Writing and talking at the same time

In Part I, Chapter XXVIII of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, there is a scene in which Prince Bolkonski is writing a letter and talking to his son at the same time. The prince is not interspersing the writing with the talking; Tolstoy is clearly conveying the notion that he is formulating a written message while saying something different to his son.

                      Through this description Tolstoy is giving us a sense of the Prince’s lively and restless character. It struck me, however, that this is not something I could imagine happening in real life. It is not just that formulating oneself in one way in writing and in another way in speaking at the same time is very difficult; I’d wish to go further and say that they can’t intelligibly be carried on in parallel. Nor, for instance, do I think one could contribute to one conversation in sign language and to another orally at the same time. Though one may obviously write and say out loud what one is writing at the same time.

                      It’s not, of course, simply that one can’t do two things at once: one can walk and chew the proverbial gum at the same time, or tie one’s shoelaces and whistle a tune, or talk and drive, etc. And one could talk while signing one’s name, and possibly write while reciting a poem. It’s as if what becomes possible is to say and write different things at the same time and mean them.

                      I think there is an important philosophical point here, but I don’t think I’m philosopher enough to bring it out.

                      Would this be the way to think about it: in order to imagine this happening, we should have to think of two persons (two speakers) inhabiting one body?

Getting under their skin

This blog is in (partial) response to the latter part of David Cockburn’s comment on “What you see is what you grasp”. My thinking has been enriched through numerous discussions of the topic with my wife Merete. (She still disagrees with some of my claims.)

                      David writes:

(1) “the notion of a visual appearance does not need to come with any picture of it as a ‘mediator’ (in some, or all, perception); there is a respectable, everyday, use of such locutions (often closely linked with the notion of ‘seeing as’ as Wittgenstein discusses this.)”

I agree.

(2) “the urge to wonder what it is like for, say, someone with severe autism is, it seems to me, such a basic and significant form of concern for others I am reluctant to suppose that it rests on a philosophical confusion.”

Again, I agree. There is a serious task of trying to get clear about what life is like for someone with severe autism – or, for that matter, for someone who is blind, or has recently been widowed, or is physically disabled, or suffers from chronic pain, or is deeply in debt, etc. The seriousness of the task is bound up with the sense that these people suffer an affliction, that we have an obligation to share their burden if only in the sense of trying to be attentive to what life is like for them (or, as we might also put it: what life must be like for them). The seriousness of the task is also bound up with the sense that it is hard for us to imagine what things are like for them, partly because we may not wish to think about it, and partly because we lack the imagination to do so.

We may feel we have to get under their skin, that we should be able to share their “subjective experience”. Now this may be an intelligible way of setting out the nature of the task, and then again it may be misleading. I guess this may be why David speaks about the risk involved in trying to spell out how things appear to another.

What makes it so hard to get under someone’s skin? In order to get clear about this question, we should keep several ideas apart.

                      For one thing, there’s the idea of a metaphysical barrier between you and me, also known as solipsism: “It’s not just hard to imagine what life is like for another, it is impossible. In order to understand someone else’s affliction, I would have to be that person.”

Moderate solipsism

There are also more moderate forms of the idea that there’s something we can’t do: “I can imagine what things are like for another, but not entirely”, or “I can only imagine what things are like if I’ve been afflicted in the same way myself.” I think there are legitimate ways of talking of an inability here: one may be expressing a form of respect for what the other one is going through, bowing to his authority concerning his experience, or admitting that he’s the one who’s suffering. (On the other hand, if I’ve gone through the same affliction as the other, we may feel that this creates a bond between us, perhaps giving me the right to say: “I know what you’re going through.”)

I think we only resort to this form of discourse in connection with highly significant experiences.

(Perhaps we’ll say that his suffering can’t have as great a significance for us as it has for him. To this it can be retorted that in some cases, those close to a person may be more troubled by his affliction than he is himself.)

In these instances, we are not really addressing a philosophical issue about the imaginability of other people’s experience, but rather expressing a moral attitude*. Yet we may feel drawn to giving this attitude a metaphysical grounding, arguing that there is a limit in principle to how far we can get under someone’s skin.

(I’m not here addressing the difficulty the afflicted person may feel trying to communicate her experience to others. I touched on this in my earlier blog, “On trying to capture reality in language”.)

A genuine difficulty

I believe focusing on philosophical solipsism is liable to make us ignore a more genuine difficulty: the difficulty of getting an overview of the actual, specific problems of living with a particular affliction: what the pain does to you on an everyday basis, what activities are made impossible or unimaginably harder to carry out, etc.

I call this a genuine difficulty because it is not logically insuperable. Some people are better at this than others: say, Sarah may have an eye for the way Joe´s movements are hampered by his back pain, or she may have a sense for how the pain affects his moods. (This may or may not be connected with Sarah suffering or having suffered similar pains herself, or having been around someone who does.) Or she may be able to imagine the kinds of daily problems a deaf or blind person may face. Such abilities may be rare, but some people do have them, and one may get better at this. It is because of this that coming to terms with a person’s affliction may be a moral challenge to others.

(Solipsism, on the other hand, may serve as an alibi for not caring, while what I called moderate solipsism, on the contrary, may be an expression of care; one could imagine someone like Sarah combining her sensitivity with an attitude of not being able to get under Joe’s skin.)

The idea of a mental shortcut

I believe our jumbling together the different sorts of real or imaginary difficulties we experience in connection with other people’s afflictions may converge in an idea of the absolute inaccessibility of the other’s mind. How does all of this connect with my remarks about Gopnik and autism? I would contend that the wish to picture another’s life from the inside, as it were, goes hand in hand with solipsism. The “inside picture” is what we believe we could see if we could get into the other person’s mind. The idea is that, if we could only do this, then the other would be comprehensible. (We could understand the other “as she does herself”, we think. But  to what extent is “understanding” an adequate term for a person’s relation to her own predicament?*)

                      In other words, we would have a shortcut to the other person’s life, we could then see all the difficulties involved in her affliction at a glance. This, I believe, is the illusion. There can be no shortcuts;  for one reason because coming to understand the other requires a moral deepening.

                      (I wish to mention an excellent treatment of related issues by Benjamin Tilghman in his essay “What is it Like to be an Aardvark?” – a spoof of Thomas Nagel’s well-known essay  “What is it Like to be a Bat?” – in Philosophy 66 (1991), 325-338.)

P.S. I have marked with asterisks points concerning which my wife is particularly hesitant.

What you see is what you grasp

In my previous blog I promised to get back to the question of what tempts us to accept accounts of other people’s experience in the style of Gopnik’s account of what it is like to be autistic. What I had in mind was something like the following idea: “Suppose I can see that those beings over there are human beings and you can’t see it. That means that it must be given to me in what I see that they are human, whereas it is not given to you. Hence they must look different to me than to you.”

                      I want to try out the suggestion that this is connected with a general inclination, in speaking about seeing, to focus on locutions of the form “seeing an X” (”seeing a lion / a fire / clouds”) – what we might call the “direct-object form”. Less attention is usually paid to locutions of the form ”seeing that ---” (”seeing that a lion is hiding in the bush / that something is burning in the fireplace / that the sky is clouding over”). One reason for this may be that we don’t think very much about the difference between these forms, we just assume that it does not really matter which form we focus on, and find it simpler to speak about direct-object locutions (“After all, in either case, we’re talking about the same thing: seeing”). 

Another, slightly more sophisticated reason may be that we are inclined to think of the direct object form as simpler or more basic than the seeing-that form, in either a logical or an epistemological sense, or both: 

- logically, in the sense that all cases of seeing-that are taken to involve the corresponding forms of direct-object seeing (“seeing that the cat is on the mat consists in seeing the cat and the mat and the relation between them”); 

- epistemologically, in that cases of seeing-that are taken to be based on the corresponding forms of direct-object seeing: “it is through seeing the cat and the mat and the relation between them that I am able to see, hence to judge, that the cat is on the mat.”

In short, on this view, the direct-object form gives the most concrete account of what seeing involves.

Differently put, whenever I see that ---, there must be some state or entity which mediates my seeing: there must be a look of things, a set of percepts or sense-data or visual appearances, or a way in which I am appeared to. 

                      (On the other hand, it will be agreed that the seeing-that locutions generally give a more direct expression to how my seeing bears on my activities. My seeing the red traffic light explains my stopping the car only provided I saw that there was a red traffic light. For I may see the red light without seeing that the light is red.)

                      Here I want to set out briefly what I think about this approach to seeing (I realize that I am here trying to cover enormous ground in a few steps; possibly I’m getting in over my head, and I’m ready to be corrected):

(1) Actually, what the “see-that” locutions capture is usually more specific and concrete than what the direct-object locutions capture. The use of direct-object locutions is more varied and harder to survey than seeing-that locutions. 

On some uses, seeing an object is compatible with not realizing what object one is seeing, on other uses it is not.  We sometimes use a locution like “She saw the red traffic light” together with qualifications such as “but she doesn’t know what traffic lights are”, or “but she couldn’t make out what it was”, or “but she is colour-blind and thought it was green”, or “but she was thinking of something else”. On other occasions, we imply that the seer does grasp what she is seeing. (On those occasions, we could mostly have used a see-that locution instead.) 

The context will make it clear in which way the word “see” is being used; however, when doing philosophy we tend to gloss over those distinctions, and to ignore the role of the context. The consequence is that when philosophers discuss seeing, they apparently have only a hazy idea of what precisely they are discussing. (I plan to give examples of this in a later blog.)

(2) On the other hand, it is usually quite easy to grasp how what will count as seeing that --- depends on the particular context of speaking. Thus, we can easily imagine how “She saw that there was food on the table” would fit into a context in which she was starved and looking for something to eat or where she had been asked to change the table-cloth or where it meant that dinner was being served; on the other hand, without some such story we would not know what to make of the ascription of seeing.

(3) Focusing on the direct-object locution tempts us to concentrate on the first person case: we contemplate “what it is like” for us to see things, at the cost of asking in what circumstances a person will qualify as seeing that ---. (On the whole, it is often healthy to shift one’s attention to the third person in discussing issues like those of perception, memory, as well as many other psychological phenomena.)

(4) In the ordinary sort of case, seeing that --- requires no mediator: it does not usually consist in, nor is it based on, any specific state or entity. To decide that someone sees that the traffic light is red all we need to do, roughly speaking, is to establish that, with the help of her eyes, and the light being red, she judges that it is red. (In many cases of seeing-that, it isn’t even clear what the object might be: you can see that it’s windy from the way people in the street clutch their clothes, you can see from her eyes and her expression that she has been crying, you can see that the suitcase is heavy from the way that man carries it, you can see that there’s been bread in this basket from the crumbs left in it.)

(5) A great many (maybe most) tangles in the philosophy of perception are due to the idea of a mediating state or entity, and to the effort to decide what that state or entity must be like.

Let’s get back, then, to the Gopnik example. I would suggest that she makes the following assumption: the way human beings appear to people with autism has to differ from how they appear to others, since it is through their appearance that it is given to those others, and is not given to people with autism, that what they all see are human beings. (Here I grant the notion that we do not normally infer that people we see are people. I am not, on the other hand, committing myself one way or the other on whether her assumption that people with autism are “mindblind” is well-grounded or how it is to be understood.) 

My criticism of the passage by Alison Gopnik, then, has two parts. On the one hand, I would question the idea that there is a context-independent way of articulating how things appear to a person, and on the other hand, I would suggest that there is no reason for accepting the way Gopnik chooses to articulate how things appear to an autistic person, in whatever context.

The Verfremdung Illusion

In an unpublished essay by Alison Gopnik, we find the following imagined account of what it is like to be “mindblind”, a condition allegedly afflicting people with autism (a mindblind person supposedly lacks or is deficient in the ability to ascribe wishes, beliefs, intentions, feelings, etc. to other people):

This is what it’s like to sit around the dinner table. At the top of my field of vision is a blurry edge of nose, in front are waving hands ... Around me bags of skin are draped over chairs, and stuffed into pieces of cloth, they shift and protrude in unexpected ways .... Two dark spots near the top of them swivel restlessly back and forth. A hole beneath the spots fills with food and from it comes a stream of noises. Imagine that the noisy skin-bags suddenly moved toward you, and their noises grew loud, and you had no idea why, no way of explaining them or predicting what they would do next.

(Alison Gopnik, "Mindblindness"; unpublished essay, University of California, Berkeley. Frequently quoted, for instance in Simon Baron-Cohen, Mindblindness, an Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts 1995, pp.4-5.)

The writer’s purpose, undoubtedly, is to convey an eerie impression (rather like a Francis Bacon painting). Bags of skin, holes being filled with food and producing noises are undoubtedly disgusting. The question is, are we really getting a sense of what it is like to be autistic? Why should we suppose that autistic children see people as bags of skin shifting and protruding in unexpected ways? First of all, granting that people’s words and behaviour are altogether unintelligible to the child, what do we suppose the child is expecting, so that their noises and movements come across as unexpected? Isn’t it rather because we have some idea of what people in our surroundings are saying and doing that some of the things they say and do may surprise us?

Besides, in introducing the idea of movable skin bags, isn’t the writer playing on a set of contrasts that are available to us, while it would be begging a lot of questions to attribute them to the child? Skin bags, I would suggest, seem weird because they are covered by skin yet not human. But to the child, on the account being proposed here, the objects in front of him are neither human nor non-human. (Why, by the way, should they be described as skin bags: is this a child who recognizes an object as made of skin but not as human?)

What inclines us to suppose that some account such as Gopnik’s must give a realistic idea of what it is like to be autistic? The suggestion I wish to make is that it does so because of a deep-rooted but misguided way in which we tend to think about perception. I wish to get back to this matter in a later blog.

Is it a blooming buzzing confusion?

Among writers of fiction and students of human behaviour there are recurrent attempts to capture experiences radically different from one's own, say, that of animals, newborns, people suffering from severe forms of autism, etc. These attempts often reveal philosophical prejudices. A classical case in point is William James's account of what he takes to be a baby's experience of the world (or rather, perhaps, the way in which this account has often been read): 

The law is that all things fuse that can fuse, and nothing separates except what must... The baby, assailed by eyes, ears, nose, skin, and entrails at once, feels it all as one great blooming, buzzing confusion...  (The Principles of Psychology, p. 462.)

Evidently, readers have found this to be a striking account of the baby’s world as they conceive of it. The main point James wishes to make here is that the baby doesn’t distinguish between the inputs of different senses. The implication is that older children and adults do distinguish between them. Well, do we normally? In what sense? Suppose the building in which I am sitting undergoes a seismic tremor. I feel the floor and my chair shaking, see the furniture moving slightly, hear the windows rattle, etc. My experience of the tremor is made up of all these sensory inputs. Does this mean that I am confused? If I am, it is not because of the way these inputs fuse. On the contrary, it may be because of the way they combine that I am able to grasp what is happening.

                      (The fact that I may be agitated or shocked by the tremor, I submit, does not mean that I am necessarily confused about it.)

                      On the other hand, we may, after the fact, try to sort out the different sensations we had. We may do so because we have learnt to speak about the different senses, to speak of colours as things to be seen, sounds heard, shapes and movements seen or felt, etc. We may succeed to a greater or lesser extent in our effort to sort them out.

The baby does not have access to this verbal repertoire – will not ask herself: ”to what extent was that something I heard or something I felt?” etc. Does that mean that the baby is confused? Of course not; on the contrary, we might say, it is only because we have learnt to ask those questions that we may be confused about the contributions of the different senses – though this, as I said, need not mean that we are confused about what we are witnessing.

                      I suspect the reason James’s account has had such great appeal is that he appears to express an idea which we may feel it tempting to embrace: the newborn child, confronting an unfamiliar world, is bound to find her impressions bewildering. Yet that I would claim is a misleading picture of the baby’s experience. The experience of birth is probably shocking, as the experience of an earthquake is, but that does not mean that it is confusing. (I am not sure whether James is to be taken as saying that the baby is confused, or whether his point is simply that her sense impressions are all bundled together.)

Things bewilder us when we are trying to make sense of them. We are bewildered because we do not know how to go about finding answers to our questions. (“I don’t know my way about”, Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 123.) The baby, however, as yet has no questions. She has not reached the stage of confusion – nor is there, I would suggest, any particular age at which we may be more confused than at any other.