The proposition fallacy, the homunculus fallacy, the command fallacy, and the golem fallacy: A family of fallacies
The proposition fallacy, the homunculus fallacy, the command fallacy, and the golem fallacy are a family of fallacies that people exhibit when trying to understand how cognitive behavior occurs. They constitute a family of fallacies because they are all variations on the idea that cognition is inscribed rather than constructed, singular rather than collective, passive rather than active, and reactive rather than anticipatory.
The proposition fallacy is the idea that signals carry their meaning with them, as opposed to that meaning being constructed by the agent interacting with the signal. For example, the proposition fallacy says that the word “apple” refers to the concept of an apple in and of itself rather than being a noise or string of symbols that a hearer or reader uses to construct a prediction of an apple. More general, the proposition fallacy attributes perceptions such as sights and sounds to signals such as light waves and sound waves, and internal experiences such as thoughts and emotions to particular circuits or patterns of neuron activation, etc.
The constructionist alternative to the proposition fallacy is meaning-making and relational realism. Signals do not carry their meaning with them; an agent makes meaning out of them by putting the signals into a system of relationships with other signals. “Apple” means apple because of how it occurs with other words like “eat”, “tree”, “fruit”, etc., as well as how it doesn’t occur so much with words like “traffic” and “ocean”.
The homunculus fallacy is the idea that the agency/cognition/intelligence/whatever of a system is explained by the presence of a miniature person inside the system who innately has the property of being an agent/cognitive/intelligent/whatever. Of course, this belief would just create an infinite regress, and more importantly, is empirically false.
A corollary of the proposition fallacy and the homunculus fallacy is the movie theater fallacy: the idea that the inner intelligence passively receives signals that show it the world as the sensory perceptions of sight and sound that we experience, and all the inner intelligence has to do is make decisions about how to pilot the body through this movie—so maybe it should be called the virtual reality video game fallacy instead. Even if there were an inner homunculus, they would still not be able to experience incoming signals as a movie because the meanings of the signals have to be constructed. Someone still has to direct and edit the movie. (Even with a given script.)
The command fallacy is the idea that commands exist: that you can actually command something by directly inscribing onto its will somehow as opposed to simply shaping its incentive structure. This is not so. For example, if a king tells a peasant what to do, we would say in normal language that the king is issuing a command and the peasant has to obey. In reality, however, the peasant can do whatever they want. All the king can do is adjust what the peasant is likely to do by shaping their incentive structure.
The command fallacy has significant implications for how we understand development and motor behavior. Organisms neither gain form by following genetic instructions, nor do motor behaviors occur by the brain commanding the limbs to move. Instead, forms and behaviors are found, maintained, and destroyed as patterns of economic activity, with no privileged cause and no single part or signal somehow making the resulting form happen.
The golem fallacy is a corollary of the proposition fallacy, the homunculus fallacy, and the command fallacy. It is the belief that the behaviors and especially cognitive properties of an entity are due to an inscribed set of instructions, drives, etc., written within it, such as genetic or neural instructions or even programming code or mathematical equations, where the words drive the behavior of the passively receiving system and where the words contain all there is to know about the behavior of the system. In reality, the behavior of a system cannot be reduced to the writing within it. Instead, the tendencies and abilities of a system are created by the parts of the system interacting with each other. An economy contains no instructions; there is nothing analogous to (the traditional understanding of) the brain or the DNA in the economy, yet the economy is a highly capable system that pursues goals intelligently.
Whether any of these fallacies are really fallacies is an empirical question. If someone one day makes a golem, for example, by putting words on a piece of paper into head of a clay body and watching the doll come to life as an embodiment of the words, then the golem fallacy is not a fallacy. By “fallacy” I just mean “a tendency people exhibit but ought not to”, a tempting mistake.