Mind Projection
Charles Taliaferro
If you are looking down while you are walking, it is better to walk up hill. The ground is nearer.
Gertrude Stein
This fallacy occurs when we reason that the world has features that we (wrongly) project on to it or, using Stein’s whimsical language, when we do not carefully and humbly observe the world around us.
Physicist E.T. Jaynes claimed to identify this fallacy as part of his critique of quantum theory of probability in his work “Clearing up Mysteries - The Original Goal.” He claimed that probability theory led to fallacious thinking about the properties of nature. Probability is not an inherent characteristic of anything in nature, but it actually indicates a deficit of facts or knowledge. This involves mind projection insofar as someone takes a property of the mind (probabilistic reasoning) and falsely attributes this to the world (probability as if it were a feature of things independent of mind). “We are all under an ego-driven temptation to project our private thoughts out onto the real world, by supposing that the creations of one’s own imagination are real properties of Nature, or that one’s own ignorance signifies some kind of indecision on the part of Nature” (Jaynes 1989, 7). He likens the occurrence of this fallacy to the occurrence of a mental disorder: “A standard of logic that would be considered a psychiatric disorder in other fields, is the accepted norm inquantum theory” (7). This concern over the fallacious thinking of probability theorists points to various inconstancies in the standard of argument among various scientific fields.
Going beyond Jaynes’s special use of the term in the context of quantum theory, the mind projection fallacy is committed when a person creates and believes without sufficient justification factual claims about the world solely based on his experiences, mental or sensory, of the world. Given that radical skepticism is false and that some of our experiences of the world are indeed justified, this fallacy is restricted to cases in which a person (Joe) falsely attributes to things in the world properties that actually reflect Joe’s own judgments and dispositions rather than the properties that are actually in the world.
For example, it would be fallacious to conclude from one’s tasting the sweetness of sugar that the property of sweetness is itself lodged in the sugar rather than sweetness’s being a feature of how sugar tastes when consumed by humans with healthy taste buds. A more disturbing example of this fallacy is when persons wrongly attribute to others harmful stereotypes that reflect bias in the context of race, sexuality, social class, and so on. In outrageous claims that are clearly false as when a United States citizen claims that all immigrants to the USA from Mexico are rapists and criminals, the claim provides us more information about the person making the claim (he is racist) that it does about the people he seeks to identify (the immigrants to the USA from Mexico).One promising way to avoid this fallacy is through what is frequently referred to today as epistemic humility. Be cautious about when you can infer from your own response to X that X (whatever it is) has a property related to your response. For example, do not infer just because you happen not to be interested in philosophy (i.e., it is a subjective matter of fact that you are not interested in philosophy) that philosophy is itself uninteresting (in the sense that philosophy is not worthy of interest or, indeed, not worthy of passionate, energetic commitment).
Reference
Jaynes, E.T. 1989. “Clearing Up Mysteries - The Original Goal.” Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods (36): 1-27.