Jordan Peterson is not known primarily for his work as a scientist. Instead, much of the popular attention paid to him is filtered through the lens of politics, which is unfortunate. Though I must admit that I discovered him through Youtube as many other have. However, in addition to his recorded lectures and speeches, his interviews, and his most recent publication, he is also an accomplished clinical psychologist and professor of Psychology, in the past at Harvard and now at the University of Toronto. Even I was surprised when I realized his first book, Maps of Meaning: The Architecture of Belief, would be relevant to my own research.
I plan to focus primarily on the first chapter, and perhaps exclusively so. This is mainly because I am not interested in myth the way that Peterson is and, in fact, will recast much of his language about myth as meaning in terms of commonsense as meaning.
Maps of Experience: Object and Meaning
Most helpfully, he prefaces each chapter with a concise summary of the argument therein. Chapter 1 begins this way:
The world can be validly construed as forum for action, or as place of things.
The former manner of interpretation – more primordial, and less clearly understood – finds its expression in the arts or humanities, in ritual, drama, literature and mythology. The world as forum of action is a place of value, a place where all things have meaning. This meaning, which is shaped as a consequence of social interaction, is implication for action, or – at a higher level of analysis – implication for the configuration of the interpretative schema that produces or guides action.
The latter manner of interpretation – the world as place of things – finds its formal expression in the methods and theories of science. Science allows for increasingly precise determination of the consensually validatable properties of things, and for efficient utilization of precisely determined things as tools (once the direction such use is to take has been determined, through application of more fundamental narrative processes).
No complete world-picture can be generated without use of both modes of construal. The fact that one mode is generally set at odds with the other means only that the nature of their respective domains remains insufficiently discriminated. Adherents of the mythological worldview tend to regard the statements of their creeds as indistinguishable from empirical “fact,” even though such statements were generally formulated long before the notion of objective reality emerged. Those who, by contrast, accept the scientific perspective – who assume that it is, or might become, complete – forget that an impassible gulf currently divides what is from what should be. (1)
I am most interested in Peterson’s claim that “the fact that one mode is generally set at odds with the other means only that the nature of their respective domains remains insufficiently discriminated.” I accept his division between the world construed as a forum for action, or a place of things, but I wonder whether the forum is best called “the mythological worldview.” Peterson equates this mythological construal with value and meaning and, therefore, with narrative as the vehicle through which we identify value and meaning in a social context.
Additionally, he provides an epistemic blueprint (in poetic form) for his investigation, but also for all human orientation towards living:
We need to know four things:
what there is,
what to do about what there is,
that there is a difference between knowing what there is, and know-
ing what to do about what there is
and what that difference is. (2)
Lonergan distinguishes between elementary knowing and fully human knowing, and there are hints of something like this distinction in Peterson’s understanding. Lonergan’s elementary knowing roughly maps onto Aristotle’s knowing how and knowing that. Or, in an even less precise match, the distinction resembles Bertrand Russell’s knowledge by acquaintance and knowledge by description. But, it is less important to reconcile the mappings of various distinctions than it is to acknowledge that there are good reasons for making such distinctions at all.
Peterson associates the natural, or pre-experimental, or mythical mind with “basic” or “sufficient” knowledge.
To explore something, to “discover what it is” – that means most importantly to discover its significance for motor output, within a particular social context, and only more particularly to determine its precise objective sensory or material nature. This is knowledge in the most basic of senses – and often constitutes sufficient knowledge…
The empirical object might be regarded as those sensory properties “intrinsic” to the object. The status of the object, by contrast, consists of its meaning – consists in its implication for behavior…
Everything is something, and means something – and the distinction between essence and significance is not necessarily drawn… For people operating naturally, like [a] child, what something signifies is more or less inextricably part of the thing… (3)
There is, then, a natural intermingling of what the object is and what the object means for everyday, commonsense experience. And the claim that this is the “natural” state of things is also a claim about how “unnatural” the scientific perspective is. I don’t use the term “unnatural” here as a pejorative, but it is a fact nonetheless that the scientific viewpoint is not the native viewpoint for humans.
Peterson characterizes the world of meaning as subjectively oriented:
The automatic attribution of meaning to things – or the failure to distinguish between them initially – is characteristic of narrative, of myth, not of scientific thought… Things are scary, people are irritating, events are promising, food is satisfying – at least in terms of our basic experience… We fall under the spell of experience whenever we attribute our frustration, aggression, devotion or lust to the person or situation that exists as the proximal “cause” of such agitation. We are not yet “objective,”…
The “natural,” pre-experiemental, or mythical mind is in fact primarily concerned with meaning – which is essentially implication for action – and not with “objective” nature… For the pre-experimentalist, the thing is most truly the significance of its sensory properites, as they are experimented in subjective experience – in affect, or emotion. (4)
The subject/object distinction is weighted down by centuries of epistemological and metaphysical baggage, so I don’t want to get hung up on those particular terms. By meanings and sensory properties “in subjective experience,” Peterson is making a claim about how the world appears, or is described, in relation to us, as opposed to an “objective,” or scientific, rendering of the world. For Peterson, both of thses descriptions are necessary to understand the world, but are distinct.
[I]n truth – in real life – to know what something is still means to know two things about it: its motivational relevance, and the specific nature of its sensory qualities. The two forms of knowing are not identical; furthermore, experience and registration of the former necessarily precedes development of the latter. […] It has taken centuries of firm discipline and intellectual training, religious, proto-scientific and scientific, to produce a mind capable of concentrating on phenomena that are not yet or are no longer immediately intrinsically gripping – to produce a mind that regards real as something separable from relevant. (5)
In part, Peterson’s perspective is valuable because he is not a proponent of eliminating one construal of the world in terms of the other. Yes, the objects within the world as meaning could be explained in by a shift in perspective to the world as things, but that does not mean that the world as things could replace the world as meaning in human life or experience.
Peterson’s comment above about what the mind regards as real is reminiscent of his debate with Sam Harris over the nature of truth. I will say more about this in a moment, but I want to present some more of Peterson’s material before doing so.
Further discussion of the real in relation to myth and science comes after a long quote from Carl Jung on alchemy, from which I will spare you, but Peterson elucidates the different senses of real in his commentary on the passage:
The alchemist could not separate his subjective ideas about the nature of things – that is, his hypothesis – from the things themselves… Things, for the alchemical mind, were therefore characterized in large part by their moral nature – by their impact on what we would describe as affect, emotion or motivation; were therefore characterized by their relevance or value (which is impact on affect)…
It was the great feat of science to strip affect from perception, so to speak, and to allow for the description of experiences purely in terms of their consensually apprehensible features. However, it is the case that the affects generated by experiences are real, as well… [In science w]e have removed the affect from the thing, and can therefore brilliantly manipulate the thing. We are still victims, however, of the uncomprehended emotions generated by…the thing. (6)
Several points should be made:
- First, science is achieved, in part, by stripping out the affective, or subjective, elements of our experience. We abstract, or prescind, from some considerations in favor of others. As McGilchrist might describe it, we focus our attention on certain aspects of within our experience to the exclusion of others. Yet, Peterson is making the point that those affective elements of our experience still exist and are, therefore, still real. Despite the fact that affective considerations are irrelevant to their scientific description, being irrelevant should not be equated with being unreal.
- Second, since subjective experience of things is best described as things in relation to us, objective experience of things can be described as things in relations among themselves. The relations that things have among themselves are, in part, what is left once you strip away the affective, emotional, or subjective elements of experience.
- Third, it makes sense to speak of what is uniquely real or true from both of the above perspectives. There are things, or aspects of things, that one will consider real when regarding things in relation to us and, further, these things might not be regarded as real from the scientific perspective. And vis-a-versa.
The nature of the disagreement between Harris and Peterson hinges on this third point. To take an example from the sciences, Peterson made the following remark regarding the alchemist’s confusion of the subjective and objective: “It is precisely this fantastical contamination, however, that renders the alchemical description worth examining – not from the perspective of the history of science, concerned with the examination of outdated objective ideas, but from the perspective of psychology, focused on the interpretation of subjective frames of reference.” (7) For Peterson, as a psychologist, the subjective frames of reference are real objects that are worthy of investigation. For Harris, the neuroscientist, these subjective frames of reference do not have the same value; further, as someone concerned with reducing higher-order phenomenon to their neurological, and then quantum, elements, Harris does not even regard the subjective frames of reference as real, or at least not in the same way that Peterson does. Peterson is interested in the higher-order phenomenon. Determining precisely what is at stake when the various sciences have different senses of what is real is a fascinating question, and one which falls to philosophy, not to science itself.
But divergent senses of real is not only on display among the sciences. Commonsense and science also differ here. As Peterson points out, those affective elements of our experience are produced by specific aspects of things, or by things understood in relation to us according to particular contexts of social meaning. And it is precisely those affective and subjective elements and contexts that are stripped away when we move from our natural, everyday perspective to the scientific perspective. But those affective elements are constitutive of our everyday, commonsense experience of the world. One cannot eliminate those elements without also eliminating the practical and social purposes for which they exist.
Lastly, if real can have divergent senses when shifting from commonsense to science, then true can also have divergent senses. But, to anticipate a potential objection: I am not making relativist claims here. I am not claiming that we all have our own truth, or that truth is relative in some absolute sense, or that truth doesn’t really matter because truth can be said in many different ways. None of that is the case. Rather, I am only making the claim, which I take Peterson to be making as well, that what constitutes the truth will vary depending on the manner in which we construe the world. What counts as truth in psychology is different from what counts as truth in physics, or mathematics, or history, or literature, or in a court of law, or in commonsense. And, as with the differing senses of real, determining what to make of the fact that there are so many divergent senses of true is the domain of philosophy, not science.
Why Peterson?
Peterson is a figure who is immersed in a host of other projects and controversies, any one of which could serve to preclude his mention in a dissertation on the philosophy of science, so let me address that concern head on. The language of Peterson’s argument that we construe the world in two different ways develops the naturalistic position of James Ladyman and Don Ross (following Quine), who will be central figures in this project. In Every Thing Must Go, Ladyman and Ross make the case that man’s natural, habitual perspective was evolutionarily useful, but is epistemologically disastrous. There is much to agree with in their account, but I will cite the work of Peterson, as well as that of Jonathan Haidt, Daniel Kahneman, and Iain McGilchrist, to claim that Ladyman and Ross do not consider the epistemic import of our natural perspective deeply enough. Here is a representative example of their evolutionary epistemology:
Quine (1969), in arguing for the naturalization of epistemology, claimed that the evolutionary processes that designed people should have endowed us with cognition that reliably tracks truth, on the grounds that believing truth is in general more conducive to fitness than believing falsehood. This is an empirical hypothesis, and it may well be a sound one. However, it does not imply that our everyday or habitual intuitions and cognition are likely to track truths reliably across all domains on inquiry. We believe it to be probably that human intelligence, and the collective representational technologies (especially public languages) that constitute the basiss for what is most biologically special about that intelligence…evolved mainly to enable us to navigate complex social coordination games… People are probably also relatively reliable barometers of the behavioural patterns of animals they get to spend time observing, at making navigational inferences in certain sorts of environments (but not in others), and at anticipating aspects of the trajectories of medium-sized objects moving at medium speeds. However, proficiency in inferring the large-scale and small-scale structure of our immediate environment, or any features of parts of the universe distant from our ancestral stomping grounds, was of no relevance to our ancestors’ reproductive fitness. Hence, there is no reason to imagine that our habitual intuitions are inferential responses are well designed for science or for metaphysics. (8)
I agree with much of what is said here, but it is what goes unsaid throughout Every Thing Must Go that is worrisome. While Ladyman and Ross present a strong critique of any philosophy of science that fails to be thoroughly naturalistic (i.e. relies too heavily on our natural and habitual categories for organizing our experience of the world rather than our scientific ones), they offer almost no account of how science arises, or how our scientific perspective is distinguished from our natural perspective. Therefore, cognitive psychologists such as Peterson, Haidt, Kahneman, and McGilchrist, are important because they are concerned with precisely these distinctions. And, in fact, Peterson’s work more or less picks up precisely where Ladyman’s and Ross’s leaves off.
To sketch my broader strategy: the Positivists separated what they called the context of discovery from the context of justification. The context of discovery is the manner in which we create ideas while the context of justification is the means and methods by which we assess the logical coherence, veracity, or truth of those ideas we create. The Positivists did not think that any necessary link existed between these two contexts and, in fact, without such a separation, epistemology became confused and embroiled in tangential questions.
I, following Lonergan, will argue that the same cognitional structure underlies both the context of discovery and the context of justification. More specifically, the context of discovery and the context of justification seem to map onto different aspects of the phenomenon of insight as described by Lonergan. Lonergan makes this case through intentionality analysis, but the cognitive psychologists I’ve mentioned above make the same case empirically.
Notes:
(1) Jordan Peterson, Maps of Meaning, 1.
(2) ibid., 1-2.
(3) ibid., 2.
(4) ibid., 2-3.
(5) ibid., 3.
(6) ibid., 4-5.
(7) ibid., 4.
(8) James Ladyman and Don Ross, Every Thing Must Go, 2.
Dissertating Outloud 