The Philosophy of Psychology, or, Wrestling With A Pig

Attentive readers will have noticed that I've been playing catch-up again. Every now and then I get waylaid by something I can't resolve within the timetable of this blog. I've been looking for another longer-term project, with psychology or category theory as candidates. What? I'm a philosopher - I contain multi-disciplinary multitudes. Let's talk about psychology.

There is a perfectly reputable, if unexciting, study of the way the brain / mind works; how perception works and can occasionally mislead; and related subjects. Degrees in that subject tend to be B.Sc's and the studies don't make for best-selling pop-psych.

The psychology we are looking for is sometimes called moral psychology, the study of emotions, feelings, behaviour towards ourselves and others, thought-processes and other such stuff that can be discussed sensibly without knowing the difference between a ganglion and a neurone. Degrees in that subject tend to be B.A's.

Moral psychology used to be a stock-in-trade for any reputable Enlightenment philosopher, who would use it to make often mordant and worldly observations about their fellow man, society and economy, disguised as descriptions of emotions and personality traits. Sometimes this was to show that the vast array of human behaviour and emotion could be reduced to two or three basic traits, emotions or principles. David Hume did this in his Treatise of Human Nature;, as did Adam Smith in his Theory of the Moral Sentiments.

Moral psychology is for the philosophically-inclined. The way people ordinarily understand each other's behaviour and characters is called folk-psychology. It starts with identifying kinds of behaviours (counting the expression of emotions and thoughts as 'behaviour'), continues by grouping those behaviours into a "personal quality", and if those actions, emotions and thoughts are observed to be "done-once, done-often", ascribes a dispositional "personality trait", "character trait" or "quality" to the person. Folk-psychology is sometimes subtle, always contextual and culture-bound, and of course, independent of any theory of the container of those traits and qualities, be it mind, soul, spirit or something else.

Folk-psychology is always directed at action. Its aim is not "understanding all to forgive all", nor is it to understand motives or reasons. It is a grab-bag of concepts to describe us, and of tricks to influence, persuade, re-educate, convert, and indoctrinate us. The aim is to make us act, think or feel in a manner useful to someone else. It is also to identify people who might turn out to be odd, disruptive or obstructive, to the point that we would not choose them as colleagues, neighbours or friends - so we can avoid them before they become a nuisance. Folk-psychology is what we need to choose and develop alliances, friendships, social networks, sports teams, military units, political parties and so on, and it is what we need to avoid users, losers and abusers, wastrels, hopeless cases, traitors, freeloaders and so on.

Hegel was the last of the great systematisers of moral psychology, linking it with politics and law at one end, psychiatry in the middle, and folk-psychology at the other. After that, the philosophers stopped doing moral psychology, and instead specialised in sociology, economics, psychiatry, or "philosophy of mind". As a result, folk-psychology took over as the theoretical foundation of all psychology.

Today, the vast majority of what passes for "psychology" on the shelves of bookshops, in hospitals and therapy rooms, in novels, films and plays, and even in psychiatry and the DSM / ICD classifications, is variations on and justifications of folk-psychology, peppered with pseudo-technical terminology, salted with politics, seasoned with religion, law and morality, and poured like gravy over people and behaviour. The aims of academic psychology are now those of folk-psychology: producing conceptual tools for influencing the people we need to-do with, and identifying the people to avoid.

That is what the books are about; that is what the tests are used for; that is how it used by Governments, militaries, schools, and businesses. The "normies" use conventional psychiatry and psychotherapy to make an industry out of "treating" the fringe people; and recently in response, the fringe people have created mental health activism. Some even use it against themselves via a third-party when they go to psychotherapy.

In practice, psychiatrists have been suborned by the pharmaceutical industry, the insurers and State health services, and are pill-pushers: the patient gets fifteen minutes for free if the taxpayer is paying, or an hour or more for £800 or so for a private consultation. The result is still a pill. In the same way, psychotherapists "deliver" a short course of CBT-based treatment if the taxpayer is paying, while psychodynamic therapists will settle in for three days a week for forty-four weeks over three or four years at £150 or so an hour, with variations in between. These are features, not bugs.

A theory that gains a wide reception in the profession usually meets a number of conditions. It fits the prevailing mores of the largely white, middle-class, feminist-y, liberal-ish, and majority female, members of the profession. It can be used by businesses to gee-up their employees when times get hard and HR is cutting heads. It can be used to give the appearance that a vast military organisation cares about the morale of its troops, as it sends them into yet another asymmetric war where the enemy might be a twelve year-old boy with a bomb. It might describe a new symptom, disorder or condition that expands the market for psychotherapeutic services. It can be used by Governments to scare their populations into compliance with unjustified and disastrous public health policies.

These abuses are not failures of professional ethics, but actual professional success-stories.

This line of thought could be, and probably has been, expanded into a paperback polemic. Those can be fun to read, but writing them has always struck me as being like mud-wrestling with a pig: you both get muddy, and the pig enjoys it. I don't enjoy mud-wrestling.

So I'm going to have some fun discussing category theory (or something else) instead.

If You ever Doubted That We Went Insane in the 2010's

 The Supreme Court - an institution created by Tony Blair in imitation of the Americans, and exactly as successful in the UK context as you might expect - has had to interpret an Act of Parliament to make clear that "woman" means "adult human female". Which everyone thinks means "person with a uterus and without a penis", but doesn't. Any ambiguity over "woman" transfers to "female", except when someone goes barmy and thinks that "gender" is anything other than a euphemism for "sex". Oh. Wait. We have been that barmy for almost twenty years. 

Anyway, it is now official that, if you have a penis, you cannot go into the women's changing rooms or WC's. 

This statement of the obvious was only made because a group of Scottish women, with whatever backing they had, kept on banging their heads against the legal system until they got this judgement.

You might wonder why the House of Commons did not put this through as supplementary legislation. 

That's because the Supremes exist to rule against the Government. They have no other purpose in life. So if Labour had passed the legislation, the Crazies would have run lawfare - with whatever limitless backing they seem to have - against the Government until it reached the Supremes. Who true to form, would have ruled against the Government.

But someone gamed them.

In this case the Supremes were ruling against a Government. The Scottish one. 

Sci-Fi Towers

 You know that sci-fi movie where the gigantic towers of the mega-corporations and the rich loom over the poverty and little people below? Well, the "below" bit here isn't poor, but the effect is much the same. Those towers don't even look as if they belong in the same world as the rest of us, like some hallucination.

(Photo edited 19/4/2025)

C'est Manifique, Mais C'est N'est Pas Singapore

Politicians talking about "Singapore on Thames" again. It looks plausible...

until you go inland, and realise that far more of Singapore looks like a tourist postcard than scruddy old East London will ever do.

 

Greenland Dock

 

The station for Greenland Dock is Surrey Quays, but they don't signpost it at the station in case, you know, the wrong kind of people go there. It was one of the first Docklands developments, as the low-rise and human scale (as the architects say) of the buildings shows. It was the first of the London docks to be built (as opposed to riverside wharves) (more details here) and it's pretty darn large. The Royals are larger, but some of the Isle of Dogs docks are smaller. On a sunny day, it's a pleasant place to walk around, with houseboats...

and little feature places as well.

When you get to the Thames, turn right and start walking along the Thames Path towards London Bridge. It's a nice stroll.

...Really, Even If You Can Make The Katana Sound Like One (Almost)...

And it turns out we're not done with Katanas yet...

Roland / BOSS have a thing called Tube Logic. I'd forgotten about it. It's some clever stuff that makes power transistors (or more to the point, an Op-Amp) sound more like power valves. More. Like. Not "exactly like". This is rock 'n roll. Nobody can hear your nuances over the drums.

In a last desperate attempt, to do something about the ineffably "blurry" clean tone I was getting from the humbuckers on the 594 with the power selector at 25W, the Master volume at 09:00 and the pickups at 6 / 7... I turned the volume to 12:00 and dialled the guitar volume back to 2 to bring the volume back to polite levels. It sounded almost identical to the first setting, but, I don't know, 10 lbs lighter?

Then out of curiosity, I turned the power selector to 0.25W (which takes all of 6dB off the 1W loudness of the speaker), and dialled the guitar volume back to 8. Oh Holy Moly! When played through an HX Effects channel with a Tube Screamer, or another distortion pedal, the clouds parted, and the sun shone through. Okay, we're not talking Mediterranean, but it was good enough.

You'll notice this is entirely counter to how Real Amps work. To get a clean tone on a Real Amp, keep the volume / gain below a certain level, and crank it up to get distortion. Cranking up the guitar, while turning down the amp, to get distortion, or cranking up the amp, while turning down the guitar, to get clean, is just being silly.

But that's Tube Logic for you. (Plug in via the Power Amp In socket, to by-pass the K's DSP, which you don't need because you've got a multi-effects pedal.)

It works for me. (For now.)

I do need to dedicate three blocks (two EQ and one compression) of the nine in an HX Effects circuit to what amounts to managing the Katana so it sounds vaguely like a proper amp, but I can live with that for the moment.

There's one combination I'd like to test: a Big Trees

 through a 1x12 cab. Not cheap, but then neither is a decent home hi-fi. And I think it looks cool.

...No, You Really Do Need A Valve Amp...

Hope you enjoyed the little psycho-drama. It had no resemblance to the inner workings of my mind. At. All.

I'm an engineer at heart. I don't collect, and I don't have that "pride of ownership" thing. Things are tools: cars, guitars, screwdrivers, espresso machines, lawnmowers, hi-fi's, whatever. I buy one because it does the job, and I can afford it. I prefer it to be well-made, with good materials, be comfortable to handle, and work with as little friction and bother as possible.

Guitar amps are made to compete with the singer, the bassist, maybe a horn section, a keyboard, the guys at the bar ordering drinks, the pool game over in the corner, the trucks leaving and arriving outside, and (shudder) a drummer, that monster capable of rendering any other instrument inaudible with a flick of the wrist. Nuance and subtlety of tone pretty much vanish when the band strikes up. Guitar amps are just fine for that purpose.

Ah, you say, but they are used in studios as well, where there isn't so much competition. Take a look at a video set in a 32-track (or more) recording studio. Not only does the mixing desk have more controls for things you didn't even know could be adjusted, there are racks of industrial-grade electronics to distort, warp, and modulate sound in ways that are not available on a Helix or a DAW. What comes out of the guitarist's amp into the mic and back to the mixing desk is mere raw material. What's on the record bears zero resemblance to what the band heard in the studio. In the 1960's the amp might have mattered, but not so much since the mid-1970's.

Guitar valve amps are not for home playing. They only come on song around 70dB, and the sweet edge-of-breakup only hits at 85dB or so. Unless it's a, yes, the K-word, which has some trickery in its Tube Logic.

Okay. Let's look at the gear.

Based on Guitar tube reviews, there's a bunch of valve and modelling combos priced below £600 from Marshall, Supro, Vox, Fender, and other familiar names. The clean tone sounds somewhere between suspiciously pristine and just okay, while the cranked tone is thin and fizzy, or boxy and fizzy. The so-called boost buttons do not add harmonic distortion, but just noise. Many of them have quality compromises even more than usual, often in the quality of the speaker, tubes or other components. See Psionic Audio's review of the AC10C1 for an example.

Let's go over the £600 line, and stay there.

Guitar-amp manufacturers have a house take on the clean, edge-of-breakup, and distorted sounds: the usual characterisations relate to the clean sound. Roland is super-clean; Fender is "scooped"; Vox is "chimey"; Marshall is "mid-range"; and so on. Each range has three variations on weight: 20-25 lbs, 40-50 lbs, and 60+lbs. Only the first of those will be going upstairs, so if you want an AC15 or a 4x12 Marshall stack, either you need to know a couple of strong lads prepared to get them up the stairs, or the studio needs to be in the garden or on the ground floor, and you will need a trolley.

So the questions for a bedroom player are: a) do I like the clean tone , b) can I get the thing up the stairs without getting a hernia, c) does it sound good at low volumes, d) will it treat my favourite pedals nice , e) what's the cool factor?, f) can I afford it?, g) will it make that much difference?

a) excludes Fender, because their clean tone is full of itself, and c) excludes Roland because even the JC-20 is WAY TOO LOUD at about 2 on the dial. b) excludes any combo over about 12kg or so, and hence restricts me to the smaller 5-15 watt combos, or a 1x12 and a head. f) depends a lot on the answer to g). To be fair to most modern gear, c) and d) are generally YES for the clean tone, and NO for edge-of-breakup or distortion.

e) Cool factor. That's a tricky one. None of the usual combos or head+cabinets are that cool. Even Marshall stacks are iconic rather than cool.