Jordan Peterson

Fox_In_Socks wrote: »

I've looked at a few of his lectures on youtube and what got me into watching him, were the "sort yourself out and clean your room!" snippets of self-help, that had been isolated from some of his lectures where he's diverted on a tangent and tells his audience how to deal with someone who needs structure in their lives to get them going again.

I like him and how articulate he is, how many of the ideas he has talked about, I would have found stupid in the past but compelling now. Like, the idea of the archetypes (which I dismissed as fanciful when I tried to read Jung), his rants about where nihilism and lack of meaning comes from (which I can relate to) and how intolerance of free speech could give rise to totalitarianism.

I'm not a philosophy student and I know little enough in any depth about it, but can anyone point out some of the bad points and shortcomings his ideas have?

Hello OP,

as mentioned earlier I would take with a grain of salt many of the criticisms you may read in left-leaning publications. I would also take with a grain of salt any claims made by forum posters that their few seconds of googling the opposite to his conclusions constitutes proof that a professor of clinical psychology is not taking into account many different studies (his own and others) when making claims in the realm of clinical psychology.

Taking all that into account, and giving him the benefit of the doubt when he speaks on scientific matters relating to the discipline in which he holds a professorship, we can still ask about what are problems with his positions.

Personally I would have a problem with his philosophies on an ethical level: he argues about the natural occurrence of hierarchies, and the natural evolution of different religious myths and how these things are useful and efficient ways to organise society, and the distillation of the stories and rules to live by that have developed over the course of human evolution.


He goes from here, pointing out that these hierarchies, and the religious rules, are natural productions ( and not social constructions etc. ), to the fact that they are efficient etc. ; but then his final step, and this is where I would disagree with him, is that because they are natural, and efficient they are good.

This is the basic structure of the argument he uses to justify lots of things that lots of people think are bad: patriarchal social organisation, big divide between rich and poor, whatever particular rules in any particular religion that you may thing are bad.

Now this isn't automatically wrong, it's a perfectly acceptable ethical position, but one which many people don't accept, and one which is not completely logically connected. In fact there is a name for arguments which go from "natural" to "good" without sufficient connecting matter and it's the "naturalistic fallacy". If you simply say at the start "my ethical axioms are that what is natural is good and what is efficient is good", then there's no problem there.

So, it's easy to argue that hierarchies evolve naturally, and are a fundamental biological aspect of the way human beings relate to each other (perhaps more appropriate than the amusing lobster analogy would be just to look at how other primates organise, or to just go and watch children on a playground, or read Lord of the flies) , but to say that this means they are good is quite another thing altogether. You can accept such a model for human interaction and say that we can nevertheless strive to transcend those biological imperitives.

Black Swan wrote: »

Peterson suggesting that something was a natural production and not a social construction may be problematic. See Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann in The Social Construction of Reality, 1966, where hierarchies and religious rules were treated as social constructions.

I suppose there needs to be a bit more care in using those words there. What Peterson probably (and anyone who makes similar arguments), means, or wants to say, is that the particular forms of social organisation that people tend towards (particular hierarchies etc.), are biologically derived, and independent of a particular culture. The claim is that people "naturally" tend towards certain social constructions. So I guess what is at issue is not really that they are "socially constructed", but that different social constructions are really fungible, and that the ones we have now are just a circumstance of our particular culture.


I think further you can have social constructions on top of what is at root a social system no different from that of the other primates. The baboon with the shiniest healthiest red butt being swapped for the rich person with the shiniest gold heap, or, indeed, the priest best versed in catholic dogma along with the Internet hipster best able to present the hippest styles and ideologies. That is, the social constructions play much the same role as the natural thing (the biological fitness).

I will read more of the wiki page of the reccommended books, but at present I don't see that it is inconsistent with an argument from nature in favour of the herarchies that peterson makes.

Both David Hume and George Edward Moore cautioned about committing naturalistic fallacies, or holding positions that represented unsubstantiated leaps of belief from what exists in social organisation to being natural and good, and what ought to be. Such a fallacy may exist in Peterson's works and readers should be cautioned accordingly.

Yes, I suppose whether or not he makes such a mistep, depends on how clear he is when he is going from a factual claim to a value claim; how clear he is about laying out his moral axioms, and treating them appropriately as the givens they are.

In a similar manner we might be cautioned about Peterson's works as exhibiting some elements of causal fallacy, or more specifically cum hoc ergo propter hoc (i.e., with this therefore because of this). This fallacy may occur when Peterson mistakenly interpreted two things found together as being causally related (i.e., by treating social constructions as natural when they may or may not be so, with insufficient evidence to support his claims).

Well yes, I suppose we would have to look what he cites as evidence for those claims. I think the lobster analogy is something he would puts forward in favour of that. It is definitely a huge area though and something I would be very interested to read more about. Again, however, I think we (and Peterson) would need to be a bit more careful about how we make distinctions between "social" and "natural".

Black Swan wrote: »

Peterson should be "more careful" indeed about such distinctions between social and natural. Just because a social construction has been about through the course of history does not ensure that it was natural to the species. The nature vs nurture debate comes to mind at this point, which in many cases has not been resolved.

Yes, and I suppose the most pertinent areas of study to this point would be anthropology, psychology, zoology, physiology, neurology and sociolgy. I would start with with the former three, particularly the first, because if you find via anthropological studies that there are many human societies that are not disposed towards hierarchical organisation, then that would be a strong point against Peterson's claims. Of course the "disposed to" would have to be addressed then with physiology etc.