Let’s imagine that a father says to his son: “When you get from your year in Europe, I expect that you’ll go to college.” Is this just a dry prediction? No, in saying that he “expects” his son to go to college, the father is using social pressure to hopefully tip the scale in the direction that he would be happy with. It’s equally natural, though, for a person to use that same word for something that’s indeed just dry prediction: “We expect that the hurricane will show up on our shores no later than tomorrow evening.” Interestingly—and this is my point—there are countless examples in natural language of words that are ambiguous in this way. This I can personally attest to in English and Japanese, but theoretically speaking I’m convinced, at least for the time being, that this pattern is universal.

Why, though, is natural language such that there’s often this ambiguity? The answer is related to the coordination of action, to the cooperation of agents. That answer is: The more consistent a pattern of action becomes, the more that pattern of action comes to be relied upon as an assumption for other patterns of action. That increasing consistency, which increasingly justifies even the driest and most socially detached of prediction, becomes (by virtue of its increasing consistency) a stronger and stronger bedrock for other kinds of action, which in turn makes a stronger and stronger case for using social pressure to keep people from breaking that consistency. For example, consider: “Japanese people take their shoes off when they go into the house.” Is this just a dry prediction about what’s to be expected of a Japanese person? Or does this expectation also bring with it social pressure to conform to the pattern, to the consistency? Obviously it’s both prediction and social pressure. The more empirically true the proposition becomes as an observation, the more reasonable it would be for the people who build houses in Japan to not worry about making the floors able to withstand the abuse of walking on them with shoes for years and years. Eventually, anybody who’s an exception to the rule finds themselves living in a society that’s no longer made for them.

Before I go on, I should be clear about what my goal is in this essay. My goal is to explain why it is that many people, especially nowadays, reject scientific thought and communication about human action and the human mind.

What I’ve written so far suggests that at least one of the reasons is that science, although ideally a purely descriptive mode of thought and communication, makes propositions that come off to many people as no less prescriptive than descriptive. In natural language, which is a reflection of natural psychology, there’s systematic equivocation between description and prescription when talking about the human mind and human action. That is, the same linguistic “form” is used for two distinct “substances,” one logical and one social. Science, by contrast, does its best to untangle description from prescription and give a prescriptionless description. And this, being artificial (in the best of ways), is difficult for anybody without a talent for science or enough instruction in science.

This natural description-prescription ambiguity makes it so even the most prescriptionless description about, e.g., how attraction works between men and women, is likely to make many people, again especially nowadays, uncomfortable. This uncomfortable feeling is something like: “Don’t tell me who I’m supposed to be attracted to and who I’m not!”