I think it's about time I did this.
In my last video, I explained the concept of the family resemblance, and this was the
fourth time I explained it in my videos, in order to debunk a certain fallacy used by
the anti-liberal, regressive left.
So instead of doing it again and again, I am just going to make one video explaining
it, a video I can refer to.
The rest of you content creators are welcomed to refer to it as well.
And, on top of that, I am going to give a name to that regressive fallacy, so we can
have something to identify it by.
So, let's make some definitions.
If we want to understand where this regressive tactic comes from, we first need to talk about
essentialism.
Essentialism is basically the belief that every entity has an attribute, or a set of
attributes, that is essential to its identity, and without which it would lose that identity.
Aristotle, the first man to formalize western logic, posited that every entity has substances
that are inherent to it, and every such substance makes it a member in a category shared with
other entities that have that substance.
Essentialism believes that while members of a category might differ from each other in
many of their attributes, they all must have that substance, that essential attribute.
Otherwise, they are not part of that category, even if they share many other attributes with
its members.
This is the approach that dominated western logic from Aristotle on.
But everyday language, for some reason, refused to adhere to the strict rules of logic.
Philosophers throughout the ages were frustrated by the fact that people would use terms freely,
and mean different things at different times when using the same term.
Many philosophers believed that this is one of the things that prevent us from living
a truthful life, and that if we just cleaned up our language of all of this ambivalence,
we will solve a lot of our problems.
The attempts to create a better language reached their peak at the beginning of the twentieth
century, with a movement that was called logical positivism, which tried to use logic to create
a language that can better represent reality.
The masterpiece book written in this effort was The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, published
in 1921, and written by a young Austrian philosopher named Ludwig Wittgenstein.
With the Tractatus, Wittgenstein came the closest to producing a perfect language, a
language that can describe the world without any ambivalent terms.
But Wittgenstein himself was not satisfied.
The more he grew older, the more he felt that there was something very wrong with this language.
He started to claim that perfect languages, like logic and mathematics, may be beautiful
in their purity, but they are not suitable to dealing with the complexities of daily
life.
In the 1953 book Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously, Wittgenstein compares
the language he created in the Tractatus to pure crystal, but, he adds, this purity made
it useless in the real world.
It is like a ground with no friction, and because of that, a ground we can't walk on.
Therefore, we need to stop trying to create a perfect language, and realize that our everyday
language evolved to be the best language that there is to deal with daily life in the world.
Wittgenstein, then, rejects the old idea that we need to clean our everyday language from
ambivalences and create a perfect language.
Everyday language is basically alright just the way it is.
Instead, the book tries to clean everyday language from the idealist notions put into
it by philosophers, and which cause us to have an idealized view of the world.
One of the notions he goes after is essentialism.
In aphorism 66 of Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes: "Consider for example
the proceedings that we call "games".
I mean board-games, card-games, ball-games, Olympic games, and so on.
What is common to them all?—Don't say: "There must be something common, or they would not
be called 'games' "—but look and see whether there is anything common to all.—For if
you look at them you will not see something that is common to all, but similarities, relationships,
and a whole series of them at that.
To repeat: don't think, but look!—Look for example at board-games, with their multifarious
relationships.
Now pass to card-games; here you find many correspondences with the first group, but
many common features drop out, and others appear.
When we pass next to ballgames, much that is common is retained, but much is lost.—Are
they all 'amusing'?
Compare chess with noughts and crosses.
Or is there always winning and losing, or competition between players?
Think of patience.
In ball games there is winning and losing; but when a child throws his ball at the wall
and catches it again, this feature has disappeared.
Look at the parts played by skill and luck; and at the difference between skill in chess
and skill in tennis.
Think now of games like ring-a-ring-a-roses; here is the element of amusement, but how
many other characteristic features have disappeared!
And we can go through the many, many other groups of games in the same way; can see how
similarities crop up and disappear.
And the result of this examination is: we see a complicated network of similarities
overlapping and criss-crossing: sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities
of detail."
What Wittgenstein is telling us is that because of the essentialist tradition, we have come
to expect that members of a certain category must all have at least one attribute in common.
So when we think of the category of games, we expect that we would find an attribute
that is common to all games.
But when we look into it, we realize that there is no such attribute.
Instead, we find that every game shares many attributes with every other game, but those
are different attributes each time.
Wittgenstein uses the term "family resemblance" to describe this type of similarity between
members of the same category.
To illustrate, let's look at this table I drew.
We have ten items that belong to the same category.
We see that almost all of them have the attribute D, except item 8.
Yet, item 8 is still part of the category, because it has five other attributes that
are shared by other members.
Items 2, 3 and 6 are more typical to the category, because they have seven of its attributes,
and 3 is the most typical of all, because it has the attributes that appear the most.
Item 1 has only three attributes, and is therefore the type of item that some people might not
include in the category.
So the borders of the category are not well-defined, there is ambivalence around its atypical members,
and yet, we can still all recognize and agree that its typical members belong to it.
Wittgenstein equates every language to a game, obeying certain rules.
However, our everyday language is not one language-game, but a combination of numerous
language-games.
These language-games will share the same words and terms, but they might have a different
meaning, as their meaning is derived from the rules of the specific language-game.
But the human mind is flexible enough to navigate between these language-games and understand
the different meanings, and it is this flexibility that allows us to deal with the complex reality
of human life.
So the attempt to impose a rigid, one-dimensional language-game on our everyday language is
a fool's errand.
Like he said, we need the friction.
We need this multi-dimensional language, with all its ambivalences and imperfections.
Now, in some language-games, a more rigid essentialist approach is called for.
Let's take a hypothetical case.
Say that we discover a liquid that is like water in every way: it is transparent, it
boils at 100 degrees Celsius, it has the same specific gravity, it has the same effect on
our body when we drink it, etc.
Except for one thing: its molecular formula is not H2O.
Is it water?
Well, it will probably be marketed as water, and humans will consume it and call it as
such.
But the chemist will disagree.
Because in the language-game of chemistry, water is rigidly defined as H2O.
Who is right?
Everybody.
The chemist is right within the rules of chemistry, and the people calling it water are right
within the rules of everyday language, in which the language of chemistry is just one
of many languages we use.
In my last video, I claimed that the categories of man and woman cover a large variety of
different cases, grouped together by the concept of family resemblance.
Some commenters objected, and said that there are two reproductive systems that define them.
Alright, but what about a man who is born infertile?
Is he not a man?
What if a woman has a hysterectomy?
Does she stop being a woman?
The answer in both cases is no, because they still have many other attributes that define
their sex and gender.
Those who try to defend the essentialist view would say that these are abnormal cases, and
an infertile human is damaged.
Well, this holds only if we are in a language-game that believes it is essential for humans to
procreate.
In our everyday language, we value people by many different things, not necessarily
by their ability to procreate.
So to say that these people are damaged is wrong.
Traditionally, human society used to hold essentialist views about many things, and
did indeed define some people as abnormal when they were lacking the essence.
But the liberal society of today has adopted a non-essentialist view.
We do not judge individuals as unacceptable just because they are atypical to their category.
As long as their divergence doesn't prevent them from functioning in everyday life, or
cause them to harm themselves or others, they are accepted as normal.
Instead of normal, we speak of normative.
The typical members of a category determine what is normative to that category, whereas
the atypical members, while there is nothing wrong with them, are not normative.
And this is what the regressive left is trying to exploit in order to undermine our liberal
society.
The regressive tactic is simple.
First, they pretend that society has an essentialist perception of a certain category of people,
and portray themselves as those who are fighting against this essentialist view.
This allows them to claim that science is on their side, because science does indeed
show us that we cannot impose essentialist categories on the natural diversity of humans.
And so, they can present themselves as debunking that strawman of essentialism that they themselves
have erected.
However, where I countered the essentialist position by relying on the family resemblance
concept, which allows me to keep believing in categories even without an essence, the
regressives claim that the absence of an essence proves that those categories are merely a
social construct.
Exploiting the ignorance of naive laymen, who are unaware that you can define categories
in a non-essentialist way, they can then manipulate the discourse around the subject.
Once they establish the idea that it is a social construct, they claim that what is
considered normative is not the result of what humans typically are by nature, but something
that was imposed on us to construct us in a certain way.
Thus, they can portray liberal society as oppressive, and undermine it.
In my previous video, I described in detail how this is done with gender.
I analyzed how the regressive left is employing this tactic to portray contemporary society
as ruled by what they call the "cis-normative": a social construct that says that men and
women should behave only in a certain way, thus creating what they call the gender binary.
I showed how they are fooling confused kids, who fall outside of this alleged binary, into
believing that the cis-normative is oppressing them, because it puts pressure on them to
conform to the norm.
Once they convince them that they are oppressed, they turn them into pawns in their ideological
battle to undermine liberal society.
I mentioned Professor Jordan Peterson, who is leading the fight against these regressives,
and I showed part of a TV debate, which by now is not the most famous TV debate he was
in.
Anyway, in THAT debate his main rival was Dr. Nicholas Matte, a lecturer in gender studies.
Right off the bat, Matte comes out with this assertion:
Matte never gets around to explaining what he means by that, but it is quite obvious.
He pretends that biological sex is defined rigidly, in a way that sees certain biological
components as essential and belonging to only one of the sexes.
Science has shown that this is not the case, that the male biology contains components
that are associated with the female sex, and vice versa.
It is rather the amount of these components in our body that determines if we are male
or female.
But we are still male or female according to science.
But not according to Dr. Matte, who pretends that biological sex can only be defined in
an essentialist way, so he denies its existence, and even has the temerity to claim that science
is on his side.
On the basis of this claim, he can argue that
the cis-normative is nothing but a social construct, which is excluding certain individuals,
and thus oppresses them.
Dr. Matte behaves like such a weasel during
this debate that I've decided that he deserves to have this fallacy named after him.
So, I hereby christen it as the Nicholas Matte Fallacy, or the Matte Fallacy for short.
Let's define it officially: The stages of the Matte Fallacy are as follows:
1.
Create a strawman by pretending that, in liberal society, a certain category of people is rigidly
defined in an essentialist manner.
2.
Cite scientific research to show that when we look into it, we see that this essentialist
definition fails.
3.
Claim that this proves that this category isn't based on nature, and is therefore completely
a social construct.
4.
Conclude that the category is imposed on us, and creates a normative that is oppressing
certain individuals or groups.
5.
Use this to portray liberal society as oppressive.
The way to debunk this fallacy, as I have shown, is to explain that you don't need an
essence to define a category.
A category can be defined based on Wittgenstein's family resemblance principle, and in fact,
this is how contemporary liberal society does define categories of people.
Thus, the category is not a social construct but based on human nature, and the normative
is simply determined by how humans typically are by nature.
Therefore, as long as it allows the atypical people to express their nature, the normative
is not oppressive.
We can find the Matte Fallacy employed in other places as well.
Long before he became famous for his stance on the non-binary gender issue, Jordan Peterson
took part in another TV debate, about the difference between the male and female brain.
His rival this time is Daphna Joel, a Professor of Psychology, who claims that there is no
such thing as male brain and female brain.
So basically, Joel shows us that nature perfectly
matches Wittgenstein's description.
There is no attribute that is unique or essential to the male or female brains, but there are
attributes that are more typical to each one of the sexes.
A brain that has more feminine attributes is a female brain, according to the family
resemblance principle.
But since Joel pretends that only an essentialist definition can hold, she claims that this
shows that there is no such thing as a female brain.
And based on that, she can claim that the gender roles in our society are not based
in our nature, but are a social construct.
To her credit, Joel isn't fanatic in her social
constructionism.
She admits that there is a possibility that nature plays a role.
But her ideological bent keeps driving her to try and deny it throughout the debate,
and emphasize the role of nurture.
By using the Matte Fallacy to deny the existence of a male and female brain, she can pretend
that nature plays no part.
Even though Prof. Peterson does not hold an essentialist position when he argues for difference
between the sexes, she is seemingly incapable of getting the point.
One of Prof. Joel's main arguments is that her rivals' claims are ideologically and politically
motivated.
She claims that we are obsessed with trying to find biological differences between the
sexes, so that we can justify the different gender roles in society.
She is completely oblivious to the fact that there is an opposing ideological movement,
which claims that the gender roles are a construct of an oppressive society, and that her arguments
stem from this radical ideology.
The result, as usual with regressives, is that she is delegitimizing the arguments of
those who are trying to fight against this radical, anti-liberal ideology.
Although she doesn't go as far as Nicholas Matte, who accused Peterson of hate speech,
she does imply that his position stems from bigotry.
This debate took place in 2015, and Joel could
still say that it is unthinkable to inquire about natural differences between races.
Today, with the rise of race realism, the unthinkable became very thinkable.
Some of you are probably already wondering how what I've delineated here pertains to
race realism, so let's now turn to that.
When we come to talk about race realism, the first thing we need to point out is that it
is not rigidly defined.
It is rather a vague term, which can only be understood through the principle of family
resemblance.
It means different things to different people.
At the most basic level, it is a reaction to regressive leftists who posit that the
existing racial categories have no basis in biology.
Using the Matte Fallacy, they claim that race is a social construct, constructed by a racist
society to justify the oppression of one ethnicity by the other.
According to the regressives, the fact that some ethnicities do better than other proves
that Western society suffers from systemic racism.
In reaction, the race realists claim that race is real.
Meaning, that people of different color, when looked at as a group, display differences
on the biological level, to the point where you at least have to consider the possibility
that these differences may account for their different social status.
And the science, on this, is on the side of the race realists.
But then, some race realists interpret race realism to mean that race is not only real,
but is the most defining feature that we have.
They assert that we should construct our identities around our race, because our biology is somehow
more real than anything else.
This is a weird argument, since culture is obviously more important than biology in determining
one's identity.
Actually, I see no reason why we should regard race as identity at all.
Ethnicities are identities, since every ethnic group has its own beliefs, its own customs,
its own shared history, etc.
And since humans tend to procreate within their own ethnic group, we will usually find
that an ethnicity also has typical biological traits.
But what makes the ethnicity an identity is not these biological distinctions – it's
the shared cultural heritage.
And, there are some race realists who are taking the statement "race is real" a step
further, and argue for an essentialist view of race.
They are simply wrong.
Race is real only if you view it through the principle of family resemblance.
This demonstrates one of the dangers of the Matte Fallacy: by employing it to race, and
attempting to silence their opponents, the regressives have aided in the rise of the
race realists.
Many people are drawn to the race realist side because of the truthful part of it, but
once they are on that side, they might be lured into adopting actual racist positions.
Alright.
The Matte Fallacy has thus been defined and explicated.
Feel free to start using the term – I think you will find it very useful in debunking
regressive claims.
Let's get to work.
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