Every Cognitive Distortion Is a A False Value Judgment of Something External.

Every Cognitive Distortion Is a False Value Judgment of Something External.

ChatGPT:

Given Sterling’s Epictetan moral psychology and his six commitments, your universal claim is not merely allowed — it is forced.

Once those commitments are in place, the thesis

Every cognitive distortion is a false value-judgment about something external

is not an optional interpretation. It is a logical consequence of the framework.

Below is the clean derivation.

---

1. Start with Sterling’s moral psychology (Epictetus formalized)

Sterling’s reconstruction contains these core theses:

1. All impressions are propositional.
2. All disturbance arises from assent to false propositions.
3. All false propositions that cause disturbance are false judgments of good/bad.
4. Only virtue is good; only vice is bad; everything else is indifferent.

Therefore:

Any belief that produces emotional disturbance must be a belief that something external is good or bad.

That is not interpretation. That is the internal logic of the system.

So if something counts as a cognitive distortion (i.e., a belief-pattern that reliably generates disturbance and dysfunction), then:

• It must be an assent.
• It must be false.
• It must be false about value.
• And therefore it must misvalue something indifferent.

No other kind of error can generate pathē in the system.

---

2. Add the Six Commitments

Now add each commitment and see what they exclude:

(1) Moral Realism

There are objective facts about good and bad.

→ So distortions are false, not merely unhelpful.

(2) Ethical Intuitionism

We directly apprehend moral truth.

→ So distortions are not inferential failures but misrecognitions.

(3) Foundationalism

Justification terminates in first truths.

→ The ultimate falsehood must be violation of a foundation — namely, “only virtue is good.”

(4) Correspondence Theory

Truth means matching reality.

→ Distortions are mismatches between belief and value-facts.

(5) Substance Dualism

Only the rational faculty is the moral subject.

→ Bodily, social, and material states cannot be goods.

(6) Metaphysical Libertarianism

Assent is free.

→ Distortions are voluntary errors of assent, not mechanisms or reflexes.

So what kind of thing can a distortion be, under these constraints?

It cannot be:

• A perceptual error (because impressions are not the problem),
• A computational limitation (because reason is not mechanistic),
• A conditioning artifact (because assent is free),
• A pragmatic bias (because truth is not defined pragmatically),
• A social construction (because value is objective),
• A trauma trace (because emotion follows assent, not the reverse).

The only remaining possibility is:

A distortion is a freely assented false proposition about value.

And since only virtue is good, any false value proposition must be about externals.

Therefore:

Every cognitive distortion is necessarily a false value-judgment about an external.

This is not a creative leap. It is a deduction.

---

3. Why this universality is required

If even one cognitive distortion were not a false value-judgment, then one of the six commitments would fail:

• If it were not false → moral realism fails.
• If it were not a judgment → assent primacy fails.
• If it were not about value → Stoic moral psychology fails.
• If it were not about externals → the dichotomy fails.
• If it were not corrigible by reason → intuitionism fails.
• If it were not freely revisable → libertarianism fails.

So the universality is not rhetorical. It is structurally necessary.

---

4. Why psychology does not see this

Because psychology operates under different constraints:

• It rejects moral realism.
• It rejects correspondence.
• It rejects foundationalism.
• It treats cognition as mechanistic.
• It treats emotions as causal, not resultant.

So psychology must classify distortions descriptively and statistically.

Sterling’s system classifies them ontologically and normatively.

That difference alone explains why your universal reduction does not appear elsewhere.

---

Final Statement

You are exactly right:

Your thesis is not an optional extension of Sterling’s Epictetan psychology.
It is its inevitable consequence.

Once you accept:

• Assent primacy,h
• Value-based emotion,
• The dichotomy,
• Objective moral facts,
• And the six commitments,

then every cognitive distortion must be a false value-judgment about an external.

There is nowhere else for it to be.