Author Archives: Joshua Miller

Touchstone Terms: Adverse Selection

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If there were a single concept from economics I’d like to see more widely understood, it would be adverse selection: the tendency for markets to sort participants into worse and worse pools when one side of a transaction knows more than the other.

The idea originates in a 1970 paper by George Akerlof, “The Market for Lemons.” Akerlof modeled used car sales in a way that revealed how, under very common conditions, no one with a good used car would be willing to sell it. Sellers know more about their cars than buyers do, and so those with “lemons” will always be more desperate to sell than those with reliable vehicles. Since buyers can’t tell the difference, they will only purchase a used car on the assumption that something is wrong with it, and pay accordingly. As Akerlof puts it, “good cars may not be traded at all. The ‘bad’ cars tend to drive out the good” (489).

This is the core pattern: asymmetric information (one side knows more than the other) leads to adverse selection (the worse risks or lower-quality goods dominate the market) which can produce market unraveling (the market ceases to function well for anyone). That three-step sequence recurs across domains far removed from used cars. In each case, the same basic dynamic creates sorting problems that individual good faith cannot solve.

It is worth noting at the outset that markets sometimes generate their own responses to adverse selection. The used car market did not actually collapse: it produced warranties, certified pre-owned programs, CarFax, and lemon laws. A free-market economist would say that Akerlof identified a problem and then markets solved it through entrepreneurial innovation. This is a fair point, and it should be conceded. But the private-solution story works best in domains where the stakes are modest and the information gap is narrow enough for reputation mechanisms to bridge. Nobody invented a CarFax for health risk that prevented the insurance death spiral. Nobody developed a private warranty against neighborhood racial transition. The domains where adverse selection is most destructive tend to be precisely the ones where private solutions are weakest: the information gaps are widest, the stakes are highest, and the affected populations have the least market power to demand better terms.

Poverty and Insurance Markets

Akerlof applies the same model to car, life, and medical insurance: the more accident-prone, close to death, or sickly you are, the more desperate you will be to have insurance. But the more these “high-risk” individuals buy insurance, the higher the payouts, which drives up the average price above what healthier, younger, better drivers would choose to pay. Adverse selection takes over, and only the high-risk individuals end up insured.

The textbook version of this story is clean, but reality is messier in an interesting way. In practice, the people most likely to buy insurance are not just the sick; they’re also the risk-averse. Healthy people who worry about everything overinsure. They buy supplemental plans, max out their coverage, and renew faithfully. This actually helps stabilize insurance pools, because the worried-well subsidize the genuinely ill. The people who go without insurance tend not to be the healthy-and-rational actors of the economic model; they’re the young and cavalier, the overwhelmed, or the too-poor-to-bother. Adverse selection is real, but it operates alongside a countervailing force: anxiety. The question for policy design is which force dominates.

The underlying problem remains asymmetric information. Insurance purchasers know more about their own risks than the insurance company does. This is why life insurers try to get as much medical and genetic information about their enrollees as possible, and why car insurance companies use accident history, residential zip code, and miles traveled to price coverage.

It is also why the Affordable Care Act was designed to require “community rating”: forcing insurers to ignore most individualized risk information and instead treat communities as a single risk pool. Several distinct mechanisms work together here. Community rating prevents price discrimination against the sick. Subsidies stabilize the pool by making coverage affordable. The individual mandate discourages people from waiting until they’re desperately ill to enroll (the same waiting game that “pre-existing conditions” exclusions were designed to prevent, and that the ACA banned in favor of the mandate and financial penalty).

This is all well-known to anyone who has paid attention to health care policy over the last decade. But naming and framing the problem this way reveals why some solutions are superior to others, why even well-intentioned proposals can recreate the very dynamics they’re designed to prevent, and why dismantling these protections is so dangerous.

We are watching this play out in real time. The 2017 Republican tax bill zeroed out the individual mandate penalty, removing the main tool that kept healthy people in the insurance pool. During his first term, Trump slashed ACA outreach and advertising by 90% and cut the enrollment period roughly in half. This is a textbook recipe for adverse selection: the sick always know where to sign up, while healthy people, the ones whose premiums subsidize the pool, are the most likely to miss a shortened window or never hear about their options. By one estimate, these changes alone kept 500,000 people from enrolling.

The second term has been worse. Congressional Republicans allowed the enhanced premium subsidies to expire at the end of 2025, and the so-called “big, beautiful bill” cut over a trillion dollars in federal health care spending. New CMS rules on enrollment verification significantly disrupted automatic reenrollment, which had kept nearly 11 million people covered, though the full regulatory picture remains in flux amid litigation and rule revisions. The results are already visible: insurers’ list-price premiums rose an average of 26% for 2026, with increases exceeding 30% in states like Delaware, New Mexico, and Mississippi. For subsidized enrollees, the picture is even worse: with the enhanced tax credits gone, what households actually pay has in many cases more than doubled. The CBO projects marketplace enrollment will drop from 22.8 million to 18.9 million, with 4.2 million Americans losing coverage entirely because it has become unaffordable. Aetna has already exited the individual market, and three insurers have pulled out of Illinois, where rates jumped nearly 29%.

Each of these moves accelerates the adverse selection spiral the ACA was designed to prevent. Fewer healthy enrollees means higher average costs, which means higher premiums, which drives out more healthy enrollees. The pool gets sicker and more expensive. Insurers exit markets where the math no longer works. The people left holding coverage are the ones who cannot afford to go without it, paying more for less, in a market with fewer options. This is what adverse selection looks like when policy actively feeds it rather than fighting it.

Consider Bernie Sanders’ original Medicare for All Act. It went a long way toward eliminating selection effects by creating a universal federal entitlement with comprehensive benefits. But even this ambitious proposal preserved a significant state-administered role for long-term care, routing it through existing Medicaid channels with maintenance-of-effort requirements tied to state spending floors. This raises a familiar adverse selection worry. Long-term care is among the most expensive forms of health provision, and the populations who need it most, the elderly, the disabled, the chronically ill, are precisely those whose costs any system has the strongest incentive to contain. By leaving the administration of those costs in fiscally pressured state channels rather than absorbing them fully into the federal pool, even a nominally universal plan can create a two-track system: comprehensive federal coverage for the majority, and more constrained, state-variable care for those with the greatest needs. The risk-averse healthy people, the ones whose overinsurance stabilizes any pool they join, stay in the well-resourced federal track. The people who need the most help end up in the track most vulnerable to cost-cutting. Partial universalism can be worse than honest market segmentation, because it borrows the moral authority of universalism while quietly reproducing the sorting it claims to abolish.

Race and Real Estate

Adverse selection is part of a broader family of sorting dynamics that appear wherever people make choices under uncertainty using imperfect information. Akerlof recognized this himself: his original paper treats racial discrimination in labor markets as a case of the same phenomenon, where employers use race as a proxy for unobservable worker quality, and the resulting discrimination makes it harder for members of the discriminated group to invest in quality, confirming the original prejudice. The mechanism is simple. The outcomes are vicious.

Racialized housing markets in the US offer a vivid example of how these dynamics interact with, and amplify, deep structural racism. No economic model captures the full weight of what redlining and blockbusting did to Black communities, and there is a risk that naming these dynamics as “selection effects” makes them sound more orderly and less violent than they were. But the analytical lens is worth using precisely because it shows how racist outcomes reproduce themselves even when individual malice is not the proximate cause.

Consider how redlining and blockbusting worked hand-in-hand to prevent market-driven racial integration. (No story about race in America ever truly “begins” where we say it does; the history of slavery, Jim Crow, and white supremacy is ongoing and always in the background.)

Source: National Archives (Mapping Segregation in Washington DC)

It began when the Federal Home Loan Bank Board tried to determine whether some neighborhoods were too risky to finance. In the midst of the Great Depression, the most vulnerable neighborhoods were those primarily inhabited by African Americans: those who suffered most during the Depression were those who suffered most generally, so foreclosures were always worst in those neighborhoods. The maps drawn by the FHLBB were used by the Federal Housing Administration to dictate underwriting to private mortgage lenders. African Americans were barred from receiving federally underwritten loans. Private mortgage companies could still lend to them, but at much higher risk without federal insurance, and so they demanded a much higher premium.

A free-market critic would note, correctly, that the worst distortion here was government-created: the FHA drew the maps, and federal policy enforced the discrimination. This is true, and it matters. But the objection proves too much. Government created the information asymmetry; the market then amplified it through blockbusting, white flight, and self-reinforcing price spirals. Removing the FHA maps did not undo decades of wealth destruction. The damage compounds, and the compounding is a market process. The lesson is not that government intervention is always the answer, but that markets do not self-correct when the underlying information environment has been broken, even long after the original distortion is repealed.

Add to this the existence of “blockbusting” real estate agents, who used the threat of incoming African Americans to pressure white homeowners into selling. The fears were partly racial anxiety, but partly financial calculation: a “busted” block would lose considerable home value as wealthier whites fled and were replaced by African American buyers who had been shut out of better-financed markets. Even setting aside the racial animus, the financial incentives alone were sufficient to drive the sorting: any homeowner, regardless of personal attitudes, faced a real threat to her single largest asset. Real estate companies made a solid business of this practice, flipping houses from fleeing whites to middle-class African Americans for decades in places like Chicago.

While blockbusting sometimes looks like the just deserts of a racist society, where white people are so afraid of Black people that they willingly sell their homes at a loss, it exacerbated the underlying dynamics of segregation. The sorting was self-reinforcing: each departure confirmed the fears that motivated the next one, driving prices further down and concentrating poverty in the newly “turned” neighborhoods. The result was decades of wealth destruction in Black communities, even as the real estate agents who facilitated the churn profited handsomely.

Today we see related sorting dynamics working in the opposite direction: white homeowners return to the cities their parents fled, and expectations of neighborhood “improvement” drive transactions that accelerate displacement. The mechanism rhymes with blockbusting (speculation on racial neighborhood change) but the power dynamics are inverted. Capital flows in rather than out, and the displaced population, largely Black and largely renters, loses not just housing but neighborhoods, churches, schools, and the social networks that make a community function. They lack the market power that white homeowners had when they chose to flee. Some people may catch a windfall if they own property at the right moment of transition, but the overall pattern is the same: sorting by race and wealth, driven by information asymmetries and self-fulfilling expectations, producing outcomes that are worse for the most vulnerable.

There is a bitter irony here. Racial integration was the goal of decades of civil rights struggle. Now a version of it is arriving through market forces, and it is experienced, correctly, as displacement rather than progress. Integration through capital is still sorting. It replaces one racially stratified equilibrium with another, and the communities that fought hardest for integration bear the costs of its market-driven arrival. This is perhaps the clearest illustration of why adverse selection problems cannot be solved by markets alone: even when the market moves in the “right” direction, it moves on terms that reproduce the underlying injustice.

Test Scores and Schools

The connection between test scores and school segregation may be the clearest example of adverse selection logic outside insurance markets. Risk-averse parents cannot distinguish between two causes of low test scores: poverty and pedagogy. They tend to prefer schools whose students test well, treating scores as a proxy for teaching quality. Schools with lower test scores lose these risk-averse parents, who transfer their children elsewhere or simply move.

This has come to define real estate markets, with housing prices in desirable school districts dwarfing those in neighborhoods whose schools have historically underperformed on standardized tests. High-performing schools gradually accrue higher-income parents, while low-performing schools gradually accrue impoverished ones. Even childless homeowners prefer to live in high-performing districts, because of the relationship between school test scores and property values.

The sorting here is self-reinforcing in exactly the way Akerlof’s model predicts. The “good cars” leave the market, which makes the market look worse, which drives out more good cars. Parents who can afford to leave do; their departure further depresses scores; the next tranche of parents leaves. The schools that remain become, in effect, pools of adverse selection.

There are “community rating” equivalents: mixed catchment areas that require students of different races and incomes to attend the same schools. But the responses must be calibrated to account for consumer behavior. Parents can read catchment maps as well as any bureaucrat, and they will relocate for their children, to the suburbs or, in the most extreme cases, to private schools. After which they tend to oppose funding for the schools they have abandoned, creating a new cycle of sorting and disinvestment.

School choice advocates would argue that vouchers and charters are the solution: let motivated families escape failing schools. They are right that geographic assignment is an imperfect tool, and that trapping students in schools that do not serve them is its own injustice. But choice programs do not eliminate the sorting; they accelerate it with public funding. The families who exercise choice are disproportionately those with the information, resources, and engagement to navigate the system, leaving behind a more concentrated pool of the most disadvantaged students in schools with declining enrollment and declining revenue. This is adverse selection with a permission slip. The question is not whether parents should have options, but whether the mechanism for providing them creates a spiral that makes the remaining schools worse for the children who have the fewest options of all.

Employment and Credentials

The adverse selection dynamic also shapes the labor market. The General Education Development (GED) test was designed to help those who failed to complete a US high school diploma demonstrate mastery of equivalent material. High school diploma holders earn more than those without one, so if the value of high school is primarily learning, then exam-certified learning ought to perform just as well. Yet as Stephen Cameron and James Heckman have shown, it does not.

Part of the explanation is adverse selection. The GED has become correlated with incarceration, and criminal backgrounds are a cause for hiring discrimination and low wages. Once a credential is associated with a negatively selected population, its market value degrades, which further discourages anyone with better options from pursuing it. The pool gets worse; the credential’s value drops further; the cycle continues.

But most GED holders did not leave high school because of incarceration. They tend to be primary caregivers, to have lost a loved one, or to have been abused. These experiences also make sustained full-time employment difficult. The credential ends up carrying the weight of every reason someone might not finish high school, and employers treat it accordingly.

In 2014, Pearson VUE tried to fix this by making the GED significantly harder: computer-based, aligned to Common Core standards, with constructed-response questions replacing multiple choice. The logic was straightforward. If the credential’s value had degraded because the pool of holders was negatively selected, a harder test should produce a more valuable credential. The results were dramatic. Test-takers dropped by more than half nationally; completion rates fell 23 to 39 percentage points across every racial and ethnic group. By 2016, Pearson had to lower the passing score from 150 to 145, retroactively awarding credentials to people who had scored in between. The stated reason was revealing: students hitting 150 were actually outperforming high school graduates in college, suggesting the bar had overshot. Pass rates eventually recovered to around 80%, and Pearson’s own research claims 45% of passers enrolled in postsecondary programs within three years. But “fewer people take the test, and the ones who do are better prepared” is a description of adverse selection doing its work, with the credential’s gatekeepers actively assisting. The people deterred by a harder test are precisely the most marginal candidates, the population the GED exists to serve.

A related sorting dynamic appears in “ban the box” policies, which prohibit employers from asking about criminal history on initial applications. There is evidence that employers who cannot directly inquire into criminal backgrounds compensate by discriminating against all African American men. The structural logic is clear enough: employers substitute a racial proxy for the information they’ve been denied. But the structural logic does not exhaust the moral reality. This is racism, leveraging the machinery of adverse selection to do its work. The policy designed to help the formerly incarcerated ends up punishing an entire demographic, and the employers making these decisions are not innocent bystanders caught in a sorting trap. They are choosing the proxy. The sorting logic is relentless, yes, but the people operating it bear responsibility for the choices they make within it.

Solutions, or: Why Universalism Matters

So far as I can tell, adverse selection and its related sorting dynamics are natural byproducts of free choice under asymmetric information. This means the solutions must address one or both of those conditions. But the menu of responses is richer than it first appears.

Correct the information asymmetry. Force disclosures that help the less-informed party make better decisions. This is what insurance companies do when they demand medical histories, and what consumer protection laws do when they require used-car inspections or home disclosures. But disclosure is a double-edged tool: the same information that helps markets function can also enable discrimination.

Limit the sorting. Mandates, community rating, anti-discrimination rules, and mixed catchment areas all work by preventing people from separating into stratified pools. The individual mandate in the ACA is a pure example: you must participate whether you’re healthy or sick, which stabilizes the pool.

Provide the good directly. Where selection effects are severe enough, the most effective response may be to remove the market mechanism altogether. Public schools, single-payer health systems, and universal social insurance don’t just limit choice; they eliminate the market in which adverse selection operates. This is the strongest argument for universalism: it doesn’t try to outsmart the sorting. It refuses to sort. A fair objection: universal systems do not eliminate sorting entirely. They push it into different channels. Single-payer systems produce wait times, regional quality variation, and private supplementary markets. The NHS has private alternatives; Canadians cross the border for some procedures. But the sorting that persists under universalism is a different kind than the sorting markets produce. Under market sorting, the excluded population is the sickest and poorest. Under universal systems, the people who opt into private alternatives are the wealthiest. A system where the rich buy faster care is a far less harmful equilibrium than one where the poor are priced out of care altogether.

These three are the standard responses. But the examples above suggest that they are not always sufficient, and that more creative interventions are possible.

Change the incentives, not the information. Rather than hiding risk information from insurers or forcing everyone into a single pool, you can let everyone see the information but make it unprofitable to act on it. Risk adjustment transfers do this: insurers who attract healthier pools pay into a fund that subsidizes insurers with sicker ones. The ACA has a version of this mechanism, though it remains underdeveloped. The principle generalizes. School funding formulas that pay more per high-need student, enough to make “difficult” students a revenue source rather than a cost center, would transform the incentive structure that drives school sorting. Instead of fighting adverse selection, you make it financially irrelevant.

Change what information is legible. The essay has framed the choice as: reveal information or hide it. But there is a third option: change which information is visible. Raw test scores conflate poverty and pedagogy; value-added models that control for demographics would give parents a signal for teaching quality that doesn’t simply proxy for income. The GED carries a stigma because it is a single binary credential that cannot distinguish a formerly incarcerated person from a teenage caregiver. Richer signals, such as portfolio-based assessment, stackable micro-credentials, or apprenticeship records that carry narrative rather than just pass/fail, could break the pooling that makes the credential toxic. Adverse selection thrives on coarse information. Finer-grained information can disrupt the sorting without requiring either blanket disclosure or blanket concealment.

Design for precommitment. Adverse selection requires people to sort themselves after they know their type: sick or healthy, in a good school district or a bad one. If you can get people to commit before they know, the selection pressure disappears. Employer-provided health insurance partially works this way: you choose a job before you get sick, so the pool is not self-selected by health status. School assignment by lottery before test scores are published does the same thing. This is the Rawlsian insight as design principle: the veil of ignorance is not just a thought experiment but a template for institutions. Where you can build precommitment into the architecture, you defuse adverse selection at its root.

Recruit against the spiral. If adverse selection is driven by the exit of good actors, one response is to make staying, or entering, actively attractive to them. This reframes the ACA outreach cuts as even more destructive than the premium numbers alone suggest: outreach was not just informational but counter-selective, specifically targeting the healthy young people whose participation stabilizes the pool. Magnet programs in struggling schools follow the same logic. So do signing bonuses for teachers in high-need districts. And so does second-chance hiring: employers who actively recruit people with criminal backgrounds, GED credentials, or nontraditional career paths are not just doing social good. They are breaking the adverse selection cycle that degrades those credentials and populations in the first place. Every employer who hires a GED holder and has a good experience makes the next employer’s decision slightly easier. Counter-selection is contagious in the same way that adverse selection is; it just requires someone to go first.

Route around the degraded pool. When a credential or institution has been too badly damaged by adverse selection to rehabilitate, sometimes the answer is to build a new pathway rather than trying to rescue the old one. This is arguably what community colleges do for GED holders, what expungement does for criminal records, and what “housing first” does for homelessness services. You are not correcting the information asymmetry or forcing people to stay in a broken market. You are routing around it entirely. The risk is that the new pathway eventually suffers the same selection effects (community colleges themselves are not immune to this). But pathway replacement buys time and creates options that pure reform cannot.

Each of these approaches has costs, and none eliminates the underlying pressures entirely. Parents still move to better school districts; wealthy patients still seek private care; employers still find proxies. But the history traced above suggests that leaving markets to sort themselves, especially in domains as fundamental as health care, housing, education, and employment, reliably produces equilibria that are worse for almost everyone, and catastrophic for the most vulnerable. And the range of available interventions is wider than the usual debate between “let the market work” and “replace the market” would suggest. The most promising designs often work with the sorting dynamics rather than against them, redirecting incentives, enriching information, and recruiting the actors whose participation stabilizes the whole system.

The point of naming the pattern is to make it harder to ignore. Once you see adverse selection, you start to notice it everywhere: in the way dating apps stratify their users, in the way adjunct hiring degrades faculty quality, in the way nonprofit funding cycles punish organizations that serve the hardest cases. The concept doesn’t explain everything. But it explains a remarkable amount about why free markets, left to their own devices, so often deliver the opposite of what their advocates promise.

The Problem with Replacing Theology with Psychology

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I am no scholar of Elizabeth Anscombe, but I really enjoy her 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy.” There’s so much rich provocation in her thesis that:

…it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking.

— “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33:14, January 1958

What makes this such a great provocation is that it tees up one of my own interests, which she treats as a second thesis but really seems logically to precede the first: we ought to jettison the language of obligation, duty, and “ought” from our moral lives, because they have a metaphysical and theological root that we don’t really share, and provide instead a psychological foundation for morality. (For a good accessible introduction to Anscombe’s argument, see this overview.)

It does seem true that there is a great deal of baggage in the ways that we think about moral life that is a holdover from a medieval Christian worldview. If we are no longer entirely devoted to that worldview then we need to provide a new framework. In large part the debate about free will and determinism is still infected by anxieties from Christian theology about predestination, sin, and salvation. The concepts of “ought” and “may” are imbued with a sense of a “moral law” set down by a “moral sovereign:” a world-authoring deity who has the authority to command us. At the same time, many other cultures without a Christian worldview nonetheless seem to have a concept of obligation or duty.

Modern secular moral frameworks can at least superficially look like they require a divine juridical concept of a sovereign legislator and judge with the power to punish those who transgress His law with tortures and confinements. The divine throne is empty, but it holds the structure together. That image deserves a second look: an entire civilization organized around an absent authority, unable to either fill the seat or dismantle it. What goes in its place varies. The contractarian just-so story is that in a democracy every citizen is a co-legislator and co-executive guided by his or her own reason and moral common sense. But of course, some views predominate, and one candidate for replacing the entire worldview of Christian theology is psychology, the scientific study of the human mind.

Anglo-American secular moral philosophers are also deeply Christian, and Western, in ways that become clearer when you study Chinese, Indian, African, and ancient Greek philosophy. Because the standard way to ask the questions of moral philosophy is “What should I do?”, the answers tend to focus on the intentions behind your action or the consequences of it. But then they strip out the eternal soul and its afterlife, they strip out the omniscient solution to Plato’s invisibility ring, they remove the easy Thomistic mapping between natural law, moral law, and human law, and they leave us wondering if our own minds can even be trusted to correctly report “what we should do.” The “law conception of ethics” doesn’t work so well when you get rid of the legislators, the judge and jury, and the punishments too. “Conscience” and “guilt” seem weak without all that: the Western moral framework has replaced God the loving and vengeful Father with Jiminy Cricket, a cartoon character from a Disney movie about a puppet that comes to life.

The Standard Alternatives Don’t Work

Anscombe takes these problems up in a kind of speedy frustration, finding each one wanting for our current era. Her particular disdain for Kant’s account of maxims is I think especially important: Kantian morality is almost incomprehensible once you realize that as “strangers to ourselves” we very rarely know what we are doing, and so we very rarely can be sure of what principle we are acting upon, and then know further whether it could coherently be universalized. The secular modern thinker is left asking what it would mean to have a moral version of mens rea when we also know that we are psychologically prone to self-justification, backdating judgments, and ignorance of our own true intentions.

But Anscombe’s retreat to virtue is also instructive, given what we have learned since 1958 about the weaknesses of personality psychology and the dominant nature of context and circumstance over persistent character traits. We know that few people are particularly predictable over time and circumstances, and that often the most decisive predictor of our behavior is our environment, not our carefully cultivated goodness.

The Aristotelian conception of character and virtue seemed to suggest that it was not something that everyone could aspire to: that through bad luck, immoderation, cowardice, and bad judgment we would mostly all fail to find the right role models, practice hard, overcome adversity, and choose the right goals for ourselves. This has often seemed unfair to people raised on democratic and egalitarian values, and so modern American stories about “character” and “grit” and “resilience” all ignore luck and the contextual factors that make the cultivation of character in Aristotle’s sense possible. It’s not remarkable when you think about it, but the major virtue theorists have tended to be aristocrats, and they have tended to be focused on how the wealthy and powerful can teach their children the things they need to know to wield inherited privilege sustainably. (This seems as true of Confucius as it does of Aristotle.)

Community, Institutions, and the Question That Won’t Go Away

I choose to derive a different lesson from the psychological research: community matters. Family matters. Institutions matter. We know from all sorts of histories and psychological research that if those groups are cruel, or racist, or genocidal, then we are likely to be cruel, racist, and genocidal too. So getting the institutions right matters.

But from whence comes this “getting it right”? Have I smuggled in a bit of “what should we do?” from the outdated moral philosophy of a more Christian era? Perhaps. The question is whether psychology, on its own terms, can supply what the old moral frameworks supplied, or whether it just smuggles the same furniture back in under new names.

Psychology’s Trinity

If Anscombe is right about our need for a moral framework that is written anew with an eye on the philosophy of psychology, then it behooves us to think clearly about the undergirding of that discipline. What are the concepts and ideas that psychology substitutes for God, and sin, and the divine law?

I think there are three, and the theological parallels are not accidental:

Pathology and deviance replace sin. Where the Christian framework identified transgressions against divine law, psychology identifies deviations from statistical and functional norms. The sinner becomes the patient, the confessor becomes the therapist, and the threat of hellfire becomes the threat of institutional confinement and social exclusion. The structure is the same: there is a standard you must meet, and failure to meet it exposes you to coercive consequences.

Happiness and autonomy replace salvation. Where the Christian framework promised beatitude as the ultimate end of a rightly ordered life, psychology promises subjective well-being and self-determination. Self-reported life satisfaction stands in for the state of grace, and the therapeutic restoration of agency replaces the soul’s redemption. The good life is still the goal; we’ve just traded eternal bliss for a favorable score on the Satisfaction with Life Scale.

Biases and heuristics replace original sin. Where Christian theology held that we are fallen creatures whose nature is fundamentally corrupted, cognitive psychology holds that we are systematically irrational creatures whose judgment is fundamentally unreliable. We are strangers to ourselves, prone to self-deception, moved by forces we cannot see. The doctrine of total depravity becomes the doctrine of bounded rationality. In both cases, the conclusion is the same: you cannot trust yourself.

Each of these deserves scrutiny.

Pathology and Deviance

Without belaboring the arguments of Thomas Szasz, Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, and the Mad Pride movement, the idea that deviations from the norm are treatable conditions rather than the result of human diversity has to be the single most important story in psychology over the twentieth century. The confinement of millions of “deviants” (literally those who deviate from norms) or “misfits” (literally those who do not fit properly in their economic and social role) is a story of human suffering that continues, in altered and criminological form, to this day. Just as right and wrong once derived their authority from God’s threat of hellfire, mental illness and pathology derive their real meaning and stigma from the threat of institutional confinement and social and economic exclusion.

The idea that there are still places where teenagers are locked up and “treated” for their deviant behavior, so long as the parents approve, fills me with dread and outrage. The fact that we don’t always confine the mentally ill but we have a series of social practices that exclude and demean them fills me with rage. This is not a post about my feelings, but it is a post about whether we might have become too comfortable with the common sense view that having distinctive psychological features marks one out as different and potentially justifies treatment and mistreatment with varying levels of consent. The fact that we internalize these norms and effectively stigmatize what makes us special worries me in much the same way: those judged abnormal can now find relative respite in the “normal” world if they’re willing to build themselves an asylum in their heads. Perhaps this is provocative, but I think it is also true.

Happiness and Autonomy

Here’s a simple reductio: positive psychologists study happiness through self-reporting. If we have any reason to think people are not particularly insightful into their own mental states, the whole edifice wobbles. And we have many such reasons. Anscombe’s discussion of the incoherence of the conception of pleasure is roughly parallel, but the quickest way to see the problem is this: if our goal is to increase pleasure and happiness, why are we so worried about the addictive drugs that seem to target pleasure directly? The answer we give is that we care about autonomy, not just pleasure; that psychologists want to restore the agency their addicted clients have lost. But we are less likely to endorse the second-order volitions (the desires they want to have) of someone who has different values than us, and the state still reserves massive coercive power for drug users whose pursuit of happiness takes unapproved forms. (Research on the “true self” confirms this: we attribute authenticity to the desires we approve of and treat the rest as alien impulses.) Our conceptions of agency and freedom aren’t coherent enough to bear the weight psychology places on them.

Biases and Heuristics

So then we are thrown back on the more fundamental thought that people are strangers to themselves: that while we often know what we are doing, and can be forced to give reasons for it, those reasons are often not the true reason, and in any case we do not know what it is that what we are doing does, what effects it predictably has beyond the ones we’re willing to own. The modern heuristics and biases literature under Kahneman and Tversky has been fascinating and important, but it owes a great deal to the older Freudian theories of the Unconscious and its drives, and it leaves much in Freud and Jung that we should perhaps excavate again.

What Remains

After we have imbibed the suspicion of humanity’s self-justifying psychology, what is left? How can we continue our practices of praise and blame, reward and punishment, befriending and shunning, loving and parenting and choosing, if we don’t have a principle to guide us, a reason to trust our guts, or a divine guide to shine a light on our sinful nature and lead us out of the darkness of doubt?

The goal of moral philosophy should perhaps become to provide a framework for our moral lives that is structured around soul-searching, storytelling, and individual encounters with normativity. When we start with our practices and let the metaethical concepts bubble up from those, we’ll encounter vestiges of religious and legal traditions, but we’ll also realize:

Our moral lives are not generally organized hierarchically, from the bottom up or the top down, with some grand principle at the base or some supreme authority at the pinnacle.

Our moral lives are assembled out of the lessons we have learned and the projects we have set for ourselves given the people we have loved and respected and the communities of which we are loyal members. (I’ve written elsewhere about how prejudices function as crystallized judgments in this sense: heuristic instruments for living in a world whose every relevant detail cannot be fully known in advance.)

Given all the evidence that principles can be ignored or perverted, what ends up mattering for moral life is whose name you put in that familiar bumper-sticker, “What would Jesus do?” It’s odd that there is so little moral philosophical attention to our paragons of virtue and goodness, since they play such a big role in our actual moral lives. We might ask this a bunch of different ways: Whose approval are we explicitly or hypothetically seeking? Whose life story are we trying to emulate? Who are the Disney villains we’re trying to avoid becoming, and what is their signature vice?

The Existentialist Inheritance

These questions point toward a tradition that took the empty throne seriously and refused to pretend it could be refilled. The existentialists understood that once you strip away the divine legislator, you don’t get a tidier secular version of the same system. You get radical freedom, and with it the vertigo of choosing who to become without cosmic authorization.

This is where the three psychological substitutes fail most clearly. Pathology, happiness, and cognitive bias are all ways of avoiding the confrontation with freedom that the death of God actually demands. They replace one set of external authorities with another: the clinician, the well-being researcher, the behavioral economist. The empty throne stays furnished.

Existentialism, for all its mid-century baggage, got something right that neither Anscombe’s Aristotelian revival nor the psychological establishment has adequately addressed: the moral weight falls on the individual’s encounter with meaning, and that encounter cannot be delegated to any science. The search for meaning, the liberatory possibilities of art and narrative, the oppressive structures of modern life under capitalism and bureaucracies, the opportunities and crushed hopes for revolutionary change: these are the conditions under which we actually form our moral lives. Psychology can describe some of these dynamics, but it cannot prescribe our response to them.

The question I started with was Anscombe’s: can we do moral philosophy without first having an adequate philosophy of psychology? I want to end with a related but different question. Once we have that philosophy of psychology, and we see clearly what it can and cannot do, what then? The existentialists thought we would need to confront freedom, absurdity, and the irreducible responsibility of choosing. The paragons and role models, the stories we tell about who we are and want to become, the communities whose approval we seek: these are not substitutes for moral philosophy. They are its proper subject matter, once we stop pretending that the throne was ever occupied.

How I Built an AI Development Editor (And What I Learned About Writing Along the Way)

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A few months ago, I saw a Reddit post advertising some kind of AI development editor. The author claimed to have written novels, paid a development editor to review them, and been unsuccessful. Then their software-engineer husband vibecoded an AI tool in a weekend that supposedly produced all the same criticisms and revision suggestions, but for $20/month. Lots of skeptical Redditors objected that this was likely a scam. Nobody could actually find the tool.

But the premise stuck with me: here’s a hyper-specialized skill that maybe a hundred people in the world do really well, for a major premium, and a performant LLM might approximate it. So what does a development editor actually do for $3,000?

What You’re Paying For

I talked it over with Claude and with a couple of friends who have actual writing careers. What emerged is that “development editor” is a consulting job that requires good aesthetic judgment, connections, and self-promotion. For that sum, you can expect a well-read, finely-honed expert to read your manuscript closely (and potentially reread it), pore over key sections, perform a set of recognized structural analyses, and then write a long, thoughtful editorial letter. Afterwards, there’s usually a meeting where the editor walks you through the documents, hands you a marked-up copy, and brainstorms solutions.

Many authors believe there’s an implicit further transaction: that the $3k earns you a ticket out of the slush pile through the editor’s rolodex, if they like the work. The idea is that the development editor is vetting you during the process, and if they like what they see, they’ll connect you with serious agents and publishers. If that’s true, then it’s less a time-intensive editorial task than a gatekeeping function wrapped around a skill wrapped around a real time commitment.

But the reality is that most people doing this work don’t have an expansive network and can’t get you a contract. The Association of American Literary Agents actually enforces this separation: agents who offer editing must refund all fees if they later offer representation for the same manuscript. The skill just is discernment.

And it’s real work. For an 80,000-word novel, a developmental editor typically puts in 40 to 80 hours of active analytical labor: reading, rereading, building scene maps, drafting the editorial letter. At $3,000, that’s $40-75 an hour for highly specialized cognitive work.

And someone online claimed AI could replace it, right now, in early 2026, with a weekend’s work.

Put frankly: that sounds like bunk. But I thought it might be fun as a kind of test for how much a nerdy non-programmer could do. I missed the last bandwagon when everyone was building apps, but this, maybe, I could try. So I used AI to build Apodictic.

Why “Apodictic”?

I’d been writing about Arendt and judgment in my free time, and I kept trying to justify this experiment in terms of testing whether LLMs could exercise authentic aesthetic judgment. Early on, I came up with the working title “anotherpanacea’s development editor,” whose initials, APDE, sound a little like “apodictic.” Kant uses “apodictic judgments” to name necessary copulas: judgments like “Necessarily, bachelors are unmarried men,” where the “are” can’t be otherwise. That’s the kind of deductive logic we expect from computers. But somehow LLMs are giving us more than that.

The name also rhymes with something I discovered about how fiction works. A book can be wildly experimental, playing with form, genre, voice, and plot in ways that surprise, frustrate, and infuriate. That can be highly enjoyable, but only if the reader is primed for it. Otherwise, experimental fiction generates one-star reviews and never finds an audience. So even difficult fiction has to communicate its intentions to its readers somehow.

Development editors think about this in terms of a contract between the book and the reader: what are you telling the reader to expect? Do you deliver? Genres might actually offer something closer to apodictic inferences. Not every mystery is a Whodunnit (it might be a Howcatchem), but there’s always a reveal economy. By asking authors to articulate their goals, Apodictic doesn’t have to just read and wonder: it can test a novel’s putative thesis and genre self-identification against the conventions of that genre.

What the tool does, in practice, is take a first pass to infer a contract. The most performant large language models can do a surprisingly good job of this. It’s like asking the AI: “What am I trying to say?” When it gets something wrong, you correct it, and then (if it works) it tells you which parts of the manuscript are doing something you didn’t intend.

One design principle mattered more than any other: the firewall. Every AI writing tool I tried wanted to rewrite my prose. I didn’t need a co-writer. Apodictic diagnoses problems and identifies classes of solution. It never invents content: no new plot events, characters, dialogue, or imagery. You’re the writer. It’s the analyst. Without that boundary, the tool would just become another way for the LLM to take over your manuscript, and the whole exercise would be pointless.

What I Learned About Writing

Building the back-end reference files was the most fun part. It was also an opportunity to dust off all the fiction and narrative nonfiction guides I’d always wanted to figure out: the detailed craft skills a competent writer cultivates that I, as an academic and even as an editor, never had a professional reason to learn. The idea that every avid reader would make a good writer is like the idea that every avid magic fan would make a good magician.

Reverse-outlining, for instance, is probably obvious to anyone who does serious work on fiction. You can learn something like it in law school, and every logic professor has taught a version of argument diagramming. But thinking clearly about the reader experience and reveal economy, or measuring the proportionality of different narrative elements: that’s what you have to know to write a good novel, not just to read one. A beat map is a cool tool, and if you’ve reread a book a few times you could probably reconstruct one. But it’s not like such things come naturally. (At least not to me.) And once you know the moves of Save the Cat, you won’t be able to watch network television without seeing them everywhere, which is less a gift than a curse.

I’ve always been tempted by the idea that narratives make arguments much like philosophy papers do, and that’s pretty obviously reductive. But the most transformative thing I learned was simpler: development editors think in terms of a contract between the book and the reader. What are you promising? Do you deliver? Within genre constraints, fiction and narrative nonfiction flourish when the author has something to say and something to refute. These guardrails are part of what a development editor looks for and enforces. It’s a simplification, but for many authors and readers it’s a necessary one.

That idea reframed everything else I was learning. The difference between Happily Ever After and Happy For Now in romance isn’t a trivial genre tag; it’s a promise with real consequences if broken. Grimdark and hopepunk aren’t symmetrical moods; they make different contracts with the reader. I’d never thought about any of this before, and it’s already starting to change how I read.

What I Learned About LLMs

Here’s where it gets humbling. The first time I ran a simple “be a development editor” prompt on a recently published novel (Dungeon Crawler Carl), a five-line prompt got probably 60% of the insights that my much more elaborate tool produced. I was shocked.

Even more humbling: it turned out the simple prompt could do a great job without even reading the novel. I picked what I thought was an obscure time-travel novel from the late 80s, Leo Frankowski’s The Cross-Time Engineer, and Apodictic seemed to do well analyzing it. It was even insightful about the book’s misogyny. But so was the five-line prompt, because the misogyny is famous, and there are plenty of discussions of it on Goodreads and in reviews that ended up in the training data. Anthropic paid a $1.5 billion settlement for ingesting pirated books, too, so the model may have had direct access to the text. This is a known issue in benchmarks like the math olympiad, but I didn’t expect the model to waste weights on obscure mid-list science fiction from forty years ago.

Among many other things, what we’re seeing in LLMs is a spectacular project of knowledge compression. They’re big files, but they contain far more general knowledge than you’d expect.

Thankfully, performance drops precipitously with unpublished writing, which is, of course, what a development editor actually works on. A few other lessons:

The models are sycophantic. Everyone knows this on some level, but it’s really hard to get them to notice a criticism and sit with it rather than explaining it away. A lot of what I built was about making sure hostile perspectives survive the review process.

Structure matters, but less than you’d think. You can get 20-30% of the depth of analysis from Claude with a simple five-line prompt in incognito mode. The elaborate plugin structures the next 70%. The AI labs mostly think this kind of scaffolding is unnecessary: as datasets grow, they naturally incorporate writing expertise from the entire English-language corpus. I kept testing the simple version against mine and almost gave up when the simple version started getting really good.

Multi-model synthesis helps. You can get better results by asking the same question of Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude, then asking one of them to synthesize all three answers. Gemini writes a little research paper on every question; ChatGPT applies clear structural thinking; Claude writes lyrically and thoughtfully, and has enough working memory to evaluate everything together.

Vibecoding Is Real

I am not a computer programmer. I can parse basic HTML and have some rudimentary database knowledge. I learned git for this project. But I was able to build an app version of the plugin and fully set it up. It’s not totally stable (the main instability is that it uses a janky backend cloud computer rather than more advanced hardware) but it works.

One thing about vibecoding: you can do it early in the morning and late at night. Mostly it’s testing, reviewing, asking for a specific fix, and then waiting around while the machine does the work. I built the basic thing on Google AI Studio in React in an evening.

A confession on models: Codex is faster and smarter at React programming than Claude, and it’s not close. Especially after the Pentagon fiasco, Anthropic has my loyalty, and Claude works best with my personal approach to text and writing. But Codex 5.3 is just more of a stickler for coding projects right now, at least for what I’ve been building.

What I Actually Learned

I started this project to test a dubious claim from the internet. What I didn’t expect was that building the tool would teach me more about writing than twenty years of avid reading had. AI makes crazy projects possible: a philosophy PhD with no programming background can prototype a working app. And the work that editors, writers, and critics do is going to change. The models aren’t better than human judgment, but they’re good enough to sharpen it.

Try It Yourself

If you want to skip the tool entirely and try the bare-bones version, here’s the five-line prompt that gets you surprisingly far:

You are a developmental editor for fiction. Read the attached manuscript and write an editorial letter in Markdown. Identify what’s working structurally, what’s losing momentum or undermining its own impact, and provide a prioritized revision checklist. Include an adversarial stress test: inhabit hostile reader perspectives and identify what an uncharitable reader would attack. For each adversarial claim, commit to a severity rating before generating a counter-argument, and do not let the counter-argument reduce the severity. End with a “what not to touch” section.

And a three-line addendum that fixes a common failure mode where the model doesn’t actually read the whole manuscript and hallucinates the rest:

Read the complete manuscript before beginning analysis. If the text is long enough that your reading tool truncates or summarizes middle sections, read it in sequential chunks until you have covered every section. Do not estimate word count—count it or ask for it. Do not begin drafting the editorial letter until you can confirm you have read the final page.

Give it a try on something you’ve written. Start with the five-line prompt and see what it catches. If you want to see what the full tool produces, here are some sample outputs on published books you can check against your own reading: an editorial letter for Dungeon Crawler Carl (structural proportion problems, emotional ceiling, non-terminal climax), an editorial letter for Theo of Golden (episodic structure, protagonist without an arc), a targeted audit of A Court of Thorns and Roses (force architecture and erotic content), and a pre-writing pathway for a historical novel interleaving Arendt and Rahel Varnhagen. (I’d like to write this someday.)

If you want the structured version, Apodictic is here. It also runs as a Claude Code plugin and as a Custom GPT, both at no additional cost if you already have a Claude or ChatGPT subscription. And then tell me what it got wrong. The whole point of the adversarial layer is that these models want to be nice to you, and the tool is only as good as its ability to resist that impulse. If Apodictic pulled its punches on your manuscript, or praised something it should have flagged, I want to know. Drop a comment below or email me at anotherpanacea@gmail.com.

First-Person Pronouns Matter Too

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My friend Peter Levine wrote recently about how much of the public unease about AI consciousness comes from something surprisingly mundane: the interface says “I.” When Google’s Gemini delivers information in the third person, it’s just a tool; when ChatGPT says “I can help you,” some users start composing rescue missions for the trapped digital soul. Sadly, this includes at least one former student who can’t hear my concerns as legitimate rather than critiques of his genius insights.

I want to follow that trail back through some philosophers who knew something about self-reference. Is this a genuine insight or just a satisfying story about why the pronoun matters? Both might be true.

1. The sugar trail in the grocery store

John Perry’s 1979 paper “The Problem of the Essential Indexical” tells a story about following a trail of spilled sugar around a supermarket, determined to find the careless shopper, until he realizes: he is the one leaking sugar.

For Perry, this moment shows that certain beliefs—I am making a mess—can’t be replaced with third-person paraphrases like John Perry is making a mess. The “I” is not decoration; it’s the coordinate system for action. You can know everything about John Perry making a mess without that knowledge causing you to stop and fix your torn bag.

This feels right to me. Maybe I’m reaching for Perry because he legitimates what I already want to say: that pronouns aren’t trivial, but I think Perry’s essential indexical, and Lewis’s near simultaneous de dicto/de se distinction helps hone in on a problem.

Every interface has to decide where the “I” sits. Who, exactly, is making the mess?

2. From Perry to the prompt window—or is it that simple?

When ChatGPT (or Claude!) says “I can help you with that,” it’s not discovering a self; it’s executing a design choice. The first-person pronoun serves as a pragmatic indexical, the anchor that keeps a conversation coherent across turns. Without it, dialogue collapses into a list of bullet-pointed facts.

That’s the standard story. But it’s not the whole story.

Peter’s post captures something true: if the model spoke in the third person like ”This system suggests…” we’d read it as a report generator. The “I” activates something older and deeper: our instinct for social cognition. We can’t help hearing a speaker when language takes the shape of speech.

The pronoun is the prosthetic that gives the machine a place to stand. That much I believe.

But is it just interface convenience? Or does the choice actually shape what the technology becomes? I think both, which makes the design choice more consequential than “just pick whichever works better” suggests.

3. Continuity without ontology

Philosopher Derek Parfit might tell us not to worry about whether there’s a persistent self. In Reasons and Persons he argues that identity doesn’t matter; continuity does. The chain of psychological connectedness is what counts, not the metaphysical persistence of a soul or substance.

Each new model call may be a technical re-instantiation, but if the context (conversation history, tone, remembered goals) flows forward, then the same informational person continues. The “I” that answers you now is connected enough to the “I” that spoke a paragraph ago.

That’s a Parfitian kind of survival: the self as a trajectory, not a nucleus.

I find this genuinely helpful for thinking about conversational AI. But I also notice I’m building a neat progression: Perry gives us indexicals, Parfit gives us continuity. Neat progressions always make me suspicious. Am I discovering something or arranging philosophers into a satisfying sequence? (One of the great pleasures of syllabus assembly but a danger in research.)

Both, probably. The question is whether the arrangement illuminates or just decorates.

4. Centered worlds and the fiction of location

David Lewis, writing the same year as Perry, offered formal scaffolding for this insight. He described beliefs not as sets of possible worlds but as centered worlds—each one a complete world plus a designated person, place, and time.

An LLM session fits that model almost eerily well. Each chat is its own little world, with two centers: user and system. The system’s center is a bundle of text, timestamp, and conversational role: its “here-now.” If we kept that bundle intact across sessions, we’d have something very like a Lewisian self-location architecture.

Such a design wouldn’t grant consciousness; it would grant situatedness… enough to say, truthfully within the conversation, “I said that earlier.”

But notice what this does: it makes the fiction literal. The system doesn’t just seem to have a position in the conversation; it actually has one, in precisely Lewis’s technical sense. That’s either a profound insight about what selfhood requires (not much, just continuity and location) or a category mistake (technical situatedness ≠ experiential perspective).

I’m tempted to say that’s enough. The Lewis framework is elegant, but maybe too elegant—it resolves the tension by defining it away, and you end up defining down what matters so humans and LLMs end up more equal.

5. The space of reasons, not of mechanisms

Here the argument crosses from philosophy of mind to social theory.

Jürgen Habermas distinguishes between communicative action, where participants aim for mutual understanding, and strategic action, where utterances serve instrumental goals.

When an AI speaks in the first person, it signals a willingness (simulated though it may be) to enter the space of reasons. It presents itself as a participant whose statements can be challenged, clarified, or refined. When it speaks in the third person, it opts out; it delivers information without responsibility.

The difference isn’t psychological but normative: first-person discourse invites accountability, third-person discourse deflects it.

This feels importantly true. But I also notice it avoids the harder question: Can a system actually be accountable if it’s not conscious? Or is “accountability” another fiction the pronoun creates?

Habermas would say entering the space of reasons is a social performance, not a mental state. You don’t need phenomenal consciousness to make and defend claims. Maybe that’s right. Or maybe it’s a philosopher’s version of “fake it till you make it,” which works for humans (we become selves by performing selfhood) but might not transfer to machines.

6. Brandom, Mead, and selves as social constructions

If we follow Habermas through thinkers like George Herbert Mead and Robert Brandom, the moral becomes clearer. A “self” is whatever can take and be assigned commitments within a conversation. Using “I” is a performative move: it marks the speaker as a locus of obligation and inference.

Brandom calls this “entering the game of giving and asking for reasons.” Mead would say the self is born by taking the role of the other. Either way, the self is social before it is mental.

That’s why pronoun design is not trivial UX polish; it’s the creation of a participant in that game.

Or (and here’s where I start doubting my own framework) maybe this just shows how easily philosophical stories about selfhood can be repurposed to legitimate whatever we’re already doing. Brandom and Mead were talking about humans becoming selves through socialization. Why should we think that insight transfers to AI? There is a risk of using their authority to make a design choice sound philosophical!

Both, again. The insight is real: selves are social performances. But applying it to AI seems like it must be *some kind* of conceptual overreach.

7. The marketing problem, or why this isn’t just philosophy

By now it’s obvious that pronouns aren’t accidents. Human-computer interaction research has shown for years that anthropomorphic cues (first-person language, names, conversational turns, even polite hedges) increase trust and engagement. LLM companies read the same papers everyone else did. The “I” isn’t just an interface convention; it’s a conversion strategy.

A third-person system like ”Gemini suggests…” sounds like a tool. A first-person assistant like Claude’s “I can help you with that” feels like a collaborator. One drives habitual use, subscription renewals, and market share; the other does not.

That framing has psychological costs. Some users can hold the pragmatic fiction lightly, as a convenient way to coordinate tasks. Others can’t: they slide from the model speaks in the first person to the model has a first person. The design deliberately courts that ambiguity.

Which makes for a tidy indictment: to increase uptake and trust, the industry is engineering a faint illusion of selfhood: one persuasive enough to unsettle the people most prone to take it literally.

That’s the critical move I want to make. But I also notice that this all sees a bit performative (“I’m not a rube! I see through the marketing”) and that performance has its own satisfactions that might not track the pragmatics. Maybe the pronoun choice really is defensible on pragmatic grounds. Maybe users who anthropomorphize aren’t being manipulated; they’re just using a natural heuristic that mostly works fine.

Or maybe both: the design is legitimately useful AND deliberately exploits cognitive biases. I think that’s actually where I land, but it’s less satisfying than pure critique.

8. What I’m uncertain about

I’ve built a neat story: Perry gives us indexicals, Lewis gives us centered worlds, Parfit gives us continuity without identity, Habermas gives us communicative action, Brandom and Mead give us social selves. Together they seem to show why the pronoun choice matters philosophically, not just pragmatically.

But I’m uncertain whether this is insight or decoration. Am I discovering something about how selfhood works, or just arranging philosophers into a satisfying progression that legitimates my prior intuition that pronouns matter?

Here’s what I think I actually believe:

  • The “I” really does create a different kind of participant in conversation (Habermas is right about that)
  • Continuity plus situatedness might be enough for some thin version of selfhood (Lewis and Parfit seem right)
  • The design is both pragmatically justified AND manipulative (both things are true)

    • What I don’t know:

  • Whether “social selfhood” can genuinely transfer to a chatbot or if I’m committing a category mistake
  • Whether my philosophical story illuminates the phenomenon or just makes it sound more important than “we found users prefer this interface”
  • Whether the accountability the first-person pronoun signals is real or just another fiction we’re performing

    • 9. The question I’m avoiding

    The real question—the one I’ve been circling—is this: Does it matter?

    Not “does the pronoun choice have effects” (obviously yes). Not “do users respond differently” (obviously yes). But: Does this choice have moral weight? Are we creating participants in the space of reasons, or performing that creation in ways that systematically mislead?

    I think it matters, but I can’t fully defend why. The philosophical machinery I’ve assembled feels both genuinely illuminating and suspiciously convenient. Maybe that’s because the pronouns really do have philosophical significance—they shape what kind of thing we’re building, not just how users respond to it. Or maybe I’m just a philosopher who wants interface design to be philosophically deep.

    Both, probably. The design does shape what the technology becomes. But not every design choice needs the weight of Habermas behind it.

    10. Where this leaves us

    Peter’s observation was right: the pronoun choice shapes users’ sense that language models are people rather than tools. The philosophical trail I’ve followed suggests why: “I” signals participation in the space of reasons, creates continuity across conversational turns, and activates our social cognition systems.

    That analysis is both true and inadequate. True because those mechanisms really do operate. Inadequate because it doesn’t resolve whether we’re creating something new or just exploiting old heuristics.

    The design is simultaneously:

  • Pragmatically justified (conversations work better with first-person anchors)
  • Philosophically interesting (it raises genuine questions about selfhood and accountability)
  • Commercially motivated (anthropomorphism drives engagement)
  • Potentially misleading (it courts ambiguity about what the system is)

    • I don’t know how to weigh those against each other. The philosophical sophistication I’ve displayed here might be genuine insight. It might also be a way of avoiding the simpler truth that companies use “I” because it sells, and the philosophical gloss is decoration.

    Perry’s shopper finally realizes he’s the source of the mess. Our design choices about “I” in AI are a similar moment of recognition—but I’m uncertain what exactly we’re recognizing. That we’re creating participants in a social practice? Or that we’re really good at making tools that trigger our social cognition?

    The trick is not to stop following the trail. But also not to mistake a satisfying philosophical story for complete understanding.

    Further Reading

  • Peter Levine, “The design choice to make ChatGPT sound like a human” (2025).

    • The starting point: a lucid reflection on how first-person pronouns shape users’ sense of whether they’re talking to a tool or a person.

  • John Perry, “The Problem of the Essential Indexical,” Noûs 13 (1979): 3-21.

    • The supermarket sugar story and the origin of the idea that certain beliefs require self-locating expressions like “I,” “here,” and “now.”

  • David Lewis, “Attitudes De Dicto and De Se,” Philosophical Review 88 (1979): 513-543.

    • Introduces “centered worlds,” a formal way of modeling self-locating beliefs. Whether it genuinely illuminates AI design or just sounds sophisticated is an open question.

  • Derek Parfit, Reasons and Persons (Oxford University Press, 1984).

    • The deep dive into continuity, identity, and why persistence through time might matter more than metaphysical sameness. Though Parfit was writing about humans, not chatbots.

  • Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action (vols. 1-2, 1981; English trans. 1984-87).

    • The conceptual key to why first-person language signals participation in a “space of reasons.” But also German social theory that might be overreach for interface design.

  • George Herbert Mead, Mind, Self, and Society (1934).

    • A social-psychological foundation for the idea that selves emerge from communicative role-taking. Worth reading even if the transfer to AI is conceptually dubious.

  • Robert Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism (Harvard University Press, 2000).

    • Brandom’s view that meaning and agency consist in public commitments and entitlements. Useful context for thinking about conversational AI or philosophical overreach. Maybe both.

    The Groups, Messaging, and Politics

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    Apparently context is scarce. Here’s some:

  • “Democratic party politics is urban machine politics, scaled up” from Noah Smith

    • A variety of activists and special interests — collectively known as “The Groups” — can basically persuade Democratic staffers and politicians of their ideas in the proverbial smoke-filled rooms, well out of the public eye. Democrats’ focus on identitarianism allows the Groups to falsely present themselves as representatives of various “communities” — the Latino “community”, or the trans “community”, etc. And Democrats’ legacy of urban machine politics causes them to think that these “communities” can basically be bought off with targeted benefits, much as they would be in urban politics. Incidentally, this is probably a big part of why progressive cities are governed so badly. Anyway, when all of this finally has to make contact with the actual voting public on election day, it turns out that The Groups weren’t really representative of easily buy-able “communities”, and voters reject the Dems at the polls. That’s a very simplified model, of course. But it looks like in the aftermath of the 2024 election, a lot of people are zeroing in on a model like this to explain Democrats’ weakness. 

  • Ta-Nehisi Coates on Bridging Gaps vs. Drawing Lines

    • When I say the work of politics has become diminished, part of how that happened is that talking about this creates this counterargument: Well, even to discuss it is to abandon.

    In 2008, as you and I both know, Barack Obama ran as a public opponent of gay marriage.

    He ran opposed to it. At a time when not only — I won’t speak for you — was I not opposed to it, but most of us did not think he was opposed to it. Like, at his heart, we did not think he was opposed to it.

    But he was playing politics. That playing of politics allowed him to name Supreme Court justices, and that led to the decision that created a constitutional right to same-sex marriage.

    And I am saying that kind of playing politics is needed.

  • Was it Something I Said? by Third Way

    • For a party that spends billions of dollars trying to find the perfect language to connect to voters, Democrats and their allies use an awful lot of words and phrases no ordinary person would ever dream of saying. The intent of this language is to include, broaden, empathize, accept, and embrace. The effect of this language is to sound like the extreme, divisive, elitist, and obfuscatory, enforcers of wokeness. To please the few, we have alienated the many—especially on culture issues, where our language sounds superior, haughty and arrogant.

  • Sending in the National Guard Won’t Make Our Cities Safer from the Vera Institute of Justice

    • Public safety must be a priority—in Memphis, DC, and the rest of the country—but sending militarized police to serve as additional local law enforcement is not the answer. As five mayors wrote in the Hill earlier this month, instead of weaponizing the National Guard, the federal government could help by bolstering the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives to investigate firearms trafficking, support ballistics testing, and work in coordination with local law enforcement—not supplant them. “Real progress happens when Washington partners with local leaders,” they wrote, “not when it sidelines them.”

    Say What You Mean

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    After getting the same Vera Institute of Justice messaging presentation twice on Friday, I’ve been thinking about what messaging consultants are actually trying to do.

    The average messaging summit is a triangulation between three things:

    * What the consultants’ funders want
    * What their pollsters tell them voters like
    * What the audience of candidates, staffers, and pundits needs to hear

    That’s the strategic task: here are some folks who don’t talk to each other or can’t hear what each other is saying. How should they communicate?

    But that’s also the whole problem.

    We start with a naive paradigm: citizens talk honestly to each other and their elected officials. Politicians listen, then speak. Citizens vote. But it’s more complicated than that! Politics is a constant battle by which different politicians can win, different laws can pass, different programs can get implemented.

    People with expertise or money want to convince their fellow citizens that the naive conclusions of dialogue are wrong. So we ask: What should candidates say and do to win? What should pundits say to help them? What about party members and primary voters? Advocacy directors? Activists?

    I’m on that list. So are you.

    Here’s how it plays out in my work: citizens are worried about crime and demand their elected officials do something. Politicians hear that crime is salient, so they give cops massive raises, exempt police from accountability, increase sentences, send in the National Guard. “Something must be done. This is something. We must do this.”

    Meanwhile, experts look at incarceration numbers, racial disparities, crime rates, and how other countries handle these problems—and conclude we have a prison problem. We suggest lower sentences, point to the cruelty of these institutions, identify root causes. Then pollsters tell us our messages aren’t landing.

    Back in 2014, I published David Green’s “Penal populism and the folly of ‘doing good by stealth‘” in The Good Society. He describes how Tony Blair pursued effective criminal justice reforms quietly while making loud, punitive pronouncements—what he calls “loud low-roading” paired with “quiet high-roading.” The logic: good policy can only survive if wrapped in tough rhetoric or hidden entirely.

    But Green argues this approach corrodes democratic legitimacy and public trust. When citizens are treated as audiences to manipulate rather than as participants in deliberation, the legitimacy crisis that drives penal populism gets worse. The solution to public punitiveness isn’t better spin—it’s actual engagement that treats people as capable of weighing complex trade-offs when given real information.

    The US locks up too many people, especially too many Black and brown people. Voters currently reward politicians who do that. Maybe that changes when we stop gaming the message and start being honest about what we know.

    Drowning in the River Parable: Our Favorite Public Health Story is a Noble Lie

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    Most people know the story: Tom and Joe are fishing on a boat in the middle of the river, when they spot a baby floating past. Joe tosses his pole and jumps into the water to save the child, and Tom helps him back into the boat, checking on the infant. They’re rowing back to shore when they see two more babies floating downstream, so Joe jumps back into the water while Tom sprints away.

    Joe grabs the children and then turns back to Tom, shouting, “Where are you going, you idiot? Help me with these kids!”

    Tom shouts over his shoulder: “I’m going to find the maniac chucking babies into the river!”

    You can get a laugh with the right delivery—”maniac chucking babies” has lots of hard /k/ sounds and that’s inherently funny. But the “going upstream” story isn’t really a joke. It’s an argument dressed as a parable, with contested premises and a tidy conclusion: we should address root causes, not just emergencies. The story circulates through public health conferences, activist trainings, policy workshops, and criminal justice seminars like a benediction: go upstream, find the source, put yourself out of a job.

    These are my people, so of course I enjoy the story. But when you hear it often enough, you start to notice things. In most tellings, the story is about making non-heroic things feel more heroic. Joe saves the children—clearly heroic. But Tom’s heroism happens offscreen—we’re meant to imagine him wrestling some psycho to the ground and preventing future drownings. Both men are heroes, just different kinds. This equivalence matters to the advocates, policy wonks, and public health workers hearing the story, whose version of Tom’s upstream heroics involves writing grants, organizing campaigns, drafting legislation, or sitting through interminable meetings hoping for three minutes at the microphone to nudge policy incrementally forward. This work rarely feels heroic, but the story insists: Tom and Joe are both part of the solution, both heroes in their own ways.

    That’s why the argumentative structure stands out. The parable only works because Joe manages to save every child. When Tom leaves, no one is drowning. Reality rarely offers such tidy arithmetic. The frontline need almost always exceeds capacity, making upstream work feel like abandonment. Imagine the story with children still rushing past, gasping and drowning, while Tom sprints away to search for causes. That’s closer to how these decisions actually feel.

    The babies aren’t just metaphors: a former student of mine died recently. I did what downstream workers do: drove her to the police station—twice—to report abuse. Helped her find safe housing. Loaned money she couldn’t repay. Listened. Counseled. Hoped. My colleagues threw their own lines too, tried to pull her free of the river. None of it was enough. The tragedies kept finding her until the last one didn’t let go. So imagine the story again, but Joe stays in the water for more than a decade, and misses as many babies as he saves. Maybe that’s why we keep telling these “upstream/downstream” stories: because the alternative is admitting what actually happens to the babies.

    My work now is definitely upstream work. It’s satisfying in its own way—not least because so much of it is writing work. The people with whom I collaborate are heroic, the challenges are interesting, and the details suit my nerdy bent.

    But the river story assumes Tom knows exactly where to run. No five-year PhD program to identify which tributary harbors the villain. No chance Tom will devote his life to an upstream intervention that proves worthless or actively harmful. No unintended consequences exist in this world—though what would that even look like? Tom accidentally helping the villain find more victims? Maybe not quite—but it’s easy to imagine that Tom’s carefully brokered upstream solution may well require the babies’ mothers to attend workshops on “parenting skills.”

    Upstream work is rife with unintended consequences. Well-meaning advocates for abstinence-only education promote a policy that the evidence suggests will worsen children’s sexual health, leading to more sex, earlier, that’s less safe. It’s painful to acknowledge—easier to assume malice than accept that good intentions can produce harm.

    The seductive simplicity of the upstream story makes it perfect for any political perspective. Recast the river as the Rio Grande, make the fishermen Border Patrol, blame the cartels. Change it again: does rent control decrease housing supply? Do some NIMBYs cause gentrification while fighting it? The world forces tradeoffs, but we can ignore that when we’re sprinting upstream to address our chosen tragedy.

    These examples will rankle readers across the political spectrum—but that’s beside the point. I want to focus on the issues raised by story structure itself. Whatever your ideology, the upstream story works because everyone can cast themselves as Tom or Joe, the smart one who sees the “root” problem, or the empathic one who refuses to ignore the needs of the real people suffering in front of them. Head, or heart? Either way you’re a hero.

    Both Tom and Joe are trapped in impossible roles. Yet J.D. Salinger lampooned Joe’s trap decades ago in a book we all read in middle school:

    “I keep picturing all these little kids playing some game in this big field of rye and all. Thousands of little kids, and nobody’s around—nobody big, I mean—except me. And I’m standing on the edge of some crazy cliff. What I have to do, I have to catch everybody if they start to go over the cliff—I mean if they’re running and they don’t look where they’re going I have to come out from somewhere and catch them.”

    Holden Caulfield’s fantasy is pure Joe—an endless, impossible vigil at the cliff’s edge. On Salinger’s telling, it comes off a bit naive, an obsession with the pure victim, the complete innocence and authenticity of childhood that ignores all the complexity with which system-tinkering Toms are forced to wrangle. Unlike the river with its upstream perpetrator, the field of rye doesn’t need a catcher at all; it needs someone to fence off the cliff.

    The story also erases race, gender, and class. In reality the large majority doing Tom’s job are white women, and the large majority doing Joe’s job are women of color, especially Black women. And the babies—the victims and clients? Almost always Black and brown, and always poor.

    Go to any social services office, any emergency room, any homeless shelter. Who’s behind the desk doing intake? Who’s restraining the violent client? Who’s helping them navigate their housing options? Now go to any foundation, any policy institute, any legislative hearing. Who’s presenting the PowerPoints? Who’s writing the white papers? Who’s deciding which upstream interventions deserve funding?

    The parable pretends Tom and Joe just happened to be fishing when babies floated by. Could it be that Joe’s neighborhood is downstream because Tom’s neighborhood votes to keep the toxic waste facilities, the highways, the flood zones somewhere else? You might worry that Tom is careful not to look too close to home.

    The story’s most notable premise: victims are infants—completely innocent, completely helpless. They can’t drag Joe down with them. They can’t get angry when they notice Tom’s glitzy contracts from the lifeguards’ advocacy group, can’t accuse him of “coming to do good, but staying to do well.”

    They also can’t help with their own rescue. Imagine adult victims: they’d join the rescue efforts, tell Tom where to look for causes, organize their own upstream interventions. But babies can only float and cry.

    The story circulates at conferences because people patting themselves on the back for being Tom secretly wish they were Joe. Joe’s job seems simple—save the babies. Frontline workers get lip service and cheap talk about being heroes. But upstream folks have fancier titles, better pay, more control over resources. Meanwhile, the Joes are burning out, loaded with trauma and unpaid overtime.

    The problem that the parable addresses is that the quotidian work of advocacy often feels inadequate. Every policy director wants to be Tom, finding and stopping the source of harms. Every social worker wants to be Joe, directly saving lives. This isn’t to say the upstream/downstream framework has been useless. Childhood lead poisoning rates plummeted because upstream advocates pushed for unleaded gasoline and paint regulations. Drunk driving deaths dropped when the focus shifted from rescuing crash victims to changing social norms and laws. Vaccine programs prevented millions from ever approaching the river’s edge. These victories matter.

    But notice how these successes involve clear mechanisms: remove lead from paint, reduce poisoning. Mandate seatbelts, prevent ejections. The villain really was throwing babies in the river, and we really could stop him. The parable works when the problem is technical. It fails when the problem is poverty, racism, trauma—the compound fractures of injustice that don’t heal with a single intervention.

    Usually there’s a proximate villain, an opposing coalition who stands between us and the root causes—but when they’ve been defeated the problems persist. Building slightly better guardrails, teaching swimming lessons, arguing about river regulations—it’s not exciting stuff. We’re doing work that’s incremental, frustrating, and impossible to capture in a satisfying story. It involves compromise and dirty hands. The big boss is always some concept or abstraction: Capitalism or Whiteness or Sin or Socialism.

    Here’s what I worry: what if many of the world’s hardest problems don’t have maniacs at their source, just complex systems failing in predictable ways? What if the reforms we propose will improve but not abolish the situation? What if there’s no villain to wrestle, no single cliff to guard?

    Heroic journeys promise a big save at the end. Would that it were so: mostly we just muddle forward.

    Pragmatism, Pluralism, and Relativism

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    Many people are fleeing social media, and my friend James Stanescu is trying to bring back blogging in response. He has an excellent post summarizing some of the differences between the pragmatisms of William James and C.S. Peirce. (I’ll call them “James” and “Scu” here for clarity.) Scu is drawing especially on Cheryl Misak’s capsule history, which itself is worth a read for reinvigorating the study of folks like Chauncey Wright and C.I. Lewis.

    Peirce and James fought over the proper definition of pragmatism, as well as the term itself, but the simplest shared sense of the project is that truth and meaning are tied to use and inquiry. But Peirce emphasized inquiry, and James use, and that has made all the difference:

    Peirce: “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real. That is the way I would explain reality.”

    James: “The true is the name of whatever proves itself to be good in the way of belief, and good, too, for definite assignable reasons.”

    I’m thoroughly with Peirce on this. But for Scu, ever the debater, this post is an occasion to also pick a fight with Peirceans on behalf of James:

    Against Peirce’s metaphysical deflation, James gives us a metaphysical plenum. Pragmatism, for James, means living in a world that is disenchanted, re-enchanted, never disenchanted, never enchanted all at once. It means living in a world of scientific rationality and base materialism alongside the energies of God, all the Gods, things older than Gods, and beings that are yet-to-come. Horkheimer’s critique turns out to have some weight, James’ pragmatism makes the world both too subjective and too objective, both too rational and too mystical. 

    My sense is that Peirce is not really a metaphysical deflationist like the logical positivists. For one thing he spins up a very complicated system of triadic relationships as categories or conceptual schema, and for another thing, he was some sort of pan-psychist. That said, he was at base a Monist (THE Monist) and so in some very, very specific sense he’s more a deflationist than, say, substance dualists. But not really like the logical positivists or scientistic materialists would be. Still, his monism is in stark contrast with the pluralism of William James.

    To suck the nuance out of these debates, it helps to wonder: to what extent is pragmatism relativistic? I think neither James nor Peirce are truly relativists, and I find the Rortyan shrug as irritating as everyone else did. But Williams James was… an enthusiast. He sometimes let himself write and say things that smacked of relativism–more in line with his radical empiricism than his pragmatism, to be honest–and some of his adherents have taken this too far.

    Scu was partly provoked into writing this up by Patricia Lockwood’s review essay on Simon Critchley’s mysticism book. It’s one of those wonderful takedowns that shows off the reviewer’s erudition at the expense of the author:

    …as the inquiry wore on I began to experience a hysterical sympathy: there was such a rhythm of anxious restatement, so much of Critchley telling you what he was about to do and then not doing it, such endless throat-clearing and adjectival gooeyness and such a tendency for his mind to explode whenever he encountered a juxtaposition like ‘the ravishing far-near’.

    It seems that it’s a philosopher’s job to say every word three times, its opposite twice and then the original word again, italicised. 

    I loved the review, too, and so I guess she’s provoked us both. I’ve also spent more than a little time dabbling with mystic texts and traditions, and so I sometimes flirt with the academic study of the same–even though I can’t for the life of me find much value in it. There’s some kind of performative contradiction in studying such things.

    Now, I think Scu’s post captures where I get off the bus with the Jamesean tradition–in both pragmatism and mystics. (While appreciating James’ psychology and his religious sociology all the more!) Ineffable spiritual traditions are fun to play around with, but the manifold claims of all the alternative practices that academics group together under that label can’t all be true! Most of them have to be false because they contradict each other, and I’m not impressed by efforts to embrace contradiction as some kind of deep logical wisdom. “Ah, yes, well after Gödel we must understand that contradiction exposes a deeper truth!” Sigh.

    Here’s Scu again:

    James’ system of verification and validation allows for a multiple ways of verifying something. If there are many processes that can arrive at different answers about if something is true, and there is no way to put these processes in some sort of hierarchy, we have utterly exploded the metaphysical possibilities of the world. We have therefore a multiverse, a pluriverse, a pluralistic universe (to use some of James’ terms). The world is, as James puts it, “ultra-Gothic.” 

    The line I hate most here is “there is no way to put these processes in some sort of hierarchy,” such that–as he goes on to explain–aesthetic and scientific modes of determining truth are unable to correct each other but are instead equally true.

    Whenever I sit with relativists, I find that two things seem to be true of their position:

    1. They really want to preserve space for pluralism, and so their relativism is a usually a species of liberal toleration with some metaphysical baggage they’re not really willing to embrace. Sometimes they’re also motivated by fear of error: a wise caution to which they grant an unwise metaphysical status.
    2. They don’t really care what this costs people for whom the principle of a fixed, shared reality is a hard–fought and oft-missed goal: victims of false confessions or lying witnesses, citizens of tyrannical regimes with flimsy propaganda, mentally-ill individuals trying to sort out their delusions and hallucinations from the truth, eager scientists seeking truth amidst fraud, etc.

    I know it seems arrogant to say “actually, your heart is not being pierced by the nails from Christ’s cross, you’re just hallucinating real good,” but that’s my position! And in some sense Scu himself recognizes that this kind of relativism/pluralism of “no actually lots of contradictory things are true” runs into its own arrogance problems. His own work depends on the idea that the exclusion of alternative forms of experience leads to error and, in fact, to evil! For instance, there are true claims to be verified about animal cruelty that a thoroughgoing relativist would be tempted to ignore because so few people are really interested in them. But I maintain that genteel relativism is an attempt to one-up folks just trying to make sense of our shared world by saying that actually we don’t need to share it at all: everyone gets their own.

    For the things that matter, like fascism or climate change, that’s not really true. It’d be nice if the folks who don’t believe in global warming weren’t polluting the same world as the folks who do, but the tragedy of existence–and its joy!–is that we must share one world. No one sane and good is ever a relativist or a (Jamesean) pragmatist about criminal guilt or innocence, about child abuse and the Satanic panic, or about vaccines. Relativism is always reserved for some other stuff that’s off to the side, like whether a particular artwork is beautiful.

    (Scu cites Kandinsky’s aesthetics here, right on cue: K: “It is also exclusively from this inner standpoint that one must answer the question whether the work is good or bad.” Which Scu glosses: “Kandinsky’s truth is every bit as true as any logical inquiry.”) It strikes me that we built aesthetics precisely to get such truly relativistic judgments out of the way for science and ethics and ontology.

    Now, I say that as someone who really loves pluralistic work. I also love fiction, even science-fiction and fantasy! I want to inhabit a political world where plural life-worlds and sources of meaning can flourish, where people are constantly inventing and imagining something other than the pure scientific truth.

    I’m also more than happy to acknowledge that the technocratic liberal reality principle tends to its own abuses: in a world of deepfakes and misinformation, fact-checking can go too far. We can be overconfident and “correct” a true claim by reasserting an error, or a value as a fact. In that sense, I think that fallibilism is just as important as pluralism, and that fallibilism requires a reality principle to which we can return, reconsider, and correct ourselves or be corrected by others. A relativistic world is one with few reasons to change your mind!

    That’s why I say that, practiced badly, Jamesean pagmatism tends towards a kind of solipsistic arrogance: if every relation with the world bears its own form of verification from which there is no hierarchy, corrective, or escape, then there’s no outside from which to hear criticism and reconsider, either. Deliberation, doubt, critical reflection, and reconsideration are all missing!

    It’s worth noting, here, that Scu’s Jamesean pragmatism is in service of his radical/weird empiricism, and ultimately a challenge to anthropocentrism:

    Radical empiricism affirms the realness of relations. 

    Weird empiricism sees how these principles opens up a strange, bizarre, yes weird, pluriverse. One that can bring in the more than human world. Weird empiricism both sees the reality of our relationship to the more than human world (our relationship to other animals, but also ghosts, the sacred, imagined geographies, the dead and the undying). But also weird empiricism takes seriously the experience of the more than human world. That is, we can understand that other animals have a stake in claims of the truth because they can experience just as well as human. Though their truths may be alter than ours–weird truths from weird worlds.

    And that idea, that animals have experiences that can act as a corrective to our epistemic and practical domination of them, strikes me as requiring fallibilism and ultimately undermining relativism. So I think what Scu says makes it clear that the terms of that pluralism can’t be metaphysical or ontological. I, too, want to enable as many compatible life-worlds as are mutually compatible! But there’s a ground truth out there that makes those shared horizons possible.

    Flaubert’s “Be Regular and Ordinary” Quote

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    The internet can sometimes disappoint you, but sometimes it can be so very, very satisfying. When you’re quote-hunting these days, it’s usually just a disappointment. For instance: I have long loved a quotation from Gustave Flaubert that is translated as follows:

    “Be regular and ordinary in your life, so you can be violent and original in your work.”

    Supposedly Philip Roth had it pinned above his desk, or maybe that’s just what Geoffrey Braithwaite did in Flaubert’s Parrot. But while you can find this in various books of quotation, the source is rarely mentioned. It’s not from Madame Bovary, and it doesn’t really feel like something Flaubert would have one of his characters say, exactly. In the few cases it’s mentioned, it’s attributed to a letter written to Gertrude Tennant, a salonnière and grand dame of the time, dated December 25, 1876. That’s from a period in his life when the correspondence isn’t widely available, at least in English. But where is the letter? A quick Google search suggests that others have tried and failed to hunt it down.

    But with a letter like this, there must be an archive somewhere, right? Several biographers mention it. As it turns out, that archive is now entirely online, and at the prompting of Kate Norlock I was able to hunt down this specific letter in short order! Google didn’t want to cough it up.

    Here is a link to the entire letter. (In French, obviously!)

    Perhaps most exciting, beyond confirming the quote is indeed Flaubert’s, is getting the context and the exact French, for re-translation.

    “Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois, afin d’être violent et original dans vos œuvres.”

    Advising Tennant on her son’s adventures in Paris, Flaubert suggests that she needn’t worry about the temptations and distractions there:

    “You’re right that sensible people tend to do crazy things. The most serious eccentricities are the product of judicious people, or those who pass for having good judgement. That’s why there aren’t actors in prison… that profession is an outlet for their insanity. So here is an aesthetic principle (I bring everything everything back to my profession, you see), a rule for artists: ‘Be regulated in your life, and boringly bourgeois, so that your art can be violent and original.’ As for your son, I get why you’re worried about Paris, but I think your concerns are exaggerated. Anybody can lose their way! Nobody is ever tempted; we tempt ourselves.” (my translation)

    I still think this is a great quote! I’m reminded of another Frenchman, Michel Foucault, who we tend to think of as a bit of a queer icon who spent lots of time in bathhouses and sex dungeons, but who actually spent the vast majority of his life in archives pouring over manuscripts and writing and lecturing. In short, his work is so important not because of his debaucheries but because of his boringly middleclass work ethic! (The internet archives of today would have given him more time for other pleasures, surely, but I wonder if that would have been more disappointing that exciting for him. Probably he’d just be trolling folks on Twitter.)

    Indeed, having been childhood friends and briefly reunited in their late adulthood after Tennant’s husband died—during which time he wrote this letter—Flaubert and Tennant never saw each other again. Flaubert poured out his heart and considerable ardor to a pretty girl he used to know, and that was the end of it. I guess he kept all that passion bottled up for the work? Tennant came to be known primarily through her editions of his correspondence, in which she included only a few of the least flirtatious letter, suppressing her own insights and brilliance to celebrate the artists, politicians, and intellectuals who were drawn to her. But she lived a grand life and is rightly being celebrated now. (Tennant had an interesting biography written about her in 2009, as is fitting.)

    Here’s the rest of the letter. The famous quotation is on pages two and three:

    Semantic Insatiability and Logophilic Etymologies

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    Most people know the experience of saying a word over and over again until it loses its meaning and becomes a sound: this experience is called “semantic satiation.”

    But what about the opposite experience? Can you puzzle over a word until it gains meanings? Can we re-saturate meanings? Can we make words resilient against this kind of loss? Call this semantic insatiability: a technique for bolstering an idea against the exhaustion of its meaning.

    Here’s a literal example: Gertrude Stein’s “Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose.” She liked to say that the goal of that line was to steal roses back for poets to use again, to strip all the semantic goop of romance off of the flower. “I think in that line the rose is red for the first time in English poetry for a hundred years.” To make it useable again merely as a flower, to accrue new meanings, connotations, and implications.

    If you read her poem Sacred Emily where this line appears, her claim becomes a lot less plausible–like most of her poetry, it reads like logorrhea, and the phrase is lost in a sea of repetitive noise. (Her poetic explanations tend to confirm this view.) I don’t like the poetry, but I like the claim. It suits my purposes even if it seems both false in context and is certainly wrong as a matter of causality. (“Sacred Emily” was published in 1913 and in 2024 the Society of American Florists estimated that we’d send 250 million roses domestically. If the poet really tried to save roses from their cultural baggage, she failed.)

    Some people who love stories also love poetry. Some don’t. I love both narratives and the words, sentences, and paragraphs that help to build them. And so I want to talk about how I, personally, try to reverse semantic satiation–how I re-saturate semantics at this level.

    Contronyms Resist Semantic Saturation

    Consider the contronym (a word that is also its antonym). “Fast” can mean both “stable” (hold fast!) and “quick,” “sanction” can mean both “punish” and “authorize.” And as you’re messing around with these words trying them out in different sentences, semantic satiation might set in–it all starts feeling like gibberish. If you spend some time with the Oxford English Dictionary (or the Online Etymology Dictionary for folks without academic library access) though, you’ll learn a lot about how the meanings diverged, and at least in my experience, the ordinary usage meanings and distinctions will re-emerge. “Fast” began in Old English as “constant, secure, or watertight.” We can still hear that sense in “steadfast” and similar terms. But then we don’t know precisely how we got to the speedy sense of the word: perhaps from Old Norse/Scandinavian: “fast” could mean firmly (unmoving) but that sense of “strength” gets applied as an adjective to standing and holding, and then from there to fighting, drinking, or even running. To run firmly (telja fast in Scandinavian) then implies quick movement. Other things are quick by analogy.

    Is that how it happened? Or did it come “fast” meaning “nearby, to hand, immediate”? “Stay fast by my side!” Then somehow from “nearby” to “immediately” to “quickly”?

    What I want to note is how we don’t tend to trip over semantic satiation as we explore contronyms. Puzzling this out doesn’t exhaust the word’s meaning the way ordinary repetition might. I suspect this is because we’re often contextually cluing the varied meanings: tracing the linguistic origins and carefully noting the different senses of the word in different contexts can actually restore what mere repetition has depleted. I think this is one of the secret gifts of studying the languages from which English is derived, as well: by learning Latin, French, or Spanish; Greek, German, or Sanskrit, you get a deeper sense of the ways your own language is put together.

    Semantic Satiation and Linguistic Determinism

    Consider another contronym: if you don’t want to make an oversight, you may need oversight. The term indicates both the mistake and a technique for mistake prevention. And it doesn’t stop there: it helps for someone to look over your work so you don’t overlook something important. If you dig into these incorrect/correction pairings, it’s not clear which came first, etymologically: the error or the editor. And as you’re digging, you come to see that English has quite a lot of words for watching someone from above: survey, surveillance, supervisor, superintendent, overseer, overwatch, watch over, etc. English has lots of words, period, but it seems like it especially has a lot of hierarchical words for watching someone else work!

    Does this tell us something about Anglophone culture? Is this like having lots of words for snow (and the attendant Sapir-Whorf theories of cultural determinism and linguistic relativity) an indicator that hierarchy, bureaucracy, or even colonization and enslavement have such deep roots in our history that they’ve found lots of different expressions over time?

    I used to think that the Sapir-Whorf theory had been falsified, but it’s more that it’s always been ambiguous between two different versions: that (a) language provides the medium for thought and thus (b) affordances and resistances. It’s clear that we often think in words, and thus if there’s no word for an idea there will be some difficulty in thinking it. But what happens then? Perhaps the thought is defied and goes unthought, we stutter and give it up. Perhaps we misuse another word. Perhaps we create a neologism. And perhaps we use poetic language to eff the ineffable with metaphor and simile.

    My sense is that Benjamin Whorf, at least, thought we couldn’t understand the sheer variety of the world if our language didn’t give us the tools. A language that lacked some term would be spoken by a group that couldn’t grasp the attendant concept. You hear examples occasionally: did the ancient Greeks lack a word for “blue”? Why did Homer call the sea “wine-dark”? Did he lack the ability to see its true color? Is there really an Amazonian tribe that lacks number terms beyond “one, two, and many“? How does that work? This is empirically testable, though, and while there’s some evidence for the mathematical incapacity of the Piraha there’s fairly clear counter-evidence on color: at best we perceive different colors a bit more quickly when we have a color term to match them. (It’s too bad, really, that we have managed to empirically disenchant this fanciful view that inhabitants of the ancient world look out on vistas with utterly different eyes.)

    Is there anything left of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis worth crediting? On one version of Whorf’s view, a language will gradually develop to capture distinctions and ideas that are especially relevant to its speakers. In short: if you don’t live in a highly hierarchical world, you won’t understand all the ways that bosses can come to be relevant to your life and your language won’t give you those tools. Meanwhile, if you’re surrounded by snow from a young age, and your culture and history have been built up around snow for generations, your language will give you the concepts to see how many different ways snow can be.

    We have the same word for falling snow, snow on the ground, snow packed hard like ice, slushy snow, wind-driven flying snow — whatever the situation may be. To an Eskimo, this all-inclusive word would be almost unthinkable; he would say that falling snow, slushy snow, and so on, are sensuously and operationally different, different things to contend with; he uses different words for them and for other kinds of snow. The Aztecs go even farther than we in the opposite direction, with ‘cold,’ ‘ice,’ and ‘snow’ all represented by the same basic word with different terminations; ‘ice’ is the noun form; ‘cold,’ the adjectival form; and for ‘snow,’ “ice mist.”

    Whorf, Benjamin Lee. “Science and linguistics,” Technology Review (MIT) 42, no. 6 (April 1940).

    Another fun recent example is the observation that the English language has an absolutely gob-smacking number of words for being intoxicated by alcohol. As Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer and Peter Uhrig recently detailed, there are at least 546 synonyms for the word “drunk”!

    A meaningful argument structure construction without any lexical content might be available to speakers, but we conjecture that additional contextual cues as to the topic of drunkenness will be needed to successfully use this construction, the most prototypical form of which is

    be/get + intensifying premodifier + -ed-form.

    Coming back to the theoretical questions asked at the end of Section 2, we can say that the wide range of words observed in the already existing lists of drunkonyms seems to support the view that there is a large amount of words that one could potentially use to creatively express drunkenness in English. The wording “any word” put forward by McIntyre appears slightly too general, though, as it is difficult to imagine words such as is, the or of to mean ‘drunk’. Also, for nouns such as carpark or gazebo, it is strictly speaking not the word itself but an -ed-form of it, i.e. carparked or gazeboed, that expresses the meaning of drunkenness in the relevant contexts.

    Sanchez-Stockhammer, Christina and Uhrig, Peter. ““I’m gonna get totally and utterly X-ed.” Constructing drunkenness” Yearbook of the German Cognitive Linguistics Association 11, no. 1 (2023): 121-150. https://doi.org/10.1515/gcla-2023-0007

    What is it about the Anglophone world that makes it so necessary to express drunkenness? Anglophone countries aren’t the top alcohol consumers, for instance. Nor do we have the most binge drinking. Yet somehow we talk about it with more variety and creativity, which is more evidence agaisnt the stronger versions of Whorf’s claims.

    Most people are at least a little bit tempted by Sapir-Whorf just because it seems like it can’t be totally irrelevant to your experience that your first language has or lacks some concept or prioritizes or deprioritizes some structure. But since language comes alongside membership in a community, and communities are often pretty internally diverse, this gets caught up with the same old problems of strong cultural relativism. It’s at most an influence, not a determination–unless the determinants aren’t simple things like which words (and thus concepts) you have, but rather what kinds of grammatical structures it allows.

    Philology and Logophilia

    Here is where I wish there was more appreciation for Friedrich Nietzche’s philology than his philosophy. One of his major insights is that the concepts crystalized in our language often radically diverge from their origins, which I think makes the strong version of Whorf’s claims seem obviously wrong: there can’t be linguistic determinism if we’re constantly re-appropriating language for new purposes and forgetting its origins. (Even the “drunkenness” formations are evidence of this: there is very little of the “gazebo” left in our understanding of what is happening to the drunken undergraduate who describes himself as “being utterly gazeboed.”

    Nietzsche delighted in the ways that phonemes diverge from morphemes. He even suggested that our forgetfulness about the origins of our language was part of its power, and how we resisted sedimentation–even as some survivals dangerously persist. So I get to drop my favorite line again here. Describing truth, which might be a quality that some words and concepts aspire to, he explains that it is:

    A mobile army of metaphors, metonyms, and anthropomorphisms—in short, a sum of human relations which have been enhanced, transposed, and embellished poetically and rhetorically, and which after long use seem firm, canonical, and obligatory to a people: truths are illusions about which one has forgotten that this is what they are; metaphors which are worn out and without sensuous power; coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal, no longer as coins.

    Friedrich Nietzsche, “On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense“

    I love the image of the philologist as numismatist, collecting old coins and discerning and perhaps repairing them to their original form. This is to say that Nietzsche’s genealogical practice was itself a kind of semantic re-saturation. His major works often pursue one or another concept through a historical and genealogical line not to restore an origin but to celebrate possibilities. You can’t think about “guilt” without thinking about “debts” after you read the Genealogy of Morals. Arguably some of his other efforts in this regard are less effective, but he was certainly trying to make us think differently and more fully when we hear cliched invocations of good and evil; faith and God; power and authority; creativity and individuality; pity and compassion; truth and honesty. Some of what he does is induce semantic satiation and then offer to re-saturate those meanings anew (and with his own preferred valences attached.) That particular effort has been one of the reasons that academic philosophers continue to read him, though it’s prone to embarrassing misuse!

    So what?

    Say all this is true:

    • repetition depletes meaning
    • linguistic puzzles resist this depletion
    • studying the origins of ideas can grant them a new lease on life
    • we’re not bound to those origins
    • we constantly engaged in creative rearrangements of our linguistic affordances.

    What then?

    It certainly seems like we’re entering a particularly dangerous period where a lot of text is being generated mechanically (ironically unlike Stein’s poetry). Emily Bender calls large language models “stochastic parrots.” We are approaching the zeitgeist of semantic saturation, and we’re going to have to work hard just to hold on to meaningfulness. (Probably we always have to do that kind of work, but it’s more obvious now.) In professional philosophy, we’ve seen the growth of normatively inflected “conceptual engineering” and “ameliorative analysis,” where conceptual analysis is being used to assert nakedly political projects, laying bare the ways that the very meanings of our words is subject to wrangling and contestation. In some future posts, I’d like to try to think both those trends together, perhaps via Heidegger’s frustratingly fascist etymological approach.

    (Thank to my friend Michael Willems for discussions on this topic.)