As a closeted, anti-war (the Iraq war, specifically), non-religious, left-leaning teenager in the early 2000s, the prospect of my conservative family finding out my secrets put me in a state of terror at family gatherings. In particular, I recall a time when the conversation turned to what fate they wished upon people like me, if they had their way (not happy things). Having just turned 38, I'm still apprehensive about coming out - and thus apprehensive about divulging what I've just divulged.
To be sure, as alien I was / am to them, they are to me - at least in terms of political and religious beliefs. And this is a source of a persistent, bothersome cognitive dissonance that I'm still trying to resolve. In a larger context, I think this is something many of us experience, as we try to hold on to relationships despite the seemingly untraversable chasm between us. In what follows, I'd like to make a modest attempt to at least begin to build a bridge across this chasm.
Consider the following statements:
1. Lois Lane believes Superman can fly.
2. Lois Lane does not believe Clark Kent can fly.
Bracketing concerns from referential semantics (of which I will say no more), there is a sense in which it seems that both 1 and 2 are true (for the philosophically curious, look up Frege's "Sense and Reference" from 1892). Given that "Superman" and "Clark Kent" are co-referential (that is, they refer to the same person), it seems like we should be able to substitute these terms with no problems. Yet, if we substitute "Clark Kent" with "Superman" in 2, this statement - Lois Lane does not believe Superman can fly - clearly contradicts 1. So, what gives? Well, what we have is what philosophers call an opaque context, where substitutability of co-referential terms doesn't guarantee the preservation of truth values. While I tend to think the semantic contents of any given utterance are wholly determined by what they refer to (feel free to gloss over what I just said) - and so the above discussion is a bit misleading - there is nevertheless a sense in which we can appeal to something of the sort to explain inner psychology. That is, even if we say "Well, I mean, since Clark Kent is Superman, Lois Lane is just wrong if she thinks that Clark Kent can't fly", that Lois Lane at least doesn't think she thinks Clark Kent can fly is relevant to explaining her behavior and psychology.
So, what does this have to do with family gatherings? Being charitable, in retrospect, there is some sense in which, despite saying X about people like me, it doesn't follow that they actually think X about me. Certainly, in terms of reference, there is another sense in which they do / did in fact believe such things about me, but I don't think this is helpful in the context of explaining inner psychology - bracketing the truth values of any given statement - as a way of resolving cognitive dissonance (but it certainly is relevant in a normative context where logical implications determine whether certain commitments are consistent with other commitments). Now, of course there are certainly times where, say, a gay family member comes out to the rest of the family and those people know exactly what their general beliefs about homosexuality entail for specific cases like this, but I'm not trying to explain these cases.
tl;dr:
We aren't necessarily aware of the implications or our own beliefs and we can be wrong about what we think we believe. So, in religious or political contexts in which it seems that others think that we are terrible people, give them the benefit of the doubt and hope that they know not what they think.
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