MOST MORALITY IS INSTINCTIVE



‘Two things fill the mind with ever new and increasing wonder and awe, the more often and the more seriously reflection concentrates upon them: the starry heaven above me and the moral law within me’. -- Immanuel Kant, in Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788)



By John Ray (M.A.; Ph.D.) What follows was originally written in December, 2004 and updated in September 2007 but I have subsequently improved my analysis of some points below. See here


Although moral philosophy is a field in which I have made some very minor academic contributions, I have never taken it very seriously. So although my own account of the nature of morality is in my view at once factually correct, useful and not dependant on religious assumptions, I have been content merely to outline it rather than defend it in every detail. And I believe that to be a very conservative thing to do. And in making that claim I am also saying that there is a substantial opposition between what philosophers generally do and what conservatives generally do. And I should make clear that in talking about philosophers, I am talking about real students of the world and of discourse about the world -- not the psychiatric cases and comedians (Derrida etc.) who so often pass as philosophers in Europe.

There are two things behind what I have just expressed: 1). My belief that morality is largely inborn and, 2). A thoroughly conservative distrust of theory carried to extremes. That really constitutes the whole of what I want to say on the matter but let me spell it out a bit more anyway.

Because the standard psychological measures of moral attitudes (e.g. Kohlberg's) are profoundly contaminated by the Leftist assumptions of their authors, I have not even tried to look up inheritance data about morality in the behaviour genetics literature -- though there is some supportive evidence mentioned here and the idea is to be found in the work of various well-known writers -- e.g. Steven Pinker and James Q. Wilson. So suffice it to say that most important human characteristics seem to show very substantial genetic inheritance (See e.g. here and here and here, and some work on a genetically-coded social abnormality reported here, here and here). If morality were an exception that would be most surprising. And from the viewpoint of evolutionary biology, it would be even more surprising. Man is both a social animal and an animal that falls very readily into conflict with his fellow humans. So ways of regulating behaviour to enable co-operation and forestall conflict must necessarily be of foremost importance. And that is largely what moral and ethical rules are all about. To forestall conflict there HAVE to be rules against murder, stealing, coveting your neighbour's wife etc. And that is why there are considerable similarities between the laws of Moses (ten commandments etc) and the much earlier Babylonian code of Hammurabi. The details of moral and legal rules are of course responsive to time, place and circumstances, but there are some basics that will almost always be there. And given the importance of those basic rules for social co-operation, it should be no surprise that such rules became internalized (instinctive) very early on in human evolution. So many if not most of our social instincts are in fact moral or ethical instincts. Ethics are the rules we need for co-operative existence.

Obviously, however, the rules are not so well entrenched as to produce automatic responses. We have broad tendencies towards ethical behaviour but that is all. This is probably due to their relatively recent evolutionary origin. Most of what we are originates far back in our evolutionary past whereas the social rules that we use became needed only with the evolution of the primates.

Additionally, we are the animal that relies least on instinct. So all our instincts can be both modified and defended by our reasoning processes. Just because a thing is instinctive to us it does not mean that the behaviour concerned is emitted in any automatic way. We think about why we do what our instincts tell us and generally conclude that our instincts are thoroughly commendable! And we do generally explain our rules of behaviour in a thoroughly empirical and functional way -- generally starting with: "If everyone did that .... ". And moral philosophers are of course people who specialize in such talk. But, as Wittgenstein often pointed out, all such talk is largely epiphenomenal (an afterthought). It is predominantly their set of inherited dispositions that make people behave ethically, not any abstract rationalizations.

And that realization does explain why philosophers so often back themselves into absurd corners. You might guess what is coming next at that point: Peter Singer. Peter Singer is undoubtedly a very able and influential philosopher and in good philosophical style he starts out with a few simple and hard-to-dispute general rules from which he logically deduces all sorts of conclusions that are greeted with horror by normal people -- his view that babies and young children may be killed more or less at will, for example. As a theoretical deduction, his views are defensible but seen in the light of the biological basis of morality, they are counterproductive. A society that killed off its young more or less at will would not last long. And, just by the by, Singer's work would seem a good example of what Wittgenstein battled so hard against: The tendency to produce unviable abstractions rather than simply attending to the social rules at work in everyday language. I hesitate to call my thinking on the matter Wittgensteinian, however, as the one thing Wittgenstein seemed most sure about was that no-one really understood him.

So we come back in the end to the good Burkean principle that theories are to be distrusted and and continually tested against whether or not they lead to generally desired outcomes. Philosophers judge an argument on its consistency, elegance and comprehensivesness. Conservatives judge it on its practical outcomes. And Leftists judge it on whether they can use it to make themselves look good.


Epilogue:

A reader had a rather interesting comment on the above. He commented on my note that when ordinary people debate whether an action is ethically right or not, the Kantian critierion "If everyone did that .... " is very popular. My reader commented that Leftists would not be able to accept that criterion because it would make homosexuality wrong. But as Leftists themselves often tell us, they think there is no such thing as right and wrong anyway (except when convenient) so there is really no problem for them.

I might mention that there is a post on Gene Expression that also looks at morality as a product of evolutionary biology.

APPENDIX

As it seems particularly interesting, I reproduce below a press report of the genetically encoded social abnormality I mentioned above:

Nature wins in nurture debate

Scientists have raised new questions about free will, with some of the first evidence that the way people behave towards each other can be controlled by their genes rather than their environment and upbringing. They have found that people with a rare genetic mutation known as Williams syndrome have brains that work abnormally in social situations, producing erratic and inappropriate behaviour. The finding implies that humans' social interactions are pre-programmed to some extent and that external influences - "nurture" in contrast to "nature" - may be less important.

The researchers, at the National Institute of Mental Health in America, will publish their findings today in Nature Neuroscience. The institute's director, Thomas Insel, said: "Social interactions are central to human experience and well-being and are adversely affected in psychiatric illness. This may be the first study to identify functional disturbances in a brain pathway associated with abnormal social behaviour caused by a genetic disorder."

The researchers compared brains of people with Williams syndrome with those of healthy volunteers. People with Williams syndrome are missing about 21 genes on chromosome 7, a deficit that makes it hard for them to judge how to respond to social situations. They are impulsive in their behaviour towards others, often starting conversations with complete strangers and acting in an over-friendly fashion. Conversely, they often become anxious and agitated in non-social situations where there is no real cause for alarm.

Researchers have suspected such behaviour is linked to abnormalities in the way information is processed in the amygdala, which lies deep in the brain and plays an important role in governing social behaviour. In the normal volunteers, researchers found a complex neuron network through which the amygdala was controlled. For people with Williams syndrome, by contrast, these networks had been disrupted. One implication of the study is that genetic testing could pick out children with Williams syndrome.

(From "The Australian" of July 16, 2005. The original journal article is here)

2007 ADDENDUM

Some 2007 research by ">Haidt would seem to be of considerable interest in connection with the above. Haidt argues that the basis of morality is instinctive but that conservatives display greater cognitive complexity in dealing with moral questions. Given the frequent Leftist assertion that "there is no such thing as right and wrong", that is not inherently surprising. Although they often use moral talk in an attempt to influence others, Leftists would seem, on their own admission, to have no serious interest in or committment to morality of any kind. That does make the invariable brutalities of Communist regimes rather understandable.

Part of a summary of Haidt's review:

"Haidt argues that human morality is a cultural construction built on top of -- and constrained by -- a small set of evolved psychological systems. He presents evidence that political liberals rely primarily on two of these systems, involving emotional sensitivities to harm and fairness. Conservatives, however, construct their moral understandings on those two systems plus three others, which involve emotional sensitivities to in-group boundaries, authority and spiritual purity."


FINIS

Bulletin of the British Psychological Society 25 (1972), pp. 15-18


A PSYCHOLINGUISTIC ACCOUNT OF CAUSALITY






JOHN J. RAY

University of New South Wales

Although the layman might reasonably expect that the work of the psychologist should lead to an increase in our knowledge about the causes of behaviour, psychologists themselves at the present time are most likely to plump for the more modest goal of trying to predict behaviour. Statements of the form 'x causes y' are viewed with what is very often a fully justified degree of suspicion. For all that, few would want to deny that 'finding the causes of things' is a large part of the job that, in principle, science purports to do. There does then seem to be something of a gap between the theoretical goals of scientific inquiry and the actual acknowledged goal of many particular scientific inquiries. Part of the reason for this gap is no doubt some feeling that the standards of proof needed to back up a statement of causation are much higher than the standards needed to back up a statement about constant conjunction.

And yet the influential analysis of Hume asserted that a statement about causality is nothing but a statement about constant conjunction (Hume, 1777). In a modified form this account is still widely accepted among philosophers (e.g. Reichenbach, 1951). There are, of course, many ways of stating the case which do require us to acknowledge that the goal the psychologist appears to have when he says he only wants to predict behaviour is in fact more modest than the goal of finding the causes of behaviour. Nonetheless, it seems at least possible that the classical Humean attack upon 'necessary connection' as a feature of causation is one of the reasons for our reluctance to talk about causes. Some clarification of what talk about causation entails therefore seems timely -- doubly so, because work in psychology itself has enabled a fuller account than has heretofore been possible.

To recapitulate, then, Hume may be summarized as analysing the notion of cause into the two notions of temporal priority and necessary connection. Contiguity, too, he detects to be in some sense a feature of cause. Although apparently willing to grant that we have a notion of necessary connection, he is unwilling to grant that there is a necessary connection between an effect and its cause. On this view, then, it is sufficient grounds to say X is the cause of Y if X always precedes Y and if X and Y are, in some sense, contiguous. A notion of necessary connection between X and Y is, on the other hand, just a little something we add on when speaking or thinking of the conjunction.

This rejection of necessary connection by Hume stems from a real difficulty in finding out what it might consist of. The connection is either an event, a relationship or an object. If it is an object it is either physical or, perhaps, non-physical. Whichever is the case it is difficult to see what could be so versatile as to fit in 'between' each and every instance of cause and effect. Fundamentally, it is the purpose of this paper to suggest wherein this 'connection' might reside.

Some initial groundwork needs to be laid first in developmental psychology. William James is often quoted as saying that the world of the newborn child is a 'blooming, buzzing confusion' -- a chaos out of which particular things are only slowly differentiated. In varying ways, this view is widely accepted by psychologists in their treatment of perceptual development-psychologists as diverse as Hebb (1949) and Piaget (1926).

The second consideration needed here is the work of Whorf (1966) on linguistic relativity. Whorf shows that the way we differentiate our world is more arbitrary than had been supposed. Different environmental pressures will result in a cultural heritage of differentiations between objects and between events that is adaptive for the particular group of people concerned. These differentiations will be reflected in the language of that tribe or culture. The colour spectrum is a popular example of this process. We break up what is essentially a continuum into categories of red, blue, green and yellow, etc. Some primitive tribes have only one word for what we call blue and green. They just do not attend to differences between these wavelengths. It has never been adaptively important for them to do so.

It is easy to extend the above analysis to events. We speak of events such as my striking the golf ball and the golf ball flying through the air, but is this differentiation in fact anything other than convenient? Surely it would be just as correct (though perhaps less convenient) to speak of a single process of motion which was at first exhibited by the golf club and later in the golf ball. Pursuing the point even further, what is necessary about the categories of striking and flying ? It would be just as correct (though less useful) to say: 'There was an event of physical objects in motion.' We cut up the happening going on around us in non-necessary ways. We could cut up our club-ball happening into the downward motion of the object and the upward motion of the object. If we did this we would say that the downward motion of the object plus some other centripetal vector X caused the upward motion of the object. It might be of no interest that in the upward motion the object (as attended to) was first the club and then the ball.

What is asserted then is that we cut up the 'happening', the 'goings on' or the 'process-stream' about us in non-necessary ways. That part before the cut we call the cause and that part after the cut we call the effect. The very notion of cause is itself an arbitrary supercategory. Whorf reports that some Indian tribes use no such category.

Let it be stressed at this point that the above account is not dependent upon that extreme version of the process-stream argument which asserts that there is nothing about the ontological given which predisposes people to use one categorization rather than another. It is simply asserted that pragmatic usefulness must be taken into account in explaining any particular categorization. It would seem apparent, moreover, that (insofar as there is any distinction between objects and events) the categorization of objects might be much more dependent on the ontological given than the categorization of events (which could, indeed, be almost entirely pragmatically based). Note, however, that the whole distinction is only an approximate one. In the Hopi Indian language the word for table -- one of the philosopher's prime candidates for an example of an object -- is conjugated as a verb! This example should also make us less assertive about the degree to which the ontological given impels certain categorizations. Whatever the differential impact of the raw ontological given, it does seem at least necessary on Whorf's evidence to assert that pragmatic considerations must always have a potentially overriding influence in determining what categorizations are actually used by a particular tribe, culture or linguistic group.

The above does not, of course, imply that two people from different cultures must fail to agree on what object or event is being attended to, though each might be puzzled by an apparent tendency in the other to include 'irrelevancies' under the one term. Eventually, of course, they will be able to compromise to the point where they will agree entirely. We can be sure this is possible because the ontological given really is there. The categorizations we apply do not in any way alter what is given.

We could now, if desired, replace 'necessary connection' by 'essential connectedness' where 'essential' merely means 'in the essence' (i.e. the ontological given). This formulation is, however, still not entirely satisfactory (except perhaps as an obeisance to Hume). Any use of 'connect' implies discreteness. 'Essential continuity' would be better. It is, in short, denied that discreteness is an inevitable part of an accurate and useful description. Paradigmatically, to say that X is the cause of Y is to say that X is the or a temporally prior category of what is also perceived as one event. Psychologically, our imputation of connectedness lies then in our ability to see that two events are in fact one or, more exactly, that one event has been made into two. To perceive X as causing Y is to recognize the larger event F. There is, of course, nothing sacred about the (often unnamed) larger category called here F It might, for instance, be characteristically more useful to group Y and Z as G rather than X and Y as F.

This explanation clears up rather parsimoniously some of what would be difficulties for a simple temporal priority account of cause and effect. Take the example of a water pump. The cause of the water rising (effect) is the upward motion of the piston in the cylinder. But surely both of these, in fact, go on at once. Do we have here an instance of cause and effect being concurrent? The very fact that we can ask such a question shows some weakness in a simple temporal priority account of cause. If, however, a cause is seen as simply a convenient category within one event, there is, of course, no difficulty.

Note that this example also shows clearly how in this culture we tend to divide up single events in terms of what we have already decided their physical object membership to be.

It is, of course, assumed that a pragmatic and hence changeable base for any categorization does not prevent that categorization from being repeatable in the case where a similar ontological given is again present. Although offering no particular difficulty, this assumption about human abilities is mentioned because it is one not required by the naive view that our categorization of objects and events is in some sense 'natural'. We could not, of course, speak of a cause if the particular category were not repeatable. To recognize a causal relationship then is to recognize that a particular recurrent stretch of the process-stream is such as to be easily seen as a single event.

It will be seen, then, that this paper agrees with Hume in denying that there are any necessary connections. The justification offered here (that there is in fact no necessary discreteness) is the point of difference. Along the way, of course, this paper also eliminates Hume's difficulty of explaining from whence it is that we get the idea or feeling of necessary connection. Such an idea is shown to be in fact the very idea of a thing or event having a separate identity of its own. It is not desired to assert that we always get the idea of necessary connection from the idea of an event or object having particularity but the idea of necessary connection is the idea of what could also be perceived as elements being in fact perceived as a whole. The idea of necessary connection is then an idea of a wholeness or of particular identity.

In conclusion, let us try out the above account on a possible criticism of it.* Someone might say: 'I have no more difficulty regarding the falling of the rain outside my window and the growth of plants inside on the windowsill as one event including them both than I have in regarding the falling of the rain and the continued growth of the lawns on which the rain falls. But I regard the former pair as not causally connected, and the latter pair as causally connected. Therefore is not at least the account of the idea of causal connection inadequate ?'

The answer here is relatively simple: if the falling of the rain outside did continue to go with the growing of the plants inside, we would probably tend to believe that they were part of one larger event. The account here does not dispense with the need for constant conjunction. It merely makes constant conjunction a necessary member of a (variable) set of conditions for perceiving what had been priorly thought separate events to be in fact part of a larger event.

If the constant conjunction were in fact established, then we might, in fact, assume that there was no essential discreteness between what had apparently been two events. We might, in fact, look for some intervening process to 'join' them (e.g. seepage of moisture and the nutrient qualities of my woodwork).

Perhaps another point inherent in the above criticism is a simple denial that either of the two sets of events can in any way be 'seen' as one event. The point to be made in reply is that any event can in principle be infinitely subdivided and we do not have (or need) words for every possible category. If we are dealing with a category for which there is no word, it is not surprising that we might tend to feel that that category is different in type from those for which we do have single words. There is, of course, a reason why we have words for only a few possible categories-a pragmatic reason having at least a great deal to do with frequency of usefulness.

On this line of reasoning any 'strangeness' we feel about regarding something as one event is an outcome of our not having one word for it. It also follows that where there is a very common or frequent cause-effect sequence we might well expect that there would be a word for it. There are, of course, many such instances.

When we speak of a man firing a rifle the same event might just as accurately be described as: the man pulled the trigger -- the firing pin struck the percussion cap of the round -- the percussion cap did whatever percussion caps do --gases were produced inside the round -- the bullet was expelled through the barrel, because we can see this common set of descriptively discrete events as one continuous event we also have one word for it in recognition of the fact. We might not know all the above details but at least we know that the man did something to the rifle which caused (sic) the bullet to be expelled.

We seek causes, therefore, by looking for connections between one event and another. These connections are not the metaphysical necessary connections treated by Hume but simply other, more minute, intervening events. We stop looking when we have found enough to convince ourselves that we are in fact dealing with one continuous event.

The implication of the foregoing for psychology then is that insofar as they concentrate their inquiries upon 'input-output relationships' and other types of constant conjunction, psychologists will never succeed in justifying causal inferences. More reductionistic types of inquiry (e.g. psychophysiology) will be needed before the 'other', more minute, intervening events' mentioned above can be identified. Insofar as they have not had such knowledge, it is little wonder that psychologists have so far eschewed much talk of causes. It was evident to them that despite the legitimation furnished by the Humean account for a concentration on mere conjunctions of events, this could not enable more than prediction.

Disputes over determinism also take on a new look when the above account of causality is used. The fundamental question 'Do all events have causes?' becomes equivalent to 'Are all events part of some larger event?' If our categorization of raw 'happening' into events is done partly on pragmatic grounds, the answer to this question does not lie entirely in the field of objective inquiry.


Acknowledgements

*I owe this to Max Deutscher.

Earlier versions of this paper were criticized by Dr Robert McLaughlin and Professor Max Deutscher. I would like to thank them most sincerely for their help, but all responsibility for errors and deficiencies remains my own.

References

HEBB, D. 0. (1949). The Organization of Behaviour. New York: Wiley.

HUME, D. (1777). Enquiries Concerning the Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963.

PIAGET, J. (1926). The Language and Thought of the Child. New York: Harcourt, Brace.

REICHENBACH, H. (1951). The Rise of Scientific Philosophy. Berkeley: Univ. of California Press.

WHORF, B. L. (1966). Science and linguistics. In E. Maccoby et al. (eds.), Readings in Social Psychology. London: Methuen.


FINIS

Chapter 40 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

IS SELF THEORY THE HYPOSTATIZATION OF A

SYNCATEGOREMATIC WORD?




John Ray

IN BOTH PSYCHOLOGY and sociology, there is an amorphous current of thought variously termed 'existentialism', 'phenomenology', 'self theory' etc. Although probably a minority view, it does represent a continuing challenge to the usual standards of scientific practice always prevalent in the social sciences and in other sciences. In fact, more than a challenge, this stream of thought represents to the scientifically inclined almost a foreign and certainly an unintelligible language. Although attacking it is rather like waging war on a mile-high cube of jelly, it is desired in this chapter to point out a possible major source of fallacy in this form of 'theory'.

From J. P. Sartre to Carl Rogers, a central theme in existentialist talk has been 'the self. An article by Bertocci (1965) summarising something of the history of this body of ideas goes back even earlier than this. Bertocci refers to the work in 1915 of the psychologist Mary Calkins in the following words: 'The self, as Calkins saw it, is self-identical, unique, related to its social and physical environment, but not "beyond or beside" the experience it has' (p. 300).

What this desperate mumbo jumbo means is anybody's guess. It creates a feeling rather than conveying any information or offering any explanation. One gets the idea that some concept of 'the self is central, but what this 'self actually is seems rather mystical. At the very least Bertocci is not so much offering an explanation as providing an oracular utterance that requires explanation and elaboration. It is very much like a verbal Rorschach inkblot -- a lineal descendant of the pronouncements of the Delphic oracle. Unfortunately the whole of Bertocci's paper and the whole of existentialist writing in general is like this. It could mean anything or nothing. Nowhere are there any plain utterances the truth of which could be tested.

An examination of the one sentence quoted from Bertocci will serve to exemplify the difficulty of finding out just what is being said in 'existentialist', 'personahstic' or 'phenomenological' writing. What, for instance, could possibly be conveyed by saying that the self is 'self-identical'? To say as much is a totally unilluminating tautology. Even primary school children realise that if you want to define a term you cannot use that term itself in the definition. The self is 'related to its social and physical environment'. What does that tell us? Practically nothing. The one totally trivial thing that we might perhaps infer is that the self is something other than its social and physical environment. This inference, however, is little more than a case of something being true by definition. Next we are told that the self is not 'beyond or beside' the experience it has. By any criterion this means that the self is the experience it has. Yet if it is experiences, how can it also have experiences? This seems to be a case of either an infinite regress or a statement that is untrue by definition. Putting 'beyond or beside' in quotes is no help except that it provides mystification. Why it was done or what it means no-one can know.

So we see how existentialist talk -- and one could multiply the above example indefinitely -- is not really discourse at all. It looks like discourse, but violates all rules of discourse. It is either totally trivial, tautologous, true by definition or false by definition. It includes no real statements, propositions or assertions at all. It is a verbal fruit salad-rather like a dictionary gone berserk. It is not even a question of being uncertain of what it means. It quite certainly and obviously can have no meaning at all. The words used do have meaning in isolation, but the use that is made of them is not meaningful. The use that is made of them contradicts what we understand to be their meaning in isolation. In isolation we are quite happy to regard an experience as something that is 'had' by someone, but when we read Bertocci we are told that this is in fact not the case. Experiences have themselves. All meaning crumbles. Words evidently are not being used according to their conventions. What is being spoken can at the best only be a private, esoteric or idiosyncratic language that just happens to look like English.

I have just used five hundred words analysing only twenty-six words of Bertocci: For this to be necessary, existentialism must at the very least be a remarkably unclear form of talk. The fact that the passage analysed came from what was supposed to be a textbook and was the nearest Bertocci came to offering a definition of his central concept is even more depressing. Even if the analysis had succeeded in discovering something that the passage meant, we would have to conclude that such writing was very, very uneconomical and poorly done indeed. Only some sort of intellectual masochism could motivate anyone with alive critical faculties to read it.

Bertocci and the existentialists are not of course the only ones who have had difficulty in defining the self. Hall & Lindzey (1957) record William James as defining the self (in his 1890 book Principles of psychology) to be 'the sum total of all that a man can call his -- his body, traits and abilities; his material possessions; his family, friends and enemies; his vocation and avocation and much else' (p. 515). The idea of my friends and even my enemies being part of myself is quite bizarre and one can only say of James' definition that why he excluded anything at all from it is difficult to work out. The definition is hopelessly overinclusive and highly idiosyncratic.

A book on the 'self' that Hall & Lindzey do recommend is The ego and the self by Symonds (1951). Symonds defines the self as 'the ways in which the individual reacts to himself'. Now the self is a way of reacting. What next will it be? The obvious question is: "Why not just say what you mean and explicitly talk about how a person reacts to himself? Why create this magical entity of the self?" The answer also is obvious. When Symonds talks about the self, he wants to talk about it as if it were something like a person or at least as if it were a definable entity. If we substituted 'how a person reacts to himself on every occasion where Symonds uses the single word 'self', it would make nonsense of what was being said.

One could go on through the excellent summary of self theories that Hall & Lindzey offer, but to do so would only be to reinforce what has been pointed out already: everybody uses the word 'self' in a different and often bizarre way.

Why is this? Why is this little word such a conceptual stumbling-block to so many people? I would suggest that it is because of an elementary philosophical mistake: Nobody has realised that the word is topic-neutral. It is a grammatical word -- not a contentful word. To wax technical it is 'syncategorematic'. It is part of the grammatical machinery used to string contentful words together -- like 'the', 'and', 'if' and so on. If anyone was foolish enough to try to define what a 'the' was, then they might have as much difficulty as do the people who try to define what the 'self' is. What a downfall it is if it can be shown that the central concept in existentialist thought has no content at all and is merely a piece of grammatical machinery --- a word that does not represent anything!

The grammatical function of the word 'self' in English (and its equivalents in other languages such as 'sich' in German), is as an indicator of reflexivity. It is used to indicate that the person or thing referred to at one point in a sentence is the same as the person or thing referred to earlier in the sentence. For instance, if we wish to amplify 'he hit him' to indicate that the 'he' and the 'him' are one and the same, we make such an indication by adding 'self' to the 'him'. To do so is so customary that it would be deceptive, and hence 'ungrammatical', if we did not add on 'self' in this context. The force of the custom is indicated by the normal English practice of spelling the two words as one (unlike 'sich' in German). Much the same is true of hyphenated compounds such as 'self-conscious'. If I use the phrase, 'A self-conscious man.' I indicate that the consciousness is reflexive (i.e. it is not of the world about, but of the man discussed). There are also some contexts where we do use the word uncompounded: as in 'his better self'. Here the word is being used to indicate that what is 'better' is still the same person as the 'his' and the entire expression could be awkwardly paraphrased as 'him being better'. It is such usages as this, however, that have given rise to the careless impression that the 'self' must have a denotation of its own. Because the expression 'his better self' falls into the identical form to 'his better suit', we tend to assume that 'self' introduces as much new content as does 'suit'. Once such an assumption has been accepted, 'hypostatisation' or 'reification' has been committed. Once we have decided that because there is a separate word for it then the 'self' must be different from 'he' or 'him' (we 'reify' it), we then may proceed to 'explain' something about the man by reference to his 'self' (hypostatisation). As Maze (1954) points out, this is a 'kind of fallacy to which psychology seems especially prone'.

Now there is of course absolutely no reason why someone cannot come along and stipulate that he is going to use the word 'self to indicate something other than reflexivity. He could use it to refer to all non-spinning flying saucers if that was his fancy. The point is that 'self' is not normally used in such a totally random way. Normally, the attraction of using the word stems from an apparent conviction that people already have some idea what it means. It is this conviction which is mistaken. People cannot know what it means for the simple reason that there is basically nothing for it to mean. It is topic-neutral. People are, however, very adaptable and when so many people use 'self as if it were topic-relevant (or "informative") they do try to construct some meaning for it. If somebody started talking about 'ands' as if everybody knew what he was talking about, we could probably make some shift at working out what he might mean there too. The revealing part is the wide variety of quite different things that various people take 'self' to mean. Because it really has no conventionally accepted substantive meaning, your guess is as good as mine as to what meaning should be attached to any particular use of the word in a substantive way.

The central concept and explanatory device in existentialist theory, then, has no meaning. It is just a noise. It could become meaningful if existentialists stipulated carefully what they intended it to mean but this, it seems, is too much to ask. Bertocci's best attempt at such a definition has been shown to be equally as meaningless as the word itself. Even a contentful stipulative definition would run the risk of not being stuck to. If 'self has to be defined by reference to other words then it should be possible to continue just using those other words and avoiding the inherent ambiguity of 'self' entirely.

It follows from the above that a theory of the self cannot be used to explain what men do. A man's self does not cause him to be or to do something for the excellent reason that he is that self. Insofar as it might mean anything at all, 'self theory' is simply a deceptive synonym for psychology.

FINIS

Chapter 39 from: J.J. Ray (Ed.) "Conservatism as Heresy". Sydney: A.N.Z. Book Co., 1974

Under the title 'Do mental events exist: Physiological adumbrations', this paper was originally published in the British Journal of Psychiatry, 1972, 120, 129-132. The abstract originally appeared in the November 1971 issue of the same journal.

DO MENTAL EVENTS EXIST OR IS MAN JUST A

PROTEIN MACHINE?



J. J. Ray

It is argued that the present state of neurophysiological knowledge and theory does give grounds for an explanation of all those phenomena normally held in some quarters to be irreducibly 'mental'. Suggestions are made as to what physiological events particular mental events could be made up of. It is proposed that perception should be regarded as a response and that the problem, 'What is consciousness?' should be treated as an empirical one -- the tentative answer proposed being: 'All those responses accompanied by an orienting response'. It is concluded that peculiarly "mental" events do not exist.

IN THIS PAPER, elaboration of a Realist answer to some of the classical questions of psychology and epistemology will be sought, starting from a knowledge of Soviet and Western findings in psychophysiology (particularly the work of Pavlov, 1932, and Hebb, 1949. See also the summary by Burt, 1968). The point of departure taken in the philosophical literature is the paper by Place (1969). This paper will adopt a reflexological model of brain function -- with its implied view that memory is synaptically encoded. While this model has largely fallen into disfavour, it is used here paradigmatically -- to show that well-developed physiological models in general can provide a satisfactory account of 'mental' phenomena.

The central expository device to be used here is theoretical consideration of a man who has had a microelectrode inserted in each cell of his CNS, each of these being connected to one of a vast array of oscilloscopes situated in front of him in a manner such that he can see at all times a representation of the electrical events going on in his brain. While such a preparation is not technically possible at the moment, the day when it may definitely be possible does not seem so far off at all against the historical perspective of the two or more millennia in which questions of epistemology have been discussed. Nonetheless the technical possibility as such is really irrelevant here. Such a preparation is considered merely for its value as a model. It will be evident that with such a preparation we would be able to determine exactly what brain processes go on when particular mental events go on. In this paper, an attempt to predict the type of answers we would get will be made on the basis of present neurophysiological knowledge and theory. There will then follow some consideration of questions more purely epistemological in nature.

A few stipulative definitions to start with: When 'stimulus' is used here, it will be used to mean any event which causes a neuron to discharge with a spike potential ('neuron' here will include those specialised cells which make up the classical sensory receptors). A discharge across a neuro-muscular synapse will also be called a stimulus (to muscle fibres). 'Response' will be used here to mean a spike potential in any neuron or a contraction in any muscle tissue. From this definition, it will be obvious that the stimulus to one neuron or muscle fibre will very often be a part of the response of another neuron or muscle fibre. A 'reflex' will be used to refer to a structural feature of nervous tissue which predisposes one particular neuron or set of neurons to fire another particular neuron or muscle fibre (out of the many particular adjacent neurons or muscle fibres it could possibly fire).

Let us go back now to our man with the wired-up brain. The responses shown on the oscilloscope are set up with a three-second time lag. He looks at a plain blue surface and then quickly looks at his oscilloscope array to find out what happened in his brain when he saw 'blue'. He sees a myriad of events going on, all over his brain. Not discouraged he looks again and again at a series of objects all of the same blue shade. Eventually he notes that of all the brain events going on there is one and only one which coincides always with his seeing blue and which never occurs without his seeing blue. What then might he say? He might say: 'Now I know what blue is' or 'Now I know what causes me to perceive blue' or 'Now I know what the perception of blue is made up of'. While we might feel confident of our ability to convince him that the first two of these statements need revision, it seems to me that, in the third statement, all people but some philosophers would agree that our man is right and his statement is accurate. But such a statement implies that the total set of brain events is the perception of blue, that a perception is a brain process. Only the object perceived is blue. There is no need of an internal analogue to represent blue. To perceive blue is to respond in a certain way to a blue object. Even in dreams, what we see are things -- not images. What does need explaining in dreams is that we see things at a time when those things are not present. The explanation of this is merely a particular technical problem. So perceiving that a thing is blue is not the same as seeing the brain process that goes on when a person perceives blue -- nor should it be. Blue is a property of the object. Perceiving is an activity of organisms. Accurate perceptions are adaptive responses in organisms, and misperceptions are unadaptive responses in organisms. (A part of the reason why they are unadaptive is that they set off stimulus-response chains which may call for opposing effector actions at any one point in time.)

The above is tantamount to a denial that there are mental events. When we close our eyes (and other receptors) what 'mental' events might go on? We could 'call up an image of an object' -- which is not quite like seeing an object. This is conceivably a conditioned response to a sub-vocalised or even non-vocalised verbal stimulus --and, like all conditioned responses, not quite like the unconditioned response. We do in fact 'see' a modified object because brain activity goes on in accordance with known conditions for brain activity.

To move out of the visual modality, we could also claim that we hear our own thoughts quite clearly. This testifies to the strength of the auditory conditioned responses to (sub-verbal) speech. At other times, brain activity may go on without verbalisations (or any 'central' part thereof), but while in retrospect we may feel that something went on, we cannot 'say' what it was -- i.e. in this sense there was 'imageless' (or non-verbal) thought. 'Imageless thought' then is any brain process not involving sub-vocal verbalisations or conditioned response perceptions of objects.

Why is it that only some responses are 'conscious'? When we 'see' an object a response takes place that has the quality of 'consciousness'. Why do not all our responses have this quality? The short answer is again that this would be unadaptive. Particular perceptual responses have their stimulus properties magnified by another, concurrent 'orienting response' (Lynn, 1966). This 'orienting response' is a stereotyped set of physiological changes which occur in various degrees after stimuli of certain strength. As so far measured, it has always peripheral components, but in the case of weak stimuli there may be a purely central form of the response with no peripheral indicators. It is stimuli eliciting orienting responses that we describe ourselves as being 'aware of or 'conscious of . Thus, when we open our eyes we respond to or perceive all the things before us. The strongest of all these responses however, will be accompanied by another, orienting, response and it is this strongest of responses which is conscious perception. For a person to be said to be conscious, orienting responses must be taking place in his central nervous system.

Just as I become 'conscious' of objects in the external world, so I may become 'aware' of my own responses. Each response acts in turn as a stimulus for another response. That a response is triggered off is perception. If this response is accompanied by another, orienting response, I then become 'aware' of my original action. Thus I may come to 'know that I know' -- when the perceptual response accompanied by an orienting response becomes itself a stimulus for a further response of like nature. At this point it becomes possible to define 'perceptual' versus 'non-perceptual' responses. A perceptual response is one that an orienting response could magnify. In humans, this is mainly the class of responses occurring in the cerebral cortex. Note that the difficulty of demonstrating unconscious conditioning is paralleled by the difficulty of demonstrating sub-cortical conditioning.

From the foregoing it follows that while it may be true that we describe a disposition of a person when we say 'he knows something', to say that 'he came to know something' is not to describe a disposition he had but rather to assert that he had an orienting and a perceptual response to a particular event that caused structural alterations in his brain; i.e. from that point on a reflex was established which was the mechanism for his having in future a disposition to respond in a way different to the way he would have responded had that perception never occurred.

In vision, how is it that we see objects, although it is a light wave that actually produces the receptor response, i.e. how is it that we know the object to be 'out there' and not on our retina? This is an inference the brain learns to make using several cues. How does it learn? Reflexes are set up by the coincidence of certain visual cues with tactile stimuli. Distance receptors evolved subsequent to contact receptors and hence touch is the 'final check' (unconditioned stimulus) of visual impressions (compare our responses when confronted with the 'bent stick' illusion in water). Thus responses to tactile stimulus could be said to form first-order conditioned reflexes while some responses to visual cues are formed as second order or 'generalised' reflexes. Note, however, that the distinction between touch and distance receptors is only one of the nature of the characteristic stimulus. In both cases stimuli cause us to 'perceive' (or: 'react to') objects. The difference is that in one case. we believe the stimulus event to involve only the object perceived (touch), whereas in the case of the distance receptors we have to learn otherwise.

The inferences necessary with distance receptors may of course fail when the needed cues are attenuated. This has often been shown in distance perception and size constancy experiments. This shows that the 'inference' is in fact a conditioned response as dependent on appropriate stimuli as any other conditioned response. To say the 'brain infers distance' is to say that we respond as if the thing perceived were not touching our receptors. This is what the perceiving of a thing 'out there' is. We respond in such a way because that has been both learnt and selected for in evolution -- and the reason such a response has been learnt and selected for in evolution is that the object really is 'out there'.

But when it is asserted that perception is made up of neural responses and nothing more, someone will want to claim that Watson (the founder of behaviourism) was discredited for just such an assertion when he denied that mental events exist. This is not so. The failure of Watson was not that he denied mental events but that he also acted as if brain processes too did not exist. Watson acted as if he believed that the only responses and stimuli which existed were those observable from outside the organism without the aid of instruments. The remarks made here, on the other hand, if they have any implications for the direction of future psychological research, point rather to the importance of introspection, free association and other techniques which stimulate and disinhibit vocal muscle responses to neural outputs from the brain.

I will, however, heartily concur with Watson in claiming that mental events do not exist. How do we know there are mental events unless we perceive them? But how could we perceive them? We perceive objects and some of our own physio-chemical processes, but if one defines mental events as something beyond physiochemical processes or objects then how can they be perceived? How can one know them? If mental events are an 'aspect' of brain processes, in what sense of the word 'aspect'? I believe that if we are to retain the term 'mental events' we may do so only if we use it as a term completely interchangeable with 'brain processes'.

As a coda to the above considerations, Anderson's (1962) suggestion that 'mind is feeling' rather than brain processes may be treated. Do we really think of emotions when we think of mental events? No. We think of emotions as somatic events. They are perceived in the same way as we perceive a blue object. The only difference is that the impulse comes from different receptors (visceral) and projects in a different part of the cortex. An emotion is a visceral conditioned response to stimuli perceived externally and then a conditioned stimulus for further motor conditioned responses (e.g. flight). The temporal order here is not important. As in the James-Lange theory, the motor action may also come as a direct conditioned response to external stimuli, with the emotional response subsequent.

REFERENCES

ANDERSON, J. (1962) Studies in empirical philosophy. Sydney: Angus & Robertson.

BURT, C. (1968) Brain and consciousness. British J. Psychology, 59(1), 55-69.

HEBB, D.O. (1949) The organization of behavior. N.Y.: Wiley.

LYNN, R. (1966) Attention, Arousal and the Orientation Reaction. London: Pergamon

PAVLOV, I. P. (1932) Selected works. Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House.

PLACE, U.T. (1969) Burt on brain and consciousness. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 22, 285-292.

FINIS

Article written in 1969 for the Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, but not accepted for publication


PERCEPTION IS JUST ANOTHER RESPONSE



By J. J. RAY

School of Behavioural Sciences, Macquarie University, Australia

"The brain functions, not as a generator of consciousness, but as a two-way transmitter and detector; i.e. although its activity is apparently a necessary condition, it cannot be a sufficient condition, of conscious experience" -- Cyril Burt, 1968.

Burt (1968, 1969) has raised some challenges in his defence of mentalism that I would like to answer from a behaviourist perspective.

Since I wish to extend the arguments of Place (1956, 1969) and Smart (1959) and suggest that peculiarly mental events do not exist, I can only agree with Professor Burt's attack on emergentism. I first wish to challenge him, however, in his discussion of Identity (p. 31). He says:

"There could hardly be two things more disparate than a sensation, such as the blueness I see in the sky, and the electro-chemical processes taking place in my visual cortex as I lie in a meadow and gaze up at the zenith."

.

While this is of course true, it is no refutation of the claim that all mental events are brain processes. The blueness is a characteristic of the sky. The electro-chemical processes initiated by the impinging of a blue light wave on my retina are characteristic of people. We would not expect the two to be the same. When we say we have an experience of blueness we do not mean that there is any such thing as a "blueness" in our heads. We rather mean that we respond to a blue object in the outside world.

Perhaps I should at this point define "response" in the way that I wish to use it. I mean a spike potential in a receptor cell, neuron, or muscle cell. By stimulus I mean anything which initiates such a response. Obviously, the response of one cell may be the stimulus for another and I see no quarrel with the usage which treats such a chain of responses as itself a superordinate response.

I next wish to disagree with Burt in his summary of Place as saying: "I observe the cortico-sensory process from within; the neurologist and the brain surgeon study it from without". As Burt rightly says, such a statement would imply the "aspect" theory - a modern idealist theory with which I and, I feel, Place, also disagree. I would summarize the realist position here as being: "When I see something (respond to light waves) the neurologist studying me from without observes certain events going on in my brain". I certainly do not "observe the cortico-sensory process" in any sense. I see objects and to see objects is a "cortico-sensory process". This, I feel, is Place's position. My "mode of access" is different from that of the neurologist because I see whereas the neurologist sees me seeing.

At risk of being repetitious, I would point out that this also answers Burt's question: "would Powell or Hirst declare that what I saw was really identical with my own brain process?" No, the nature of the brain process is (partly) influenced by what I see but to see the brain process of another person is not to see what that person sees.

Burt also mistakes the intent of Place's analogy with lightning. Place does not claim that the lightning an observer sees is "identical with a process within the observer's brain". What Place is pointing out is that one can engage in different operations to detect lightning and to detect electrical discharges and it is not unreasonable to conclude that, because electrical discharges always happen to be detectable where lightning is detectable, then lightning might just happen to be no more nor less than a particular sort of electrical discharge. In a similar way I can watch a neurosurgeon apply a stimulus to a particular brain area of a conscious patient and also ask that patient what he sees or feels. If he says he can see blue I might then say that the perception of blue is a response or responses in brain tract X - just as I say that lightning is an electrical discharge.

Burt's next question is: If "certain brain processes are identical with conscious experiences . . . . (how is it that) all these various processes . . . . prove to be much the same in every part of the brain and nervous system, whether or not they are accompanied by consciousness?" I might point out that this question is an empirical one which could only finally be solved by enumerating all types of brain events which are accompanied by consciousness and all which are not. Only then could we find out of what consciousness is made. (In the sense that we found of what lightning was made.) For all that, I would like to venture a prophecy of what we will find when we are able to make such a study. My prediction is that conscious brain responses are those which take place in the presence of, or linked with, that particular subcategory of responses known as "orienting responses" (Lynn, 1966).

To Professor Burt's arguments about the heuristic value of mentalism I have no fresh criticisms to add but would point out that the materialist monism I have outlined above is at least more parsimonious than Burt's position. Note that in claiming there is no uniquely "mental" class of events I am simply claiming that all of the phenomena we have been accustomed to call "mental" can be discovered to be in fact entirely "made up of" physical events. I am quite happy to continue using mentalistic terms such as "see", "think" or "idea" as long as they are understood to be summaries of physical events. A realist explanation such as this is, I believe, adequate to explain all the data and answer, at least in principle, all the questions. I have a suspicion, however, that the criteria of parsimony, heuristic value and explanatory power are not the only ones people use when evaluating a theory in this area.

Finally I would like to point out that it is an example of the classical ad verecundiam fallacy (i.e. an appeal to irrelevant authority) when Burt tabulates the opinions of physiologists on a philosophical issue.


References:

BURT, C. (1968) Brain and consciousness. British J. Psychology, 59(1), 55-69.

BURT, C. (1969) Brain and consciousness. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 22, 29-36.

LYNN, R. (1966) Attention, Arousal and the Orientation Reaction. London: Pergamon

PLACE, U.T. (1956) Is consciousness a brain process? British J. Psychology, 47, 44-50.

PLACE, U.T. (1969) Burt on brain and consciousness. Bulletin of the British Psychological Society, 22, 285-292.

SMART, J.C. (1959) Sensations and brain processes. Philosophical Review, 68, 141-156.


FINIS

The Australian Journal of Psychology, 1990, 42, 87-111.


(With a post-publication addendum following the original article)



BOOK REVIEW

Enemies of freedom: Understanding Right-wing authoritarianism By R. Altemeyer. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1988. Hardbound. 407 pp. $22.95

It is presumably only a minor distinction but it is nonetheless the case that Australia is home to all three academics who regularly write on the topic of authoritarianism. Aside from these three (K. Rigby, J.J. Ray and P.C.L. Heaven) there are only authors who contribute one or two publications on the topic and then fall silent. It seems therefore very appropriate that the latest book on authoritarianism should be reviewed in this journal.

As it happens, the book concerned invites extreme derision from an Australian point of view. It shows no awareness of anything that the Australian authors have long been debating. Where the Australian authors have long been struggling with what should be deemed "authoritarian" Altemeyer even fails to comprehend what is meant by "Right-wing". He trots out a definition that may owe something to dictionaries but which shows no current political awareness whatsoever. He equates it with the basic lexical definition of "conservatism" -- in summary form "rejection of change". In other words, figures like Brezhnev and Li Peng are Rightists and Margaret Thatcher is a Leftist!

Such theoretical incompetence is hard to believe. The fact that those who are traditionally in politics called "conservatives" have long opposed extensions of State power, control and intervention whereas Leftists want to extend State power, control and intervention is quite lost on Altemeyer. Only when State interventionism was all the rage was it literally "conservative" to oppose it. Now that it is not, the literal meaning of the term "conservative" applies best to Leftists -- something which many journalists have noticed but which Altemeyer has not.

The foundation for this theoretical incompetence would seem to be Altemeyer's determination to read as little as possible on his topic before sitting down to write. Not one of the papers by Rigby is cited by Altemeyer and Heaven is cited once only because he once used Altemeyer's scale. Of my more than 100 papers on the topic only three are cited -- two of which used Altemeyer's scale. Even Altemeyer, however, seems embarrassed by his failure to use so many of my papers. He seems to be trying to excuse himself by giving a critique of just one of my papers -- the paper in which I introduced my "Directiveness" scale for the measurement of authoritarianism (Ray, 1976). He starts out by asserting that in that paper I made the mistake of claiming that Milgram used students as subjects and Psychology Department staff as the authority figure. That is not true. What I said was that the "tradition of research" emanating from Milgram's work was so characterized. In other words, Milgram's successors were less rigorous than Milgram. So even when he is trying to score (surely trivial) points, Altemeyer still cannot get it right. He then goes on to make some criticisms of my Directiveness scale and concludes that my work is therefore to be dismissed as irrelevant. He neglects to let his readers know that I also found that the first form of the Directiveness scale had faults and that he is criticizing the Mark I version of a scale that is now in its Mark VI form! He does seem quite desperate to avoid the need for reading anything.

Is this because his own research is so superior? Far from it. His RWA (Right-wing authoritarianism) scale looked to me suspiciously like an ordinary conservatism scale so in Ray (1985) I used a random community sample to correlate it both with a well-validated measure of authoritarian personality and with two fairly orthodox scales of conservatism, one of which was balanced to control out any influence of authoritarianism (i.e. Left-authoritarian and Right-authoritarian items were included in equal numbers). Altemeyer's RWA scale correlated overwhelmingly with both conservatism scales but not at all with the authoritarianism scale. In other words, Altemeyer's naivety about the concept of conservatism has simply caused him to reinvent it under another name! Altemeyer mentions this finding in his present book but rejects it on the grounds that I devised the conservatism scales. I suppose that I could with equal coherence reject the RWA scale solely because Altemeyer devised it.

Given Altemeyer's theoretical deficiencies, it should come as no surprise that his book arrives at the ultimate anti-climax. His alleged scale of Right-wing authoritarianism is, by Altemeyer's own admission, an almost complete failure at predicting anything Right-wing! Scores on it are roughly normally distributed so it should discriminate well but in fact it is a virtually complete failure at predicting political candidate preference. The form of conservatism it measures is essentially non-political. The basis for Altemeyer's claim that his work explains Right-wing authoritarianism (rather than non-political conservatism) is, therefore, a considerable mystery.

J.J. Ray

University of N.S.W.



REFERENCES

Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.

Ray, J.J. (1985) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.




POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM

I should have mentioned above that there is another Canadian study that is everything which Altemeyer's work is not -- the study by Sutherland & Tanenbaum (1980). This was a remarkably rigorous study that used a large Canadian general population sample and applied to it scales that distinguished carefully between the various supposed "components" of authoritarianism. It may be noted from their Table III that high and low scorers of their measure of "General Obedience" (excerpted from the F scale) were virtually identical in political party orientation -- both being on average very much at the political centre in fact.

I did not above give the exact reference to the failure of the RWA scale to predict vote. My reference was to p. 239 of Enemies of Freedom -- where Altemeyer makes the bald statement that "Right-wing authoritarians show little preference in general for any political party". So in what sense are the statements in the scale "right-wing" if right-wingers are no more likely to endorse them than Leftists are? Altemeyer is like a character in "Alice in Wonderland" where words can mean anything that he says they mean.

Even Altemeyer however seems eventually to have become perturbed after the decline and fall of Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe enabled use of his RWA scale there. Studies in the East such as those by Altemeyer & Kamenshikov (1991), McFarland, Ageyev and Abalakina-Paap (1992) and Hamilton, Sanders & McKearney (1995) showed that high RWA scores were associated with support for Communism!! So an alleged "Rightist" scale went from being non-political to being a measure of Leftism! If you took it at face-value, it showed Communists were Rightists! -- the absurdity of which I was not slow to point out at the time (Ray, 1992).

After that, Altemeyer more or less gave up his original claim and engaged in a bit of historical revisionism. He said (Altemeyer, 1996, p. 218) that when he "began talking about right-wing authoritarianism, I was (brazenly) inventing a new sense, a social psychological sense that denotes submission to the perceived established authorities in one's life". It is true that he did originally define what he was measuring in something like that way (in detail, he defined it as a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness) but what was new, unusual or "brazen" about such a conceptualization defies imagination. The concept of submission to established authority was, for instance, part of the old Adorno et al (1950) work. What WAS brazen was Altemeyer's claim that what he was measuring was characteristic of the political Right. But it is precisely the "Right-wing" claim that he now seems to have dropped and the RWA scale is now said to measure simply submission to authority.

Even that claim, however, seems ambitious. In a general population survey, Heaven (1984) found that the peer-rated behaviours that the RWA scale significantly predicted were submissiveness (r = 0.22) and authoritarianism (0.20) but the very low level of the correlations may be noted. More importantly, however, there is evidence showing that there is no such thing as a consistent or overall attitude to authority -- not even to conventional authority (Ray, 1972; Ray & Lovejoy, 1990). People are discriminating about what authority they will accept and when they will accept it. So "acceptance of conventional authority" is now clearly a "unicorn" concept -- i.e. there turns out to be no reality there to correspond the words. But anybody who talked to committed U.S. conservatives about the U.S. Supreme Court in late 2003 would soon get an idea of how little respect conservatives have for THAT major example of conventional authority! James Lindgren has also drawn together some U.S. public opinion poll data showing that respect for authority among the public at large is anything but monolithic.

It may also be noted that, despite all the evidence to the contrary and Altemeyer's own backdown, the RWA scale still seems to be referred to by all its users as measuring something "Right-wing". As I have pointed out at some length elsewhere (Ray, 1987) psychologists hold to their prejudices so rigidly that they rarely let little things like evidence disturb them.

Altemeyer did however have still more to contribute in his role as the clown of political psychology. He then went on to develop a scale of Left-Wing Authoritarianism -- the LWA scale. When he tested it on over two thousand people however, he could not find one single high-scorer on it! The LWA scale did not detect a single Left-wing authoritarian! Again he himself proved that his scale was not valid -- unless of course one is so totally one-eyed as to accept that there ARE no Left-wing authoritarians. If you are as good at waving magic wands as Altemeyer is, you might perhaps be able to claim that no such thing as Communism has ever existed, I guess.



ALTEMEYER ON RELIGION

Unsurprisingly, Altemeyer does not seem to have had much success at getting papers published in the journal literature. In fact I could find only one of them online. So I thought it might be useful for me to append here a few comments on that article.

His paper is about religion and does seem to show the usual Leftist hostility to religion (Islam excepted, of course). He concerns himself with the now hoary question of whether or not religious people are racially prejudiced. The answer of course does to a large degree depend on how you define "religious". But generally, psychological research -- such as mine -- has found no association between orthodox Christian beliefs and racial prejudice. That does not suit religion-hating Leftists at all, however -- as "racist" is one of their handiest terms of abuse. So we find Altemeyer riding to the rescue with a paper headed "Authoritarianism, Religious Fundamentalism, Quest, and Prejudice"

Again in this paper Altemeyer relies heavily on his Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) scale. As the very name of it implies, it contains a "mixed bag" of statements. Many are worded in a very aggressive and punitive ("authoritarian") way but there are also in the scale statements such as: "National anthems, flags and glorification of one's country should all be de-emphasized to promote the brotherhood of all men" (from p. 305 of Altemeyer's 1981 book). Now how many conservatives would agree with that statement? Very few, I suspect. So agreeing with the aggressive and hostile statements of the RWA scale can get you a high score on it but just rejecting characteristically Leftist statements can also get you a high score on it. So whether any given correlation with the scale arises from its conservative character or its authoritarian character is simply unknowable.

So Altemeyer's failure to recognize that simply being conservative could lead you to get elevated scores on his RWA scale leads him to lots of apparently profound conclusions that are in fact much more parsimoniously (simply) interpreted. For instance, he concludes: "people raised in no religion are apt to be the least authoritarian [conservative] respondents". But all that that finding really tells us is that modern-day North American Christians tend to be conservative. Big news! In a similar vein he supports his assertion that high scorers on his RWA scale [conservatives] are characterized by "deplorable behavior" by showing that they were more supportive of Republican President Richard Nixon and were more opposed to Communists and more dubious about homosexuality. Again: Big news

Anyway, Altemeyer's whole approach in this article is again so silly and naive that it does not deserve a full critique so I will simply move on to a few remarks on what he says about religion and racism. His first interesting statement is this one: "For example, in a study of 533 University of Manitoba students tested in the fall of 1987 by Altemeyer, the RWA Scale correlated .48 with a measure of acceptance of Christian beliefs, the Christian Orthodoxy (CO) Scale ( Fullerton & Hunsberger, 1982). It also correlated .41 with a measure of prejudice against most of the minorities mentioned a few paragraphs ago. But CO scores correlated precisely .00 with prejudice". In other words, Altemeyer found what I found 15 year before him (not that he mentions my work) -- that orthodox Christian beliefs have ZERO correlation with racial prejudice.

That pesky finding did not defeat him, though. He went back to the drawing board and came up with his own measure of religious belief -- a "Religious Fundamentalism" (RF) scale, which was essentially a set of statements that were very dogmatic about the truth of religion. And he went on to show (Phew!) that that scale DID show a small (.30) correlation with racial prejudice. But here's the kicker: Altemeyer's scale of religious belief deliberately EXCLUDED all specifically Christian statements of belief! Even an atheist with a passionate belief in flying saucers could get a high score on it! There is a later study by Ken Deeks here which also used Altemeyer's scales and that study confirms that high scorers on Altemeyer's RF scale (but not Christians) tended to be simple-minded. So once again poor old Alty tried to fudge his data and failed. All he has really shown is that racial prejudice (but not Christianity) tends to be simple-minded.

It may finally be worth noting that my earlier study used a measure of religious dogmatism too (which I called the "religiocentrism" scale) but my scale was specifically Christian in content. And guess what? It too showed NO correlation with ethnic prejudice. So it was only by taking the Christianity out of religion that Altemeyer could show that religious people were bigots. What a laugh! Only too typical of Leftist psychology, however.


REFERENCES

Adorno,T.W., Frenkel-Brunswik, E., Levinson, D.J. & Sanford, R.N. (1950). The authoritarian personality. New York: Harper.

Altemeyer, R. (1996). The Authoritarian Specter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Altemeyer, R. & Kamenshikov, A. (1991) Impressions of American and Soviet behaviour: RWA changes in a mirror. South African J. Psychology 21, 255-260.

Hamilton, V. L., Sanders, J., & McKearney, S. J. (1995). Orientations toward authority in an authoritarian state: Moscow in 1990. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 21, 356-365

Heaven P. C. L. (1984) Predicting authoritarian behaviour: analysis of three measures. Personality & Individual Differences, 5, 251-253.

McFarland, S. G., Ageyev, V. S., & Abalakina-Paap, M. A. (1992). Authoritarianism in the former Soviet Union. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 1004-1010

Ray, J.J. (1972) The measurement of political deference: Some Australian data. British Journal of Political Science 2, 244-251.

Ray, J.J. (1987) Intolerance of ambiguity among psychologists: A comment on Maier & Lavrakas. Sex Roles 16, 559-562.

Ray, J.J.(1992) Defining authoritarianism: A comment on Duckitt & Foster, Altemeyer & Kamenshikov and Meloen. South African J. Psychology, 22, 178-179.

Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1990) Does attitude to authority exist? Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 765-769.

Sutherland, S.L. & Tanenbaum, E.J. (1980) Submissive authoritarians: Need we fear the fearful toadie? Canadian Review of Sociology & Anthropology, 17 (1), 1-23.

Australian J. Psychology, 1983, 35, 267-268

Book Review



Right-Wing Authoritarianism
By Robert A. Altemeyer
Winnipeg, Canada, University of Manitoba Press.
1981. ix + 352. C$30.00.

Review by John Ray
(Sociology, University of New South Wales)

This book has attracted reviews in North America which might well be called ecstatic. It does do well what it sets out to do. To add a little balance, however, one of its previously unremarked limitations might be referred to. In a rather humourous preface, the author makes a considerable point of how long it took him to get the book into print. One might therefore reasonably ask whether it was significantly undated during this period. A glance at the references in the back of the book suggests not. There are a very large number of references to the psychological literature for 1972, a few for 1973, fewer for 1974 and very few indeed after that. The inference from this would seem to be that the book was written in 1973 and 1974, is pretty complete up to 1972 and was very little altered after that. It is therefore much less up to date in its coverage of the relevant literature than its publication date might suggest.

One of the more remarkable features of the book is the saga it relates of the almost heroic efforts Altemeyer made to balance the F scale. He seems to have carried out over many years literally dozens of studies devoted to testing reversed forms of F scale items. In the end he did find 14 items that correlated well with the original items they were derived from and used these to make up a final version of a balanced F scale. He found that his positively and negatively scored items, after all his efforts still were non-significantly correlated. Bathos indeed! He concludes from his failure that acquiescence is indeed a large component of what the F scale measures. One wonders what he will make out of it when he discovers that someone else did finally succeed in producing a satisfactory balanced F scale (Ray, 1972, 1979).

Like most North American authors, Altemeyer seems to know little about the literature outside North America. He does however have the grace to acknowledge this in one of his footnotes. He does at least seem to be aware of the work of Wilson (1973) -- unlike most of his North American colleagues. He makes the interesting point about Wilson's C-scale that its reliability is usually high only because it has such a large number of items (50). He points out that the C-scale's internal consistency (as measured by mean inter-item correlations) is actually quite low and is thus consistent with the scale being quite multi-factorial.

What are Altemeyer's conclusions on the validity of the 'F' scale? He finds that it has predictive success in only two areas. To quote:

"What can we make of the test's very limited success at predicting (a) hostility toward certain targets, and (b) conservative political sentiment? These findings might be insightful if we know more about them, but as matters stand now, there is a perfectly straightforward interpretation of them: they may just be due to those items on the F Scale whose content reflects (respectively) aggressive and conventional sentiments. Thus the studies on aggression listed in Table 4 may carry no more psychological significance than the fact that people who indicate on the F Scale that they are particularly hostile toward sex criminals, disrespectful youth, rebellious youth, and homosexuals are also aggressive on other measures against these and similarly unconventional individuals. That should not knock anyone off his horse. A major failing of the research we have just reviewed is that nearly all of the investigators who found positive results failed to determine if these results were attributable to the scale as a whole or mainly to subsets of items with rather obvious connections to the criterion."

After demolishing the F scale, Altemeyer proceeds to develop his own new scale of Right-wing authoritarianism (the RWA scale) and test its correlates. His scale, needless to say, was balanced against acquiescence from the beginning. In the end, however, the only conclusion he seems able to come to firmly about the genesis of Right-wing authoritarianism is that Right-wing authoritarians have generally learnt their Right-wing authoritarianism from their Right-wing authoritarian parents. He rejects the Berkeley view of authoritarianism formed as a response to parental harshness.

It is an enjoyable book and is well worth reading: Some account of work in the field more recent than that covered by Altemeyer can be found in Ray & Lovejoy (1983).

References

Ray, J.J. (1972) A new balanced F scale -- And its relation to social class. Australian Psychologist 7, 155-166.

Ray, J.J. (1979) A short balanced F scale. Journal of Social Psychology, 109, 309-310.

Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1983). The behavioral validity of some recent measures of authoritarianism. Journal of Social Psychology, 120, 91-99.

Wilson, G.D. (1973) The psychology of conservatism. London: Academic Press.

POST-PUBLICATION ADDENDUM

In the above review I was not critical of Altemeyer's claim to have produced a new measure of "Right-wing authoritarianism" because I had not at that time tested the claim for myself. When I did test the claim, however, I found it to be not supported. See below:

Ray, J.J. (1985) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.


For a review of Altemeyer's second book on the subject see:

Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.


FINIS

Personality & Individual Differences, 1987, 8 (5), 771-772.

SPECIAL REVIEW




R. A. ALTEMEYER

Right-wing Authoritarianism. University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg (1981)

Books on authoritarianism seem generally to be very popular. Two of them have achieved the status of classics (Adorno, Frenkel-Brunswik, Levinson and Sanford, 1950; Rokeach, 1960) and a more recently published one (Altemeyer, 1981) received initial reviews bordering on the rapturous (e.g. Goldberg, 1982). Perhaps unfortunately, however, the third book mentioned devotes roughly half its pages to an, at times, scathing demolition of the first book mentioned. Popularity is evidently not tied to consensus. In the circumstances it seems fair to ask if Altemeyer (1981) is much of an improvement on Adorno et al. (1950). Does the popularity of the topic mean that our knowledge of it is advancing?

For a start, let it be acknowledged that the first part of Altemeyer's book is quite uncontroversial. His demolition of the work and findings of Adorno et al. (1950) could be repeated from the works of a hundred other authors from Christie and Jahoda (1954) onwards. Altemeyer is remarkable only perhaps for bringing together in one publication so much that is damaging to the Adorno et al. (1950) account. Even here, however, McKinney (1973) may be argued to have done more.

The important question becomes then one of how much Altemeyer has himself accomplished. Has he been able to construct as well as to destroy? It will be argued here that he has constructed very little.

Altemeyer's efforts to construct an alternative account of authoritarianism are, however, quite extensive and might well persuade the casual reader. A brief account of what he proposes is therefore in order.

Most notable of all is that Altemeyer completely sidesteps the important question of the relationship between ideology and authoritarianism. He claims that he is interested in only Right-wing authoritarianism and has virtually nothing to say about either Leftist authoritarianism or authoritarianism in general. This attempted sidestep does seem to be the major source of problems for his account of things. He does of course make some mention of the problem. He 'doubts' (p. 151) that there is any such thing as authoritarianism on the Left. Lenin, Stalin and their heirs among the more 'revolutionary' student Left of contemporary democratic society may be nasty types but they are not authoritarian in Altemeyer's view. In this respect Altemeyer would seem to be at one with Adorno et al. (1950). The California authors, however, did make at least some initial attempt to define authoritarianism and conservatism separately. Altemeyer's only definition of 'Right-wing' appears to be two lines on p. 152. This must be some sort of record for treating briefly such a large topic. Altemeyer's definition of the construct that does interest him, however (i.e. his definition of 'Right-wing authoritarianism') is a combination of three elements: submissiveness to established authority, adherence to social conventions and general aggressiveness. The first two elements are surely little more than versions of support for the status quo and, as such, amount to a definition of conservatism more than anything else, while the last could be seen as a reference to the fact that conservatives are more likely to favour military preparedness and wars of various sorts. It would seem that Altemeyer's slighting of the literature on conservatism has simply led him to reinvent the concept. When Altemeyer says, therefore, that Lenin and Stalin are not authoritarian in his sense, he is simply saying that they are not conservative.

In constructing his own measure of authoritarianism (the RWA scale), therefore, Altemeyer could clearly have learnt at least one thing from the work of Adorno et al. (1950). They employed throughout their work separate measures of authoritarianism and conservatism. They could therefore present it as an important empirical finding that the two tended to correlate highly. It has been shown elsewhere (Ray, 1973), in a work that Altemeyer does allude to, that the Adorno procedure was something of a charade but, far from improving on the Adorno procedure, Altemeyer simply ignores the problem. As a result, one has to ask why the RWA scale should not be regarded as just another conservatism scale? It certainly reads like any number of conservatism scales that have been used over the years and from its item content alone it would certainly seem to have no obvious claim to be a particularly authoritarian sort of conservatism scale. One must, as a consequence, ask for validity studies. Does Altemeyer present evidence that, despite appearances, the RWA scale does in fact predict authoritarianism particularly well?

In his quite extensive range of studies with the RWA scale, what Altemeyer seems to have shown is that high scorers have parents who are high scorers and that they tend to accept their parents' religion. They tend to accept or approve of the sort of government activity that liberals criticize and are more punitive towards criminals but not towards Jews. They are more obedient in the Milgram situation at intermediate levels of punishment but not at a dangerous level of punishment (the level Altemeyer refers to as 'big red'). They show a weak tendency towards racist attitudes but not towards discriminatory behaviour. All these seem to be things that could equally well be said of conservatives. For instance, there is an occasional weak association between some scales of conservatism and some scales of racist attitudes (Ray, 1972, Ray & Lovejoy, 1986) but attitudes of any sort are generally poor predictors of racist behaviour (Ray, 1971). Conservatives have also been shown to be more punitive (Boshier and Rae, 1975) but this is probably only to the extent of supporting a general community norm of high punitiveness -- particularly towards criminals (Ray, 1985b). Approval for conventional sources of authority has also been long known as an important element of conservatism (Ray, 1973; Rigby and Rump, 1979).

Even from his own work, therefore, it seems unlikely that Altemeyer has succeeded in studying authoritarianism at all. The picture on the cover of Altemeyer's book appears to be intended to convey the impression that Right-wing authoritarians are rather insane and obsessed people but there is in fact nothing in Altemeyer's findings and research that would support such a characterization. The characterization may nonetheless be true so it may be asked whether there is anything outside Altemeyer's own work that would support his conclusions.

Perhaps because it is early days yet, there appear to be only two published studies which used the Altmeyer RWA scale. In the first; Ray (1985a) applied the RWA scale to a general population sample in conjunction with another authoritarianism scale and another conservatism scale. The conservatism scale was one that had been especially counterbalanced to preclude it from measuring any component of authoritarianism. It was found that the RWA scale correlated very highly with the non-authoritarian conservatism scale and not at all with the authoritarianism scale. In concurrent validity terms, therefore, the RWA scale emerges as a measure of conservatism only. In a second study, Heaven (1984) correlated the RWA scales with peer-ratings of attributes important in the authoritarianism literature. With his student sample Heaven found that the RWA scale failed to yield significant predictions of any of the authoritarianism-related attributes. With his community sample, Heaven found that the RWA scale significantly predicted submissiveness (r = 0.22), authoritarianism (0.20) and conservatism (0.51). Although significant, the first two correlations are quite low so again we must conclude that the RWA scale is above all a measure of conservatism. By contrast, Heaven found that the Ray (1976) Directiveness scale (another measure of authoritarianism) correlated 0.34 with dominance, 0.23 with aggression and not at all with conservatism. A non-ideological scale of authoritarianism is therefore at least possible. In ignoring this possibility, Altemeyer seems to have failed to do anything at all that could confidently be called research into authoritarianism.

As a final note, it should perhaps be pointed out that even as a literature review the Altemeyer book is severely deficient. Although it was published in 1981, a glance at the references reveals that there is a plenitude of references up to 1972 but comparatively few thereafter. In his preface, Altemeyer does admit that it took him a long time to get his book published so it would seem that he completed the book in about 1973 and revised it very little while it was going from publisher to publisher. It is therefore much less up to date than its publication year might suggest. No substitute for the Altemeyer book that is more satisfactory in this respect comes immediately to mind but a partial substitute may perhaps be found in Ray (1984).

J. J. RAY

REFERENCES

Adorno T. W., Frenkel-Brunswik E., Levinson D. J. and Sanford R. N. (950) The Authoritarian Personality. Harper, New York.

Altemeyer R. A. (1981) Right-wing Authoritarianism. University of Manitoba Press, Winnipeg.

Boshier R. and Rae C. (1975) Punishing criminals: a study of the relationship between conservatism and punitiveness. Australian & New Zealand J. Criminology, 8, 37-45.

Christie R. and Jahoda M. (1954) Studies in the Scope and Method of the `Authoritarian Personality'. Free Press, Glenco, IL.

Goldberg L. R. (1982) Facets of fascism. J. Personality Assess. 46, 181-182.

Heaven P. C. L. (1984) Predicting authoritarian behaviour: analysis of three measures. Personality & Individual Differences, 5, 251-253.

McKinney D. W. (1973) The Authoritarian Personality Studies. Mouton, The Hague.

Ray, J.J. (1971) Ethnocentrism: Attitudes and behaviour. Australian Quarterly, 43, 89-97.

Ray, J.J. (1972) Militarism, authoritarianism, neuroticism and anti-social behavior. Journal of Conflict Resolution 16, 319-340.

Ray, J.J. (1973) Conservatism, authoritarianism and related variables: A review and an empirical study. Ch. 2 in: G.D. Wilson (Ed.) The psychology of conservatism London: Academic Press.

Ray, J.J. (1976) Do authoritarians hold authoritarian attitudes? Human Relations, 29, 307-325.

Ray, J.J. (1984) Alternatives to the F scale in the measurement of authoritarianism: A catalog. Journal of Social Psychology, 122, 105-119.

Ray, J.J. (1985a) Defective validity in the Altemeyer authoritarianism scale. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 271-272.


Ray, J.J. (1985b) The punitive personality. Journal of Social Psychology 125, 329-334.

Ray, J.J. & Lovejoy, F.H. (1986). The generality of racial prejudice. Journal of Social Psychology, 126, 563-564.

Rigby K. and Rump E. E. (1979) The generality of attitude to authority. Hum. Relat. 32, 469-487.

Rokeach M. (1960) The Open and Closed Mind. Basic Books, New York.

POST-PUBLICATION UPDATE

Altemeyer's later work is reviewed as under. The quality has not improved.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Australian Journal of Psychology, 42, 87-111.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Letter to the editor about Altemeyer's Enemies of Freedom. In: Canadian Psychology, 31, 392-393.

Ray, J.J. (1990) Book Review: Enemies of freedom by R. Altemeyer. Personality & Individual Differences, 11, 763-764.

Ray, J.J.(1992) Defining authoritarianism: A comment on Duckitt & Foster, Altemeyer & Kamenshikov and Meloen. South African J. Psychology, 22, 178-179.


FINIS