The what and the how of experience

I wish to thank Matthew Pianalto for his stimulating response to my blog of 5 February. It made me reflect on how the idea of sharing an experience enters into the discussion. His paper also raises a number of interesting issues connected with this theme.

In his comment, Matthew sums up the issue as follows:

The difficulty ... is relational: about how to share a baffling (or awesome, etc.) experience with another.

My first response to this was to say: we have to distinguish between different senses in which an experience may be shared. In one sense, two persons who have been rescued from a sinking ship or who have been victims of a robbery or who have suffered a stroke share an experience: this is an experience they have in common. All the same, their shared experience may have been highly different. For one thing, of course, the circumstances may have been different: one robbery was minor, the other was serious, etc. (The "what" was different.) To allow for this, let us suppose what they experienced was one and the same event: say, they were both robbed together (the same "what"). Even so, the way they experienced it may have been different: say, one of them was able to shrug off the event, for the other it became a life-shattering experience, leading to an awareness of vulnerability and lack of control, or to an awakened awareness of the social injustices driving young people to desperate actions. Etc. (A difference in the "how".)

On reflecting, however, I realized that the nature of this distinction may easily be misunderstood. The "what" and the "how" are not independent of one another. The way I shall describe the situation I, or you, have experienced (what I take the "what" to have been) will be expressive of how I experience it. (What I took to be a robbery was to you just a harmless attempt at intimidation.)

Or maybe this would be a better way of putting it: what, for any given speaker, comes under the heading of "what" and what comes under the heading of "how" depends on what aspects of a situation he or she is able to see as open to question. Something becomes "a matter of how" when (roughly speaking) a person realizes that that is a perspective she might have missed. (She may then either think it an open question who was right, or she may think her perspective correct but recognize that in this case competent judges could get things wrong.)

In other words: if I can only see the duck I will call this a duck (and I will think you wrong if you claim to see a rabbit); if I can see both the duck and the rabbit I will call this a duck-rabbit (and I won't consider either description wrong).

In his paper, Matthew writes that the

oftentimes immense difficulty of putting our experiences into words that enable others to share in those experiences is what often also makes it difficult to motivate our ethical claims (p 10).

Differences in how we experience things may be of many different kinds. Matthew discusses the example of Elizabeth Costello's horror at the way animals are treated in slaughterhouses (in Coetzee's novel of that title), as well as her incomprehension that most other people may witness or be aware of what goes on in slaughterhouses, yet not share her horror.

Matthew speaks about "the difficulties of articulating (in a convincing way) the reality not only of her experience but also what it reveals ". I would suggest, however, that it is misleading to want to distinguish between an experience in itself and what is revealed by it: the experience, one might say, is (partly) constituted by what it reveals.

He imagines an interchange between Costello and someone who does not experience the situation the way she does. He writes:

... unless there is some reason to think that Costello’s horror, as it were, reveals some feature of reality to which her distinctive response is appropriate, rather than that her experience is just a peculiar way of responding to an already fully shared and accessible reality—say, the reality of what happens in a slaughterhouse—then it will be difficult for Costello to convince others that she has seen something they have not (p 15).

I would question this way of setting things up. It makes it sound as if there were some method, independently of how we see things - or can be brought to see them - for determining what is there to be seen: a way of establishing the "what" independently of any conceivable "how". I don't think there is such a method. I would suggest matters are to be turned around here: it is by getting someone to see things the way I see them (and to recognize that way of seeing them as authoritative) that I can get them to recognize that what I claim to see is really there to be seen.

According to Matthew, Costello would have two ways of bringing the other around to her way of seeing things:

She might seek to draw attention to specific details, to see if this direction of attention can bring about an experience (and judgment) like hers, or she might seek to show that the reaction of the critic results from a malformed psychology (or sensibility), where this latter task draws attention to features of the critic apart from (but which give rise to) his reactions when he faces or reflects on the things that horrify Costello. The prior approach might involve, for example, drawing attention to the behavior of animals nearing slaughter; the latter approach would involve observations of the form, “You grew up on a pig farm, so of course you’re insensitive to the suffering of these animals!”

The first method would concern the matter of the what, i.e. it would presuppose that the disagreement is not profound. The second, ad hominem, method might conceivably nudge the other in the direction of changing his mind, but we might as well imagine him turning around and saying: that is precisely why I have a clear notion of what goes on in the slaughterhouse. Or it might make him ashamed of his views, make him pretend to change his mind, but that of course is not what Costello is after. To change his mind he would, himself, have to come to see things differently, and there can be no technique for bringing that about - it may happen or it may not.

(I should mention that the kind of seeing that an actual confrontation may bring about may be of two kinds: I may come to think I was wrong in thinking that slaughtering animals is humane; or: while I have realized the cruelty of slaughter, I may not be moved by this insight until I visit a slaughterhouse. I hope to get back to this distinction.)

The elusive taste of pineapple

On the opening pages of Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume famously talks about a

plain and convincing phaenomenon; which is, that, where-ever by any accident the faculties, which give rise to any impressions, are obstructed in their operations, as when one is born blind or deaf; not only the impressions are lost, but also their correspondent ideas; so that there never appear in the mind the least traces of either of them. Nor is this only true, where the organs of sensation are entirely destroyed, but likewise where they have never been put in action to produce a particular impression. We cannot form to ourselves a just idea of the taste of a pine apple, without having actually tasted it.

This sounds natural enough: the congenitally blind cannot understand colour language, the congenitally deaf can have no idea of the sound of a trumpet or clarinet, and someone who has never tasted pineapple can’t form an idea of what it tastes like. Hume is here arguing for his central doctrine that all our ideas (anything we can talk or think about) have to originate in sense-impressions: we learn what red is by having a visual impression of red, what the taste of pineapple is by having the sensation of tasting pineapple, etc. (Hume would probably have conceded that this need not be literally true: someone might be able to produce a pineapple-tasting compound in the lab and teach us the taste of pineapple by means of it.)

Is Hume right here? What type of claim is he making?

There appear to be two sides to the claim, one apparently psychological, the other concerning understanding. Hume seems to be saying that under certain conditions (in the absence of having tasted pineapple) certain mental contents (or qualia as philosophers would nowadays call them) will not occur. In consequence of this, the person “cannot form a just idea” of the taste. How are these sides connected?

“Isn’t that obvious?” someone may retort: “having an idea of a taste simply consists in feeling or recalling the taste, that is, in undergoing this particular sensation”. But how do we know that someone who has never tasted pineapple (or even a lab-made imitation) will never in fact experience this particular sensation? How are we to exclude the possibility, say, that certain neurological conditions will cause a person to have precisely this sensation when eating cucumber or shrimp, or whatever? Similarly, can we be sure that a congenitally blind person will not in fact have an impression of red and blue dots swimming before him?

The point is that this would make no difference. What matters is that these individuals would have no way of connecting their sensations with the taste of pineapple or with the colours red and blue. (I’m not committing myself on what it would mean actually to attribute experiences of this kind to someone.) The importance of the event of tasting pineapple or seeing an actual coloured object does not lie in its causal efficacy in bringing about a particular sensation; it lies in its constituting a point of reference which guides the speaker in her use of the words - provided of course she knows (e.g. has been told) what she has been tasting or seeing.

What matters are not her mental contents, but the fact that from now on we expect her to be able to carry on certain tasks or to make certain kinds of judgment. Differently put: someone who has seen a red object or has tasted pineapple has access to a sample to which she may appeal in her use of words. She has a mastery of the language-game that someone who has not had these experiences or is incapable of having them does not have. I can tell the first person certain things that I cannot tell the second. (Of course, it isn’t that I can tell the first but not the second what pineapple tastes like - but the first will understand me if I say that something else tastes like pineapple, while the second will not.)

On samples as tools of the language, see Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §§ 16, 50, 56.

Could this line of thought be applied to the case of horrendous experiences? Are we to think, say, of the loss of a loved one as a “sample” that can be used as a point of reference in describing or comparing experiences? Maybe in some cases, but for the most part, the contexts in which we speak about experiences like grief are radically different from the contexts in which we discuss colours or tastes. I hope to return to this question.

(These reflections were inspired by discussions with Olli Lagerspetz.)

On trying to capture reality in language

The small volume Philosophy and Animal Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008) consists of a series of contributions by Cary Wolfe, Cora Diamond, Stanley Cavell, John McDowell and Ian Hacking, each of the latter three commenting on those that precede it. The essays are highly readable and they raise a number of intriguing issues.

In my reading, the essays are more centrally concerned with questions about the limitations of language than with animal life. The theme is adumbrated by John McDowell in speaking of situations "when something we encounter defeats our ordinary capacity to get our minds around reality, that is, our capacity to capture reality in language. That dislodges us from comfortably inhabiting our nature as speaking animals, animals who can make sense of things in the way the capacity to speak enables us" (p. 134).

One situation to which McDowell refers is that invoked in Cora Diamond's essay in the book, "The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy". It comes from a poem by Ted Hughes, "Six young men". (The poem can be read at http://www.hebdenbridge.co.uk/news/news07/102.html .)

The poem is about a photograph of six young men who were soon after all to be killed in the first world war. "The poem", as McDowell expresses it, "is about a kind of impossibility the poet finds in trying to combine that fact [of their imminent death], in a single mental embrace, with the vibrant aliveness with which they are present in the photograph" (p. 132). The poem ends:

To regard this photograph might well dement,
Such contradictory permanent horrors here
Smile from the single exposure and shoulder out
One's own body from its instant and heat.

The poem connects with experiences with which we are familiar: the very incomprehensibility of the death of those who matter to us and of the thought of our own non-existence, the senselessness of the slaughter of young men in war, the poignancy of a photograph capturing a moment in time that is almost palpably present and yet forever lost.

The question I wish to raise is whether experiences like these actually do throw light on our predicament as speakers. Do they reveal something about the essence of language? Or are they just one way of reacting to a powerful experience?

Here are some things to ponder: I believe some of us are more inclined than others to speak of experiences defeating our capacity to capture reality in language. Do those who do not have this experience miss out on something? Or is it merely a matter of what forms of expression we prefer?

Experiences of the sort hinted at by McDowell seem to be speaker-centred rather than bound up with problems of communication. It is I as speaker who experience my inability to capture the experience in words. It is not a matter of someone else finding my words hard to understand. Indeed, we could imagine a situation in which I tell someone of an experience of mine, and when he responds by saying "Yes I understand" I may react by feeling that he does not understand at all. (Perhaps we could even say that in these situations the criterion of one's being understood is that one's interlocutor should have a sense of not understanding?)

McDowell equates "getting our minds around reality" with "capturing reality in language", and he says that the capacity to speak enables us to make sense of things. Again, it is as if I need language to tell myself what it is I experience; language failing I do not understand my experience. However, there is a special twist to this. It is not that I cannot find the right words to articulate my experience. That would be a different situation altogether. Here the problem is that even the right words (say, "these young men died shortly after this picture was taken") fail to capture the experience - that is what takes me aback.

But if so, what is the understanding that we are missing here? It is not that we are at a loss how to interpret the description: we know what the relevant evidence might be for such a claim, and what follows from it. My suggestion is that the feeling of not understanding is partly constitutive of the experience - of how it feels. In saying that this experience "defeats my capacity to capture reality in language", I am using words in a secondary sense.

The paradox of language failure

People sometimes say they have an experience that words cannot convey. These occasions may be of different kinds. There are trivial cases like Hume's claim that we cannot convey the taste of pineapple to someone who has never tasted it. And there are more dramatic cases as when someone who has lost a child says that it is impossible to convey what the experience is like to someone who has not gone through it.

I would suggest that there is something paradoxical about this notion of words failing us, about the idea of a task to which words are unequal.

The task, for one thing, is undeniably linguistic: conveying experiences is the sort of thing we do with words (unlike feeding people, or keeping them warm - words can't do that either, but we would not call this a shortcoming on the part of words).

In the ordinary kind of case, if I try to give an account of an experience and fail, the failure, as it were, is in the language I use. Speakers may disagree on the right description:

"It wasn't really a chaos, just a roomful of people bustling with activity."

"He didn't really hit you, it was more like a friendly pat on your shoulder."

"The columns may look straight but really they get broader the further up you go."

"It wasn't so much that I felt betrayed as that I was mad at myself because I should have seen it coming."

In these cases, getting the description wrong is a shortcoming on the part of the speaker, not on the part of language. But to say that an experience cannot be conveyed is to claim that language isn't up to it. You can't even attempt to describe it: no proposal is better than any other. Nor can you try to overcome this problem by trying to reform the language. (Cp Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 610: "James: 'We lack the words.' Then why don't we introduce new ones? What would have to be the case for us to be able to?")

The deficiency, it seems, is not in this language or that, rather here we are up against a limitation of language, of speaking, as such.

We apparently judge how language measures up against something that is not linguistically articulated. But how can this be done? It seems to require that we step outside language and compare it with reality. And this is what seems paradoxical.

Is there some non-paradoxical way (or ways) of understanding such claims?

Language is things we do

In this blog, I wish to raise some questions in the philosophy of language. I have long been planning to write a book on the subject but found it hard to get going. My friend Pär Segerdahl, who edits an ethics blog, suggested to me that I start a blog on the topic instead. So here I go.

There are, to begin with, two types of questions that concern me in particular, what might be called the question of the powerlessness of language - the idea that there are things language will not allow us to say - and the question of the power of language - the idea that language has power over our thinking, that we are the captives of language. In a sense, these are opposite ideas. The problem that concerns me is that both ideas seem hard to square with the notion that language is our doing, neither more nor less.

We'll see how it goes. I do hope for questions, suggestions and objections from my readers.