Fuzzy Sets: Intellectual Dark Web, New Atheism, Logical Positivism and Behaviourism 

Introduction

Philosophical analysis, if done carefully, can reveal the manufacturing of a social narrative that is designed to instigate public attention. In this article I will be discussing the relatively recent creation of an apparent social group, the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ (IDW). To better analyze the features of the group, I will discuss it in relation to three other groups. This first group is the ‘New Atheist’ movement, represented by the famous ‘Four Horsemen’ of New Atheism. The other groups are two major research programmes in the last Century, the Vienna Circle and Behaviourism. The purpose of these comparisons will be to evaluate the degree to which the Intellectual Dark Web compares with these groups both in the clarity of their purposes and what they aim to achieve.

Before proceeding to the comparison I need to make a couple of brief caveats. Firstly, to forestall an obvious complaint, I am in no way comparing the intellectual importance of these respective groups. I hope it should be obvious that I am not arguing that people like Joe Rogan and Jordan Peterson belong in the same intellectual universe as Ludwig Wittgenstein, Rudolph Carnap or B.F. Skinner. I feel embarrassed to have to even make this point, but I do so to avoid confusion.

Another complaint could be that I am not comparing like with like. The Vienna Circle and the Logical Positivism it developed consisted of an actual research programme; the same is obviously true of Behaviourism. But the Four Horsemen of Atheism did not make up a research programme; rather this was a political movement interested in treating questions about religion and God by the standard methods of science. I think that this is a legitimate criticism. However, it doesn’t really affect what I argue for, as I am just trying to clarify what type of group the Intellectual Dark Web is, and how it compares with other intellectual groups. I am not offering any criticisms of the Intellectual Dark Web for not being a scientific research programme.

The Four Horsemen of Atheism

Intellectual life, like all areas of life, is pervaded with territorial allegiances. Thinkers form groups which they use to separate themselves from those who hold a different ethos about life. In the act of naming a group, the members of the group become associated with the name. However, sometimes people have difficulties disambiguating members of the group. A brief synopsis of the formation of the ‘New Atheist’ movement provides an illustration of this phenomenon. Ten years ago four ‘public intellectuals’ met up to critique the outside role of religion in public life. The four thinkers were Dan Dennett, Sam Harris, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins. All were already well established in the public sphere and known as members of so-called ‘New Atheism’ (which was considered more aggressive and adversarial to religion than traditional atheists). Prior to meeting in Hitchens’ apartment to discuss the question of religion, all four of them had each authored a book criticising religion and belief in God. Sam Harris published his ‘End of Faith’ in 2004, Dawkins published his ‘The God Delusion’ in 2006, Dennett published ‘Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomena’ in 2006, and Hitchens published his book, ‘God is not Great’ in 2007. All four books were massive successes. So in 2007 when they met up to discuss their thoughts on the social and theological roles of religion and God, they released the discussion to the general public to substantial public interest. They became known as the ‘Four Horsemen’ of atheism and helped instigate a large number of adversarial internet debates between atheists and theists.

What was interesting about these debates was that, in some circles, ‘The Four Horsemen’ were treated as though they were identical people in agreement on almost every topic. The Four Horsemen were all sceptics about religion and its effects on society; all were atheists; however, they didn’t agree on everything; Harris and Dennett disagreed on the nature of consciousness and free will; Dennett and Dawkins disagreed about the use of the term ‘design’ in evolutionary explanation; at the time, Dawkins’ politics were slightly to the left of Hitchens; and so on. Yet even when these differences were pointed out some people couldn’t differentiate the members of the group. The existence of the label for the four thinkers worked against some people’s capacity to distinguish between the positions advocated by members of the group. Nonetheless, the label was helpful to the members of the group. It was an excellent marketing tool, and it helped to entice guys who liked, for example, Hitchens’ writing to read the other Four Horsemen and vice versa.

The Intellectual Dark Web

Flash-forward twelve years. One of the Four Horsemen, Sam Harris, appears in a photo shoot for a group called the ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ (IDW). A New York Times article written by Bari Weiss on this ‘Intellectual Dark Web’ was complete with shadowy photos illustrating the leaders of this new movement. The members of this group are described as brave renegades fighting against the shadowy forces of ‘political correctness.’ The article was an instant marketing success. Forums on the internet exploded with argument after argument.

The IDW is a much larger group of thinkers than the Four Horsemen. Bari Weiss listed members of it as including Sam Harris, Brett Weinstein, Eric Weinstein, Jordan Peterson, Christina Hoff Summers, Ben Shapiro amongst many others. What makes someone a member of the IDW? In her opinion piece, Bari Weiss offers the following vague, unhelpful definition:

Most simply, it is a collection of iconoclastic thinkers, academic renegades and media personalities who are having a rolling conversation — on podcasts, YouTube and Twitter, and in sold-out auditoriums — that sound unlike anything else happening, at least publicly, in the culture right now. Feeling largely locked out of legacy outlets, they are rapidly building their own mass media channels.

She notes that these iconoclastic thinkers are committed to disagreeing strongly with each other while also remaining civil when engaging in this discourse. A couple of lines down, without a hint of irony she gleefully notes that Jordan Peterson responded to an article by Pankaj Mishra which criticized Peterson, by calling Mishra a sanctimonious prick who Peterson would like to slap. Bari Weiss claimed that in order to be a member of the IDW one must remain civil while having intellectual disputes, and yet Weiss didn’t seem to spot any difficulty in the aggressive uncivil behaviour of one of the leaders of the IDW when someone criticised him.

One of the problems with the IDW is that, on examination, its extension is extremely vague to the point of failing to pick out any salient similarities between the members of the group or differences between members of the group and members of the out-group. If, for example, being civil to one’s critics was a key defining property of the IDW then Peterson wouldn’t be included in the group. Nor, for that matter, would a number of other members of the IDW, such as Ben Shapiro and Sam Harris–if civility meant engaging in good faith with critics rather than speaking in a calm voice. If being banned from an institute or losing a job because of political correctness was a key criterion for being a member then Sam Harris couldn’t be a member, nor could Ben Shapiro. In fact, their very income seems predicated, in part, on saying particularly controversial things about race, IQ, sex, gender, and so on, in articles, opinion pieces, blogposts, debates, and podcasts.

The attempt to individuate them as, perhaps, iconoclastic thinkers who are having interesting discussions on podcasts, on Twitter, etc., is equally hopeless. Philosopher Robert Wright has appeared on Sam Harris’s podcast to discuss Buddhism; Harris has appeared on the Very Bad Wizards podcast and vice versa. Of course, Wright has appeared on the Very Bad Wizards podcast and one of the Very Bad Wizards (Tamler Sommers), has appeared on Wright’s podcast. Similarly, people like Russell Brand have had Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris on their podcast, Brand has appeared on the Joe Rogan podcast to discuss politics, religion, etc. So do the Very Bad Wizards, Russell Brand, or Robert Right belong in the IDW? If not, why not? They are an iconoclastic bunch of thinkers who are having an ongoing online discussion and they are committed to civil discussion with each other (I haven’t heard any of them threaten to punch a critic in the face yet). Admittedly they haven’t faced trouble in a university over their political views, then again neither has Harris or Shapiro, yet Weiss chose to categorize some of these people as members of the IDW and not others.

When people interview members of the IDW they typically emphasize that they all hold different views on a variety of different topics. So, for example, Harris shouldn’t be held responsible for the views of Jordan Peterson. This is similar to the way it would have been a mistake to assume that all of the members of The Four Horsemen held the same views on consciousness. However, there were two clear differences with the Four Horsemen: First, they claimed to be in agreement on their atheism; second, they claimed to be in agreement on the fact that atheists should be more critical towards religion and religious institutions. So there were certain key features that the members of the group all shared in common and this was clearly delineated. With the IDW, however, this is not the case. There seem to be no core beliefs that hold them together in a set that exclude people who are not members, for example, Massimo Pigliucci, Robert Wright, etc. In sum, if we are interested in whether members of the IDW belong to the same group in the same or similar way that The Four Horsemen belonged to the same group, it is hard to view the IDW as anything other than a marketing plan by Bari Weiss to promote the work of a number of disparate thinkers that advocate for a number of policies and positions that are not generally accepted within academia.

Even the members of the IDW don’t seem to agree on the significance of the group or what it stands for. In one podcast Sam Harris portrayed the whole thing as a bit of a joke that isn’t meant to be taken that seriously. Eric Weinstein, on the other hand, argued that he came up with the name IDW in a deliberate manner to implicitly force the mainstream media (who according to Weinstein have some problem with them), to inadvertently promote the group.

The Vienna Circle and Logical Positivism

Of course, just because something has an inauspicious beginning doesn’t mean that it isn’t capable of being developed further. One of the more famous groups in the history of philosophy is the Vienna Circle. They are now remembered as logical positivists, but they began as a discussion group between a few PhD students and professors interested in science, mathematics, logic and philosophy. The group eventually became known because of their joint manifesto on the nature of the movement, and popular books designed to spread it, but in the beginning, they were a group held together by shared interests, not by an official doctrine.

The unofficial head of the group was Moritz Schlick who was trained as a physicist but was working as a professional philosopher. Schlick was known as “Einstein’s Pet Philosopher” and wrote a book outlining the philosophical implications of Einstein’s theory of relativity. But he soon came under the sway of another great man: Ludwig Wittgenstein. Wittgenstein’s Tractatus became an important starting point for the group’s research programme. His use of Frege and Russell’s logic to draw limits to what could sensibly be said was exactly what the logical positivists were looking for in their battle against metaphysics.

However, despite his work being of central importance to the Vienna Circle, Wittgenstein wasn’t exactly a member. The group did manage to get him to attend some of the meetings, but he didn’t attend regularly and he didn’t approve of the views of many members of the group. Furthermore, there was not universal agreement on how his work was to be interpreted. Some members of the group such as Otto Neurath sneered at the reverence that Wittgenstein was held in by Schlick and Waisman, and argued that Wittgenstein was treated like the leader of a religious cult instead of as a fellow logician. Others such as Carnap were impressed with Wittgenstein’s work but didn’t agree with all of it.

Despite being members of a single group they didn’t all agree on either the importance of Wittgenstein’s work, nor on how to deal with difficulties interpreting his Tractatus. And this wasn’t the only point of dispute within the group. There was an intractable debate on the status of protocol sentences that virtually none of the members of the Circle could agree on. Nonetheless, despite holding many disagreements, there were core principles that held the group together. They were all empiricists, promoting a science-based worldview and who thought that the new logic was the best way of systematizing our best scientific theory of the world.

The Logical Positivists, like The Four Horsemen, disagreed on many subjects; however, they were held together by a core set of beliefs and attitues on certain topics. In this way, they differed from the IDW, which doesn’t seem to be held together by any core beliefs that separates them from people who are not categorized as members of the IDW. However, as we saw above, when the Logical Positivists began meeting first they were just some like-minded friends interested in a science-based world view. It was only later that they developed an explicit manifesto about what the group represented. Likewise the IDW, as far as I can determine, is nothing but a collection of people who operate outside of normal domains of peer-review or adhering to rigorous academic standards. What they all do share is the public promotion of each others’ work. As things stand there seem to be no core principles they stand for that can be used to differentiate them from anyone else. Even their relative lack of expertise in a number of fields, their frequent dissemination of right-to-center talking points about ‘identity politics’, ‘poitical correctness’,  ‘free speech’, ‘race realism’, adherence to Israel in the Israel/Palestine conflict, American hegemony abroad, and so on, do not differentiate them from, for example, Rush Limbaugh.

The Behaviourists

Of course, even having a manifesto doesn’t guarantee unity on core topics. J B Watson’s ‘Psychology as the Behaviourist Views It’, could be viewed as the document that launched behavioural psychology. It has been a hundred years since Watson wrote his famous text. To this day a lot of scientists still identify as behaviourists. However, it would be a difficult task to extrapolate precisely what it is that makes one a behaviourist other than an emphasis on intersubjectively observable behaviour and scepticism using about introspection as a tool.

Watson and Skinner are probably the two most famous behaviourists, and yet they disagreed on many things. Watson was a stimulus-response theorist, while Skinner used the three-term contingency to explicate behaviour. Watson argued that we couldn’t study private events scientifically, while Skinner argued that private events are a form of behaviour that can be studied in the same way as any other behaviour. However, even amongst the neo-behaviourists who tried to move beyond Watson’s behaviourism, they did not share a homogenous set of beliefs. Thus Edward C Tolman believed that it was acceptable for a behaviourist to use inferred constructs, and cognitive concepts, Clark L Hull argued that behaviourists could use inferred constructs but not cognitive concepts, while Skinner argued against inferred constructs, and cognitive concepts (‘Logical Positivism and Behaviourism’ p. 305). While Hull argued that behaviourism should be a deductive science, Skinner and Clark argued that it should be an inductive science (ibid p. 305).

Tollman considered himself a behaviourist and is considered a behaviourist to this day; however, given that he allowed cognitive constructs and inferred entities it is difficult to see why his views should be considered any different than those of a contemporary cognitive scientist. Behaviourism started as a reaction against the introspective tradition in psychology. Today, most cognitive scientists would agree that introspection is a bad tool to rely on in science. With some behaviourists such as Tolman it is hard to find a line that distinguishes them from non-behaviourists, whereas with others such as Skinner the line is a bit clearer.

Behaviourism, like both Logical Positivism and the Four Horsemen of atheism, was largely defined by what they were against: Introspective methods in psychology, metaphysics and a belief in God. In the hundred or so years since Behaviourism was first proposed as a method, it has branched off in many different directions: methodological behaviourism, radical behaviourism, applied behavioural analysis, relational frame theory, etc. Some behavioural theories can be clearly distinguished from other branches of psychology such as cognitive science, while it more difficult to distinguish some kinds of behaviourism from cognitive science.

It is clear, though, what the behaviourists were reacting against. This fact distinguishes it from the IDW, for it is unclear which positions or group the IDW oppose, other than widely accepted standards of argumentative rigor in academia; black, women, poor, progressive, Muslim and trans thinkers; experts that share relatively well-established positions that are not widely held within the political mainstream. However, what makes them different than people who aren’t members of the group, and what would constitute being successful, remain unstated, for even then, the commonalities of the IDW members, are also shared, as previously mentioned, almost all center-to-far-right ‘public intellectuals’ (or for that matter, American ‘public intellectuals’ in general).

Conclusion

In this comparison of the IDW with other groups I have noted that, unlike all of the other groups, there appears to be no clear criterion as to what makes someone a member of the group. This isn’t a devastating indictment of the group, as it is possible that over time they will develop a coherent ethos. Nonetheless, as things stand, the primary shared characteristic of the IDW is a group of individuals is that Bari Weiss has grouped together on the basis of mutual marketing.

At this moment in time, the most reasonable conclusion to draw is that the IDW is nothing more than a label that helps members promote each others’ podcasts, books and public-speaking tours. How long this marketing gimmick will continue to be used is an open question. At the moment the members of the group find each other useful as a tool to promote their individual brands. Once they determine that this mutual usefulness has run its course it is likely they will disband and use another marketing gimmick to promote their respective brands.