Wrong Goal or Wrong Method?
It may be asked, concerning the
objections I raised against Alison Gopnik’s attempt to describe an autistic
child’s experience of the world, whether the problem lay in wanting to give an
account of the child’s experience in the first place, or whether it simply lay
in the way she went about it.
One may ask: what task is
the inside story (as constructed by an outsider) called upon to fulfil? Onesuggestion I made is that it is taken to function as a key to an understanding
of the other’s behaviour. If we could see the world through the eyes of the
other, we would have a direct perspective on how situations will present themselves
to people like him. Thus, if I could give an “inside account” of how the
autistic child sees other people, this would provide me with an understanding
of how, say, the inability immediately to see others as human beings will shape
his responses to them, make them different from those of normal people. In this
way, the “inside view” would make the child’s behaviour comprehensible.
This line of thought
would accord with a very influential view of human life. On this view, our
actions and expressions are governed by mental states and processes (thoughts,
feelings, sensations, etc) that exist independently of their manifestation in
behaviour. The mind, as it were, is the core of the human being, like a control
tower. The individual forms a representation in her mind of the world in which
she lives. It is through this that her conception of her world comes to guide
her actions. Since the autistic individual represents the world to herself
differently, her actions are different.
This
thinking may or may not be what underlies the importance bestowed on “inside
stories”. Anyway, it seems to be circular. Our basis for constructing the
inside picture the way we do is presumably the child’s behaviour, so what we
end up arguing, it appears, is that the autistic child behaves the way he does
because that’s the kind of child he is. Could there still be an advantage to
dressing up our understanding in the first person form? (Perhaps it helps us
remember that the child’s perspective is indeed inhabited by another?)
---- I should remind you
that “the autistic child” here and throughout my discussion is really a
philosophers’ man of sticks, since I have no first-hand familiarity with the
predicament. ----
On the other hand, the
line of thought might be the opposite of this. It might be argued that, aside
from the child’s actions and expressions which we might gradually learn to
recognize, to predict, and in some sense perhaps even to understand, there
would still be a residue: the way it feels to the child himself, which we
cannot get at simply by coming to know him and recognizing what challenges are
posed to him through his special affliction. Perhaps it will be added that this
is the really important part, and that, unless we can recreate it in our own
mind, we do not really understand the child in a deeper sense. It may also be
added that, if we pursue this line of thought to its logical conclusion, we
must recognize that we will never be able to get at this innermost residue of
the child’s experience. (Can that conclusion be avoided?)
Now what kind of „Einstellung“ would one be expressing in
saying that we will never have access to what the other is thinking? (“Hold
on!”, the conventional analytic philosopher will interject here. “Why should
significance matter? Knowledge is knowledge; what flows from it is external to
the knowledge itself.” What this philosopher overlooks, though, is that there
is a question of what point someone is making in claiming knowledge or the lack
of it, or attributing it to another. The sense of the word “know” is just as
dependent on its context of use as that of any other words of our language. So
if the claim that we can’t have access to the other’s mind is to be anything
other than a classroom exercise in philosophical dualism, we must ask ourselves
what attitude it expresses.)
I
could see this idea as bound up with two different, almost opposite attitudes.
One is the one I touched on before: respect in the face of affliction: the
refusal to appropriate the other’s suffering as one’s own. The other, I would
claim, is a form of indifference; an unwillingness to deal with the other’s
predicament.
I
saw a manifestation of this latter attitude in a documentary (Swiss I think it
was) which I saw many years ago. It was about a girl of maybe 10 who suffered
from a Helen Keller type affliction: she had neither sight nor hearing. But
hers was not a Helen Keller type of fate: she lived with her family almost like
a feral child. No effort was made to convey language or any kind of manners to
her. (Whether it could have been done I do not know: Helen Keller may have been
a special case, she was undoubtedly exceptionally gifted, she had been speaking
before she lost her hearing; also, she had Anne Sullivan.) Anyway, what struck
me was that the members of this girl’s family kept on saying how impossible it
was to fathom what went on in her mind. And it seemed to me that this profession
of incomprehension went together with the way she was treated. It may have been
used as an alibi for not undertaking the very strenuous effort of having her
educated. Or it may have expressed resignation after numerous efforts had
failed. In either case, I think we can see how the “it’s impossible to know”
may go together with an inclination to distance oneself from affliction.
