A “representative enough sample” isn’t logically exhaustive, of course, but for some reason it’s linguistically sufficient.
8. See any manifestation of 🥢 and think of some manifestation of 箸, はし, or ハ↓シ. Also, see or hear any manifestation of 箸, はし, or ハ↓シ and think of some manifestation of 🥢.
9. How do the logical concepts of intension and extension relate to the linguistic concepts of recognition and production? What about input and output?

If you happen upon a watch lying on a beach, then you’d of course assume that there was a watchmaker responsible for that watch: a designer of that watch. Even the most rational people who lived in the age of religion, before the triumph of science, found it natural to think the same about plants, animals, etc. There must be a designer of nature, for nature is too orderly to not have a designer.

Analogously, most modern people—even those very familiar with science—look at society and think that there must be a designer, here not God but the State: When society seems intelligently ordered such that good things happen systematically, then surely there’s an intelligent and benevolent individual (or group of individuals) who made that order deliberately. And when society seems intelligently ordered such that bad things happen systematically, then surely there’s the evil counterpart of the aforementioned: an intelligent and malevolent individual (or group of individuals) who made that order deliberately. But the idea of natural order makes it clear that even the most orderly system needn’t have a “watchmaker,” a designer. We don’t need to invoke God to explain nature, and we don’t need to invoke the State to explain society. The invisible hands of Darwin and Smith show how the order in nature and society actually came about, viz. via evolution.

1. When met with Roissy’s ideas (and the ideas of other thinkers like him), many people have the intuition that such ideas ultimately just help men fake the signals of high status. Instead of going through the trouble of actually becoming high status, which is not only attractive to women but is correlated with other things as well, Roissy and his followers just make a study of the trappings of the stereotypically high-status man. The resulting action is more simulated than real, i.e. more of the form of the high-status man than the substance. Such ideas are good only for getting empty proxies. Young women, who are still naïve, may be manipulated into attraction, but women with more experience dating will be able to see through the empty proxies to the reality underneath.
2. One counterargument is that the system of proxies may be broken. If you don’t agree that your confidence as a man should come from what most men get their confidence from, then a circumvention of that system of proxies may be in order. Being directly attractive, rather than depending on a culturally evolved, indirect route to being attractive, makes it easier to think independently. It makes it easier to opt out of the social game.
3. Success in the modern social and economic systems is badly aligned with success in primal attraction and sex.

It’s possible to use a category, as associated with a word, only for the purpose of establishing joint attention on a referent—a fundamental aspect of communication to be made clear shortly. For example, let’s say that we’re watching a tennis match on television and I want to tell you who I’d prefer to see win. I may say to you: “I’m cheering for the red-haired player.” The fact that the player that I’m cheering for has red hair may have nothing to do with why I’m cheering for them. It may be nothing more than a useful way to contrast that player with the other player, assuming of course that the other player doesn’t also happen to have red hair. In fact, just pointing, without describing anything at all about the player, could be equally useful: “Who do I hope wins? That player 👉.” Either way, there’s joint attention established on the same referent. We both know who I’m referring to.

If I tell you that I’m cheering for the red-haired player, then I use that category (i.e., “red-haired”) in an expendable way. With joint attention established, the category can be forgotten about. But what if I tell you that red-haired people have a higher pain tolerance on average than people of other hair colors? The category “red-haired” is no longer expendable. It becomes core to what I’m trying to say, no longer just a means to an end.

The continuum from maximally concrete to maximally abstract is related to:

1. How narrow the category is vs. how wide it is
2. How easy it is to capture the thought in a moment of imagination vs. how difficult that is

The meaning of the word “apple” is more concrete than the meaning of the word “fruit” because (1) categorically speaking, the former is more narrow than the latter—there are fewer possible-to-imagine sensory complexes deserving of the word “apple” than possible-to-imagine sensory complexes deserving of the word “fruit”—and (2) it takes just a moment of unimaginative thinking in order to visualize an apple, with more effort needed, though of course not all that much effort ultimately, to visualize fruit. An apple is… 🍎. Done. But fruit? 🍎 and 🍊 and 🍌 and… It’s not obvious, at least at first glance, when to stop cycling through sensory complexes before we should be satisfied in making sense of the meaning of that word.

#1 and #2 seem connected, though, in that narrower-category words often seem to be easier to capture in a moment of imagination. “Apple” is narrower-category than “fruit,” and it’s easier to visualize too.

Two definitions:

1. In reductionistic simplification (which is the kind of simplification that comes more naturally to the stereotypically masculine mind), some of the parts of the whole are kept without change or simplification and others are taken away entirely. For example: In the evolution of katakana, 加 was simplified to 力. The left part of the kanji was kept (at 100% resolution), and the right part was taken away (i.e., put to 0% resolution).
2. In holistic simplification (which is the kind of simplification that comes more naturally to the stereotypically feminine mind), none of the parts of the whole are taken away—well, at least fewer of the parts are taken away. Instead, the whole is taken as a whole, and kept as a whole, with the simplification being a matter of decreasing the resolution in an overall way. For example: In the evolution of hiragana, 守 was simplified to す. With enough imagination, squinting at the former can blur it into the latter. That is, “defocusing” blurs the shape into something of lower detail, and then “refocusing,” with stylization added to the result, brings back something sharply focused and aesthetically good, but now with a more manageable amount of detail.