Thanks for the thoughtful read. I think this is a good normative framing of philosophical living which many CBT therapists might agree with as it lays out tools for self-betterment.
The term 'classification error', especially in machine learning, assumes a clean normative target. This may or may not descriptively be true of human beings and human affairs.
Beliefs based in deep emotion may be intrinsic to humanity. For example, often people act as if permanence is possible and it motivates acts of great love, care and ambition.
It's also tempting to frame things like Buddhism as primordial CBT. However, Buddhism even today is practiced mainly as a religion where adherents turn to celestial entities for succor or seek release from a purported cycle of life and death.
One thing I like about using the term classification error for "tarachic" beliefs is that it gives a clear, secular normative reason to let certain beliefs go.
The alternative position entails recommending that we preserve beliefs that are false, damaging, self-limiting, and not just privately costly but contagious to those around us.
Even if such beliefs are emotionally natural or motivational in some contexts, it’s hard to see why they should be protected when they reliably produce suffering and functional inhibition (and are based on falsehoods!).
The appeal of this framework is precisely that it doesn’t require appeal to unprovable metaphysics or new superstition. Unlike religious systems that may be instrumentally helpful but rest on strong metaphysical commitments, this view grounds its normativity in observable error, harm, and inhibited function.
In short: if a belief is false, painful, unhelpful, and spreads harm to others, there’s a strong normative case—without invoking anything exotic—for revising or abandoning it.
It seems to me that you are expressly and actively committing to a specific version of rationality and secular epistemology. Is that right?
Generally, most lived belief systems have caveats for why we can't just get on with a virtuous or rational life. Major religious belief systems consider human nature to be inherently sinful, or deluded or distant from divinity in some way. Several contemporary secular belief systems give evolutionary, psychoanalytical or structural reasons for why we can't often help having "tarachic" beliefs. In each case the solution requires some degree of buy in and making some normative commitment for some objectively demonstrable improvement in our quality of life. Needless to say, each system of belief views the others' commitments with suspicion and thinks of them as overwrought.
(I also note most religious / classical Buddhists would make any modern, secularized treatment of Buddhism as inherently deluded and accruing of karma.)
This essay lays out a field of very interesting points and ranges of discussion. I hope it sparks a lot of further discussion because it makes some radical points that are helpful, I think, for everyone to consider. A few questions arose for me while reading. You wrote that not all suffering is pathological or to be eliminated. Are you saying that someone could not rightfully (reasonably) consider the end of any given pain a good thing? Even if pain is at times "informative, morally appropriate or to be eliminated," couldn't it still be that such pain is good to be eliminated, if its elimination then necessarily means the end of some lack of information, the end of some moral punishment, or the end of something that is "to be eliminated?"
You wrote that "underestimating stability leads to a failure to cultivate goods that could flourish" but then wrote that "every composite being will cease to exist -- this is not a contingent fact that might be otherwise." I assume you are aware that very intelligent humans have considered this issue and concluded either that we are not composite beings or that in thinking death is necessarily our annihilation we have "underestimated our stability." But you write as it this is a fact. Do you have proof of this or is this really not a hypothesis? If you admit that there is some uncertainty around what happens after death then you might admit that a lot more fear of death becomes reasonable, for other reasons than you list, since what happens after death could be contingent on actions fulfilled within one's life. Then a fear of dying too early, before one has fulfilled whatever projects that could cultivate a beneficial outcome in and after death, becomes much more appropriate. What if fear of death is a fear of dying before one is ready in this way, before one is ready for whatever may happen upon dying, before one has resolved these nagging confusions about birth and death itself (the who am I really question)?
You mention "goods of sufficient durability to reward investment" as friendship, knowledge, craft, care of loved ones, etc. The question that arose for me is whether these things are always "goods." Isn't an important issue here concerning when and where these types of things are beneficial and harmful? Certainly not all friendship, knowledge, craft, care of loved ones in every circumstance is a good? When are they and when are they not?
You propose that philosophy is the consideration of this boundary between necessity and contingency and I would agree but isn't that dependent on the ability to recognize the boundary between goods and bads? Don't we have to recognize that something is more good than bad in order to then calibrate our fears and desires appropriate to the degree they will last? And I'm not sure I would agree that it is good to lessen our desire for something that is 100% good right now and whose end may or may not be ever actualized (in something other than just a change of clothes or scenery). And I would include good friendships, good knowledge (that is beneficial to all), good skill in a craft (that doesn't ever lead to the creation of useless or even harmful garbage) and good caregiving of loved ones (that isn't more sadistic than anything else).
Thanks for the article. Great points for discussion!
(1) Let me clarify what I had in mind, especially concerning the claim that not all suffering is pathological or to be eliminated.
A clear example is grief. There would be something deeply wrong about not grieving the death of one’s mother, because grief is coextensive with care: it is precisely the cost of having loved well. The absence of grief would not indicate health but indifference or impairment. In this sense, some forms of suffering are not malfunctions but appropriate negative feedback.
More generally, I side with Aeschylus’ πάθει μάθος—“learning through suffering”—with an important qualification: suffering may teach, but it does not have to. What matters is that certain pains are functional signals, not evils to be erased wholesale. Physical pain illustrates this clearly: individuals with congenital insensitivity to pain tend to fare much worse, precisely because pain normally predicts and prevents structural damage. I think an analogous claim holds for some forms of psychological suffering.
That said, ταραχή (tarachē) is not one of these healthy pains. The kind of disturbance I critique in the article is grounded in a misunderstanding of nature—specifically, in false expectations, misordered goods, and distorted anticipations of harm. Unlike grief or physical pain, tarachē does not guide action or protect value; it impairs judgment and propagates further dysfunction, often socially.
(2) On the metaphysical side: while the human body is clearly a contingent composite, one might argue that the soul is metaphysically simple (as you note, many have!). This may be correct, but I think it does not influence the argument about the afterlife.
Instead, I adopt the older maxim: "fear sin, not hell." If there is a just God and post-mortem punishment exists, then that punishment would be good for us in that circumstance—medicinal rather than merely retributive. So still little if anything to fear, and death just takes us there, being a neutral gateway to the otherside in itself.
Generally though, I tend to avoid arguments about the afterlife because I feel that (as Diderot said of Pascal's Wager) "an imam could argue the same way." Such arguments I have found too often operate on a double standard: demanding credence for their own position without allowing it to those of other faiths.
Clearly, this is not what you are doing, but this is why I avoided questions of the afterlife in the paper.
(3) On the question of goods. I take an Aristotelian line here: goods such as friendship, knowledge, craft, and care for loved ones are typically considered instrumental goods—necessary for the realization of higher goods like wisdom—but in some cases (especially friendship) they are also choice-worthy in themselves. They are not the highest good, but higher goods cannot be actualized without them.
(4) I agree with you! Philosophy, is not only a matter of modal recognition—seeing what is necessary versus contingent—but also of ethical recognition: seeing what is genuinely good for us. Much suffering arises from misrecognition or misordering of goods, from failing to put first things first. This, too, i would call a source of tarachē -- as it fails to take into account the nature of the good.
(5) Finally, one psychological point that nearly made it into the article: people tend to assume that pain will be both acute and chronic, even though, empirically, it is usually one or the other. This mistaken anticipation causes people to fear pain far more than is rational—and that fear itself generates additional suffering. In this way, tarachē produces suffering from misinformation. It is suffering born of ignorance, functionally impairing, and often contagious to those around us.
That is the core target of the argument. Misunderstanding of the nature of things sometimes directly leads to suffering and the inhibition of function (and the contagious spread of that inhibitory misery to others!). Uprooting such ignorance I think is a proper object of philosophical inquiry.
Thank you again for the engagement, and please feel free to respond to any of the points above!
This is a compelling and carefully argued account of taraché as a form of modal misrecognition. The emphasis on calibrating affect to necessity and contingency is especially clarifying and philosophically well-grounded.
What the essay invites, however, is to consider the limits of this therapeutic frame in environments where action itself is structurally preconfigured. In contexts where decisions are resolved upstream—through institutional procedures, automated systems, or delegated flows—accurate modal cognition may still reduce taraché locally, but no longer suffices to restore agency in any operative sense.
That doesn’t undermine modal therapy as such, but it does highlight a boundary: where personal affective calibration ends and structural conditions begin to determine what can still be meaningfully acted upon.
Thanks for the thoughtful read. I think this is a good normative framing of philosophical living which many CBT therapists might agree with as it lays out tools for self-betterment.
The term 'classification error', especially in machine learning, assumes a clean normative target. This may or may not descriptively be true of human beings and human affairs.
Beliefs based in deep emotion may be intrinsic to humanity. For example, often people act as if permanence is possible and it motivates acts of great love, care and ambition.
It's also tempting to frame things like Buddhism as primordial CBT. However, Buddhism even today is practiced mainly as a religion where adherents turn to celestial entities for succor or seek release from a purported cycle of life and death.
Thanks for the thoughtful comment, Vishakh!
One thing I like about using the term classification error for "tarachic" beliefs is that it gives a clear, secular normative reason to let certain beliefs go.
The alternative position entails recommending that we preserve beliefs that are false, damaging, self-limiting, and not just privately costly but contagious to those around us.
Even if such beliefs are emotionally natural or motivational in some contexts, it’s hard to see why they should be protected when they reliably produce suffering and functional inhibition (and are based on falsehoods!).
The appeal of this framework is precisely that it doesn’t require appeal to unprovable metaphysics or new superstition. Unlike religious systems that may be instrumentally helpful but rest on strong metaphysical commitments, this view grounds its normativity in observable error, harm, and inhibited function.
In short: if a belief is false, painful, unhelpful, and spreads harm to others, there’s a strong normative case—without invoking anything exotic—for revising or abandoning it.
Thanks again for your comment!
- Cole
It seems to me that you are expressly and actively committing to a specific version of rationality and secular epistemology. Is that right?
Generally, most lived belief systems have caveats for why we can't just get on with a virtuous or rational life. Major religious belief systems consider human nature to be inherently sinful, or deluded or distant from divinity in some way. Several contemporary secular belief systems give evolutionary, psychoanalytical or structural reasons for why we can't often help having "tarachic" beliefs. In each case the solution requires some degree of buy in and making some normative commitment for some objectively demonstrable improvement in our quality of life. Needless to say, each system of belief views the others' commitments with suspicion and thinks of them as overwrought.
I am curious to hear how your approach differs from, say, the Bay Area Rationalists' (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community). If you are more or less in their quadrant, what do you make of the postrats (https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/rational-magic)?
(I also note most religious / classical Buddhists would make any modern, secularized treatment of Buddhism as inherently deluded and accruing of karma.)
This essay lays out a field of very interesting points and ranges of discussion. I hope it sparks a lot of further discussion because it makes some radical points that are helpful, I think, for everyone to consider. A few questions arose for me while reading. You wrote that not all suffering is pathological or to be eliminated. Are you saying that someone could not rightfully (reasonably) consider the end of any given pain a good thing? Even if pain is at times "informative, morally appropriate or to be eliminated," couldn't it still be that such pain is good to be eliminated, if its elimination then necessarily means the end of some lack of information, the end of some moral punishment, or the end of something that is "to be eliminated?"
You wrote that "underestimating stability leads to a failure to cultivate goods that could flourish" but then wrote that "every composite being will cease to exist -- this is not a contingent fact that might be otherwise." I assume you are aware that very intelligent humans have considered this issue and concluded either that we are not composite beings or that in thinking death is necessarily our annihilation we have "underestimated our stability." But you write as it this is a fact. Do you have proof of this or is this really not a hypothesis? If you admit that there is some uncertainty around what happens after death then you might admit that a lot more fear of death becomes reasonable, for other reasons than you list, since what happens after death could be contingent on actions fulfilled within one's life. Then a fear of dying too early, before one has fulfilled whatever projects that could cultivate a beneficial outcome in and after death, becomes much more appropriate. What if fear of death is a fear of dying before one is ready in this way, before one is ready for whatever may happen upon dying, before one has resolved these nagging confusions about birth and death itself (the who am I really question)?
You mention "goods of sufficient durability to reward investment" as friendship, knowledge, craft, care of loved ones, etc. The question that arose for me is whether these things are always "goods." Isn't an important issue here concerning when and where these types of things are beneficial and harmful? Certainly not all friendship, knowledge, craft, care of loved ones in every circumstance is a good? When are they and when are they not?
You propose that philosophy is the consideration of this boundary between necessity and contingency and I would agree but isn't that dependent on the ability to recognize the boundary between goods and bads? Don't we have to recognize that something is more good than bad in order to then calibrate our fears and desires appropriate to the degree they will last? And I'm not sure I would agree that it is good to lessen our desire for something that is 100% good right now and whose end may or may not be ever actualized (in something other than just a change of clothes or scenery). And I would include good friendships, good knowledge (that is beneficial to all), good skill in a craft (that doesn't ever lead to the creation of useless or even harmful garbage) and good caregiving of loved ones (that isn't more sadistic than anything else).
Thanks for the article. Great points for discussion!
Thank you so much for the thoughtful engagement!!
(1) Let me clarify what I had in mind, especially concerning the claim that not all suffering is pathological or to be eliminated.
A clear example is grief. There would be something deeply wrong about not grieving the death of one’s mother, because grief is coextensive with care: it is precisely the cost of having loved well. The absence of grief would not indicate health but indifference or impairment. In this sense, some forms of suffering are not malfunctions but appropriate negative feedback.
More generally, I side with Aeschylus’ πάθει μάθος—“learning through suffering”—with an important qualification: suffering may teach, but it does not have to. What matters is that certain pains are functional signals, not evils to be erased wholesale. Physical pain illustrates this clearly: individuals with congenital insensitivity to pain tend to fare much worse, precisely because pain normally predicts and prevents structural damage. I think an analogous claim holds for some forms of psychological suffering.
That said, ταραχή (tarachē) is not one of these healthy pains. The kind of disturbance I critique in the article is grounded in a misunderstanding of nature—specifically, in false expectations, misordered goods, and distorted anticipations of harm. Unlike grief or physical pain, tarachē does not guide action or protect value; it impairs judgment and propagates further dysfunction, often socially.
(2) On the metaphysical side: while the human body is clearly a contingent composite, one might argue that the soul is metaphysically simple (as you note, many have!). This may be correct, but I think it does not influence the argument about the afterlife.
Instead, I adopt the older maxim: "fear sin, not hell." If there is a just God and post-mortem punishment exists, then that punishment would be good for us in that circumstance—medicinal rather than merely retributive. So still little if anything to fear, and death just takes us there, being a neutral gateway to the otherside in itself.
Generally though, I tend to avoid arguments about the afterlife because I feel that (as Diderot said of Pascal's Wager) "an imam could argue the same way." Such arguments I have found too often operate on a double standard: demanding credence for their own position without allowing it to those of other faiths.
Clearly, this is not what you are doing, but this is why I avoided questions of the afterlife in the paper.
(3) On the question of goods. I take an Aristotelian line here: goods such as friendship, knowledge, craft, and care for loved ones are typically considered instrumental goods—necessary for the realization of higher goods like wisdom—but in some cases (especially friendship) they are also choice-worthy in themselves. They are not the highest good, but higher goods cannot be actualized without them.
(4) I agree with you! Philosophy, is not only a matter of modal recognition—seeing what is necessary versus contingent—but also of ethical recognition: seeing what is genuinely good for us. Much suffering arises from misrecognition or misordering of goods, from failing to put first things first. This, too, i would call a source of tarachē -- as it fails to take into account the nature of the good.
(5) Finally, one psychological point that nearly made it into the article: people tend to assume that pain will be both acute and chronic, even though, empirically, it is usually one or the other. This mistaken anticipation causes people to fear pain far more than is rational—and that fear itself generates additional suffering. In this way, tarachē produces suffering from misinformation. It is suffering born of ignorance, functionally impairing, and often contagious to those around us.
That is the core target of the argument. Misunderstanding of the nature of things sometimes directly leads to suffering and the inhibition of function (and the contagious spread of that inhibitory misery to others!). Uprooting such ignorance I think is a proper object of philosophical inquiry.
Thank you again for the engagement, and please feel free to respond to any of the points above!
This is a compelling and carefully argued account of taraché as a form of modal misrecognition. The emphasis on calibrating affect to necessity and contingency is especially clarifying and philosophically well-grounded.
What the essay invites, however, is to consider the limits of this therapeutic frame in environments where action itself is structurally preconfigured. In contexts where decisions are resolved upstream—through institutional procedures, automated systems, or delegated flows—accurate modal cognition may still reduce taraché locally, but no longer suffices to restore agency in any operative sense.
That doesn’t undermine modal therapy as such, but it does highlight a boundary: where personal affective calibration ends and structural conditions begin to determine what can still be meaningfully acted upon.
BTW I'm Diane.
Question - Does this pertain to anger as well?
Thank you for that brilliant essay.