Science: Behaviourism: Behaviour causes attitudes, says blog Canadian Steele, so you'll get over State-imposed gmarriage

Canadian Steele's Errors: A Syllabus (#2)

In a previous entry, I began my replies to Tommy Steele's insistence that I deal with his July 5 entry on his blog Canadian Steele in a more than summary fashion. I had had in mind that I was then wrapping up my rather long and detailed treatments of the matter during the course of the Parliamentary address to the issue of demotion of the traditional solemnized wedbond between 1woman1man. Tommy was annoyed that I didn't deal with his meme theme, nor thereto bow on bended knee. I may have annoyed him further when I got around to the reply for which he asked, perhaps annoying him by first addressing at greater length what was of greater importance to my long well-developed ethical reflection from the standpoint of the Philosophy of the Cosmonomic Idea as it pertains to ethical science, especially in regard to the three kinds ethically-qualified institutes of human existence (marriage, family, and friendship). In this I followed ethicists André Troost and James Olthuis, from whose work I learned much but whose approaches I have tried to take a step or two further. Especially, in my reflections to date I have blogged and posted on scholarly and Gay fora only on marriage and family. In blogging here on refWrite I have concentrated on marriage, but have done so within the context of then-proposed legislation in Canada and the USA pertaining to the planned demotion of the traditional public-legal definition of marriage to that of a generic definition.

I proposed instead a philosophical-ethical appreciation of three forms of intimate union, one of which is traditional marriage, while arguing for everyone's general acknowledgement that de facto the other two forms of intimate union do exist: those between 2 women, and those between 2men. I have argued that there is in principle sufficient grounds to argue not only that the state should continue to recognize and support in appropriate ways, first of all, the unique and irreducible structural principle of the distinctive journey intended for life and to the exclusion of all others, the 1woman1man intimate union, and that doing so continues to be in the state's own interests. However, I made most clear that the other two forms of intimate union which do exist within the fabric of both Canadian and American societies, had good grounds to be recognized each in its own uniqueness and irreducibility, whereby both could not be rationally reduced to marriage or two one another, the internal character of the bond of a 2woman intimate union, in comparison to that of 2men. I did not mount a sustained and systematic argument to the effect that all three in the uniqueness and irreducibility of each not only should be recognized (rather than consigned to a realm of denial by the state) but should be supported to the degree and in the manner in which it is in the state's own good interest to do so. I often cite the results of women's medicine and anthropology as the best starting place for the background material in the Congressional and Parliamentary committees that would explore such legislation. This has never been done by them in the least, to my knowledge. I would also expect such bodies to explore at length the distinct responsiblities and rights that may accrue to the distinct forms of intimate union should each be recognized in its distinctness and uniqueness in public law, in contrast to what we have now on both sides of the border; but I always defer to the specificity of the jurisdication/s involved, in the States to the several states, in Canada to the several provinces, each thru its appropriate legistlative bodies. The question of family is a different question from that of marriage. Tommy Steele seems to conflate them. And, as said, I do not yet blog on friendship, but any systematic treatment in a full-fledged philosohically-responsible ethics would do so.

Now, what I put forward in my previous July 5 answer to Tommy's July 5 blog entry, "Canadian Steele's Errors: A Syllabus [#1] - " Ethics: Sexual Morals: Do refWrite and Canadian Steele share a kernel of truth in common?," said much of the foregoing, but dug more deeply for the possiblity that there was some point at which we mite agree were we able to hone mutually our senses about Tommy's deployment of the term "immorality" which he wanted to blame on the state, where I would lay any blame on the religions of Canada, especially Christianity in not maintaining the uniqueness, distinctness, and priority to the state of the 1woman1man bond, but more to the point, denying a real moral guidance to its own people in regard to a horizon of hope of ethically-qualified instituting (by either 2women or 2men intimate unions, with full moral room for sexual expression within those bonds). That would undercut the pressure toward a life which for many is experienced as a pressure toward promiscuity by lapses from the Christian communities moral teaching, instead of a healthy bondedness with intention of permanence and to the exclusion of all others. I think that was a point Tommy too wanted to make, but stumbled over his own statism. I thawt perhaps Tommy could see that this is the problem of Roman Catholic, Fundamentalist Protestant, and Evangelical Protestant teaching in Christianity - poor moral guidance based on inadequate ethical reflection (ethics = the science of morals).

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Here, I shift over onto Tommy's ground and enter into his philosophical framework for the ideas he expressed (he may have other philosophical frameworks for other areas of his thinking, but we can attend only to what he expresses in his blog entry; in the earlier response, I dealt with his approach to jurisprudence where he doesn't even acknowledge that there are different scientific frameworks, coloured by different philosophies of law and reality in the notion of "equality" dominant today in Canada). Tommy argues in the following text from the standpoint of a different science - one of the psychological sciences, behaviourism. Let's look at Tommy's key thetic statement of his position.

Now, what I find the most interesting is, in fact, behaviour generally leads to attitude change - completely fascinating. Once John eats ice cream, even after proffessing abhorrence for the stuff, John is very likely to change his feelings about ice cream. A simple example, one that could be explained different ways, but this phenomenon is a proven relationship; behaviour causes attitudes.

So, if action feeds attitude, can laws change your own ardent view point? Can your strongly and deeply held belief actually be circumvented by legislation? Results from the laboratory and history resoundingly say yes.

First, note Tommy's deployment of the rhetorical device "in fact." The facticity of what he wants to claim as absolute, is only such on the basis of the presuppositions and the methodologies, indeed on the basis of the specific methods of studies he has in mind and which he wants us to swallow whole around the metaphor of ice cream and the probabllity statistics of people who say they "hate" ice cream, then eat some, and change their minds.

Second, note the abstractness of Tommy's next deliverance: "behaviour generally leads to attitude change." Note further that Tommy uses the term "generally" - so he leaves open the possiblity that behaviour does not always lead to attitude change. Let's look at such not always cases, hypothetically, the possiblity of which Tommy does not go so far as to rule out. Some people may say they "hate" ice cream, then willingly put that attitude to a test or instead may be forced to eat ice cream thus again testing their attitude in an alternate way. In these varying cases, these people tested, let's say, in two sets - one set tested by their own willing choice and the other set tested by coercion - were they to conclude that they "hate" ice cream would not be anomalous by Tommy's own statement. Indeed, there are other kinds of cases also: some people may discover they are actually allergic to ice cream, that it induces extreme illness, that it may create phobic reactions merely to be in the same room when it is noticed to be present, etc.

So, we're back to Tommy's "generally." We find that the word "generally" can be used to erase the difference, to hide it and the minority who adhere to what counters it. In an exercise, let's not let the word slip by us, due to its mere rhetorical position in the sentence Tommy profers. Let's re-order the sentence without changing its formal semantics: "behaviour leads to attitude change, generally." This may help us isolate the abstractness of the statement under which so much legerdemain lurks. Indeed, we could make this statement completely outside the scientific claims of behaviourism altogether. We could simply say that when things happen in history, as a conflict settles, people tired of the conflict, go along with the winning result, at least for the time being. That seems to me to be true enuff, and platitudinously so. We don't need the debatable apparatus of behaviourism to see in terms of historical dynamics, that especially in a country of good democratic order like Canada, people who dissent from a long hotly-contested dispute on a matter will try to find a way to accomodate their victors, and make the best of the new status quo, while in many cases still creatively looking for ways to preserve outside the law the cultural element that they had previously valued so dearly but which now has no standing, has been devalued by the public-legal realm with its police backup, and in the ranking of things, demoted. This is what happened to legal definition of marriage, according to the Canadian tradition, which has now been demolished in favour of a generic definiton that does not recognize in their specificities the intimate unions of either 1woman1man (across the differences, and thus distinct from the other two), or 2women (a sameness that perhaps should be recognized as relevant to certain special responsiblities and rights, and not reducible to the sameness of the third...), or 2men (which becomes privileged in the very least in that it benefits doubly from the male-paradigmed medicine that dominates Canadian medicine, according to medical analysts who have made this their locus of expertise).

Once we note the platitudinous of Tommy's preoccupation with behaviourism, and get behind that facade to the well-ordered usual response in a democracy when one side has been outmanoeuvered in Parliament and has gone down in defeat to another side that packages in the Canadian flage its product of generic marriage only, selling said product in the name of an unreflective but dominant theory of "equality" regarding marriage, so as to interpret into the small blank spaces between its words a huge discourse that is not enshrined in the Charter of Rights but has been interpreted into it, as said, by the same school of uncritical juridical theorizing, we come to a multi-factoral set of results that can not yet be historiographically evaluated. Too many features of the results are still in motion. But, Tommy can shortstop historiography by invoking behaviourism. As to the contest's outcome: one side has lost something dear and vital, a side that is not limited to people of the couples of trad marriages, as many homos also feel that something dear and vital has been lost in the victory of the unthinking and uncritical, sloganeering, flag-packaging winning side.

Let's return to Tommy's text: As stated, where Tommy finds a certain deliverance from on hi, in the theoretical realms of the admittedly counter-intuitive psychological school of behaviourism to be "completely fascinating," I find it, when translated to a general historical rumination, to be platitudinous. In other words, "completely fascinating" is froth, chaff which the wind driveth away, not some startling revelation. So, while sticking with Tommy's text, let's turn from the abstractness of his first statement in the quote to his second, thereby to get something of a critical perspective on the abstractness itself. "Once John eats ice cream, even after professing abhorrence for the stuff, John is very likely to change his feelings about ice cream. A simple example, one that could be explained in different ways, but this phenomenon is a proven relationship; behaviour causes attitudes." Notice how Tommy's metaphor and example of "John eats ice cream" floats up out of concrete reality into isolation from any consideration of whether John is going against his "hate" of ice cream as a result of wanting to test his "hate" by free choice, or whether he has been forced or more subtly coerced into doing so.

Or, maybe John is dating a girl who has let him know she'd love to have him take her to an ice-cream parlour, as such establishments used to be called, but let's update the establishment to a Baskin Robbins outlet. He doesn't mention his antipathy to ice cream, he is single-mindedly desirous of doing exactly what this young lady desires of him for their date. He likes her a lot; so, he will eat ice cream, even tho in comparison to 10,000 other possible edibles, he would prefer almost anything else than ice cream - his "antipathy," thus, amounts to a strong range of preferences. So, we see how lacking Tommy's abstractions are, floating above any historical specificty, just as in John's case his "hate" may be a strong preference for almost any other kind of food or drink, or it may be due to an allergy to dairy products. Let's say, he gets a choice at Baskin Robbins between real ice-cream which is a dairy product, and a vegan product which is composed entirely of vegetables (excluding peanuts). So, even in the latter cases, we see that in so individual and personal a matter as foods we "hate" and foods we like, choice vs coercion is a factor that de-abstracts the behaviourist construct, and also that a huge array of variables that configure uniquely in the case of each person provide the co-factoral elements in the specificity of any particular "attitude." Now, let's proceed with this second element of Tommy's text by looking more closely at his slide from one meaning to another, that he thinks he can impose on his readers with impunity.

"[B]ehaviour ...leads to attitude change[, generally] ... professing abhorrence ... very likely to change his feelings about ice cream." Earlier, Tommy used the term "hate" in reference to liking or disliking ice cream. There are cases where people do indeed hate ice cream, but the hatred involved usually is real and is the result of experience, not simply a notion untested in the vicissitudes of life. So, "hate" in conjunction with "ice cream" is more likely not to indicate an emotion, but as Tommy plays with the concept to this point, it is ambiguous and draws on "hate" as an idiom of hyperbole for a mere attitude untried by any real experience of eating the stuff. However, having used the word "hate" in so ambiguous (and to the unwary reader, misleading) a way, suddenly Tommy is tilting the word to an emotional-intensifier that admits of no such ambiguity, and even forecloses on the misleading ahistorical abstract juxtaposition of "hate" and "ice cream" (again, most people who hate ice cream have real reason to do so, but most people who "hate" ice cream and have never tasted it, don't actually hate it, and those who "hate" in this idiomatic hyperbolic usage of the word, actually dislike it only in the sense that they have strong preferences and would enjoy other kinds of edibles or drinkables in preference to ice cream ... but for his lady friend, John who "hates" ice cream, may be quite happy to eat and pretend to enjoy it or even enjoy in order to please her in the enjoyment of it together - but since she breaks up with him later that evening, John never even thinks about eating ice cream again ... perhaps he becomes merely indifferent to it).

In any case, by a rhetorical shift, Tommy tilts against what he has misled the typical unwary reader into thinking was a mere matter of attitude. What he has waited to do, is exploit the ambiguity of the word "hate" in ordinary parlance (back to the ice cream parlour and Baskin Robbins) in regard to "ice cream." So, now two words are intensified to high emotion-laden semantic values, mid-discourse: "attitude" suddenly becomes intense emotion, and the implicit and idiomatic hyperbole "hates ... ice cream without having ever tried it" suddenly becomes an unambiguous "abhorrence." This is not good logic; this is rhetorical finesse to the point of trickery.

Now, no matter how words can harbour several meanings at once (see Umberto Eco, Semiotics: An Introduction and Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language), and no matter how a crafty writer can avoid clarifying the meaning-usage he wants to hold back until the moment when disambiguation is most likely to benefit him, in contrast to his previous lack of thereof; for his rhetorical purposes, having mislead his readers, still we must note that in the shift from "attitude" as used by behaviourists in the would-be scientific testing along the line of Tommy's thesis, to Tommy's additional slide to the word "feelings," takes us one additional step in fathoming the trickery of Tommy's misconceptualizations at the root of his argument. "Attitudes" and "Hates ice cream, tho untried" becomes hatred, abhorrence, and intense feelings.

I believe I have already proven that Tommy has not made his case with his use of terms, which are bedevilled with illogical breakdowns in consistency of meaning. Now, I want to make the point that the entire construct so analyzed around "hates ... ice cream" just can't carry the metaphorical weight that Tommy wants, when he tries to evoke a general rule in a behaviorist fashion in regard to predicting the feelings of those who lost in the social conflict about displacing and demoting the traditional public-legal definition of marriage.

Tommy seems to think that attitudinal testing by the behaviourist school of psychology is directly applicable to the case before us - demotion of marriage, displacement of it by gmarriage (generic marriage) - according to some general rule putatively established. "...[A]ttitudes do not account for actions very well at all." This thawt, says Tommy, is "counter-intuitive," which means that most of us balk at it as seeming on the face of it, misleading. The truth is that we are not here called upon to decided that attitudes alone account entirely for any particular action. Nor the opposite. What we find instead that is that attitudes, especially when strong and emotionally-charged with moral convictions, are likely to be co-factoral in regard to action or lack of action. Tommy's construct places us in a binomial situation of either/or (the exclusive disjunct in logic). But in historical dynamics, even our own personal actions, attitudes are co-factoral only, and actions rarely occur without any attitudes whatsoever. There is no either/or, or one-factor causality known to a good historiography. But apparently, behaviourism - or at least, Tommy's take on behaviourism - has been able to invent such a single-factor doctrine of human causality. "In fact," Tommy goes on to say (my boldface added - Owlb) "the general rule discovered was that attitude accounts for 10% of the variance of behaviour, meaning you are still uncertain what an individual will do 9 out of 10 times," once you have ascertained what you consider to be his/her attitude, Tommy neglects to append. And just look at the conceptual thinness of what must in all honesty be appended. Tommy's reliance on this kind of "science" puts him way out on a limb.

To generate this so-called "general rule," its progenitors and Tommy have to use the soft meaning of "attitude/s" (their "in general" and "generally") - not the cases of previous experience, not the cases of strongly-held beliefs about moral institutions attached to ultimate values of the individual, and not the cases where strong emotions on the level "abhorrence" are invested in the instance, especially an instance of the kind contested around the traditional public-legal definition of marriage. What behaviourism needs to do to give its construct any crediblity at all (maybe it has, but Tommy isn't aware of it or has suppressed it, sorry Tommy but that's a logical possiblity here) is to provide for any Tommy-style argument, an internal structural ranking of various categories of its data - from attitudes toward trivial matters at one end, along a spectrum, to attitudes on vitally important matters to those surveyed. Now, with that in place, Tommy's whole discourse on "hating ice cream ... tho never having tried it," is not only rhetorical sophistry here (tho it wouldn't be to ice-cream marketers), it is also an instance of trivialization.

Attitudes toward trivia can be changed by eating ice cream, which one "hated" when one had never tried it. Attitudes toward the public-legal definition of marriage may also be trivial for some people, may become trivial for some people for whom it wasn't trivial before they had to live with the new legislation in Canada for awhile; but we can invoke no general rule nor the rubric Tommy wants to marshall that "attitude accounts for 10% of the variance of behaviour," because that rubric takes no acccount of the internal structural differences of the kinds of variance being lumped together to produce an abstraction and generalization that doesn't distinguish what kinds differentials make that statement true, and what kinds render it patently false and absurd. This procedure is not authentically scientific. It is uncritical of the behaviourist methodologies, and it is uncritical of the actual methods used and the questions asked in making this broad and sweeping undifferentiated set of generalizations about "attitude," "change" and "behaviour" in regard to the displacement and demotion of the public-legal definition of marriage for a neologism (gmarriage, generic "marriage").

Lastly, today, we must recognize that science at its best (and this offering by Tommy and his uncited sources also) only gives one kind of knowledge - probabilities. Science cannot tell us at any time - when it says "what an individual will do 9 out of 10 times" - what that means for this time, this case, this instance, this loss by one side and win for the other side. Time will tell. One thing is sure, that many people who "ardently" opposed the winning legislation will accomodate themselves to it, and some will come around to approve of it later on. The vote was an historic moment, But, contrary to Tommy's dubious science, the situation could reverse itself. And the last place to turn, if you're a betting person, is to Tommy's behaviourism, if you want to suss out the odds, to place a wise wager. My guess would be, that this move is just one feature of a great spiritual shift by which secular Humanism (a spirit of the times) is seeking to disenfranchise Christian participation in the public square. But the public-legal issue in itself is not peculiarly Christian; no religious community and no philosophical orientation held even by numerous secular Humanists to the contrary of the new law, will benefit from the demotion and displacement of 1woman1man as integral to the public-legal definition of marriage.

But, hey. I'll give Tommy the last word, since he is his own reductio ad absurdam on the issue, which he implored me to debate with him. "So, if action feeds attitude, can laws change your own ardent view point? Can your strongly and deeply held belief actually be circumvented by legislation? Results from the laboratory and history resoundingly say yes."

Endnote: It will take some time before I am ready with Canadian Steele's Errors: A Syllabus [#3]. - Owlb