Can You Be Wrong Aboout How Happy You Are?
I accept a more or less functionalist account of the mind, according to which mental states are individuated by their functional role in the economy of cognition and behavior. I also believe in the possibility of what is sometimes called the “Cartesian Fallacy,” the assumption that our own mental states are transparently accessible to consciousness. Functionalism together with anti-Cartsianism about introspective access imply that we may not know what words in our language mean, even if we use them correcly, and that we may have false beliefs about what we believe.
I’ve brought this up before in an earlier discussion of “meta-atheism,” [pdf] roughly the idea that people may sincerely believe they believe in God when they do not in fact. The disposition to avow a belief that P is neither necessary nor sufficient for believing that P. Actually believing P requires that one is generally disposed not only to say that one does, but that one is disposed to make certain inferences, to behave in certain ways, and more. This raises the possibilty that people may sincerely believe that they are happy or unhappy, when they actually aren’t.
It is hard to believe that one could make a mistake about whether one was in a state of pain, say. But happiness probably isn’t like that. If happiness is a complex, partly historically and socially constructed condition composed of dispositions to experience certain basic emotions and moods in a distinctive combination, togteher with dispositions to have certain thoughts, and to behave in certain ways, then it may be pretty plausible that we could just be wrong about whether we are happy, or about how happy we are.
I don’t think I want to press this view very hard, but it strikes me as a real possibility, and another reason why self-report is not the most promising technique of measurement.
November 22nd, 2006 01:29
It seems like you are confusing beliefs and qualia.
Or maybe you take them to be the same thing? Under the interpretation of “functionalism” you describe, I guess they could be just different species of “mental economy”.
Seems strange to say that happiness and the belief “I’m feeling happy” are the same thing. Which comes back to the argument at hand, whether happiness and the belief “I’m not happy” could coexist.
November 22nd, 2006 05:47
Thank you for reminding me why I gave up on grad school in philosophy. After yesterday’s abstract algebra exam (and today’s advanced calculus homework) I was pining for Aristotle. But Aristotle has left the building and all we’re left with is Merleau-Ponty crooning about “the other.” Speaking of happiness: “an activity of the soul in accordance with virtue” might be horribly naive, but it works for me.
November 22nd, 2006 11:33
Huh. On the one hand, you point to the historically contingent nature of happiness. On the other, you assert we might be wrong about self-ascriptions of happiness, which implies that there is a condition of happiness which is not being satisfied. Whether that is an objective condition or a historically condition condition circumscribed by the agent’s beliefs - some of which are false and self-delusional - you have yet to clarify. If it’s the latter, I would argue that you face a difficult task of cherrypicking the relevent beliefs.
I would piggyback on Moore and argue that there is an open-endedness to happiness.
November 22nd, 2006 12:31
So I was sitting in my cubicle today, and I realized, ever since I started working, every single day of my life has been worse than the day before it. So that means that every single day that you see me, that’s on the worst day of my life.
November 22nd, 2006 15:04
pal, Things can be BOTH historically conditioned AND objective. There may be, at any time, something that it really is to be happy, such that there’s a fact of the matter about whether someone is or not. At the same time, your belief about happiness may not correspond to your actual condition.
It’s an interesting question whether some of the beliefs that are partly constitutive of a historically happiness must be true or not. It seems perfectly possible that perhaps some of the beliefs that generally make up happiness must be false, or based in self-deception. In that case, part of what it is to be happy is to be self-deceived about certain things.
November 23rd, 2006 01:40
I’m actually surprised you can think it is conterintuitive. Maybe it’s because I’ve been bathing in Aristotle for too long.
First and most importantly, it’s an empirical fact. We can observe people who claim to be happy and yet evidently aren’t. Of course, if your happiness standard is the subject’s own standard, then you might think it’s more difficult, but even then, you can observe many people who are not happy by their own standard and claim they are anyway.
One’s belief that he his happy is very often motivated by reasons who have nothing to do with representation or cognition. A happy being generally has more authority when it comes to living styles. He becomes a model. On the contrary, a unhappy probably should change his life, which is painful on the short-term, and the result is not garanteed. Lying to oneself becomes a way to avoid the questioning whether it would be worth it to change lifestyle.
November 23rd, 2006 01:41
Actually, I’ve seen many christians or other people involved in some sect or spiritual movement claiming to be happy and acting it in order to convert people, yet they evidently were not.
November 24th, 2006 16:25
On introspection and privileged access to one’s thoughts, I’m almost convinced that I can fail to know what certain words mean, even given that I have thoughts that feature those words. I think that this is shown by the standard twin-earth thought experiments.
And I think you’re right to be skeptical that we can just tell introspectively how happy we are, in the same easy way that we can just tell introspectively whether or not we’re in pain. There’s much to say here; one thing is that it seems like our sense of how happy we are is influenced and often corrupted by things such as expectation effects and shifting standards and that these don’t apply to the pain case. But this too is disputable. Take the prank torture case. A guy believes that he’s going to be stuck in the back with a red hot poker; his anticipation is intense. Instead, they stick an ice cube on his back. And he yelps in pain, mistakenly thinking that he’s being burned.
Do self-reports of happiness measure something? Probably. But I’m not sure we know what they measure.
November 24th, 2006 20:18
Will –
Interesting point. Numerous psychological studies suggest that people are very bad at identifying why they do things so it seems plausible that a lot of our mental functions are compartmentalized in such a way as to block our own conscious access of them.
I wonder, though, whether this line of thought brings us back to a “revealed preference” formulation of happiness, where we infer mental states from dispositions to act. I think this is why the whole happiness survey idea was generated.
Interested to hear your thoughts on whether there is a middle ground…
DED
November 27th, 2006 00:27
Will,
One thing that strikes me as problematic with self-reporting is that ‘happiness’ is ambiguous, and, as someone interested in Aristotle (like some of the commenters above), I think an important ambiguity is between descriptive and evaluative senses of the term. If someone asks me if I’m happy, I don’t really know what’s being asked of me. Do I feel happy (right now, most of the time, etc.)? Am I happy with my life? Would I be happy with my life if I took the standpoint of an “ideal observer”?
I think your disanalogy with pain is good, especially if the relevant sense of ‘happiness’ has any significant evaluative (moral) weight. A villain might be happy with his life, but viewed from the outside, we might look at such a person (living within tightly secured walls, with bodyguards and food-tasters, no friends - think “the perfectly unjust man” from Plato’s Republic) and claim, “What an unhappy (sad) life!”
November 28th, 2006 17:21
Almost certainly correct. Seems related to a “Heisenberg” principle of psychology — the person you are when you are introspecting is not the same person as when you are interacting with the world. Hard to see in yourself, othen obvious with others.
December 2nd, 2006 15:08
[...] Will Wilkinson writes: [...]
December 10th, 2006 08:35
Suppose you model happiness as a stochastic process H(t) (assume H is a scalar for now).
I think that a profitable viewpoint on this is to regard a self-report of happiness to be a (noisy) sample at time t.
In this manner you could be “wrong” about your happiness if that sample was not strongly correlated with your self-reports at nearby points in time (i.e. if that report was an outlier).
If however you performed repeated measurements and kept seeing the same self-reported happiness numbers cropping up, the only way there could be an error is if there was a disconnect between your reported happiness and your biochemical happiness.
As an experimentalist, to control for this what you might do is measure a huge number of people and build up a regression function relating underlying biochemical happiness to reported happiness. Then take biochemical measurements on people, which are much harder to fake/misreport than self-reports, and use the vector of biochemical measurements to predict true happiness in the event that self-report is discordant with biochemistry.
December 18th, 2006 17:46
If one is unable to give a definition of a word (say, to give it extemporaneously; “on-the-fly”), but he can nevertheless employ that word with full accuracy in whatever extemporaneous speech/dialogue, does it then follow that this person does not know what that word means? No, it does not. Why? Well, interestingly, it has to do with the very same reason that (to take a “classic” example) no medical doctor has ever, nor will ever, be able to explain to young doctors in residence (or for that matter, to anyone else) — i.e., explain in analytic, deductive or rational terms — how it is that one reads X-Rays. And yet reading X-Rays is no less a bona fide form of knowledge, despite it not being an activity susceptible of rational account/explanation. And the ability to read X-Rays seems not just “intuition” (or is it? Not sure about this; see below*). Rather, it seems a direct manifestation, or form, of pre-rational knowledge. (Stanley Rosen’s book, The Limits of Analysis, which you otherwise long ago dismissed for being somehow “out-dated” and no longer relevant to anything important today, addresses precisely this theme — especially in the opening chapter).
I bring this up because this was pointed out to me once by a well-appointed professor of psychology. I was discussing with him how I found it frustrating that, on some earlier occasion, I was unable adequately to explain to some cantankerous person with whom I’d been arguing, why it’s not the case that, given accumulated advances in modern science, only the ignorant and/or stupid can be religious (in this case, those who adhere to orthodox Catholocism). In days prior to that dust-up, I’d been reading a lot about modern natural science and the possibility of the existence of a personal/creator God, etc., yet I couldn’t for the life of me cull the proper arguments in refutation of my interlocutor. And yet I *knew* — or, let’s say, I knew I had strong “justified belief” that — this person’s arguments were erroneous. Does it therefore follow that I wasn’t justified in my knowledge that this person’s arguments were a bunch of bullshit? (I.e., does it follow that my belief that science can’t disprove the case for belief in a creator/personal god was mistaken?) Not to take anything on authority, but given his use of the X-Ray and word-definition analogy, I was satisfied with my psychologist friend’s answer: “No.”
—-
[*from a particularly brilliant Thomist-acquaintance of mine, who, I'll wager, presides over a theoretical grasp of modern natural science as forbidding, impressive and acute as any hard-nosed scientist-for-the-sake-of-atheism today:]
Intuitions
It is common to hear people claim that knowledge is based on intuitions. If these intuitions are taken to mean an essential grasp of a thing, then I agree, but I don’t see how one can get the word intuition to mean an essential grasp of a thing. The essence of a thing is revealed in words, in its name. This essence imples that certain things are per se, others per accidens, and certain things are virtually contained in the very idea of the term. To say these things of the term makes for what is called “a self evident proposition”- a primarily known truth. Intuitions seem to be wordless things, you just “get it” apart from words, apart from the act of naming. Naming, in this sense, is seen as incidental to the act of knowledge, and it is unclear how the self evident comes to be, since essence is not acknowledged as known.
I think the physicist that I imagined below** in my dialogue two posts back had an “intuition” of time and distance and mass in the true sense, but I would call his grasp “a working postulate” or something of the kind.
In a word, intuitions lack a relation to the essential. It is inevitable that an intuition based science will be unable to handle accusations of being arbitrary.
[His blog:]
http://www.liverevolt.com/assimilatiodei/
** http://www.liverevolt.com/assimilatiodei/assimilatio.php?title=a_discussion_with_an_all_physics&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1
December 21st, 2006 14:46
I think its easier if you think in less abstract terms such as with people that experience color blindness. They may be able to identify red from subtle differences in shadeheir own perspective, but from anothers perspective, it would not be objectively red. The problem made simple is that none of us can know whether the red I see is not very different than the red someone else sees although we can understand something about the spectrum of red experience by finding people who are color blind. If we can know something about the distribution, we can create a model.
December 21st, 2006 14:48
And I can easily cite a proof that you can be wrong about how happy you are…and I call that proof…Daddy.
December 30th, 2006 07:10
Hi Will
If the point you are making is worth making, then it needs to be expressed in simple, accessible language.
There is no excuse for using terms like “inviduate” and “functionalist”, or for cramming loads of abstract terms into a single sentence.
Where is the sense in writing in this needlessly impenetrable style? We are not code breakers. We are flesh and blood human beings.
With a bit of care and thought you could express the same ideas using short accessible sentences and everyday words.
I assume you are trying to communicate rather than to impress. In that case please rewrite this article in a form that makes sense to ordinary human beings. Use simpler language and give concrete examples of what you mean.
There are a lot of people out there I am sure who would be interested in the point you are making.
Unfortunately, the language you use and your over reliance on abstractions are placing your message out of their reach.
Best wishes
Rhodes
January 10th, 2007 17:25
At some other post you roughly stated that belief equates to a state of being that influences how one actually goes about living, that professing a belief was not the same thing as having belief, i.e. a person who professes to believe in God, but does not act upon that assertion does not in fact believe in God. I tend to agree with you here, so this seems like a good place to start.
If we take the above definition of belief as an axiom, I find it hard to reconcile the idea that somebody could in fact be happy but not believe himself to be happy (or vice versa: be sad but believe to be happy). This is because with this definition of belief implies a state of being!
I assume you are of sound reasoning, however. Perhaps I misunderstood what you had said earlier about belief, or perhaps you are merely using the term differently in this case (e.g. perhaps you mean by believe: “would profess belief that ‘I am happy’”). In either event, I would very much like to get to the bottom of this.
I should like to say that I do not think that believing you are happy is all there is to being happy. I do not know what conditions it would take for a person to be happy (i.e. believe he is happy), and the conditions seem to vary from person to person. Thus for one person, happiness is not the same as happiness for another person.
October 27th, 2007 13:10
To even start to think about what a word means, try to understand the words purpose, wich I believe (