Iain McGilchrist: The Coincidence of Opposites

 On the twelfth day of Antonym Christmas, the Internet gave to me: 

a lecture on opposites and meaning in life

Based on a chapter Oxford University psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist's book The Matter with Things.

"We fail to understand anymore that things and their opposites are not as irreconcilable and as far apart from one another as they may seem"

Now, the video above is from a strange college in the US, and it's a 2-hour thing. I put it there just to have a video embedded here. But I've watched the unembeddable one here from the Fintry Trust. 

It includes a lot of philosophical and literary references to the complementarity of opposites, some of which have appeared on this blog before, and some of which will show up here again when I re-discover them. 

Fallacious discrete thinking

On the tenth day of Antonym Christmas, the Internet gave to me: 

fallacious discrete thinking

Mark Liberman at Language Log coined the term grouping-think for the tendency to create dichotomous categories where really they aren't so dichotomous. Liberman discusses it with reference to a study on psychopathy with a graph like this:

About it, Liberman writes:

So that press release and its mass-media uptake exemplify a cluster of fallacies that needs a name, and (as far as I know) doesn't have one. The key pieces:

1. Thinking of distributions as points;
2. Inventing convenient but unreal taxonomic categories;
3. Forming stereotypes, especially via confirmation bias.

 

It is a statistical take on the fallacy of the excluded middle. Andrew Gelman calls it "discrete thinking" and epidemiologist Sander Greenland calls it dichotomania "the compulsion to replace quantities with dichotomies (‘black-and-white thinking’), even when such dichotomization is unnecessary and misleading for inference.”

Liberman has also shared his slides for a talk about mis-use of generic plurals (e.g. psychopaths are ...), related to this post. 

Plutchik's Wheel of Emotions

On the fifth day of Antonym Christmas, the Internet gave to me:
Big feeling wheel!

Read more about this diagram here.

Goodness, it took me a long time to find a version of this diagram online that spelled ecstasy correctly.

Anyhow, I like thinking about the oppositions here: trust is the opposite of disgust;  annoyance is the opposite of apprehension; serenity is the opposite of pensiveness. Love is the opposite of remorse.