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".

Fathom wrote: »

Peterson using lobsters to inform mammal, or specific primate, or more advanced homo sapiens behavior became a humorous stretch of the imagination at best. Gareth Morgan in Images of Organization (1986) suggested that metaphors (or metaphorical analogies that attempt to show two behaviors as similar) may be used to stimulate discussion. But cautioned that they were distortions of reality. Peterson's lobster-human behavior position was metaphor. A distortion of reality. Not real or natural (This critique may have occurred earlier, but deserved reiteration at this point).

Well I dunno if metaphor is even entirely appropriate for his comparison between how the physiology of both lobsters and humans is affected their position in a social hierarchy. In fact it's not a metaphor at all. He's not saying "people are lobsters", he's saying ... whatever he's saying about the similarities in how peoples' and lobsters' physiologies adapt to social position.



And yes, as I alluded to in a previous post, this point about the "natural" predisposition of humans to organise hierarchically would be better made with reference to other primates; like chimpanzees.


Personally, however, I think the lobster comparison is entertaining and original. (at least I haven't heard it before, but I would still give somebody a thumbs up if they only introduce me to something I haven't seen, whether or not they came up with it themselves.)

Howzers,

I had started a thread here a number of years ago which was active for a while, and have only just returned with a follow-on to it. As I had been dipping in and out of the Jordan Peterson ‘phenomenon’ recently (nearly finished watching his Maps of Meaning series), I had a quick look to see if there was chatter here, and (almost inevitably) there was. However it had petred out, without delving it that much, which is a pity, because ‘love him or loathe him’, he is certainly provocative in an intellectually stimulating way.
The most interesting thing about his ‘provocations’, so far as I can tell so far, lies in his approach to the nature vs nurture debate, in that he wants to bring his empirical background in clinical psychology to bear on the practical engagement of individuals in the complexities of modern life. His approach is that of a defender of biological determinism, which can only be tempered by our conscious capacities. Iows, because of his self-admitted obsession with totalitarianism, he sees our social institutions as playing out, for the mostpart, our inherent biological tendencies, and attempts to dampen them down on an intellectual/philosphical level-which seeps into politics- inevitably leads to (cultural) totalitarianism.
Petersen is, effectively, on a conservative crusade against cultural totalitarianism slipping in through the back door. His beef, generally, seems to be against the principle of equity, and in particular about how this principle is utilized by postmodernist cadres (where he is linked to conspiracy theories). He talks of the sleight-of-hand Marxists pulled off when Marxist/Leninism was shown to have required brutal imposition of its theories, and to stagger on for as long as it did- and the response was to turn the economic oppression of the subjugated into oppression by certain intellectual elites, as an expression of power (hence Marxists allying with postmodernists, who are ideologically opposed.
The conservatism of Petersen then, appears to be a clarion call for ‘biological traditionalism’, as it were. His thesis seems to be that we as conscious human beings have a paradoxical ‘gift’; we have a capacity that no other creature has, but that it is currently ‘going against the grain’-which it will do in ebbs and flows anyway- way too far. He reckons our rationalisations towards ideas of equity (rather than equality of opportunity, which he fully endorses) ignores our biological bases too much, and that these rationalisations have taken root- and I suppose to his mind metastasized- into society. This, he contends, is dangerous to society.

cdgalwegian wrote: »

In other words, from what I've seen, I think he justifies male dominance in hierarchical systems as part of the natural order, just the way a slave-owner might have found justification for the slave system due to supposed 'natural' superiority. Foucault would have been proud.

Indeed, men dominate at every level, from General to cannon fodder. Lots and lots of cannon fodder. Hopefully women will gain more opportunities to order the cannon fodder around. It would make the spectacle more palatable.

Fathom wrote: »

NASA on TV crawl yesterday reports that the first man on mars may be a woman. What would Peterson say to that?

He'd probably point out that the accumulated technology that went into the achievement of creating a craft capable of going to the moon was invented by mostly men because men are more interested in 'things' (physical) than women are, hence higher uptake by men in STEM subjects etc. The first sentient being to reach outer space was a primate and you'd hardly attribute this achievement to the primate.

Fathom wrote: »

Peterson has "built a case on false facts and distortions of general observations from the scientific literature... distorting the evidence" to fit a conservative political agenda in Maps, 12 Rules, videos, lectures, and other media (biologist P.Z. Myers).

Examples:

1. Uses left-brain right-brain as factual argument, ignoring it's only a metaphor not scientifically valid (Maps).
2. Cites the neurochemistry of lobsters and that of humans treating them as similar in terms of influencing behavior for both. Uses serotonin for behavioral parallels between lobsters and humans.
3. Directly compares the social behavior of chimpanzees with human behavior.
4. Peterson claims "The Nature of Nature... it is a truism of biology that evolution is conservative." Misrepresents biology with political position.
5. Peterson claims humans are wired to a "dominance hierarchy" in an attempt to justify paternalism; the subordination of women to men (Maps).
6. Peterson claims "Everything I'm saying and thinking about religion is nested inside a evolutionary viewpoint." Confuses religion with science.
7. Peterson treats archtypical superstitious myths as "objectively true" for his anthropomorphised gods, spirits, and male heroes.

Apart from the left/right brain reference again, the rest of the list concerns Peterson's over-generalizing and plain old misrepresentations. It was his use of outdated science I was looking for.

Point 7 is not outdated science either, but rather pure pseudoscience- Jungian archetypes. It gets negatively mentioned by a lot by people, but is not attacked in the way it should be. Perhaps the misuse of scientific data to further a thesis is more repugnant, so Jungian archetypes aren't front and centre; in the crosshairs. However, his whole thesis of Maps rests on them. Archetypes are nonsense on stilts, having no more scientific import than tarot cards or phrenology. Yet Peterson's re-imagining and re-tooling of them through Campbell's mythical tropes (as pointed out by Black Swan) lends a certain panache that unfortunately is capable of fooling many, in his intellectual sleight of hand.