Analogical reasoning

It’s that kinda thing again where I have lots of post drafts and amn’t advancing any of them, but at least this time they all have a similar theme. Anyway, maybe you can bully me to finish my drafts.

Constraining acts

Discussion on moral responsibility cites two necessary conditions: the control condition (“were you acting freely when you did it?”) and the epistemic condition (“were you aware of what you were doing?”).

Suppose I fed my dog chocolate, which is poisonous to dogs, and so the dog gets sick. Was it my fault? Well, if an evil mastermind forced me to feed my dog chocolate, I could say I didn’t have control over my actions: that is, I failed the control condition. Or, if the chocolate came in a box labeled as dog food, I could say that I didn’t know it was chocolate: that is, I failed the epistemic condition.

Let’s say that, instead, I didn’t know that chocolate was poisonous to dogs. Could I say that excuses me, under the epistemic condition? You could argue that, as a dog owner, I should’ve known that chocolate was poisonous. Maybe I was given a pamphlet of appropriate dog food, which I threw out instead of reading. Smith introduced the term benighting act for this: an action or omission that, as a consequence, makes me ignorant, failing the epistemic condition.

I didn’t find a name for the control condition version of this, perhaps a constraining act, like drunk driving? We have a moral responsibility to be informed about the consequences of our actions, but I haven’t really thought about our responsibility to be free in doing our actions.

Regions of emotion-space

My understanding of the color naming debate is that it settled on something like: all humans perceive colors as lying in the same three-dimensional color space, but different languages have words that partition this space into distinct regions.

The words we use for these regions affect our perception of them, because we assign them different concepts. Native speakers of Greek, a language that has different words for light and dark blue, identify the contrast between them a bit more consistently in rapid presentation than German speakers, who have the same word for both. This isn’t to say that German speakers can’t distinguish them, just that color perception is relative, and influenced by cultural concepts.

While the regions around basic color words differ between cultures, languages tend to draw similar regions. White and black are never referred to with the same word, for example. Things like cone sensitivity and opponent processes drive different cultures to partition color-space in somewhat similar ways. In this sense, color perception is universal, and influenced by biological constraints.

I’ve been thinking emotions are analogous: relative in the sense of being influenced by cultural concepts, universal in the sense of pointing to similar regions in arousal–valence emotion-space. This explains why there’s high cross-linguistic variability in emotion words, despite translations of these words mapping to similar spaces in the body.

Self-distancing

What does it mean to be friends with someone? There’s three constructs that I like, which I picked up from the Handbook of Closeness and Intimacy.

One is prototype analysis, which states that intimate relationships are those that conform to certain if-then expectations: if I need to talk, my friend will listen. Second is inclusion of other in self, which states that in intimate relationships, each person includes some extent of the other in their self. Third is intimacy as interpersonal process, which states that intimacy is composed of self-diclosure and perceived partner responsiveness.

All this to say: I haven’t seen a lot of work done in analogizing these constructs toward the intrapersonal relationships between the parts of the self. Imagine seven pairs of circles, ranging from not overlapping to almost coinciding. Which of these best represents the relationship between your self-critical voice and your notion of self? That’d be applying the inclusion of other in self scale, and I wonder what that correlates with, mental-health-wise. (Similar work has been done for current-self and future-self, and I’m asking about parts-of-self.)

For this particular question, it’s reasonable to predict that moderate overlap would have better mental health outcomes than high overlap. Unlike interpersonal relationships, the default is full overlap, not zero overlap. Self-distancing is a helpful move in certain cases: if you tell yourself “you’re such a failure,” you’d counter with “would you say that to a friend?” But what does it look like to apply other interpersonal theory?