We do a lot of logical work to come up with our definitions

Reading Ernest Gellner on logic.

Some people at the turn of the 20th century hoped: “if only the whole of logic and mathematics could be deduced from a limited set of safe premisses, the whole edifice would thereby be made trustworthy.” But now “the ideal itself has lost its appeal and authority.” W. V. O. Quine, for example, says (Gellner’s paraphrase) that “even in logic, our premisses cannot insure us against future surprises and the need to retrace steps” and that we “haggle and weigh advantages, risks, and convenience, rather than move rectilinearly in marble halls along pathways of clear and indubitable truth.” Logic, too, will “retrace steps, make opportunist and revocable choices, use anything that happens to be close to hand,” just like Lévi-Strauss’ prehistoric bricoleur, that opportunist neolithic handyman who ‘makes arrows from any timber that is close to hand’.” (p. 6)

Meanwhile, the philosopher of mathematics Imre Lakatos maintains, in Gellner's paraphrase, that

“definitions follow rather than precede proofs. Objections to proofs can only be raised and understood after the proof has been formulated; the refinement of the proof in the light of the objection leads to a reformulation of the initial concepts, with a view to weathering the objection or modifying the conclusion. The fully refined and powerful definitions of the initial concepts, and hence the axioms formulated through them, are only the fruits of many, many repetitions of this process. The definition, the official premiss, comes one at the end, not at the beginning — and even this end is only an interim one. The process can never be known to be complete, and indeed is unlikely ever to be terminated. Moreover, the order in which these sequences occur — proof, objection, redefinition — is not something contingent and accidental, something that only happens in the rough work and can be left out in the clean copy; it is, on the contrary, essential to and inherent in the very nature of mathematical discovery. The messy, insecure, step-retracing procedure is of the essence of the subject.” (p. 6–7)

Ernest Gellner, Legitimation of Belief Cambridge University Press, 1975.

Image by johnhain on Pixabay

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Quotes: What role does ideology play in our thought?

Passages I've come across on how ideology influences thought.

Image by Graehawk on Pixabay. Quotes:

Democracy is premised on the belief that we can trust ordinary people to make consequential decisions. It’s in some ways an enlightenment ideal premised on another enlightenment ideal: the triumph of reason and the capacities of ordinary people. To buy into it, you have to believe that people will be more loyal to principles and discernment than to leaders and groups, and in that sense, democracy has always been a risky project. If democracy requires independent-minded people who can reason well, autocracy requires the opposite, people who will obey orders about what to think as well as do.
"Why Republicans Keep Falling for Trump’s Lies." Rebecca Solnit. New York Times. Jan. 5, 2022.

Now, credulity does not stand alone. In turn, it is part of an attitude called dogmatism — the belief in and defense of "truth." Those who believe strongly in "truth" will try to find it through the mechanism of belief. We are today a "belief explosion" which throws skepticism to the winds and attaches itself in a credulous manner to mental malpractice and intellectual humbuggery of every kind — to faking it, small and big. Without dogmatism, the Fake Factor could not exist. Because of dogmatism, that ancient enemy, everything goes, or very nearly.
Arthur Herzog. The B.S. Factor: The Theory and Technique of Faking It in America. (1973) Baltimore, Maryland: Penguin Books Inc., 1974. p. 183.

Constant development is the law of life, and a man who always tries to maintain his dogmas in order to appear consistent drives himself into a false position. That is why Emerson said that foolish consistency was the hobgoblin of little minds... * * * A devotee of Truth may not do anything in deference to convention. He must always hold himself open to correction, and whenever he discovers himself to the wrong, he must confess it at all costs and atone for it.
Gandhi. Young India, March 2, 1922 and September 20, 1928. Quoted in Louis Fischer's 1962 book The Essential Gandhi

No ideology can tolerate a full historical consciousness. Only realism can...
Clive James. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. 44.

Our fearsome gods have only changed their names: they now rhyme with ism.
C. G. Jung. Aspects of the Feminine. (Collected Works.) Translation by R. F. C. Hull. New York: MJF Books, 1982. p. 93.

For an ideology differs from a simple opinion in that it claims to possess either the key to history, or the solution for all the "riddles of the universe," or the intimate knowledge of the hidden universal laws which are supposed to rule nature and man.
Hannah Arendt. The Burden of Our Time. London: Secker and Warburg, 1951. Published in the US as The Origins of Totalitarianism. p 159.

Ideology functions as a machine to destroy information, even at the price of making assertions in clear contradiction of the evidence.
Jean-Francois Revel, La Connaissance Inutile, p. 153. Quoted in Clive James. Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts. (2007) New York: Norton, 2008. p. 605.

In 1897, French sociologist Émile Durkheim theorized four different types of suicides — the egoistic, the altruistic, the anomic, and the fatalistic —
I love how sure and clear these words sound. I love anything that breaks suffering down into a clean taxonomy you might look to when lost and nod your head in the performance of understanding.
sam sax, Yr Dead, San Francisco: McSweeney’s, 2024. p. 207.

And people distinguish cis and trans:

Katelyn Burns, Oct 24, 2025:

"...this week, a federal judge in Mississippi overturned an Obama era rule mandating that health care providers and insurers can not deny trans people gender affirming care if that same care would be available to cisgender people for reasons other than transitioning their sex.

The court's ruling is incoherent, and essentially establishes trans people as a disfavored class of American citizen, with fewer rights than everyone else. If you're cis, you can walk into a doctor's office tomorrow and ask for a breast augmentation or reduction and they will do it, no questions asked. But if you are trans, no such luck.

If you are cis, and you want testosterone so you can feel horny again, that's fine as long as you're cis. Go pound rocks if you're trans. If you want estrogen for your perimenopause, go ahead. Fuck you if you're trans.

Somedays I hate this world, and today is one of them."

Categorizing is necessary for humans, but it becomes pathological when the category is seen as definitive, preventing people from considering the fuzziness of boundaries, let alone revising their categories. Contagion was the culprit. If you selected one hundred independent-minded journalists capable of seeing factors in isolation from one another, you would get one hundred different opinions. But the process of having these people report in lockstep caused the dimensionality of the opinion set to shrink considerably — they converged on opinions and used the same items as causes.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb. The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. New York: Random House, 2007. p. 15.

But can it be avoided?

One suspects that philosophy of mind has not in fact been performing the task, which Professor Hampshire recommends, of sorting and classifying fundamental moral issues; it has rather been imposing upon us a particular value judgment in the guise of a theory of human nature. Whether philosophy can ever do anything else is a question we shall have to consider.
Iris Murdoch. "The Idea of Perfection" in The Sovereignty of Good. New York: Schocken Books, 1971. p. 2.

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God Doesn't Believe in Atheists, and I Don't Believe in God

Image by KELLEPICS on Pixabay.

On Nov 14, 2025, I moved this essay to Medium. It's a 5-minute read.

But you can still read the background here...

I listened to the 1-hour audiocassette lecture in 2011. Since it had the same title as the 650-page book, I treated the abridged audio as an alternate version of the book, and I posted my comments about it to Goodreads under this book title. I didn't leave the book a starred rating, so as not to affect its collective starred rating, and I did specify I was responding to the abridged audio and not to the full print version. This generated a few negative comments from people who were mad at me for — in their view — reviewing a book that I admitted to not having read.

I disagree with this characterization of the book and of my activity. Audiobooks are books; abridged books are books; abridged audiobooks are books. If a one-hour recorded lecture is not meant to be considered a valid version of the longer print book, then the author or publisher should not give them the same title, as that causes confusion, the responsibility for which falls on them. Finally, I don't believe there is a One True Answer for how people ought to use the Goodreads website; it's social media, and we make it up as we go along. Goodreads may have hoped people would use their website in a particular way, but people who use the site may come up with creative interpretations and we are not necessarily wrong when we do so.

Nonetheless, I no longer wish to receive sporadic comments questioning the validity of why I posted comments about an abridged audio on the product webpage of the longer book ten years ago. I mean, the planet is burning, can we worry about bigger things please. But also, to the extent that I allow myself to be trolled, I admit to being peeved that I have logged over 1750 full-length books that I've read and yet internet strangers are repeatedly needling me about my intellectual capacities because of the single instance of an abridged audiobook among them. (Never mind that I, not they, am the one who bothered to engage the author's argument.) From their perspective, it makes sense that they comment on this post, since it is the post that they saw; but from my perspective, I wonder why this post is high-engagement and rarely does anyone interact with my other 1750 posts. It is a headscratcher. Thus, I have moved the old essay from Goodreads to this webpage. I have rephrased and reformatted the essay for clarity.

May I also add that it is common for people to complain that an online comment is not the correct length — it needs to be shorter to hold their attention, or it needs to be longer for me to prove my intellectual capacity to them upon their demand. That's in the same bucket with people who claim I should not have posted the essay in an internet field labeled "review" because my essay is, for one reason or another, not a proper "review." Or, if the field is labeled "comment," I shouldn't write a full-fledged review, but rather a shorter "comment," because that would be the proper use of the field. People have assumptions about the "proper" use of fields on the internet. (It's almost as if the proper use of the internet were ordained by God.) When they cannot or will not engage with the substance of what I wrote, they sometimes pick an argument with my choice of website, or my choice of labeled field on that website, or the length of what I wrote. But actually, that's not their concern. The reason they criticize the way I wrote what I wrote (be it essay, review, comment, or what have you) is that they don't agree with my point at all and they would like me to stop making it. Until they provide a counterargument, of course, I'm left with my own argument. Thus, my argument here has not changed since 2011, as no one has yet bothered to rebut it.

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If you'd like to learn more about my work, I've published books. Also, I write for Medium. There, readers with a paid membership don't have to worry about the paywall.