In 1968: Radical Protest and its Enemies (HarperCollins, 2018), Richard Vinen describes the ideals and mores of people he calls “68ers.” (He discusses the USA, France, Germany, and Britain and acknowledges that he omits Mexico, Czechoslovakia, and other parts of the world where the events of 1968 were probably more consequential.) For him, the 68ers include Black Panthers in Oakland, Maoist professors in Parisian grandes écoles, striking French industrial workers in shrinking factories, Berlin squatters, and more.

How should we define such a meaningful but heterogeneous category? A similar challenge may emerge when we try to define any religious or aesthetic movement or historical period. This is not only a scholarly but also a practical issue, because words like “68er”–or “expressionist,” or “fundamentalist”–can be used to motivate or to criticize. We should be able to assess whether such words apply.

One option is to apply a general scheme. For instance, 68ers were on the left. That statement invokes the ideological spectrum that originated in the French Revolution. But 68ers often differentiated themselves from the Old Left, and both sides in that debate claimed to be further left than the other.

One could define the spectrum independently and then use the definition to settle the question of how far left the 68ers stood–but surely they did not agree with each other. Nor would they all endorse anyone else’s definition of the ideological spectrum. They devoted considerable attention to debating issues (with their opponents and among themselves) such as race, sexuality, violence, Israel, and voting. Where specific views of these matters fall on the left-right spectrum seems hard to establish without taking a substantive political position.

Another option is to use an exogenous characteristic that is directly observable to define the category. For example, surely 68ers were college students during the year 1968–hence, early Baby Boomers. But most college students were not 68ers (by any definition of that term), and some classic 68ers were considerably older or had never gone to college. Even the founders of Students for a Democratic Society were as old as 32 (Vinen, p. 30), and many important 68ers were industrial workers.

A third option is to use concrete behavior to define the category. Maybe 68ers are those who participated in mass protests during the year 1968. But the largest protest in Paris was in support of de Gaulle and the regime. Some classic 68ers never literally protested. Probably few thought that the act of protesting defined their movement. And “1968” was not constrained by the calendar year. Vinen thinks that most of Britain’s ’68 took place during the 1970s. The “hard hat riot”–in favor of the Vietnam War — took place a bit late (May 1970) but is still part of Vinen’s narrative.

A common approach in the social sciences would be to treat “68er” as a latent construct that can be detected statistically. Imagine a survey with numerous items: “Do you have a poster of Che on your wall?” “Would you abolish prisons?” “Do you live in a commune?” “Do you like the main characters in Bonnie and Clyde?” After many putative 68ers had completed the survey, researchers would use techniques like factor-analysis to detect patterns. The data might show that an individual’s aggregate score on a small set of the questions defines the category of interest. Then we would have a reliable “68er scale.”

I think that kind of method is helpful, but it cannot be presented as innocent of concepts. We might ask about communes and Che Guevara because we already have a loose mental model of a 68er. We wouldn’t ask people their favorite flavors of ice cream. If we did, and the answer happened to correlate with the whole scale, we would treat that result that as a curiosity, not part of the definition of a 68er. But, if we asked about food and found out that 68ers ate lentils, that would be meaningful. Evidently, we must already know something about what a 68er is as we draft the survey. What is already in our minds?

My own view would build on Wittgenstein’s notion of a family resemblance. In Philosophical Investigations (67), he writes, “the various resemblances between members of a family: build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, etc. etc. overlap and cris-cross in the same way.” He’s arguing that many useful words point to groups of objects that need not all share any single feature but that tend to share features from a list, much as a surname can point to a cluster of people who tend to display some of the same physical characteristics. (“Lots of the Joneses have curly red hair.”) Statistical procedures like cluster analysis can point to these resemblances.

But we know why physical features recur in families: DNA. Why would certain musical choices, political opinions, recreational drugs, hairstyles, and career choices cluster to form the group that we identify as 68ers? Is there an underlying cause?

I think of it this way: Each person holds many beliefs and values. Ideas come and go, and individuals hold them with various degrees of confidence. But ideas are not independent of each other. People think one thing and conclude something else as a result, thus linking two of their beliefs with a reason. For example, they might start by liking Joan Baez and come to oppose the Vietnam War, or vice versa. But there are many ways to put ideas together, and few do it in just the same way. You could hold a strongly anti-authoritarian premise that takes you to anarchism or to capitalism. You could begin by opposing the Vietnam War and find yourself against capitalism or against the state. (I’ve known some Boomer libertarians for whom Vietnam was the formative experience.)

Thus a group like the 68ers (and many others) consists of a cluster of people with a family resemblance, but the reasons that connect their individual beliefs and values together tend to recur, and they recur for discernible reasons. In that sense, a satisfactory account of the group is a list of many of their common specific beliefs and values plus a discussion of the ways that they tend to fit together. The resulting map will not describe everyone but it will capture some of the common patterns and explain on what basis members of the group disagree with each other.

See also: Levine, P. (2024). People are not Points in Space: Network Models of Beliefs and Discussions. Critical Review, 1–27 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2024.2344994 

Years ago,  Justin McBrayer found this sign hanging in his son’s second-grade classroom:

Opinion: What someone thinks, feels, or believes.

Fact: Something that is true about a subject and can be tested or proven.

This distinction is embedded in significant aspects of our culture and society. For example, science aspires to be about facts, not opinions. And values are often assigned to the category of opinions. But this distinction doesn’t describe the way people actually reason.

After you utter any standard sentence, another person can ask two questions: “Why did you say that?” And, “What does it imply?” Any standard sentence has premises that entail it and consequences that it, in turn, implies. Any sentence is in the middle of a network of related thoughts, and you can be asked to make those relationships explicit (Brandom 2000).

Imagine a rooster who wakes you up by crowing at a dawn, and a parent who wakes her child in time for school. Both have brains, perceptions, and desires. But only the parent shares a language with another party. As a result, the child can ask, “Why are we waking up now?” or “What do I have to do next?” These are upstream and downstream implications of the sentence: “Wake up!”

Upon receiving an answer, the child can ask further questions. “Why do I have to go to school?” “Why is learning good?” The parent’s patience for this kind of discussion is bound to be finite, but the very structure of language implies that it could go on virtually forever.

The same process works for sentences that are about facts and for those that are more about values. A child asks, “Why do I have to go to school?” The answer, “Because it is 8 am,” is factual. The answer, “Because it’s important to learn” involves values. Either response can, in turn, prompt further “why” questions that can be answered.

The positivist assumption that values are opinions rather than facts suggests that values are conversationally inert, connected to the speaker but not to any other sentences. When you say that you value something, a positivist understands this as a fact about yourself, not as a claim that you could justify. However, we do justify value-claims. We state additional sentences about what implies our values or what our values imply.

In real life, people sooner or later choose to halt the exchange of reasons. “Why do you think that?” “I saw it with my own eyes.” “Why do you believe your eyes?” At this point, most people will opt out of the conversation, nor do I blame them.

Note, however, that the respondent probably could give reasons other than “I saw it with my eyes.” Statements typically have multiple premises, not just one. Further, a person could explain why we typically believe what we see. There is much to be said about eyes, mental processes connected to vision, and so on. I realize that discussing such matters is for specialists, and most people should not bother going into them. But the point is that the network of reasons could almost always be extended further, if one chose.

And the same is true for value-claims. “Why do you support that?” “Because it’s fair.” “What makes it fair?” “It treats everyone equally.” “Why do you favor equality?” At this point, many people may say, “I just do,” which is rather like saying, “I saw it with my own eyes.” But again, the conversation could continue. There is a great deal to be said about premises that imply the value of equality and consequences that equality entails if it’s defined in various specific ways. By spelling out more of this network, we make ourselves accountable for our positions.

Driving a distinction between opinions/values and facts would artificially prevent us from connecting our value-laden claims to other sentences, which we naturally–and rightly–do.

Source: Robert R. Brandom, Articulating Reasons: An Introduction to Inferentialism. (Harvard 2000). See also: listeners, not speakers, are the main reasoners; how intuitions relate to reasons: a social approach; we are for social justice, but what is it?; making our models explicit; introducing Habermas; and “Just teach the facts.

[Additional note, Oct 18: David Hume originated the fact-value distinction. For him, reasoning was essentially about perceiving things. The mind formed representations, especially visualizations. As Hilary Putnam writes (p. 15), Hume had a “pictorial semantics.” But you can’t see values. Nor can you see the self or causation. If we use visual metaphors–lenses, paintings, or images–for the mind, then it can’t seem to reason about values.

Nowadays, we think of reasoning mainly in terms of symbols that are combined and manipulated. The reigning metaphor is not a lens but a computer. We absolutely can compute sentences that include values. It’s true that a mind that manipulates and combines symbols must ultimately touch the world beyond itself, and there remains a role for sensation. Computers have input devices. But the connection between a mind and the world cannot be a matter of separate and distinct representations, since many things that we reason about–not only values, but also neutrinos, diseases, and economies–do not appear to our eyes. Source: Hilary Putnam (2002) The collapse of the fact/value dichotomy and other essays. Harvard.]

Newly published: Levine, P. (2024). People are not Points in Space: Network Models of Beliefs and Discussions. Critical Review, 1–27 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1080/08913811.2024.2344994 (Or a free pre-print version)

Abstract:

Metaphors of positions, spectrums, perspectives, viewpoints, and polarization reflect the same model, which treats beliefs—and the people who hold them—as points in space. This model is deeply rooted in quantitative research methods and influential traditions of Continental philosophy, and it is evident in some qualitative research. It can suggest that deliberation is difficult and rare because many people are located far apart ideologically, and their respective positions can be explained as dependent variables of factors like personality, partisanship, and demographics. An alternative model treats a given person’s beliefs as connected by reasons to form networks. People disclose the connections among their respective beliefs when they discuss issues. This model offers insights about specific cases, such as discussions conducted on two US college campuses, which are represented here as belief-networks. The model also supports a more optimistic view of the public’s capacity to deliberate.