My impression was that equivocation typically refers to cases with articulated words, and bucket errors refers more to more abstract cases where the issue is a bit more in concepts than in the stated vocabulary. I’m curious if there is a decent definition of equivocation out there to make it a bit more clear what the specific boundaries are.
I don’t disagree, but I’m assuming that the brain uses some signals to model what’s going on, and by calling bucket errors “equivocation” I’m treating that internal symbology as a language. So, yes, we can make a distinction between buckets and equivocation by making equivocation all about externally articulated words. But to the extent that equivocation can happen in anything we can treat as a sort of language, I feel justified in grouping them together.
Similarly, I’m curious if other readers here agree that equivocation is the same thing as “bucket errors”. If so, I kind of would like to replace ongoing discussion of “bucket errors” with equivocation instead.
I’m curious myself because I’m sure I’ll want to refer to the concept in the future, but am not sure which word to use. I’ve used “bucket error” here, recently, for instance.
I’m not sure. It might be useful to have a separate term for “equivocation broadly construed” (verbal equivocation + bucket errors + buddhist identification + psycotherapy’s fusion), and then use the more specific terms when you want to be more specific. Each term has, at least, slightly different connotations.
By the way, one thing I only addressed very briefly in the essay: they way “fusion” and “identification” are normally explained, one would think that they primarily/exclusively refer to equivocation between some X and the self. I think this is due to a confused ontology. For example, a central example of fusion is getting caught up in anger, so that angry actions seem necessary. De-fusion would be moving from “Frank is an idiot who needs to be punched in the face” to “I am feeling angry at Frank right now”. This is obviously a map/territory sort of distinction, plus a temporal distinction. Yet it often gets explained as a self-vs-other distinction. I think this is a result of an overzealous application of object-vs-subject. To make the map/territory distinction, or even the temporal distinction, one must “take the anger as an object”: sort of “see it from the outside”, create a token in working memory which refers to it. Psychologists then make the leap that because we can call this “taking the anger as an object”, and the opposite of “object” is “subject”, it must have been “taken as subject” before.
And that’s not even total nonsense? Taken as a definition I’m OK with it: “Taking something as subject means it’s a fact about you, but which you haven’t generated an internal symbol for yet”.
But I think people then confuse it with somehow moving a symbol from self to non-self status, like, treating the anger as something inside you vs an outside force. This is also a thing. Maybe even a thing that’s worth throwing in the same cluster! But IMHO, it’s a much more complicated phenomenon. I don’t think I want to take it as the defining feature or even the central case of a cluster.
I think buddhists are doing almost exactly the same thing, with “identification”. (At least, american buddhists.) The way the phrase is used, you identify with something, rather than identifying two things with each other (such as map and territory). Is the state of no-self one where all symbols are moved out of the “self” box, and into the “other” box? Or is no-self a state where facts about the self can be fluently symbolized? (So that the gap of time between being angry and noting “I am angry” is very small, making anger easier to appropriately respond to.) The first sounds like a psychological trick: disassociating to reduce suffering. The second sounds like an actual cognitive skill.
I don’t disagree, but I’m assuming that the brain uses some signals to model what’s going on, and by calling bucket errors “equivocation” I’m treating that internal symbology as a language. So, yes, we can make a distinction between buckets and equivocation by making equivocation all about externally articulated words. But to the extent that equivocation can happen in anything we can treat as a sort of language, I feel justified in grouping them together.
I’m not sure. It might be useful to have a separate term for “equivocation broadly construed” (verbal equivocation + bucket errors + buddhist identification + psycotherapy’s fusion), and then use the more specific terms when you want to be more specific. Each term has, at least, slightly different connotations.
By the way, one thing I only addressed very briefly in the essay: they way “fusion” and “identification” are normally explained, one would think that they primarily/exclusively refer to equivocation between some X and the self. I think this is due to a confused ontology. For example, a central example of fusion is getting caught up in anger, so that angry actions seem necessary. De-fusion would be moving from “Frank is an idiot who needs to be punched in the face” to “I am feeling angry at Frank right now”. This is obviously a map/territory sort of distinction, plus a temporal distinction. Yet it often gets explained as a self-vs-other distinction. I think this is a result of an overzealous application of object-vs-subject. To make the map/territory distinction, or even the temporal distinction, one must “take the anger as an object”: sort of “see it from the outside”, create a token in working memory which refers to it. Psychologists then make the leap that because we can call this “taking the anger as an object”, and the opposite of “object” is “subject”, it must have been “taken as subject” before.
And that’s not even total nonsense? Taken as a definition I’m OK with it: “Taking something as subject means it’s a fact about you, but which you haven’t generated an internal symbol for yet”.
But I think people then confuse it with somehow moving a symbol from self to non-self status, like, treating the anger as something inside you vs an outside force. This is also a thing. Maybe even a thing that’s worth throwing in the same cluster! But IMHO, it’s a much more complicated phenomenon. I don’t think I want to take it as the defining feature or even the central case of a cluster.
I think buddhists are doing almost exactly the same thing, with “identification”. (At least, american buddhists.) The way the phrase is used, you identify with something, rather than identifying two things with each other (such as map and territory). Is the state of no-self one where all symbols are moved out of the “self” box, and into the “other” box? Or is no-self a state where facts about the self can be fluently symbolized? (So that the gap of time between being angry and noting “I am angry” is very small, making anger easier to appropriately respond to.) The first sounds like a psychological trick: disassociating to reduce suffering. The second sounds like an actual cognitive skill.