In the Space of Reasons

UCLan PhD Studentships, School of Health

2012-01-25T13:41:00.002Z

Reference Number: RS/11/17-19

The School of Health wishes to appoint 3 full time PhD studentships. Each studentship is tenable for up to 3 years for a PhD (via MPhil route) [subject to satisfactory progress]. The studentship will cover the cost of tuition fees for UK/EU residents plus a stipend (currently £13,590 per annum). The successful applicant will start on 1 April 2012. International applicants may apply but will be expected to pay the difference between the UK/EU and International Fee Rate.
Applicants need to undertake research projects within an area of methodological and subject expertise within the School of Health details of which can be found on the websitehttp://www.uclan.ac.uk/schools/school_of_health/research_in_school_of_nursing.php
The School of Health has a broad range of expertise and was ranked in the top 10 Nursing and Midwifery Schools in the UK in the Research Assessment Exercise in 2008. Our main subject areas are:-

Stroke (Professor Caroline Watkins) 01772 89 3646 clwatkins@uclan.ac.uk
Evidence Based Health Care (Dr Bev French) 01772 893642 bfrench1@uclan.ac.uk
Cancer Nursing (Professor Kinta Beaver) 01772 893715 kbeaver@uclan.ac.uk
Mental Health (Dr Joy Duxbury) 01772 895110 jduxbury@uclan.ac.uk
Families, Children and Life Transition (Professor Bernie Carter) 01772 893720bcarter@uclan.ac.uk
Centre for Professional Ethics (Professor Doris Schroeder) 01772 892550/2547/2549dschroeder@uclan.ac.uk
Healthy Settings (Dr Mark Dooris) 01772893760 mtdooris@uclan.ac.uk
Philosophy and Mental Health (Professor Tim Thornton) 01772 895405tthornton1@uclan.ac.uk

Potential applicants are strongly encouraged to discuss their research proposal with an appropriate lead prior to application.
Applicants should have a first degree (Honours) in a relevant subject at 2.1 or above for standard entry onto MPhil/PhD or Master's level qualification in a relevant subject (Essential for ethics and philosophy applicants)
Requests for an application pack (quoting the reference number RS1117-19) should be directed to the Graduate Research School Office. Tel: 01772 895082 or email:researchdegrees@uclan.ac.uk
Closing Date: 10 February 2012

CHSTM Mental Health Group Programme Jan - May 2012

2012-01-23T09:09:00.001Z

Centre for the History of Science, Technology & Medicine & Wellcome Unit for the History of Medicine

Mental Health Group Programme Jan - May 2012

Thursdays, 4.30.pm, Room 2.57,
2nd Floor, Simon Building, Brunswick St.

26th Jan Matthew Smith, University of Strathclyde
The uses and abuses of the history of hyperactivity

1st March Len Smith, University of Birmingham
Work as treatment in the home and colonial lunatic asylum; England and the West Indies, 1815 – 1890

29th March Sarah Collins, University of Manchester
Second stories: dementia, narrative and memory in conversation

3rd May Jen Wallis, Queen Mary, University of London
The male brain: pathology and gender in the nineteenth- century asylum'

31st May Ian Cummings, University of Salford & Martin King, MMU
Representations of post-traumatic stress in modern detective fiction

The mental health group is an informal, interdisciplinary forum for academics, practitioners and people with an interest in mental health to share and discuss their mutual interests. Everyone very welcome. For more information see http://www.chstm.manchester.ac.uk/newsandevents/seminars/mentalhealthforum/

Metaphor and anomalous self-experience

2012-01-20T15:17:00.011Z

I have been having a look at Josef Parnas et al’s EASE: Examination of anomalous self-experience with the hope of adding discussion of its attempt to codify, or at least increase the degree of codification of, a complicated diagnosis based on anomalous self-experience to my chapter in the OUP Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry. But before turning to that I’m intrigued by an initial comment in the context of the difficulty of patients putting such abnormal experiences into words. The difficulty is this:

The experiences may be fleeting, perhaps even verging on something ineffable. They are not like material objects that one can ‘take out of one’s head’ and describe them as if they were things with certain properties, or redescribe the experience at different occasions in exactly the same terms. The patient may be short of words to express his own experiencing. [Parnas et al 2005: 237]

Given that, then patients employ metaphors. And that prompts the authors to say the following:

Use of Metaphor
The patients employ metaphors to describe what they experience; this is also the case with healthy people – it is a universal process. A metaphor is usually defined as a transfer of meaning from one conceptual domain to another, like in the expression: ‘life is a journey’ (the concept of life is made meaningful by an appeal to a journey, belonging to another domain). In the context of a psychiatric interview, a metaphor should not be seen as ‘just a metaphor’ or ‘just a manner of speaking’ that somehow, distortingly or conventionally, stands for an underlying (more) true or authentic anomalous experience, i.e., a metaphor is not only a signifier (sign), distinct from, and contingently attached to the signified content (‘signifié’ = the sign’s meaning). Rather the following is the case: an experience (non- or prelinguistic), especially of the prereflective type, becomes progressively conceptualized, i.e. transformed into a conceptual (linguistic) format, in order to be grasped by the reflecting subject, thematized and rendered communicable to others. The metaphor should be seen here as a basic functional aspect of this symbolization process, where it operates as a linguistic vehicle or medium through which the experience first articulates itself and so becomes reflectively accessible. The metaphor is therefore the first stage of making a prelinguistic or prereflective experience explicitly accessible to oneself and to the other. The choice of metaphor is linked to the nature of experience in a noncontingent way, i.e., experience and metaphor are not entirely independent. [ibid: 237-8]

The picture is this. In the context of EASE, the use of a metaphor to express an abnormal experience is not mere metaphor where this normally involves either a distorting or a conventional representation which stands in for a true or authentic experience. So the first point of note is the idea that experiences of this (normal) sort could be true. I suspect that is not what is meant at all. A normal perceptual experience could be true if were representational and represented things correctly. (Lots of philosophers, including, eg., McDowell have thought this. Others deny that experiences themselves ever have any content.) But in this passage, there is no suggestion that this is the relevant dimension of truth (between the experience and the world). I think they mean just between the metaphor and the experience. It is as though if a metaphor is distorting or false, there must be a standard of truth and the thought here is that it is the thing for which the metaphor is a metaphor which is itself true. (As though: if a sentence falsely describes something, there is a fact which is true. Or if the sentence is true then there are two true things: derivatively the sentence and originally the fact. But facts are not true; they just are.)

Rejecting that thought – but not rejecting it as senseless – Parnas et al suggest that in the case of EASE, the metaphor is a basic feature of the symbolization process. It serves as vehicle through which the experience articulates itself (another fishy phrase) and thus experience and metaphor are not independent.

That seems very odd to me. Surely if one selects a metaphor to express one’s normal experience, the metaphor and the experience will not be independent. The one will be selected to fit, in whatever way metaphors fit, the experience. If, for example, one thinks that metaphors have content then the content of the metaphor will (be selected to) fit the experience. So the idea of saying that in EASE the two relata are not independent, and that choice of metaphor is instead linked to the nature of experience in a noncontingent way, seems not to distinguish it from the everyday case properly or normally understood.

So my hunch is that this is an attempt to dig deeper and say something like this: in the case of normal experiences, one might put them into words in a non-metaphorical way as well as in metaphorical ways. But in the case of EASE, all there is, is a metaphorical expression. If so, though, I have two worries.

First, ‘metaphor’ is the wrong word because, I suspect, there will be no possibility of unpacking how the metaphor applies to the abnormal experience. There will be no unpacking because there will be no way to weigh up the content of the metaphor and the content of the experience as potentially distinct matters. In fact, that is part of what Parnas et al are trying to say when they contrast the EASE case with normal cases where there is, they claim, by contrast no connection of content. That very closeness (in the EASE case) suggests that this is not a matter for metaphor, however.

Second, the idea of anomalous experience becoming conceptualised having initially been unconceptualised seems odd. Again I say this in part because of something they say: when they say that abnormal experiences are not like material objects that one can ‘take out of one’s head’ and describe them as if they were things with certain properties. For that reason, such experiences seem the wrong sorts of things to be first independent of, but then clothed in, conceptual form.

PS: Look here for a video made by Josef Parnas.

Parnas J, Moeller P, Kircher T, Thalbitzer J, Jansson L, Handest P, Zahavi D. (2005) ‘Examination of Anomalous Self-experience’ Psychopathology, 38: 236-258

Philosophy for the theory of translation and interpretation

2012-01-20T11:55:00.006Z

I’ve been invited to give a guest lecture on a post-graduate module on the theory of translation and interpretation here at UCLan. I learn that ‘part of the programme content involves studying post-structuralist approaches to fluid textual meaning and to the (im)possibility of equivalence and semantic fidelity within translating, especially of literary texts with fluid meaning, which are open to interpretation/deconstruction by individual readers and translators’. So that prompts the question of which bits of the philosophical larder to raid, of what is sufficiently-free standing to be teachable to non-philosophers and then, finally, what one should think about the matter.

Obvious first thoughts are:

1) Quine’s attack on analyticity based on the impossibility of a sufficiently independent characterisation of such a notion. The argument in a nutshell is that there is no distinction between the analytic and synthetic if we cannot explain what that distinction amounts to. But all attempts at explanation presuppose equally mysterious concepts.

Against this, Grice and Strawson memorably argue:
If we take these two conditions together, and generalize the result, it would seem that Quine requires of a satisfactory explanation of an expression that it should take the form of a pretty strict definition but should not make use of any member of a group of inter-definable terms to which the expression belongs. We may well begin to feel that a satisfactory explanation is hard to come by. [Grice and Strawson 1956: 148]

2) Quine’s radical translation and Davidson’s radical interpretation. Under slightly different ground- rules, both offer accounts of what underpins facts about meaning by examining its ascription by field linguists starting from scratch to interpret native utterances. They go on to suggest that our own access to language is constrained by the same epistemic predicament.

It turns out, they argue, that the underpinning account does not determine meaning sufficiently to rule out a lingering indeterminacy. Concretely, according to Quine, the native utterance of ‘gavagai’ could pick out rabbits, rabbit stages, or even rabbit flies etc. More abstractly, according to Davidson, there is holism that connects word meaning and belief content such that there can be no atomic equivalencies.

3) Kripke’s Wittgenstein-inspired (if hardly accurate) argument that there are no facts about meaning. In thinking about how I can justify that my use of a word today is in accord with the standards of correctness that governed my past practice, Kripke unleashes a form of scepticism which concludes from limits on what we can know to the claim that there are no facts about meaning. How can Kripke draw such a conclusion about the link between rules and applications from epistemological considerations?

The answer is that an important assumption is built into the sceptical approach. If there were some fact that constituted the relation between a rule and its applications, it would be independently identifiable by the idealised subject that Kripke postulates. Kripke supposes, for the purpose of argument, that one may have all possible information about one’s past experiences, mental states and inclinations. He then asks whether any of these would be sufficient to determine the rule that one were following. His conclusion, based on his interpretation of Wittgenstein’s arguments, is that none would be. Given the idealisations involved, and the assumption that had any fact constituted the rule one were following one would have known it, then there is no such fact of the matter.

The sceptical argument, then, remains unanswered. There can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word. Each new application we make is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything we may choose to do. So there can be neither accord, nor conflict. [Kripke 1982: 55]

What should we conclude from these arguments?

All three lead to revisionary consequences. They undermine our pre-philosophical commitment to facts about meaning, respectively: there are no facts about meaning equivalence; there are no determinate facts about meaning; there are no facts about meaning.

All three start by examining the nature of meaning and attempting to shed light on it (one might say, what we mean by ‘meaning’ but this is not an interesting reflexivity yet) from outside. Quine assumes a scientistic naturalism about the kind of facts there are. Davidson at least wishes to shed light on meaning without circularity (though he says:
Quine describes the events or situations in terms of patterns of stimulation, while I prefer a description in terms more like those of the sentence being studied; Quine would give more weight to a grading of sentences in terms of observationality than I would; and where he likes assent and dissent because they suggest a behaviouristic test, I despair of behaviourism and accept frankly intensional attitudes toward sentences, such as holding true. [Davidson 1984: 230]).
Kripke appears to place no particular limits on the reduction base (though it turns out he does).

All three, therefore, can be undermined by those with sufficient confidence to reject explicit and implicit attempts at reductionist naturalism. The arguments share the same defect: they infer, from the failure of a particular kind of reduction of facts about meaning, the conclusion that there are no, or at least limits on, those facts about meaning. But the cost of this diagnosis is that one has to grant that facts about meaning are sui-generis. And that in turn suggests that the ontology and epistemology of meaning is mysterious (or rather, will seem mysterious to anyone who feels any temptation at all towards physicalist reduction): the world contains facts about meaning which are not reducible to more basic facts and those facts are apparent to those, at least, with eyes and ears to see and hear them, to those initiated into this tract of the space of reasons.

Davidson, D. (1984) Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Grice, H.P. and Strawson, P.F. (1956) ‘In Defence of a Dogma’ Philosophical Review 66: 141-159
Kripke, S. (1982) Wittgenstein on rules and private language, Oxford: Blackwell

Language and cold symptoms

2012-01-12T09:46:00.001Z

I’ve spent the last three days not just working from home but from bed, laptop nestling in a growing mountain of tissues, mug of lemsip in hand, and angry and apparently underfed cats shouting from the doorway. A cold, in other words. I wonder whether there’s any truth in the idea that if one can be ill for a few days, after a period when it would have been very difficult to be, then one is more likely to be so. The only upside of still feeling lousy on, unusually, a third day is that – irrationally perhaps – this suggests to me a thorough biological underpinning (even if psychological factors helped let it in).

Again however, it’s the relationship of such an ordinary experience to something quite bizarre which strikes me and yet, even so close up, it seems to resist capture. What I mean is the way the dysfunctioning of a cold upsets the relationship of language and experience.

So I am not particularly surprised by the ‘content’ of what is always for me the primary symptom: a feeling that I need to be in horizontal, to be in bed. What might have been surprising is that that seems to be a primitive content. It’s not, eg., that a feeling of dizziness (no doubt the result of blocked sinuses) leads to an inference that it would be wise to lie down. Rather, there’s a kind of direct normative demand in the feeling itself. But that seems to be language clothing experience in the way we expect.

What is odd is the way that lying down and trying to sleep I have experiences which seem to last, stably, for some considerable time and yet be a bit bizarre. Last night, for example, I became convinced that getting to sleep was a kind of practical project, an action which involved subsidiary elements. Further, I interpreted these through the metaphor of the need to shut down complex machinery. Whilst at the same time realising that this was nonsense, the thought that levers had to be moved and valves shut floated around my mind, stopping, so it also seemed, me actually falling asleep.

But I didn’t really think that to sleep required turning something off. It wasn’t that false belief. Nor was it the mad parade of imagery of a dream. Nor a fleeting fancy. For what seemed an hour I had an experience I want (and wanted, I think) to put in those words whilst also thinking them unsatisfactory. That was just one bit of the typical experience of a cold. (And why one can spend three days in bed and still feel unrested.) Given my wakeful thoughts about the relationship of experience and language, I’m not sure what to make of this.

Charles Travis ‘A sense of occasion’

2012-01-03T17:51:00.016Z

I am going to summarise just what I take to be the main argument of Travis’ 2005 paper ‘A sense of occasion’. Travis starts with two claims from John Cook Wilson, one of which, the ‘core conception’, he supports and one, the ‘accretion’, he rejects.

The core conception: knowledge is unmistakeable
The positive claim is also familiar from McDowell’s ‘Knowledge and the internal’. It runs:

[I]f N knows that p, then what he sees as to whether p leaves no possibility (for him) that p is not so. To see enough of how things are to qualify as knowing that p, one must see no less than p itself. He says, for example (p.100),
In knowing, we can have nothing to do with the so-called ‘greater strength’ of the evidence on which the opinion is grounded; simply because we know that this ‘greater strength’ of evidence of A’s being B is compatible with A’s not being B after all.
The point for the moment is this: if N knows that p, then he could not have the grounds he does for taking it that p while p was not so. There is simply no such possibility, not even a very remote or outlandish one. We can see this as rejecting a Lockean suggestion: that knowledge may be merely ‘certainty as great as our frame can attain to, and as our condition needs’. [Travis 2005: 288]

Travis illustrates this first with a mathematical case which both admits of a proof and for which there is no possibility of a sceptical ringer. But the more interesting application of the claim is to perception.

Now consider a perceptual case. N faces a pig, and, eyes open, sees it. Suppose N grasps that he is doing that – sees what he is seeing (in this respect) for what it is. N thus sees there to be a pig before him. To grasp, as he does, what he thus sees is to grasp himself to see what excludes all possibility of there being no pig (for all he can see) – to grasp himself as seeing what excludes a ringer case. [ibid: 288]

Now in one sense this is not very radical. Seeing is factive so if N does see a pig that does exclude all possibility of there being no pig there. But the point seems to be that seeing the pig involves taking oneself to be so seeing and thus is unmistakeable. That seems more contentious. Seeing requires taking onself to be seeing. (Throughout the paper, Travis rejects what he calls externalism which does not seem simply to mean something like reliabilism.)

Knowledge that one faces a pig, if available, is as unmistakable, secure, as arithmetical knowledge, if that is attainable. There is a describable position which, if attainable, would be knowing one faces a pig. Nothing less than this would do. There is (pace Locke) no second-class variety of knowledge. [ibid: 289]

But Cook Wilson adds to this a further thought.

The accretion: no ringers

[T]here is no such thing as a ringer for knowing that p – a condition which, if N were in it, would be indistinguishable to him from the condition in which he is in knowing that p. N would not know that p if not-p. So this means that N knows that p – is in the right condition – only if there is no such thing as a ringer for his situation with respect to p – a situation in which not-p, but which, were he in it, he could not distinguish from his actual one in knowing that p. Conversely, in the knowing state, N can distinguish his condition from all conceivable states in which not-p. I will call this Cook Wilson’s distinguishability principle, or, for short, the accretion. [ibid: 290]

The problem with this is that it seems to rule out knowledge of the external world (though not knowledge of maths) because it is always possible to construct a ringer. Cook Wilson puts the accretion forward because of a version of the argument from illusion which starts and finishes thus:

Premise: there is a ringer for N’s situation with respect to p (o)
Penultimate conclusion: N might be (for all he can tell/see) in a ringer situation with respect to p (o)
Conclusion: N does not V that p (or does not V o) [where the values of V are such things as know (that p), see (that p), see o (e.g., a pig)]. [ibid: 291-2]

According to Travis, Cook Wilson thinks that for knowledge of the external world the premiss is clearly true and leads to the penultimate conclusion and hence the conclusion. The challenge Travis takes on is conceding the premiss whilst denying the penultimate conclusion and hence the conclusion.

Rejecting the accretion

The suggestion for how to do this is first made in this passage. The first stage is to link the objectivity of judgement to the standing possibility of error:

I take something to be so only where there is that which I thus take to be so – something so, or not, independent of my so thinking. Where what I take to be so need not have been so (if not elsewhere), there is at least that much room for making sense of the idea of my being mistaken. Environmental judgements, in the nature of the case, always make for that much room... [ibid: 296]

But despite that, although the standing possibility implies the logical possibility of a ringer, it does not follow that I may actually be subject to such a possibility:

It is always possible, in this sense, that I may be wrong: where I take p to be so, that fact, so far, always leaves it open that I might be wrong. But, Austin reminds us, for it to be possible that I may (might) be wrong is not yet for it to be so that I may be. That depends, he tells us, on circumstances (in ways not yet spelt out). If it does, that makes the situation this: there are, or may be, circumstances in which, though there is, recognizably, such a thing as a ringer for my situation with respect to p, it is not so that I might be in a ringer situation (for all I can see or tell). If that is right, then the argument from illusion is invalid. The accretion accordingly drops out. [ibid: 296]

In other words, Travis concedes the first premiss of the earlier argument but not its penultimate conclusion. Why not?

Occasionalism

The answer, predictably, is occasionalism. There may be a multitude of standards by which to judge whether a feature of the world is the way someone has said that it is. The concepts expressed in the words used do not determine a single view. What does narrow down the possibilities (when all goes well and thus there is a determinate answer) is context: the occasion of the utterance. This applies to familiar cases such as what counts as toast being blackened or Lake Leman being blue (blackened by burning or Marmite; blue from the sun and sky or dye?) but also to knowledge ascriptions themselves.

The main suggestion for how this is the case comes from a discussion of something else Travis talks about elsewhere (and in truth I’d not before seen its point in his picture): factive meaning. Because Travis supports Cook Wilson’s core conception of knowledge, knowledge cannot be generated merely from strong evidence. It needs something stronger such as factive meaning. He takes a typically Travisian example: the signs of Sid’s infidelity.

[C]onsider the tell-tale signs – that strange perfume, the receipt for lunch at a secluded spot, Sid’s suddenly depressed libido. There are at least two statuses such things might have. That scent may be evidence that Sid is seeing someone. But it may also mean that he is. Here ‘mean’ is factive: if a means that b, then given a, b. If, despite a, b does not obtain, or happen, then a did not mean b after all. Suppose Zoë sees that a, and recognizes it as meaning b. (Thus, ‘recognize’ being factive, a does mean b.) Then Zoë has, not mere evidence that b, but proof in the strictest sense: it is not just so that, for all the grounds that Zoë has, perhaps not-b. Zoë sees, unmistakably, that b. She thus knows, on Cook Wilson’s conception of knowledge. Evidence is beside the point. Strange scents can be acquired in many ways – crowded elevators, over-zealous department store personnel. But suppose Sid manifestly had no such opportunities. Then in his case that strange scent may mean that he is seeing someone. If Zoë is au fait enough with his wonts, she may recognize the scent to mean that. [ibid: 301]

So scent can be either mere evidence or factively mean Sid’s guilt. If the latter, Zoë can acquire knowledge even according to the core conception. But still why does this connect to occasionalism? Because factive meaning depends on what might have been.

Does the scent mean that Sid is seeing someone? Or is it merely evidence? What does that depend on? Suppose that, though Sid might have got the scent through seeing someone, he also might have got it in other ways – elevators, for example. Then the scent is at best evidence. (If seeing someone is a likely way for Sid to have got the scent, then it is good evidence. If it is an unlikely enough way, then perhaps the scent is no evidence at all.) But if Sid would not have come by the scent in any other way – if no such scenario is actually a way things might be – then the scent means that he is seeing someone. It is then up to Zoë to appreciate what is there to be appreciated... What might be thus depends, for one thing, on how things are. To that extent, it is a matter for discovery. But it also depends on what is (needs) to be treated as fixed in how things are, and what is allowed to vary. That is a matter liable to vary from occasion to occasion for saying what might be. [ibid: 301-2]

In a different example Travis considers whether bleating means sheep. Well it does if there are no goats but not if there are. It can in Umbria, eg., if there are no goats there. But what if there might have been? What if it is just luck that there are none? Travis suggests that fixing this is occasion-sensitive.

Cook Wilson’s core conception could be right only if his accretion is not. Austin’s view (once established) earns us our right to jettison the accretion. It earns us a right to reject the argument from illusion. For, on some occasions for stating the argument (of particular cases), its premise may be true while its penultimate conclusion is false. Sid faces a pig – in plain daylight, and he knows as well as most of us what a pig looks like. There is plainly such a thing as a ringer for his situation. There is such a thing as facing a robotic pig with artificial flesh. Might Sid, for all he can see or tell, be in a ringer situation? Might he be facing a robotic pig? Perhaps yes, perhaps no, depending on the occasion for discussing Sid. Where not, the argument from illusion, as then stated, is invalid. It is not generally reliable. [ibid: 304]

So the shape of the position seems to be this. Travis holds something like an aspect of McDowell’s picture in ‘Knowledge and the internal’: that knowledge does not stop short of the fact known. That is the core conception. Also like McDowell’s paper, he rejects the idea that there can be ringer-free exercises of knowledge of the external world (McDowell calls that a fantasy). But, unlike McDowell, he argues that one needs occasionalism to block the inference from the mere possibility of a ringer to the undermining of knowledge via the idea that, as far as the subject is concerned, the obtaining of the veridical, non-ringer case, is external to him/her: that as far as he/she is concerned it might equally be the case.

There is a further clue as to why this is so. Travis argues that it is a mistake to say, as McDowell does say, that a subject needs luck, a favour from the world.

The favour the world must do me if, as I find myself at time t, I am to know that p, is that ‘it actually is what it appears to be’ – that p actually is so, rather than (for me, then, undetectably) merely appearing to be so. But, the idea is, once that favour is done, that it has been may be part of my standing in the space of reasons: part, that is, of what it is for me to know that p. In which case, my enjoying the standing means that I need no favours. [ibid: 313]

Now if I understand him, McDowell’s point is that one cannot have justification on one side of a divide (between internalism versus externalism) and truth on the other. It cannot be that justification requires a further favour to yield truth and thus knowledge. If so, even when combined fortuitously with truth, such ‘justfication’ would not amount to knowledge. So instead, McDowell suggests, given that we must also reject the fantasy that ‘reason must be credited with a province within which it has absolute control over the acceptability of positions achievable by its exercise, without laying itself open to risk from an unkind world’ then getting oneself into a state of justification already assumes some luck but no more is needed to get from that to knowledge.

But Travis objects to this view saying:

[T]here is no room, I suggest, for the sort of favour McDowell here envisages. I face a pig, just on the other side of the railing from me. What I see (whether I realize this or not) is a pig before me. If I take in (register, am aware of) my doing that, then I have that – that I see a pig before me – as my reason for taking there to be a pig before me; in which case I have proof, in the strictest sense of proof, that there is one before me. To take this in – to register it, and not merely, say, to surmise it – I must have a suitable ability. I must be able to tell when I see a pig before me. If I have such an ability, then one favour I do not need from the world is that things ‘be what they appear’. My ability is precisely one to tell how (in the relevant respect) things are. If I lack such an ability, then I cannot be said to know there is a pig before me – in the crucial instance, to register, rather than surmise. In that case, favours from the world cannot help me. So there is no room for McDowell’s envisaged favours. [ibid: 313]

Now part of McDowell’s account is that – when all goes well – perceptual experiences take in, or stop nowhere short of, the facts. Relative to such experiences, no more luck is needed in gaining knowledge of the world. Still, it is not wholly within the subject’s control that what they have is this sort of veridical experience. I think that McDowell thinks that he has done enough to make knowledge possible by ruling out a picture on which it was clearly impossible. (There is an appeal elsewhere to the idea that we have a concept of action – and responsibility for action – even though what we are able to do depends on external contingencies not wholly within our power.) But Travis suggests that this is not good enough. If I realise that I see a pig, I must have an ability to tell when I see a pig. But if I do, then I have proof ‘in the strictest sense of proof’ that there is a pig. Given that it is proof then no further favour is needed. That it is a pig is as within my control as a mathematical case.

Of course, there remains a disanalogy between the pig and the maths case: the former permits a ringer, the latter not. But the appeal to occasionalism is supposed to block the more general possibility of a ringer and its potential application in this particular case. In this case, there cannot be a ringer.

Well that is how it seems to go. Readers familiar with the paper will realise that, aside from a number of subtleties, I have also missed out an account of what is central: how occasionalism applies to the ascription of knowledge. I have simply hinted that this follows from the fact that what might have been is assessed in context.

The reason for the omission is that whilst I know how it applies to saying that Lake Leman is blue (where what one says or means can differ between thinking it reflects the blue sky or has been dyed) I am much less sure what the different meanings are of saying that N knows that there is a pig before him or knows that there is a sheep nearby. Even if knowledge is an ascriptive status (by which I mean that we should think when it is right to ascribe knowledge to others) and even if the grounds for the ascription might vary depending on what one thinks might have been, I do not see how this makes occasionalism apply to knowledge such that one can say different things of N when one says he knows that there is a pig before him. To pinpoint my blind spot, let me quote at some length. This is where I get lost:

Max speaks truth in saying there might be goats. The truth he speaks is that there might be, on a certain understanding of something’s being what might be: what one ought to understand by this on this occasion. Again, if there is occasion-sensitivity, then there are not, in addition to such facts as to what might be when one understands might be in this or that way, further facts as to what might be anyway, occasion-insensitively. It is facts of the first kind, and not such supposed further facts, that bear on the truth of knowledge ascriptions, different ones on different ascriptions. Where Sid does not know, he is not to be treated as authoritative; where he does, he is. That rule applies equally in Pia’s situation and in Max’s. There is no difficulty in the idea that some people, engaging with the world in given ways, ought to treat Sid as an authority while others, engaged in other ways, ought not – even if the latter cannot recognize what the former ought to do.
Max ought not to treat Sid as an authority. For he ought to treat goats behind the barn as a way things might be. If he does so treat it, he will see what Pia said as indifferent to a possibility. But what Pia’s statement is indifferent to is what might be on a certain understanding of what might be. It need not thereby be indifferent to any way things might be, on that understanding of might be which its occasion calls for. (Nor is that more than Max, on his occasion, can recognize consistently.) So it need not be understood as crediting Sid with any status he might enjoy despite the existence of possibilities that he is wrong. It may be crediting him with a status he can only enjoy in having proof he grasps as proof. What may vary from one occasion to another (from Max’s, say, to Pia’s) is what would count as enjoying that.
What, if right, would demonstrate occasion-sensitivity is this. For us, both Pia’s occasion and Max’s may be fully in view. We can see all that would make things count one way on the one occasion, another on the other – if the relevant notions are occasion-sensitive. If there is not occasionsensitivity, then at most one of these occasions exhibits the facts as they really are. For there are then only occasion-insensitive facts as to what (really) might be, no matter what else passes for that on one occasion or the other. So either it really might be that there are goats behind the barn, or, really, that is not a way things might be, punkt. So which is it? What Austin and I think is that this question has no motivated answer. Nothing in the way things are gives the one answer any better credentials than the other as an answer to the question what (really) might be. If we are right, and if the point holds, not just for goats behind the barn, but reasonably systematically, then there can be no facts about what might be (or surely not enough) if those facts are not occasion-sensitive ones. That is always the mainspring of occasion-sensitivity. I think it is easy to confirm in the case at hand. [ibid: 308-9]

See this entry on ‘A sense of occasion’, this on ‘Reason’s reach’, this on ‘The twilight of empiricism’, and this on the discussion of rule following in Thought’s Footing.

Time management, J-style planning and finding meaning in life

2011-12-27T18:13:00.002Z

At an end of term away day we were treated to a session on time management by Carolyn Blunt from Real Results. Although I have deep constitutional resistance to such sessions, she conducted it well and it was only as patronising as it probably had to be.

The session started with mention of one of the four oppositions in the Myers Briggs Type Indicator: judging versus perceiving with the interpretation that J-type strategies involve planned and step-wise progress whereas P-type strategies were more intuitive, deadline driven and perhaps spontaneously creative. Carolyn stressed that she had herself attempted to resist a typical managerial dominance of the J-type and instead think that one cannot adopt strategies in conflict with underlying personality types. One could not adopt the other approach whole heartedly. Hence one should avoid a kind of J-envy and instead aim to maximise the strengths of either aspect.

That said, the session as a whole seemed to keep pushing what seems a broadly J approach. Now there’s some difficulty here insofar as J vs P is merely one of four distinctions on the Myers Briggs picture. The others are extraversion vs introversion, sensing vs intuition, thinking vs feeling as well as judgement vs perception. And thus the broad hunch we (my colleagues in the mental health division and I) had might not be have been taken by Myers and Briggs to be faithful to their theory of personality. But I think we can let that ride given the worries there are about the reliability and validity of their picture. Let’s just go with a bit of face validity here.

One instance of this was a slide that represented life as a week with 0-10 years as Monday, 11-20 as Tuesday etc. With Christmas spirit, Carolyn suggested that whilst there might be the odd bank holiday Monday available to some, most of us ought not to count on it for getting anything done. Thus I, for example, am well into Friday afternoon already with not much time left.

But, as Gloria pointed out, this is surely just an instance of a J conception, broadly and loosely interpreted. To conceive of one’s life in advance in this way is just to plan in the way Js are supposed to value but not the way Ps do. A P-person might instead say that it is better to have a loose conception of what is worth doing without anticipating how it is mapped into the rest of the week. (Gloria wondered whether she’d spent too much of Tuesday and Wednesday like that and was planning on a bit more of a P-approach to Thursday.) So the very way of setting up the issue is not theory neutral but already an instance of J-envy.

Another instance was Carolyn’s response to my colleague Geoff’s worry that this planning failed to accommodate the necessity of a family life alongside work. (He was perhaps unnerved to find himself already on Saturday and beginning to think how to spend Sunday: more beer would hopefully be involved.) Not at all, she replied, it is necessary to have to some ‘hippo time’: some permitted time wallowing in the mud. This again seems to me to be a typical J misunderstanding (already I believe in the typology enough to blame the Judgers!). Once it is thought of as allowed hippo time – once it is so conceptualised – that seems to kill the real attraction of such time which should feel unplanned and unstructured.

More generally, she suggested, it is better to make explicit what one values in order to work out better how to approach and realise it. Now I wouldn’t want to disagree with planning. I live by the to do list and social calendar. (I suspect I’ve imposed a J-like structure on suspect P-tendencies.) Still, it seems it is also worth noting the limits of making one’s values explicit in this way. If one evaluates one’s projects by placing them in a broader – J-preferred – structure then this threatens to initiate a regress about the value of the bigger picture. The worry is that as one approaches the end of Sunday one realises that the J-picture one has structured one’s life by is arbitrary and ungrounded but anything bigger than it. The Ps may be on safer ground when it comes to the meaning of life.

(I said to colleagues that I would write this thought down a week ago. But then I thought: that is what the Judgers would want me to do!)

Draft abstract for INPP 2012

2011-12-13T21:45:00.000Z

Non-rational understanding? Can psychiatry draw on Wittgenstein’s discussion of other cultures?

Since Jaspers’ time, an important issue for psychiatry has been assessing the role of understanding, by contrast with explanation, for making the experiences and beliefs of people suffering mental illnesses intelligible. More recently, the key feature of understanding that has been taken to mark it off from other forms of scientific intelligibility has been a connection to the rationality and normativity of thought, influenced by Wittgenstein, Davidson and McDowell. But especially within recent philosophy of psychiatry this has also been criticised (eg recent work by Campbell and Bortolotti).

If, however, one does think that the connection between understanding something and fitting it within a rational pattern is a genuine insight, how can one approach phenomena which apparently resist such rational capture? In this presentation I attempt to balance two themes from the later Wittgenstein which, although both are contestable, are, I will argue, sound. The limits of sense coincide with the limits of rationality. Nevertheless, consideration of behaviour from quite different cultures can suggest, precisely because of its strange quality, a way of approaching phenomena which cannot be fitted within familiar rational patterns.

Social science according to the Journal of Mental Health Training Education and Practice?

2011-12-12T22:19:00.020Z

I return to the rather dismal reader’s report I had from the Journal of Mental Health Training Education and Practice last week to make, I can at least hope, a general point. (I guess someone will tell me if this is just sour grapes!)

‘Whilst the review was useful the main issues were in relation to the methodology. The review did not follow a systematic review format either in standard or a shortened version. There were no questions which were being used to interrogate the literature and there was no summary of the studies that were included. Databases searched were no[n-] existent if very limited without adequate justification and therefore the findings of the review would not stand up to academic scrutiny. For the review to be acceptable it needs to be extended and a clear recognised methodological framework used. The methodology adopted beyond a systematic review is a limited use of philosophical logic. There a wealth of resources that might be applied to the paper. For example, Critical Theory, Feminism, Deconstruction, etc. I appreciate this might reflect interests that are not represented in the paper...’

The more I think of this report, the more baffled I am. I fear that, if typical, it suggests something rather worrying about the approach taken to social science but of course my reaction may be as much my own familiar responses to a negative review. They are never very enjoyable. Still it may be worth explaining my more general qualm in case it is on the right lines.

So the back story is that I was invited by this particular journal to submit a paper based on a presentation I’d given at a conference in the area a couple of years ago. I sent them the reply 18 months ago and had a response a couple of weeks ago. (The editor and administrators all seem very helpful and charming, by the way, if anyone is thinking of submitting article.) The paper, previously posted here, was an attempt to answer its titular question ‘Why teach the philosophy of mental health?’ taking as its stalking horse (not quite the right metaphor) a view that the purpose of such philosophy is to defend a conception of mental health care against criticism and thus presupposing an equal and opposite view that the purpose of philosophy is to advance an anti-psychiatry view. My claim was that philosophy was a self-conscious critical examination of mental healthcare and thus shouldn’t be seen as an external perspective on it (offering independent and either critical or supportive views) but rather an organic part of what good mental healthcare would involve. It is not a second order supportive, or critical, add-on but part of what a good first order approach would be. That is why it is worth teaching the philosophy of mental health. What is more, it can and has been so taught at UCLan and elsewhere.

In the light of this I’m struck by two features of the referee’s report. First, it assumes that my paper was a review and then rather a bad one but no part of it said that. It would indeed fail rather badly as a review if a review must follow of some essential rules governing the inclusion of summaries of studies and searches of databases. But that suggests it is witless to assume it is such a review and good social science avoids witless interpretation whether of social phenomena or draft papers. That, maybe, is just my frustration. What may be more worth sharing is this worry. Look at this.

‘For the review to be acceptable it needs to be extended and a clear recognised methodological framework used.’ My worry is that someone who writes this has not thought about what the point of a ‘clear recognised methodological framework’ is. It sounds here as though it’s a kind of fashion accessory. As long as we all agree that lapels are wide this year, then we are fine. But providing that there is valid argument, a sustained justification of a claim to truth, who cares if there’s an appropriate off the peg name for the way the argument works? (The approach would also be subject to a vicious regress concerning the recognised name of the second order application of the recognised first order method in any particular context. Each such application would need a name, naming the process of application. But then that process would also have to be applied, calling for another named process of application at the next level up. The regress should be blocked by the realisation that there is a succusseful argument in play. But if so, it can be blocked at the zero’th stage.) This same disappointing attitude seems present in two further comments.

First, ‘The methodology adopted beyond a systematic review is a limited use of philosophical logic’. Now, in philosophy, ‘philosophical logic’ is a slightly old fashioned name for the philosophy of logic. (There was a tendency in the 1960s, I think, to say philosophical X to mean philosophy of X more generally.) But, given that no part of my paper was about the philosophy of logic, I’m confident that this is not what the reviewer means. What they seem to mean is this: the method of the paper was a merely limited use of logical argument. But if this is right, this way of raising the objection is depressing indeed but not critical enough. If the problem with the paper is this, it means that the argument is just bad. In which case, the worry is not that this method – philosophical logic – wasn’t used enough: five times, maybe, when ten times would be the industry standard. It is that the argument was invalid: the conclusion didn’t follow from the premises etc. If so, say so! And say which arguments were poor. Offer a counter argument.

Second: ‘There [are]a wealth of resources that might be applied to the paper. For example, Critical Theory, Feminism, Deconstruction, etc. I appreciate this might reflect interests that are not represented in the paper...’ Again this is the thought that a method is a more or less arbitrary but fashionable way of going on. Add in a few more methods and we’re, again, fine because we will have mentioned enough of this year’s X-Factor ideas. What a dire misunderstanding of the aims of academic argument and analysis.

The more I think of it, the more the kind of approach to social science suggested in these comments seems something I want no part of. Perhaps it is good to have been rejected. I turn out to be with Groucho Marx.

Evaluativism versus objectivism

2011-12-12T16:18:00.004Z

A draft paper hopefully to be translated into Italian for a special issue of Rivista Sperimentale di Freniatria on neuroscience.

Evaluativism versus objectivism: Is the question of facts versus values in the analysis of mental illness a factual or a value-laden question?

Abstract

The degree of insight into the nature of mental illness that neuroscience can offer depends on the nature of mental illness itself: on whether it is an objective, internal matter or evaluative and socially constituted. But there has been long-standing disagreement about this. To shed light on the debate, I draw on, and refine, Zachar and Kendler’s proposed framework for debating psychiatric taxonomy. I argue that a radical externalist account of mental illness (constitutive evaluativist externalism) threatens the role of neuroscience. But, further, the disagreement between such an evaluativist position and its objectivist opposition may concern not only the nature of mental illness but also the terms of the debate. The evaluativist can argue that the disagreement itself is not a factual, but rather an evaluative, matter.

Introduction

How much can we hope to learn about the nature of mental illness through neuroscientific inquiry? Here is an analogy. If mental illness is like physical illness then a scientific perspective will be as helpful in the former case as it is in the latter. But there is a long-standing debate about how similar mental and physical illness is. In his paper ‘The myth of mental illness’ Thomas Szasz, for example, claims that there is an important distinction between them.

The concept of illness, whether bodily or mental, implies deviation from some clearly defined norm. In the case of physical illness, the norm is the structural and functional integrity of the human body. Thus, although the desirability of physical health, as such, is an ethical value, what health is can be stated in anatomical and physiological terms. What is the norm, deviation from which is regarded as mental illness? This question cannot be easily answered. But whatever this norm may be, we can be certain of only one thing: namely, that it must be stated in terms of psychological, ethical, and legal concepts... [Szasz 1972: 15]

On Szasz’ view, physical illness implies deviation from the functional norms of the body, the norms governing its correct functioning. Mental illness, if it existed, would imply deviation not from bodily functional norms but from a different kind. One possibility is that they imply deviation from mental functions modelled as close analogues of bodily functions. Indeed, Szasz suggests that the norms are psychological. But he adds that they are also ethical and legal. His view is that mental illness differs from physical illness by being essentially social and evaluative.

Szasz himself does not rest content with the claim that mental illness answers to different norms from physical illness. Combining this claim with the claim that mental illness is supposed to be medically treatable and that medical interventions address bodily functional norms, he argues that there is no such thing as mental illness. Nothing could possibly satisfy these constraints. This argument, at least, can be blocked, however. Even if mental illness is defined by, or identified through, psycho-social norms, this need not imply that it is identical to, or constituted by, such deviation. It may be that the illness is the cause of the deviation such that, even though it is picked out by its characteristic effects, it is not identical to them. If so, that idea is compatible with medical intervention and so Szasz’ argument fails.

Nevertheless, if Szasz’ initial claim were true, it would still have important consequences for a neuroscientific investigation of mental illness even without his more radical sceptical conclusions. The most that a neuroscientific inquiry could find would be the causes of mental states and behaviour which, as a matter of fact, deviated from social and evaluative norms. It would not be able to investigate the nature of mental pathology as such: what makes something an illness. If mental illness is essentially socially and evaluatively constituted, then the investigation of what makes something pathological is a matter for sociological and perhaps moral inquiry, not neuroscientific inquiry. Thus Szasz’ initial claim is still of significance for understanding the connection between scientific inquiry and mental illness.

To give an example of this potential limitation, consider the experience of hearing voices. This counts as a first rank symptom of schizophrenia: a clear indication of pathology. But it is also asserted by some of those who experience it as merely an aspect of a different kind of subjectivity, in no sense intrinsically pathological. Is it pathological or not? Can neuroscience shed light on this question? Not, I suggest, if Szasz’ initial claim is true.

But is that initial claim true? One might have expected that in the 40 years since Szasz published ‘The myth of mental illness’, an agreement would have been reached as to what kind of norms are involved in a diagnosis of mental illness. But it has not been. In this paper I will explore one basic reason for that. It is not clear whether mental illness is partly constituted by values or not. But it is not even clear whether the debate about that is itself an evaluative or a factual matter. That is: is the aim of inquiry an analysis of mental illness that is true? Or is it an analysis that is good: one which fixes a desirable view of what we should mean by ‘mental illness’?

I will approach this question in the light of two distinctions from Peter Zachar and Kenneth Kendler’s recent conceptual framework for psychiatric taxonomy. In their paper ‘Psychiatric Disorders: A Conceptual Taxonomy’, Zachar and Kendler attempt to outline the many potential initial questions which have to be answered before one can draw up a taxonomy of mental illness. These questions all concern general issue of what sort of things mental illnesses are. The aim of their paper is to set an agenda for thinking about a scientific taxonomy rather than to settle it. The two distinctions with which I will be concerned are objectivism versus evaluativism and internalism versus externalism. I will take these in turn.

Evaluativism

The first distinction is defined like this:

Is deciding whether or not something is a psychiatric disorder a simple factual matter (“something is broken and needs to be fixed”) (objectivism), or does it inevitably involve a value-laden judgement (evaluativism)? [Zachar and Kendler 2007: 558]

The example picked for objectivism may seem surprising. It may not seem to be a simple factual matter, a matter to be contrasted with an evaluation, whether something is broken and needs to be fixed. Contrast this idea with a paradigmatic objective taxonomy such as the Periodic Table in chemistry. The Periodic Table classifies on the basis of atomic number (the number of protons in the atomic nucleus). To model the example on that would require thinking of ‘needing to be fixed’ as an objective property of the layout of the world which is there anyway, like atomic number, irrespective of the values of a judging subject. It would be a property the detection of which would be enough, without complementary desires, to motivate a subject to bring about its repair. Against a stark contrast of facts and values, such an objective and yet at the same time essentially motivating property seems, using John Mackie’s term, rather queer [Mackie 1977: 38-42].

In fact, even the first element of their example is not such a simple descriptive idea. Being broken is not a simple physical property. Nor need it even supervene on (simple) physical properties since, for example, a device which is broken with respect to one function might successfully possess a different function.

These considerations would motivate an inversion of the role of the example in the definition to give, instead, this:

Is deciding whether or not something is a psychiatric disorder a simple factual matter (objectivism), or does it inevitably involve a value-laden judgement (evaluativism) (“something is broken and needs to be fixed”)?

Two things, however, make the choice of example less surprising. Firstly, outside the explicit contrast with an evaluation there is something obviously right in saying that whether something is broken and needs to be fixed is a factual matter which can be of a simple and everyday kind. Unprejudiced by neo-Humean philosophy, one would naturally say that this is the kind of thing that can be the content of a descriptive judgement. A small child viewing a freshly dropped cup might take in both that it is broken and the corresponding urgent need at a glance.

Secondly, whilst it may not have the conceptual simplicity of atomic number it more closely reflects the kind of taxonomic kinds found in psychiatry. Objectivists – as contrasted with evaluativists – will have be able to analyse such claims – broken and needs to be fixed – in value-free and objective terms. The task is fundamentally harder for objectivists than for evaluativists as the former are committed to a purely factual analysis whereas the latter allow both facts and values; they are not committed to a values-only analysis of disorder. In picking this example, Zachar and Kendler are helpfully reminding us of the challenge for objectivists.

Having now clarified this distinction, I will turn to the second one of relevance to this paper before drawing out their combined significance.

Constitutive externalism

The second distinction is summarised thus:

Should psychiatric disorders be defined solely by processes that occur inside the body (internalism), or can events outside the skin also play an important (or exclusive) defining role (externalism)? [ibid: 558]

Zachar and Kendler further characterise the distinction with the following hints. Modern psychiatry has been largely internalist and holds that events within the body are ‘critical for understanding and defining’ mental disorders [ibid: 558]. Externalists are either moderate and hold that ‘what goes on inside the head cannot be isolated from an organism’s interaction with the world’ or radical, in taking external events to be definitional, as exemplified in syndromes which are considered to be ‘reactions to harsh societal demands’ [ibid: 559].

It is helpful to draw attention to a further distinction which Zachar and Kendler do not make but which can shed light on their distinction. One can think of externalism as characterising a claim about causation or constitution. If one, plausibly, thinks that environmental factors sometimes cause mental illness then one is a causal externalist. But one may think that they cause mental illness by affecting states – perhaps neurological – within the body. If so, whilst a causal externalist, one is also a constitutive internalist. (Constitution is not quite the same thing as what defines a mental illness. Even a constitutional internalist may find it helpful to label illnesses by their causes.)

This clarification can be applied to an example of externalism that they give, the Interpersonal Model:

Contrary to any of the medical models, an interpersonal systems model is staunchly externalistic. Most fundamentally, this model views disturbed behaviour as arising from disturbed relationships. Rather than deriving from psychopathology in individuals, psychiatric disorders are seen to develop dynamically from pathology in interpersonal contexts. The notion of patients being containers of internal psychological states is minimised, whereas the view of them as persons trying to adapt to their social worlds is maximised. The context or the interpersonal system is both locus of pathology and the cause of pathological behaviour. [ibid: 562]

Most of the characterisation in this passage would fit a causal externalist but at the same time a constitutive internalist view of disorder. The fact that disturbed behaviour arises from disturbed relationships is consistent with the causation being mediated by states of the brain. Similarly, dynamic changes in response to interpersonal contexts may be dynamic changes of the brain. And there is no reason to rule out a central role for brain-mediated responses for persons adapting to social worlds. The ‘context as cause’, in the final sentence of the passage above, again exemplifies merely causal externalism.

A causal externalist but constitutive internalist view of disorder poses little threat to the insight that neuroscience can offer. If what makes something a mental illness is constituted by matters within the skull then neuroscience looks the best tool to investigate it. To generate a threat to that one needs to more radical externalism. One needs, for example, to think of the Interpersonal Model in constitutive externalist terms (and thus play up two so far neglected hints of that in the quotation). On such an account, disturbed behaviour is constituted in or by disturbed relationships. Interpersonal contexts are themselves literally pathological. (Thus, for example, family relationships do not cause pathology in a disturbed child; the relationships, rather than the child, are pathological.) The context or the interpersonal system is the locus of pathology (and thus not the cause of pathological behaviour since the interpersonal system includes the behaviour). Constitutive externalism in the philosophy of mental health is a radical view (whilst causal externalism is not). It also threatens the role of neuroscientific inquiry by locating that factors that constitute mental illness outside the body. Its role would be limited to examining those causal factors which, as a matter of fact, led to these effects not the direct investigation of illness itself.

Having now clarified the nature of both evaluativism and externalism, and suggested how constitutive forms of externalism limit the kind of insight that neuroscience can offer, I will now consider, in the next two sections, a further importance distinction: between disciplined and undisciplined evaluativism. It is this that makes the debate about mental illness particularly complex.

Constitutive evaluativist externalism

Evaluativism is a particular kind of constitutive externalism. According to it, the reason why deciding whether something is a psychiatric disorder involves a value judgement is that psychiatric disorder is constituted in part by values. (Only ‘in part’ because the values either inhere in or apply to – a distinction to which I will return – other, perhaps physical, properties.)

So, for example, according to the Szaszian view mentioned at the start of this paper, the problems that are misleadingly labelled mental illnesses are deviations from psycho-social and ethical norms: they are constituted by that deviation [Szasz 1972]. According to the ‘lost tribe’ view influenced by Laing and Foucault, madness is just another way of going on [Foucault 1989; Laing 1960]. To be mad is just to be evaluatively out of step with the rest of the community. On Bill Fulford’s more moderate picture, mental illness has to be bad for its sufferer and more specifically is bad for his or her ‘ordinary doing’ [Fulford 1989]. For Jerome Wakefield, though illness involves a supposedly factual biological dysfunction, it has also to be harmful where harm is construed as essential value-involving [Wakefield 1999]. On all of these views, the status of a condition as a mental illness is determined in part by the values in play.

Consider again the claim of some people that the experiences they have such as hearing internal voices, whilst fitting a psychiatric diagnostic category, are not pathological. On a non-evaluativist or objectivist view, this is a simple factual claim. It is true or false and, further, its truth or falsity is independent of the value judgements of the subjects of the experiences (or anyone else). But on an evaluative view, how people value experiences is a constitutive element of whether they are pathological. This raises the question of how to respond to differences of opinion about such values and the consequence of such divergence for psychiatric taxonomy.

Zachar and Kendler offer the following brief discussion of one sort of difference of value judgement.

How do we respond to historical claims that slaves who had a compulsion to run away and advocates for change in the former Soviet Union were mentally ill? An objectivist would claim that those classifications contained bad values and progress was made when those values were eliminated. Their opponents would claim that the elimination of bad values is not the same as becoming value-free, and progress has been made by adopting better values. [ibid: 558]

For an objectivist, however, the fact that a classification reflected any values (aside from the epistemic values that shaped its constructions) would be an error. Values, whether good or bad, feature merely as distortions in a classificatory scheme which should reflect the underlying facts. This mirrors the way that, in Lakatosian rational reconstructions of the history of science, social factors enter only to explain deviations from rational sensitivity to the facts [Lakatos 1970]. When all goes well, there is no need for sociological explanation. So, equally, an appeal to the presence of distorting values in the pathological construction of drapetomania is significant, for an objectivist, in pointing out the presence of values at all rather than specifically bad values.

The characterisation of the contrasting evaluativist’s response raises a further question. Talk of eliminating the bad values implicit in drapetomania suggests (though it does not strictly imply) the idea of moral or more broadly evaluative progress. It suggests that value judgements are disciplined by the attempt to reflect real values. This contrasts with a view in which nothing disciplines such judgements. What appear to be value judgements are really merely expressions of subjective preference and answer to nothing external to them. Their being right is no more than their seeming right. (This is not to downplay their seriousness or importance merely to highlight a view of their logic.) The contrast between disciplined and undisciplined evaluativism is significant in understanding the nature of mental illness. But, as I will argue in the final section, it also runs deep in why the debate about mental illness is so difficult. It is not clear whether that debate aims at truth or goodness.

Disciplined and undisciplined constitutive evaluativist externalism

On a disciplined account, psychiatric taxonomy can aim to get right the mixture, or the compound, of simple facts and values that make up the complex realm of psychopathological phenomenology. Such judgements need not merely reflect motivationally inert features of the world, as the objectivist, assumes. Nor need concepts of disorder (akin to the earlier example of what is broken) be analysed into simple factual terms in order to be accommodated in the taxonomy. But aside from these relaxations, a psychiatric taxonomy based on a disciplined evaluative account would resemble an objectivist approach in one important respect. It would aim to underpin literally true judgements. It would aim, in other words, at validity.

But an undisciplined evaluativist approach is more radical. Mental illnesses are constituted, at least in part, by matters external to the body. In addition, these matters are not features of the world, broadly construed, but rather expressions of subjectivity. If this were the correct approach to the nature of mental illness, however, it fits uneasily with the very idea of a psychiatric taxonomy. Whilst one the aims of taxonomy is validity – to cut nature at the joints – so as to enable the framing of true judgements, on an undisciplined evaluativist approach, that idea of correctness is missing.

Returning to the example of subjects who argue against the pathologising of what are conventionally taken to be pathological symptoms, this distinction is important. For disciplined evaluativists, like objectivists, their claim is a judgement that might be right or wrong and thus would inform, and be informed by, the development of a valid taxonomy. (Unlike objectivists, it is not a simple, that is value-free, factual matter.) But for an undisciplined evaluativist, this is not the case. The claim is an expression of subjectivity. This is not to downplay its importance and seriousness. But it is to suggest that its assessment is more a matter for liberal politics than empirical and more broadly academic inquiry. It is more a matter for decision (of how to act) than judgement (as to what is the case) and the recognition that psychiatric taxonomy is fundamentally the wrong tool for the job.

So far I have merely flagged two subsidiary, but still important, distinctions within Zachar and Kendler’s framework without offering a judgement as to how they might actually apply to psychiatric taxonomy. I have argued that if mental illness is best thought of according to undisciplined constitutive evaluativist externalism then it will not fit well within taxonomic thinking at all. I will end with two final thoughts which will, hopefully, shed light on such a judgement.

Firstly, might there not still be a role for taxonomy and neuroscientific inquiry even given the antecedent of that conditional? There are two immediate possibilities. An undisciplined evaluativist is committed to a fundamental ontological difference between facts and values. One might thus attempt to factor out the values from the underlying facts and develop a scientific taxonomy of merely factual elements. On this account – and by contrast with an objectivist view – what would be left would not amount to a taxonomy of illnesses but rather the factual conditions that motivate competing expressions of illness status. There are two reasons to be sceptical of such a possibility. Philosophically, the prospects for a successful analysis of value judgements into simple facts and the evaluative reactions that they prompt looks poor [see Thornton 2007: 66-67]. Practically speaking, past attempts to purge psychiatric taxonomy of evaluative elements have been unsuccessful.

The other taxonomic possibility would be to attempt to encode expressions of subjectivity without any commitment to their underlying validity: a subjective ‘hit parade’ of mental illness. The problem at root with this thought is that, in the face of disagreements about how to think about diverse experiences and with no metaphysical account of why there might ever be convergence of opinion, there seems to be no rational way to agree any single taxonomy. Pluralism would seem a politically more satisfactory response than framing a taxonomy.

The point above concerning the philosophical implausibility of factoring facts and values is a point that counts against undisciplined evaluativism. Suppose however, as a significant strain of neo-Humean moral philosophers hope, that an analysis into facts and values were possible, would that establish the truth of undisciplined constitutive evaluativist externalism about mental illness? Here a distinction between philosophical debate about moral and psychiatric values is relevant. Whilst there is disagreement about particular ethical judgements in difficult cases, there is to be sufficient agreement about the broad outline of the practices of making moral judgements to make descriptive accuracy a rational aim of meta-ethical moral philosophical debate. It seems plausible to say that Kantian deontology, utilitarianism or neo-Aristotelian moral particularism may simply be the correct description of the moral realm. But that may not be true of the debate about mental illness.

Imagine, for example, that objectivists succeeded in developing a consistent and intuitively plausible account of mental illness, reducing concepts of mental disorder to simple facts. Suppose that on this account, hearing voices turned out to be pathological. Suppose also that undisciplined evaluativists succeeded in developing a rival account on which hearing voices was not in itself pathological. How should the two accounts be assessed? One problem, of course, is that whilst the status of hearing voices is evidence one way or the other, it is contested. If one somehow knew, antecendently, its pathological status that would be a crucial test for the two accounts. But, as Neil Pickering argues, no such pre-theoretical knowledge is possible [Pickering 2006]. In fact, however, the problem goes deeper.

Setting out the debate as I have suggests that whether or not mental illness is simply factual or whether it is irreducibly evaluative – and if so of what sort – is itself a deeper level factual matter. But it is open to an undisciplined evaluativist to argue that that deeper level matter is not factual but rather, also, evaluative. It is a case of ‘values all the way down’. They can argue that we should, for reasons expressive of better subjective value, choose their model of mental illness not because it is true but because it is (evaluatively) right.

This is the consequence of adopting one of the possible positions within debate about mental illness hinted at, though not made explicit, in Zachar and Kendler’s framework. To repeat the two key claims: if one adopts a constitutive and evaluativism, that undermines the role of a neuroscientific understanding of mental illness. Neuroscience cannot explain what it is about a condition that makes it an illness. But second, the debate between such evaluativism and an objectivist counterpart need not even be as simple as a debate as to their relative truth. Evaluativists may claim that their position should be adopted because it is a more desirable view of illness, of what we should mean by illness.

In this paper, I have not argued for a particular view of the nature of mental illness, merely explored some of the options. I hope, however, that I have indicated just how deep the disagreement may go.

Bibliography

Foucault, M. (1989).Madness and Civilisation. London: Routledge
Fulford, K.W.M. (1989) Moral Theory and Medical Practice, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
Lakatos, I. (1970) ‘Falsificationism and the methodology of scientific research programmes’ in I Lakatos and A Musgrave (eds)Criticism and the Growth of Knowledge, Cambridge: CUP pp91-138
Laing, R.D. (1960). The Divided Self. London: Tavistock
Mackie, J.L. (1977) Ethics: inventing right and wrong, Harmondsworth: Penguin
Pickering, N. (2006) The Metaphor of Mental Illness, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Szasz, T. (1972) The Myth of Mental Illness, London: Paladin
Thornton, T. (2007) Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Wakefield, J.C. (1999) Mental disorder as a black box essentialist concept. Journal of Abnormal Psychology 108: 465-472
Zachar, P. and Kendler, K. (2007) ‘Psychiatric Disorders: A Conceptual Taxonomy’ American Journal of Psychiatry 164: 557-565

Housekeeping

2011-12-01T14:40:00.015Z

Yesterday I submitted my co-authored (with Neil Gascoigne) book on tacit knowledge, a year late, to the very forgiving Steven Gerrard of Acumen. The manuscript will need to go to readers and, even if they like it enough, we will obviously still need to respond to their suggestions and criticisms so it is by no means done. But it is good to pass this stage even if it has taken rather longer than any previous book about which I feel rather bad.

I therefore wonder about getting contracts in advance again. If I can be so late with a contract, what would be the harm of not having one? Then, at least, I wouldn’t feel the extra guilt which can be a block to getting on. (Still, a couple of book ideas at the moment: a book on tacit knowledge and clinical judgement / decision making, possibly aimed at the CUP series on values based practice edited by Bill Fulford, were he interested; and a more speculative idea: a book on Charles Travis.)

Aside from that, I seem to have published 4 articles in 2011 but no book chapters or bulletin entries.

(2011) ‘Capacity, mental mechanisms and unwise decisions’ Philosophy Psychiatry and Psychology 18: 127-32
(2011) ‘Radical liberal values based practice’ Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice 17: 988-91
(2011) ‘Recent developments for naturalising the mind’ Current Opinion in Psychiatry 24:502-506
(2011) Thornton, T. and Schaffner, K. ‘Philosophy of science for psychiatry for the person’ International Journal of Person Centered Medicine 1: 128-30

There are a few things in the pipeline.

‘Delusional atmosphere, the everyday uncanny and the limits of secondary sense’ is about to enter the production process with the newish journal Emotion Review.

Two short entries on tacit knowledge and explict knowledge are in production for a textbook: Lanzer, P. (ed) Mastering Endovascular Techniques; Guide to Excellence 2nd edition.

A chapter for Fulford, KWM (Bill) et al (ed) Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Psychiatry has had very perceptive criticisms and suggestions made by Richard Gipps and I will try to deal with that in the next couple of weeks.

Otherwise ‘The recovery model, values and narrative understanding’ is forthcoming sometime in Rudnick, A. (ed) The Recovery of People with Mental Illness, Oxford University Press; ‘L'esprit et le monde, une anthropologie transcendentale?’ (translated A Le Goff) is forthcoming in an edited French book on John McDowell's Mind and World / L'esprit et le monde and an entry called ‘Why taxonomise anti-psychiatry?’ will come out, hopefully, with the next Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry Bulletin.

I have given up on ‘Why teach the philosophy of mental health?’ which was requested by the Journal of Mental Health Training Education and Practice 18 months ago ever appearing.**

I must write something before the end of December on ‘The normativity of diagnosis’ to be translated into Italian for a special issue of Rivista Sperimentale di Freniatria on neuroscience.

I regret bitterly failing to write something collaboratively on the MCA having been politely asked ages ago though I think the time has now passed. I regret my rudeness most.

There's ‘Naturalism and dysfunction’ for an MIT collection on Harmful Dysfunction edited by Denis Forest (Philosophie, Histoire et Sociologie de la Médecine Mentale (PHS2M) programme University of Paris Descartes).

Gloria Ayob and I plan to write a paper on psychopathy for a special issue of Theoretical Medicine & Bioethics on Neuroethics and Psychopathy. David Morris and I are ‘working up’ (the mot juste, I think) a paper on values based practice and service user roles. Finally, I have been asked by Claudine Verheggen whether I would be interested in writing a chapter on Wittgenstein and Davidson for an edited book on them.

Oh, and an invitation this week from Christoph Demmerling to be an international co-operation partner of a bid to a German DFG funding agency for a research project called ‘Between Language and Life. Understanding, Significance and Practical Concepts’.

** PS: Having typed this, I emailed the journal and discovered that the reviews of my submitted paper had come in in September this year but there had then been an administrative hiccough. In a spirit of sharing the downs as well as ups of an academic life, this is a review for the Journal of Mental Health Training Education and Practice which pulls no punches about the fact that I would make a terrible social scientist (I do not think they or I said I was when they invited the paper 17 months ago) though help might be at hand if I added some ‘Critical Theory, Feminism, Deconstruction, etc.’ into my work. I think it is the final ‘etc’ that is most wounding!

Whilst the review was useful the main issues were in relation to the methodology. The review did not follow a systematic review format either in standard or a shortened version. There were no questions which were being used to interrogate the literature and there was no summary of the studies that were included. Databases searched were no[n-] existent if very limited without adequate justification and therefore the findings of the review would not stand up to academic scrutiny. For the review to be acceptable it needs to be extended and a clear recognised methodological framework used. The methodology adopted beyond a systematic review is a limited use of philosophical logic. There a wealth of resources that might be applied to the paper. For example, Critical Theory, Feminism, Deconstruction, etc. I appreciate this might reflect interests that are not represented in the paper...

See this entry for an attempt to draw some general conclusions about the nature of social science from this passage.

Julian Dodd on performing musical works authentically

2011-11-29T15:57:00.008Z

Last week Julian Dodd, professor of philosophy at the University of Manchester, gave an excellent talk at UCLan called ‘Performing musical works authentically’. The aim was to articulate a concept of fidelity to musical works to serve, I suppose, as part of account of aesthetic judgements both by audiences and performers. I liked every aspect of the paper except for its central metaphysical claim and was left wondering how much the central claim of a paper should matter to one’s attitude to it.

I’ve borrowed from the handout in the summary here but I should say both that Julian emphasised that this was a work in progress (and so his views might change) and also that my memory of key claims may be wrong. This is how the performance struck me.

To move towards the key idea, Julian outlined two opposing view of authenticity, both of which he rejected.

1: Score-compliance authenticity
On this view, faithfulness to a musical work is a matter of accurately following the score (‘rendering the score faithfully’ (Davies, ‘Transcription, authenticity and performance’, BJA 28 (1988): 223)). It can be combined with a view of historical authenticity, the use of traditional instruments etc. When deviation from a score is justified it can only be because of a higher order intention ascribed to the composer. Perhaps he/she would have scored things differently had more capable instruments been available. But any such deviation is an exception, merely tolerated by this sort of approach.

2: Personal authenticity: faithfulness to the performer’s artistic persona.
On this view authenticity is to the performer (NB not the composer).
[W]hen we say of a musical performance that it is ‘authentic’ in the sense of being ‘personally authentic’, we are praising it for bearing the special stamp of personality that marks it out from all others as Horowitz’s or Serkin’s, Bernstein’s or Toscanini’s, Casals’s or Janigro’s: we are marking it out as the unique product of a unique individual, something with an individual style of its own – ‘an original’. (Kivy, Authenticities, Cornell U.P. 1995: 123)
Julian’s brief key argument against personal authenticity was that it is not an accurate rendition of our interest in the performance of c lassical music. A distinctive feature of this practice is that we value listening to multiple interpretations of classical works in performance. But, he argued, listening to multiple interpretations is valuable, not because this brings us into acquaintance with a wide variety of artistic personas, but because (a) we value interpretations that enrich or deepen our understanding of works, and (b) we realise that no one interpretation will have a monopoly on such insight.

Although he suggested that he was relying mainly on bald assertion, this seems quite right. Translating into the medium of theatre, my interest in Jacobi’s and McKellan’s different King Lears wasn’t in the actors but in their distinctive playing of Lear, of their different ways of realising the possibilities of the parts. (I did not, for example, want to put Lear in a relation to Emperor Claudius or Magneto, for example.)

The argument against score-compliance authenticity was more measured and turned as much as anything on its comparative weakness in relation to Julian’s favoured view of authenticity. There is a kind of faithfulness to the work that is valuable for its own sake in performance which is not score-compliance authenticity, but interpretive authenticity.

A couple of quotes from the handout give a feel for this:

‘A performance of a work is interpretively authentic to the extent that it offers an interpretation of the work that evinces an understanding of it.’
‘Such a performance makes certain musical and expressive features salient and others unsalient in such a way as to add up to an expressive and structural vision of the work that: convincingly represents how the work’s’s thematic material and expressive character develop; thereby conveys something of the significance of the work’s having the detail it has; displays a feeling for the nature of its style; and, as a result of having the aforementioned features, has a nicely judged sense of what really matters in the presentation of it in performance.’

Interpretive authenticity is a critical and evaluative matter. It cannot be undertaken from a sideways on position but, rather, is a matter of working out, from within an aesthetic sensibility, an understanding of a work and thus what the demands of authenticity to it are. Further, it is not merely a filler to make up for the under-determination of performance by score since it can, more fundamentally, dictate global approaches to pieces of music.

To bring out the distinction between this view of authenticity to a work and mere score compliance authenticity, Julian mentioned a couple of examples.

First, Beethoven’s metronome marks in the Hammerklavier Sonata are, we learnt, impossibly fast. As a result most performers do not follow them and play the piece more slowly. Brendel comments

‘In the first movement particularly, the prescribed tempo cannot be attained, or even approached, on any instrument in the world, by any player at all, be he the devil incarnate, without a grievous loss of dynamics, colour and clarity.’ (Brendel, ‘Werktreue: an afterthought’, Alfred Brendel on Music, Robson Books, 2001: 33 italics added).

So Brendel plays up the importance dynamics colour and clarity. He sees these features of the piece as making more important demands than the tempo.

Second, the recapitulation of the first movement of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony. Here, in the score, the theme first played by horns is repeated by oboes. But since it seems to serve as a fanfare this is unsatisfactory. Given that modern brass instruments are up to the job of playing both the initial fanfare and the recapitulation, that is what typically happens now. That is what responding best to the work is judged, by most performers, to require.

Thus, a proper understanding of the demands of a musical work do not seem to be a matter of merely complying with the score but rather a fidelity or faithfulness to the work itself even when, as in the Hammerklavier Sonata this involves in disregarding the composers intentions. The composer is merely one interpreter of his/her work. ‘A performer might have the utmost understanding and respect for the composer’s achievement, and yet conclude, justifiably, that something of the work’s character, or aesthetic potential, is compromised by slavishly following every instruction in the score.’

I agreed with the thrust of all of this, especially the focus on the normativity of understanding. What I didn’t understand was the underlying metaphysical story Julian wished to promote. I think that this view had two motivations. First, he wanted to pay due attention to the fact that our interest in classical music performance is a form of understanding. Further, performances can be revelatory. They can reveal the work. Second, the two rival theories he opposed explained this understanding as a matter of faithfulness either to a score or to a performer’s character. In both of these cases, and whatever else may be unattractive about them, that notion of faithfulness is quite concrete. We can see what it is that faithfulness might involve as a kind of correspondence (though this is obviously clearer for score-compliance authenticity, the main target of the paper). I wonder whether it is because of the stage setting that Julian thought that the only explanation of the normativity of understanding was one of fidelity (which seemed to be a form of correspondence) neither to the score nor the performer’s character but to the work itself.

How else, he asked, could one think that an interpretation was revelatory? How else could performance seem to be an act of discovery? But the alternative that struck me was that might discover, simply, that something worked. That playing a work, or a part of a work, like this! was a good way to play it. After all, the method of discovery would look remarkably similar: a matter of trial and demonstration with piecemeal contextual aesthetic explanation. Julian wanted to add to this a further underlying metaphysical explanation. Such a process reveals the nature of the work to which it aims to be faithful. But I do not see that that idea adds anything helpful. And it may be unhelpful in that it suggests that the work (the Work, perhaps) has a single identity, demanding to be played in just one way. Julian suggested that he did not think that that need be true. But he rather implied that such multiple readings would be exception rather than norm in accord with the basic picture of faith to an abstract, possibly platonic, work. It seems to me, by contrast, that it may always be the case with a good work that there are many and various ways to realise it. If so, the idea of fidelity to the work seems the wrong metaphor.

Anne Rogers on ‘Social Networks and the Patient Work of Chronic Illness Management’

2011-11-15T20:16:00.005Z

I went to a talk today by Professor Anne Rogers, Head of the Health Sciences Research Group, University of Manchester called ‘Social Networks and the Patient Work of Chronic Illness Management’. The abstract ran as follows:

The effective targeting and promotion of self-care support for long-term conditions needs to acknowledge the importance of everyday living and people’s social contexts and networks. Social networks are viewed as being centrally involved in the mobilisation and deployment of resources in the management of a chronic condition. This forms the basis of a novel approach to understanding, designing, and implementing new forms of self-management support.

It was an interesting talk, more an overview of some ideas than an argument but one line of thought seemed of note.

This thread began – actually five minutes into the talk – with mention of some research by Corbin and Strauss (1985) who identified 3 types of work relevant to the long term management of illness:

illness work: symptom management
everyday life work: practical tasks eg housework
biographical work: reconstruction of ill person’s biography

Anne suggested that there were other forms of work, too, including articulation and emotional work. As a technological term ‘work’ was helpful, she suggested, because it suggests division of labour. These forms of work can be shared between different participants in a social network. But if so, what’s the nature and type of knowledge needed to do work?

There is, we heard, evidence that professionals and patients do indeed view self-management as a form of work but they diverge in their degree of optimism about it. In general, she suggested, although there are aspects of management which are individualistic, it also involves collective work. There was, however reason to believe from previous surveys that this collective element was downplayed by individuals who stressed, instead, their own responsibility for their pain management. In other words, the thought, by patients, that the work was or was not carried out by others was not enough to make that claim true. I'll return to this.

The second main element of this thread of the talk was the nature of social networks or rather networks of networks, Anne suggested, which might include group plus family plus personal communities. In other areas of sociology, empirical work suggested that often quite weak or distant relationships were key to connect individuals to resources (the person who can get one’s son an internship, for example). Might this also be true for self-management of illness? Sadly, she reported, we don’t yet know: it is an epidemiological gap.

But in the US Nicolas Christakis has looked at a major US database and found that weight gain in one person is associated with others in their social network. Likewise, smoking spreads through close and distant ties. Health or illness behaviours should thus be seen as collective phenomena.

Anne thus reported her own recent survey of 300 people in Greater Manchester asking them to identify their personal supportive communities or networks. The empirical work included quantitative data based on interviews and the use of a kind of network diagram: a set of concentric circles centred on the subject in which they were asked to locate their relevant social support networks. Professionals tended to be out a bit from the centre except amongst those who were otherwise socially isolated. Outside that might be the lunch club, diabetes club, the church, particular individuals.

Another finding was that, of those surveyed, 18% owned 1 or more pets. Some familiar findings about health and pets were replicated but, more interestingly, people suggested that pets were part of their social networks. Pets as person substitutes, as it were. But, further, the survey implied not only that but also that pets were taken to have unique qualities. For example, they did not nag. And, Anne argued, they were found to mediate relationships with others, in weak relations. Dog walking, for example, prompted chance conversations. Thus, she argued, pets take on aspects of illness work in social networks. Whilst partners provide most emotional support. pets come second, higher than health professionals. She was tempted but did not say that pets are better than doctors at emotional support.

All this seemed to me to be interesting but I worried, and asked, about one aspect. The connection between work, social networks and pets seemed to support two conflicting views of the nature of her research. In one view, work is actually shared and the thought by individuals about who undertakes it may be wrong. Who is actually in the network doing the work is, to that extent, objective. Thinking it so does not make it so.

But on the other, dogs do not actually do emotional work. They may serve as emotional support; they may catalyse conversations in the park. But they do not undertake to take on this duty. So if they are indeed to count as part of an individual's network of those who are undertaking work then it is merely the case that thinking it makes it so. The network is subjective: it is what an individual sincerely takes it to be.

But social networks surely cannot be both?

In response, Anne replied that she did indeed intend both senses. Perhaps in her written work the distinction is clear. Perhaps she adds subscripts to the phrase ‘social network’: an ‘o’ or an ‘s’ to disambiguate them. (If so that went missing in the presentation). But I can’t help feeling that running two distinct kinds of ontological category at the very least quite closely together is likely to confuse.

Collins on the antonym of 'tacit'

2011-11-15T15:52:00.007Z

In an informal introduction to tacit knowledge that starts with Polanyi’s slogan – that we know more than we can tell – Harry Collins says:

That we humans do much of what we do without following explicit rules is no more mysterious than my cat hunting without knowing rules about hunting or a tree growing without knowing rules about forming leaves. We only think it's mysterious if we think explicitness is the norm, but explicitness is a rare thing, restricted to humans, and used only now and again because it is often more efficient to allow causal, neural connections in the brain and body to execute an action with little (or, indeed, no) conscious calculation - after all, cats do pretty well this way. [Collins 2010b]

In his recent book length treatment of the subject, Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, he makes use of the same demystifying comparison.

In all the ways that do not involve the way we intentionally choose to do certain acts and not others, and the way we choose to carry out those acts, the human, per individual body and brain... is continuous with the animal and physical world. We are just like complicated cats, dogs, trees, and sieves... Sometimes we can do things better than cats, dogs, trees and sieves can do them, and sometimes worse. A sieve is generally better at sorting stones than a human (as a fridge is better at chilling water), a tree is certainly better at growing leaves, dogs are better at being affected by strings of smells, and cats are better at hunting small animals... That teaching humans to accomplish even mimeomorphic actions is a complicated business, involving personal contact, says nothing about the nature of the knowledge, per se. [Collins 2010a: 104-5]

So, although the transmission of tacit knowledge is difficult and capricious, as his earlier book Changing Order argued, there need be nothing mysterious about practical or somatic tacit knowledge itself. It is something, to a first approximation, we share with animals, trees and even machines.

Only to a first approximation, because Collins thinks that the ascription of tacit knowledge must stand in a contrast to explicit knowledge. Thus, where there is no possibility of ascribing explicit knowledge, tacit knowledge should not be ascribed either. Properly speaking, although human behaviour is ‘continuous’ with that of animals, trees and sieves, none of those have tacit knowledge [ibid: 78].

Collins does not, however, explain what marks the discontinuity in the action itself: what it is about humans, when they act like animals, that distinguishes their action from that of animals. That is, why does such animal action, though tacit, count as knowledge? Again, his account addresses the tacit status of tacit knowledge only at the cost of threatening its knowledge status.

In fact, although Collins approaches tacit knowledge, as Gascoigne and I do in our current book book, through a suitable contrast with what is explicit, he is not sensitive to the requirement to chart a kind of personal knowledge in Polanyi’s phrase: knowledge for someone. We can make this point by taking as a clue the three sentences from the informal summary of his view which immediately precede the quotation above.

In The Logic of Tacit Inference, Polanyi argues persuasively that humans do not know how they ride, but he also provides a formula: ‘In order to compensate for a given angle of imbalance α we must take a curve on the side of the imbalance, of which the radius (r) should be proportionate to the square of the velocity (v) over the imbalance r~v2/α.’ While no human can actually ride a bike using that formula, a robot, with much faster reactions, might. So that aspect of bike-riding is not quite so tacit after all. That we humans do much of what we do without following explicit rules is no more mysterious than my cat hunting...[Collins 2010b]

The suggestion is that where an action could be could be codified in a formula, that tends to undermine its tacit status. In the case of bike riding, the explicit formula is not, however, one that could be used by humans to guide their own riding, at least under normal gravitational conditions, because of human bodily or somatic limits. This idea is pursued at length in Tacit and Explicit Knowledge to suggest that there are different varieties of tacit knowledge corresponding to different impediments to the efficacy of an explicit statement.

The focus, however, is not on how something is known by an epistemic subject but rather on the nature of the task or practice and whether it could in principle be explicated by someone else. Hence having said that ‘[somatic tacit knowledge] is continuous with that possessed by animals and other living things’ he goes on to say that ‘in principle it is possible for it to be explicated, not by the animals and trees themselves (or the particular humans who embody it), but as the outcome of research done by human scientists’ [Collins 2010a: 85]. But if the focus is on the nature of the subject’s own (tacit) knowledge, its explication by others is beside the point.

This orientation is clear when he considers the ability to type. For skilled typists, conscious following of the rules they learnt when they first learnt to type slows them down. But this point ‘this seems to bear on nothing but the way humans work; it does not bear on the way knowledge works’ [ibid: 104]. By ‘knowledge’ he seems to mean roughly what is known not how it is known: the nature of the task or practice as this might be performed by someone or something else. (‘Roughly’, because how it is known – theoretically or practically, demonstratively or in context-independent terms – impacts on what is personally known.)

One clue to this is that he aims to shed light on human typists’ tacit knowledge by commenting that this task could be performed by a machine that could follow explicit rules. Such a comparison is only relevant if he is concerned not with the human typists’ knowledge but the nature of the task of typing in general. The assimilation of knowledge and task is clear:

The constraints on the methods available for efficient typing by humans [by contrast eg with machines] are somatic limits; they have everything to do with us and nothing to do with the task as a task – nothing to do with knowledge as knowledge. [ibid: 104]

This suggests that his focus is on the realm of reference, of what is being picked out in the world, which may sometimes be the content of knowledge, rather than how it is known, the way it is grasped, whether tacitly or explicitly, theoretically or practically. That a task might be accomplished using either explicit knowledge or tacit knowledge need not undermine its tacit status in any one particular case. So the inference from ‘task as task’ to ‘knowledge as knowledge’ in that last quote does not go through.

Because his underlying method of examining tacit knowledge works by contrasting it with what is explicit, but because this is sometimes taken to be a matter of explicating or explaining by, for example, ‘reproducing the effects of somatic tacit knowledge in machines and computers’ [ibid: 160] rather of focusing on the nature of the knowledge for the subject, Collins’ treatment downplays the issue of knowledge as it concentrates on what would ensure something had to be tacit.

Collins, H. (2010a) Tacit and Explicit Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Collins, H. (2010b) 'Tacit knowledge: you don't know how much you know' New Scientist 31st May

The RSC, love and the space of reasons

2011-11-10T16:55:00.006Z

In Stratford last weekend, I caught the RSC’s productions of Marat / Sade (in a less than full RST) and then A Midsummer Night’s Dream in a packed house. Both productions were typical of the main theatre of old. So it seems that despite sharing the Swan’s thrust stage, productions in it do not share the latter’s minimalism. Perhaps that makes good commercial sense and both the productions this weekend had excellent lighting and were generally visually engaging. But I suspect that less would have been more, overall, for Marat / Sade even though, or perhaps because, some of what was added was an attempt to move it out of the 1960s (smart phones, laptops etc).

By contrast, a full blown RSC production seems to be a good way to deal with A Midsummer Night’s Dream (though I couldn’t get on with Lucy Briggs-Owen’s performance - too much! – nor the very odd rockabilly interlude near the end). The foreknowledge that the mechanicals play within a play is yet to come always hangs over me. But a comment of Lois’ suggested what might be a deeper cause of dislike.

It is an infuriating play because of the way that love is presented as a kind of nomologically dangler or, rather, something utterly outside rationality or reason. The love-drug deployed by Oberon and Puck changes nothing about its victims but their love objects. So there’s nothing cognitive about their attitudes: just a brute affect. That seems odd because Shakespeare often persuasively and dramatically shows how love justifies and is justified. It is a standing, of sorts, in the space of reasons. Normally he enables us to see the breadth of that space when properly understood. But not here.

Tacit knowledge in science: Nancy, France 12-13 December 2011

2011-11-09T12:35:00.001Z

PROGRAMME
Monday 12 December 2011

08h30 - 09h00 Registration

09h00 - 09h15 Welcome and Introduction. Léna Soler

09h15 - 10h15 Harry Collins (Cardiff University, UK)
Tacit Knowledge in the Scientific Collectivity

10h5 - 11h15 Trevor Pinch (Cornell University, USA)
Harry Collins and Tacit Knowledge

11h15 - 11h45 Coffee break

11h45 - 12h45 Léna Soler (Archives Poincaré, Nancy) and
Sjoerd Zwart (Delft university, The Netherlands)
Tacit Aspects in Science: The Collective and the Individual Level

12h45 - 14h30 Lunch

14h30 - 15h30 Oliver Kauffmann (Aarhus University, Denmark)
What Sort of Knowledge is Implicit Sensorimotor Knowledge, Really?

15h30 - 16h30 Bahram Djenab (Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, France)
Tacit Knowledge in Faraday’s Research on Electrostatics

16h30 - 17h Coffee break

17h - 18h Tim Thornton (Central Lancashire University, UK)
Why Tacit? Why Knowledge? The Dilemma Facing an Account of Tacit Knowledge
20h. Dinner

Tuesday 13 December 2011

9h - 10h Régis Catinaud
Tacit Knowledge in Theorization Processes

10h - 11h Aviezer Tucker (Texas university, Austin, USA)
Tacit and Explicit Knowledge in Historiography

11h00 - 11h30 Coffee break

11h30 - 12h30 Baudouin Jurdant (Paris 7 University)
Assessment, Tacit Knowledge and Reflexivity

12h30 Lunch

Contact : l_soler@club-internet.fr
http://poincare.univ-nancy2.fr/Activites/?contentId=6163&languageId=1

Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry meeting

2011-11-09T10:53:00.000Z

Association for the Advancement of Philosophy and Psychiatry
Call for Abstracts

The Biopsychosocial and Other Models for Psychiatry: Philosophical Perspectives
24th Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, PA, May 5 & 6, 2012

Conference Co-Chairs: Christian Perring, Ph.D (Dowling College) & James Phillips, M.D. (Yale University)

Full description here

Presentations will be strictly limited to 20 minutes, followed by 10 minutes for discussion.

Abstracts should be 500-600 words and should be emailed to both James Phillips
(james.phillips@yale.edu) and Christian Perring (cperring@yahoo.com)

Deadline: November 15, 2011.

Abstracts will be blind reviewed, so the author's identifying information should be attached separately.
Notices of acceptance or rejection will be distributed in early January.

Tacit knowledge of theories of meaning

2011-11-01T18:20:00.002Z

The conception of tacit knowledge I defend is that of context-dependent, conceptually-structured, practical knowledge. It stands opposed to knowledge which can be made explicit in situation-independent general terms. Thus, in general, tacit knowledge cannot be conveyed by situation-independent linguistic instruction. Such language and tacit knowledge stand opposed.

But there has, historically, been an appeal to tacit knowledge precisely in connection with language and in a way which is rather more straight forward than Harry Collins’ suggestion that tacit knowledge can reside in the patterns and frequencies of word use of linguistic communication. This is the idea that a speaker’s understanding of a language consists in tacit knowledge of a theory of meaning, or a grammar, for that language.

There are two main threads for this idea in the philosophy of language. One derives from Chomsky’s project to articulate an innate, universal grammar for human natural language.

If a person who cognized the grammar and its rules could miraculously become conscious of them we would not hesitate to say that he knows the grammar and its rules, and that this conscious knowledge is what constitutes his knowledge of language. [Chomsky 1980: 70].

The other is Donald Davidson’s aim to set out a theory of meaning for natural language based on an inversion of Tarski’s semantic conception of truth. Such a theory of meaning would contain a finite set of axioms, giving, for example, the reference of primitive terms and a recursive procedure to derive an instance of the T-schema for any declarative sentence of the language.

In Tarski’s work, T-sentences are taken to be true because the right branch of the biconditional is assumed to be a translation of the sentence for which truth conditions are being given. But we cannot assume in advance that correct translation can be recognised without pre-empting the point of radical interpretations; in empirical applications, we must abandon the assumption. What I propose is to reverse the direction of explanation: assuming translation, Tarski was able to define truth; the present idea is to take truth as basic and to extract an account of translation or interpretation. The advantages, from the point of view of radical interpretation, are obvious. Truth is a single property which attaches, or fails to attach, to utterances, while each utterance has its own interpretation; and truth is more apt to connect with fairly simple attitudes of speakers. [Davidson 1984: 134]

Under the general constraint that such a theory delivers true instances of the T-schema – true meaning theorems – across the board, individual instances such as ‘Snow is white’ is true iff snow is white will, Davidson argues, unpack the meaning of sentences of the object language.

In fact, the connection between Davidson’s project and tacit knowledge is not clear. He makes two comments on the subject. One is that knowledge of such a theory would suffice for understanding [Davidson 1984: 125]. The other is that it is a necessary condition for languages to be learnable that a constructive or compositional account of the language could be given [ibid: 3]. But he does not say explicitly, for example, that speakers have implicit knowledge of a theory of meaning which explains their ability. Others, however, have made this claim.

Michael Dummett, for example, argues that the best interpretation of Davidson’s approach is as a ‘full bloodied’ rather than ‘modest’. The requirement for full bloodedness for a theory of meaning is the requirement that it does not simply presuppose key facts about content by simply giving the meaning of the basic terms of one language by simply stating them in another language. Instead, it gives an account of the meaning of the primitive terms of a language, its basic predicates and referring terms by describing the practical abilities that an understanding of those terms gives to a speaker. This, in turn, presupposes a form of tacit or implicit knowledge.

A theory of meaning will, then, represent the practical ability possessed by a speaker as consisting in his grasp of a set of propositions; since the speaker derives his understanding of a sentence from the meanings of its component words, these propositions will most naturally form a deductively connected system. The knowledge of these propositions that is attributed to a speaker can only be an implicit knowledge. In general, it cannot be demanded of someone who has any given practical ability that he have more than an implicit knowledge of those propositions by means of which we give a theoretical representation of that ability. [Dummett 1976: 70]

The recursive structure of a theory of meaning of such a form reflects ‘our intuitive conviction that a speaker derives his understanding of a sentence from his understanding of the words composing it and the way they are put together’ [Dummett 1974: 109].

Alexander Miller suggests that this project aims at answering three question:

(a) How is it possible, given the finitude of their capacities, for speakers of a natural language to understand a potential infinity of sentences?
(b) How is it possible to understand utterances of previously unencountered sentences?
(c) How is it possible for a natural language to be learnable? (i.e. how is it possible for explicit training with only a relatively small number of sentences to secure competence with a possibly very large set of sentences outwith that initial set?).

Dummett’s outline answer to this depends on the cogency of thinking that speakers have knowledge of the axioms that encode understanding of the language and which fix the derivation of suitable, interpretative, instances of the T-schema.

There is, however, a problem with thinking of knowledge of the axioms as knowledge in any ordinary sense. The problem was highlighted by Gareth Evans as a problem for thinking of grasp of the axioms of a theory of meaning as any kind of intentional state or propositional attitude. Evans argues that ‘It is of the essence of a belief state that it be at the service of many distinct projects, and that its influence on any project be mediated by other beliefs’ [Evans 1981: **]. He then considers the ascription of a belief that a particular substance is poisonous to a rat:

It is true that many philosophers would be prepared to regard the dispositional state of the rat as a belief. But such a view requires blindness to the fundamental differences which exist between the state of the rat and the belief of the man—differences which suggest that fundamentally different mechanism are at work. We might begin with this disanalogy: the rat manifests the 'belief' in only one way—by not eating—whereas there is no limit to the ways in which the ordinary belief that something is poisonous might be manifested. The [rational] subject might manifest it by, for example, preventing someone else from eating the food, or by giving it to a hated enemy, or by committing suicide with it. These variations stem from the different projects with which the belief may interact, but similar variations arise from combining the belief with other beliefs. It might, for example, lead to the subject's consuming a small amount of the food every day, when combined with the belief that the consumption of small doses of a poison renders one immune to its effects. [Evans 1981: **]

So although the rat and the rational subject may share some dispositions to behave (in general: avoiding eating the poisonous substance), for the rat, the dispositions are tied to a narrow range of behaviours whereas for the rational subject, there is no limit to the actions to which a belief that something is poisonous may contribute. Ascribing a belief to the rat adds nothing to a more minimal stimulus response account of its behaviour. This then presents a problem which Crispin Wright summarises as follows.

[S]omeone who is credited with implicit knowledge of a meaning-delivering theorem may express his knowledge in an indefinite variety of ways, including, in appropriate contexts, lying, assent and silence. But the (implicit) knowledge of a meaning theoretic axiom would seem to be harnessed to the single project of forming beliefs about the context of sentences which contain the expression... [Wright 1986: 227-8].

Thus whilst the output of a theory of meaning, codified as a potentially infinite set of instances of the T-schema or meaning theorems, can play a role in the broader life of a rational subject and thus can be the objects of intentional states or propostional attitudes, the axioms on which such a theory is based cannot.

Evans himself continues to speak of the speaker’s relation to axioms as a form of ‘tacit knowledge’ even though it is not, according to him, a propositional attitude. It is sub-doxastic. Further, because the form of generalisability is a condition on conceptual understanding. Evans takes this to be non-conceptual. So on his picture, a speaker’s grasp of the axioms of a theory of meaning is a non-conceptual, sub-doxastic tacit knowledge.

Given Evans’ argument that a speaker cannot have intentional attitudes towards the axioms of a theory of meaning which are merely dispositions, this presents a problem about the distinction between two possible approaches. Consider a language with a simple subject-predicate structure and ten names and ten predicates yielding 100 different possible sentences of the form Fa. Two distinct theories of meaning are now possible. One comprises a list of a meaning theorem for each of the 100 sentences. The other has one axiom for each of the names, one for each of the predicates and one setting out the meaning of a subject-predicate combination, as an instance of the T-schema (eg ‘a sentence coupling a name with a predicate is true iff the object denoted by the name satisfies the predicate’ [Evans 1981, p. 123]). Given that the speaker does not stand in any intentional attitude to the axioms and need not possess the concepts in which they are expressed, what is the rationale for preferring one theory over the other?

Evans’ suggestion is that the second theory should be preferred if it turns out that a speaker has a disposition for each of the expressions given by the theory. For the list-like theory that is 100 distinct dispositions linking each sentence to its truth condition. For the theory that articulates an underlying structure, Evans argues that there are 20 dispositions: one for each of the names and the predicates. For each name, then for each predicate, the speaker will be disposed to judge the corresponding sentence composed of name and predicate is true if the object named satisfies the predicate. Likewise, for each predicate. Using Π as a universal substitutional quantifier a speaker U has tacit knowledge that a names or denotes John if and only if U has a disposition such that:

(Πφ)(Πψ) [if U tacitly knows that an object satisfies φ iff it is ψ ; and if U hears an utterance having the form φa; then U will judge that: the utterance is true iff John is ψ].

Tacit knowledge that F means bald corresponds to this disposition:

(Πx)(Πα) [if U tacitly knows that the denotation of α is x, and U hears an utterance having the form Fα, then U will judge that: the utterance is true iff x is bald].

As Wright puts it: ‘

‘Tacit knowledge’ ought to be a disposition which constitutes understanding; and what is it to understand a sub-sentential expression... except to be disposed to make the right judgements about the truth conditions of sentences containing it provided one understands the accompanying name or predicate? [Wright 1986: 230]

Hence the 21 axioms yield 20 inter-defined dispositions. If there is evidence that a speaker possess just these dispositions, that is evidence that the second, structural theory, mirrors their competence. (The fact that there are 20 rather than 21, including the axiom of compositionality, is the subject of a criticism by Wright and response by Davies that need not detain us [Davies 1987].) But as Wright points out, even the 20 dispositions are dispositions to make judgements about whole sentences. So, still, why prefer the structured theory over the unstructured list. Both will yield the same dispositions. Evans response is to stress the underlying causal structure that grounds the dispositions.

The semanticist aims to uncover a structure in the language that mirrors the competence speakers of the language have actually acquired. This does not mean , that he aims to uncover a theory that he supposes his subjects know, in any acceptable sense of that word. It means merely this: if (but only if) speakers of the language can understand certain sentences they have not previously encountered, as a result of acquaintance with their parts, the semanticist must state how the meaning of these sentences is a function of the meanings of those parts. He must assign semantical properties to the parts and state the general significance of the construction in such a way that a statement of what those sentences mean is deductively entailed. There may be more than one way of doing this. [Evans identity and predication: 25-6]

Martin Davies develops this thought further in what he calls the ‘mirror constraint’:

The salient structural facts about the competence of speakers are here presented as being of the following form: speakers who understand sentences s1, s2... sn are able, without further training, to understand sentence s. And the salient structural facts about a semantic theory are of this form: the resources used in derivations of meaning specifications for s1, s2... sn are jointly sufficient for the derivation of the meaning specification for s. The constraint on semantic theories... is just that these two structures should match. [Davies 1987: 446]

Tacit knowledge of one theory of meaning rather than another consists in the fact that the structure described by one, rather than the other, is the causal explanation of the speaker’s ability.

To conceive of semantic structure as psychological, rather than abstract, is to conceive of it as the causal-explanatory structure of the semantic ability of actual speakers. It is the kind of cognitive structure that permits speakers to recognize the meanings of previously unencountered sentences. [Davies 1986: 132]

Evidence for this should include, not just patterns of sentence use but also patterns of acquisition and loss of linguistic understanding as well as revision of meaning.

There are in the literature a number of other worries adjacent to this general approach of ascribing tacit knowledge of the axioms of a theory of meaning on the basis of sub-doxastic dispositions. One worry that Wright develops, for example, is whether any account can be given of the dispositions governing either names or predicates in the example above [Wright 1986: 232-3]. The account of the disposition that corresponds to understanding a name has to presuppose the disposition corresponding to understanding a predicate and vice versa. Hence the objection is: no non-question-begging account has been offered of what these dispositions are.

Miller, however, argues that this worry can be assuaged by a comparison with the role of beliefs and desires in rationalising action. In that case, an account of the role of either belief or desire has to presuppose the other. But we, rightly, do not take that to threaten the elucidation of either (or both) but rather demonstrate the holism of the mental. Tacit knowledge of the axioms governing a language has to be ascribed as a whole relative to the mirror constraint [Miller ** 158-9].

But this response to the objection that the dispositions corresponding to states of ‘tacit knowledge’ of a theory of meaning cannot be given non-vacuous clarification does not undermine the earlier point. ‘Tacit knowledge’ of the axioms of the theory is no form of intentional state for the subject.

Given thattalk of tacit knowledge is not very well established in natural language and thus its use is a matter, in part at least, for stipulation, there is no very firm objection to calling the relation between a subject and his or her dispositional grasp of the axioms of a theory of meaning a matter of tacit knowledge. But it is worth stressing the difference between this use of that phrase and the use I have articulated.

First, ‘tacit knowledge’ of the axioms of a theory of meaning is not a matter of belief or any other intentional attitude. It is not conceptually articulated for the subject. It is, obviously, conceptually articulated in theories of meaning and thus conceptually articulated for the theorist. But, aside from their outputs, the contents of such theories are not objects of awareness for subjects.

Second, since they are constituted by dispositions which are not at the service of a variety of distinct projects, what is tacitly known does not play a rationalising role in the life of the subject merely a causal role [Byne 2004: 79].

Third, it is open to question whether such states carry content or meaning at all. All that the mirror constraint clearly does is establish that a theory of meaning tracks causal-enabling states of a subjects physiology. Evans even suggests that neurophysiological data would be decisive in matching a theory of meaning to a subject: behavioural evidence is merely second best. But that surely supports only a causal-structural approach rather than a content-laden one.

In the terms of the dilemma expressed in previous chapters, such a conception may merit the description ‘tacit’ but only at the cost of failing to count as knowledge. By contrast, the account we have given is pitched at the level of the rational subject, is conceptually structured and, whatever causally enables the motor skills may be involved in some aspects of practical knowledge, this does not rule out the fact that the knowledge has a content albeit one which can only be expressed in context-specific ways.

There is a further and interesting difference. The project of articulating a theory of meaning for a natural language is one of formalising the knowledge that a competent speaker has. It aims to codify the ability which is exercised in particular situations in situation-independent and universal terms. Thus what we have taken to be at the heart of tacit knowledge – its situation-specificity – is what this alternative conception aims to trump. Situation-specific expertise is explained through the provision of a general theory. But for the fact that the theory itself is merely ‘tacitly’ known, the project aims to turn what is tacit knowledge for most speakers into explicit knowledge for theorists. (Of course, knowledge of an axiomatised structural theory of meaning for a natural language cannot be a matter of explicit knowledge for most speakers. If it were the project would not be as difficult as it has proved.)

If one does not follow Evans in calling sub-personal causal dispositional states ‘tacit knowledge’ is there any sense in which linguistic understanding involves tacit knowledge? Yes. The right response to Wittgenstein’s regress argument balances what is explicit in explanations of meaning with what is tacit in the sense of situation-specific understanding. To grasp the meaning of a word is to have a potentially unlimited competence in its use even if it is explicable in finite and particular explanations. But such grasp the meaning involves the recognition of any particular use that that! use is correct, accords with its meaning. Such recognition is a context-dependent demonstrative thought which accord with what we take to be the most promising understanding of what is tacit.

Polanyi’s says that we know more than we can tell. One way to approach that claim is to sketch a concept of knowledge in which the substance that we know is somehow hidden from us, not part of the space of our reasons. Tacit knowledge of a theory of meaning is an example. Such knowledge would be tacit but it is far from clear how it would count as knowledge. It is better therefore to keep a firm grip on the nature of knowledge but grant that our ability to know outstrips our ability to summarise what we know.

Multi-disciplinary teams, VBP, psychiatry and getting things right

2011-10-27T10:25:00.003+01:00

Gloria and I had dinner in Preston with Prof John Cox, our out-going external examiner and ex-President of the Royal College of Psychiatry. John is a keen promoter of medicine for the person (and the work of Paul Tournier) and a humane and spiritually aware form of psychiatry. But about such a form of psychiatry, he is very positive. That is, he emphasises the positive virtues of psychiatry so construed rather than, by contrast, taking those broader values to support the end of psychiatry since it has often failed to embrace them in the past. (I say that because I have also heard people argue for the end of psychiatry precisely because they hold some of those same values: about the importance of the person, meaning, recovery etc.)

One reason for that is this. Increasingly in the UK, mental healthcare is provided by other professions (GPs, nurses, clinical psychologists, neurologists) as well as psychiatrists, acting either individually or in multi-disciplinary teams. On John’s view, psychiatrists are uniquely positioned within such teams to provide a broad overview, spanning the biological to the social, evaluative and spiritual. Thus the diminution of the role of psychiatry threatens loss of that overview.

That suggests an underlying question about what one thinks is the nature and aim of discussion in multi-disciplinary team meetings. A first thought is that the different teams are there for a non-accidental reason. As Fulford and Colombo argued some years ago, different roles within mental healthcare typically hold different views about, or models of, the nature of mental illness and the aims of healthcare. So to omit a discipline is to omit an approach or model and thus to miss the understanding of the situation it might bring to bear. Even if one thinks that such approaches or models are merely pragmatic devices – useful rather than true – that provides a rationale for the multi-disciplinary team. A discipline with an overview of the various approaches would have an overview of their pragmatic virtues.

But there is a more metaphysically charged thought also available. One might think that somehow balancing or accommodating the different views could be done ideally so as to lead to the right answer in the circumstances. The right thing to do would be to look at this situation in this! way. This contrasts with an idea – closer to the spirit of Fulford’s values-based practice – that it is not a matter of aiming at a right answer as rather having a good process. On this less charged view, having a good discussion (with a variety of views) just is as good as it can be. Whatever result emerges as seeming right is as right as right gets (to echo a comment of Wittgenstein’s for the opposite purpose).

On the metaphysically charged view, psychiatry is a kind of master discipline which sees best the facts available (with the other disciplines as intellectual prosthetics). On the less charged view, there is no sense of a right answer to be tracked and, in so far as psychiatry has a special role, it is to organise a fair discussion: a kind of choreographer.

So it seems the view that one takes of the role of psychiatry, the nature of multi-disciplinary teams, values-based practice and the metaphysics of what a correct judgement aims at are all deeply tied together. This leaves me wondering: how should we assess the two broad options for thinking about what getting things right involves?

Notes after a SAMI discussion of an idiographic addition to diagnosis

2011-10-26T20:01:00.007+01:00

There’s a widespread intuition expressed in frustration by a reviewer of one of my papers (because it was critical of idiographic understanding) that runs as follows:

[T]he real problem in diagnosis comes when the nomothetic is given too much emphasis. Time and time again what is required is something like the idiographic. Time and time again the categorical, pigeon-holing, approach to diagnosis has to be bent in order to accommodate the individual account. The question is merely how to characterise such an account.

The idea that the ‘question is merely how to characterise such an account’ shows that the intuition is more that there must be something distinct from a pigeon-holing approach to diagnosis even if one does not know quite what. The danger, however, is that the intuition may be mistaken and the hope misplaced. That is that ‘idiographic’ is a place holder but nothing can slot into its supposed place.

What would it be for something to meet the felt need? I think three conditions have to be met.

It must be a form of understanding, or information, or sensitivity to facts which is distinct from criteriological approaches, understood broadly. ‘Broadly’ because merely adding a new diagnostic category to DSM / ICD would not address the underlying intuition. So it has to be distinct from any innovation within the criteriological approach.
It must somehow capture the individuality of individuals.
It must be a genuine form of understanding or judgement. That is, it must aim at truth or validity even if only as applied to an individual: the truth about him/her.

With these conditions in place we can look at the clues given in the IGDA document and Jim Phillips paper to see what this form of judgement is.

Class discussion suggested that responding to the uniqueness of each client/patient and their context (in family and society etc) might be a clue. But to understand the movement of an apple juice carton requires relating it to every other object with mass in the universe (ie its context) and that is likely to be a different set of vectors than any other object, as it is in a particular place (hence uniqueness). So the uniqueness and context-dependence of the subject matter does not distinguish idiographic psychiatry from physical science explanation which itself is a form of criteriological / lawlike explanation.

Nor is does the sense of idiographic understanding found in psychology meaning based on qualitative small scale research helpful because it is not distinct. Even criteriological diagnosis concerns individuals. The target is thus small scale. The question remains how is idiographic understanding distinct? How is a focus on individuals achieved?

Hence looking at Windelband. Now there are a number of interesting ideas in his paper, but at no point does he manage to substantiate what he means. There is a key emphasis on the idea that whereas nomothetic understanding concerns generality (eg understanding individuals as instances of generalities) idiographic understanding concerns individuality: individuals as individuals.

In their quest for knowledge of reality, the empirical sciences either seek the general in the form of the law of nature or the particular in the form of the historically defined structure. On the one hand, they are concerned with the form which invariably remains constant. On the other hand, they are concerned with the unique, immanently defined content of the real event… The former disciplines are nomological sciences. The latter disciplines are sciences of process or sciences of the event. The nomological sciences are concerned with what is invariably the case. The sciences of process are concerned with what was once the case. [Windelband 1980: 175-6]

[T]he more we strive for knowledge of the concept and the law, the more we are obliged to pass over, forget, and abandon the singular fact as such… In opposition to this standpoint, it is necessary to insist upon the following: every interest and judgment, every ascription of human value is based upon the singular and the unique... Our sense of values and all of our axiological sentiments are grounded in the uniqueness and incomparability of their object. [Windelband 1980: 181-2]

But this focus is not just on individuals (nomothetic understanding can be applied to just this very apple juice as an example of an object of its general physical properties) but somehow not related to other individuals, cases, the future etc. A completely one-off understanding. And the problem with this is that it is not clear it makes any sense to say that this is a judgement, aiming at truth and validity, at all.

Hence instead following the other clue. Perhaps we need narrative judgement. This looks more promising but still needs to meet the three conditions. Can it? Well we need to say what we mean by ‘narrative’. It can’t mean a particular narrative genre (because that would be unrealistic and restrictive). So I suggest we just mean the form of understanding that places things in a space of reasons, that shows how they make sense. If so on the conditions above:

making sense is a normative notion (ie correctness involving) rather than typical / usual and so is distinct.
whilst sense-making is a constraint (not everything could make sense even if anything could in the right context), it is a very flexible constraint suited to charting individuals mentality.
such understanding does aim at the truth of a person’s reasons.

But is that good enough to meet the underlying intuition? And, more practically, if diagnosis involves both standard DSM criteria and a narrative, won’t the former be the aspect that does all the work?

IDGA Workgroup, WPA (2003) ‘IGDA 8: Idiographic (personalised) diagnostic formulation’ British Journal of Psychiatry, 18 (suppl 45): 55-7

Phillips, J. (2005) ‘Idiographic Formulations, Symbols, Narratives, Context and Meaning’ Psychopathology 38: 180-184

Windelband, W. (1980) ‘History and natural science’ History and Theory & Psychology 19: 169-85.

Reading Michael Williams' diagnosis of scepticism

2011-10-26T15:14:00.005+01:00

Scepticism needs an argument. It doesn’t just win because the sceptic wears a stylish black T-shirt. The key argument for external-world-scepticism deploys a ringer. Descartes’ second and third methods of doubt, for example, work by articulating an alternative to our everyday empirical beliefs and perceptions which we cannot distinguish from the everyday cases. Our experiences would seem the same whether we were awake and experiencing the external world or, either, dreaming or subject to a daemon / a brain in a vat. Once such a ringer is in play, it is difficult to rebut the scepticism to follow because no feature within our experience seems capable of determining whether the pre-sceptical conception or the ringer applies. And if that is the case then, even if ringer is actually false, enough has been done to scupper the justificatory element of knowledge and hence knowledge.

But it may be possible to block this argument before it gets started. That, at least, is what Michael Williams attempts. He challenges the ground rules of the sceptical argument. This he offers the following outline of the dreaming scepticism argument:

if we are to know anything about the world, we must sometimes know that we are not dreaming; but we can never know that we are not dreaming; therefore we never know anything about the world.
The first premiss seems hard to deny. And as for the second, if we are ever to know that we are not dreaming, there must be a test that we can, at least in some circumstances, apply to determine whether we are dreaming or not. But now suppose that there were such a test—any test, not just one conforming to foundationalist preconceptions— it will be of use only if we know that we have really applied it and have not just dreamed that we have applied it. That is, it will be of use only if we already have some way of determining that we are not dreaming, which leads us into a regress... [Williams 1988: 436]

But he goes on to offer the following diagnosis of how the argument works: crucially the hidden premiss which is a form of foundationalism.

We can begin with a look at the first premiss, which can be read two ways. On one reading, it is a truism: at least, something I have no wish to dispute. We can concede that the claim that we sometimes have knowledge of the world logically implies that we sometimes know we are not dreaming. Like other logical points, this is epistemologically neutral. It is entirely compatible with our holding that, since we often do know things about the world, we often know that we are not dreaming: we know that we are not dreaming in virtue of what we know about the world, and in this sense there will be tests for whether or not we are dreaming, though not necessarily any single procedure that applies in all situations.
But there is another way to read the first premiss: this is to take it to require that, if we are to know anything about the world, we must be capable of knowing that we are not dreaming: that is, of knowing this in some way that is independent of all knowledge of the world. On this reading, premiss one certainly promises to be useful to the sceptic, but only because it introduces a general and intrinsic dependence of knowledge of the world on whatever knowledge we can have whether or not we know we are dreaming. So premiss one is either trivial and useless or useful but just another way of insinuating a foundationalist constraint on knowledge of the world. Only by oscillating between the two readings can we sustain the illusion of deducing scepticism from a triviality.
Now, it will be said that scepticism is not meant to follow from premiss one alone, but only from premiss one in conjunction with the claim that there could not be a test, foundationalist or otherwise, for determining whether or not we are dreaming. But unless we read premiss one in the second way, the way that presupposes foundationalism, the argument for premiss two will fail. If the dependence of knowledge of the world on knowledge that we are not dreaming is understood in the first, innocuous way, we have no reason for conceding that there could be no test for determining whether or not we are not dreaming. All the argument for premiss two shows, then, is that there is no way of knowing that one is not dreaming that is independent of all knowledge of the world. But this conclusion poses no threat to knowledge of the world unless it is presupposed that such knowledge, by its very nature, stands in need of grounding in some more primitive stratum of knowledge. The argument for premiss two shows that there can be no purely experiential test for determining whether or not we are dreaming, and the epistemological significance of this conclusion derives entirely from the thought that knowledge of the world naturally requires some kind of grounding in experience. Once again, the dreaming argument shows that foundationalist ambitions are likely to be disappointed, but gives no independent reason for entertaining them in the first place. [Williams 1988: 437 italics added]

Elsewhere he summarises this move in in slightly different language:

In effect, what the argument for [scepticism] ... really shows is that there is no way of knowing that we are not dreaming that is independent of all knowledge of the world: there is no purely experiential test by which to exclude the dream possibility. But this conclusion poses no threat to knowledge of the world unless we have already been given reason to think that such knowledge, by its very nature, always requires grounding in some more primitive stratum of knowledge. The argument for there being no test for determining whether or not we are dreaming turns out to be another way of making the point that knowledge of the world cannot be given a ground in experiential knowledge, which is not a step on the road to scepticism unless it has been established that knowledge of the world stands or falls with the possibility of giving it such a grounding. Once again we have an argument that shows that foundationalist ambitions are likely to be disappointed, but gives no particular reason for entertaining them in the first place. [Williams 1996: 87]

So Williams aims to show that the argument for dreaming scepticism can be blocked by showing that it depends on an 'unnatural' assumption that knowledge of the world depends on a substratum of knowledge of experience. Only if the latter can be used to show that there is no general problem with the former are we justified in our everyday beliefs and that is just what scepticism goes on to question (via ringers such as dreaming and the brain in the vat). But Williams argues that that is just an assumption. If it leads to scepticism then so much the worse for that assumption.

He calls the assumption that drives the sceptical argument ‘epistemological realism’. It is the idea that knowledge of the world is a natural kind, a uniform totality, which can be questioned or justified as a whole. That idea is certainly present in Descartes' discussion but it seems, there, to be merely a convenient way of doing the sceptical job quickly. Williams thinks it is more significant than that and actually underpins the sceptical argument.

Does this work?

Williams aims at a theoretical diagnosis of the sceptical argument. He claims that the sceptical argument depends on what seemed merely an accidental feature of Descartes’ method of doubt: treating our knowledge of the external world as a single type of knowledge, sharing a common style of justification (via (our knowledge of) our experience). But the idea that there is such a class as ‘our knowledge of the external world’ is not a natural idea and this category is theoretical and artificial. So once we realise that the sceptic relies on this assumption – for example in the way normal ways of justifying our claim that we are not now dreaming are ruled out because we need to prove we are not dreaming independently of anything else we know about the world – it is equally possible to reject both it and the scepticism it leads to. Further, the very fact it leads to scepticism (which is obvious rubbish) counts against it.

Williams also provides some further comments to try to persuade us that as ‘our knowledge of the external world’ is not a natural idea. His comment that Descartes’ claim that our bodies are external seems spot on.

Is this enough to stop scepticism? Unlike Putnam, he does not claim that the sceptical hypothesis makes no sense. So he does not say that scepticism makes no sense. That may count in his favour (since scepticism seems to make sense). But, unlike Davidson, he does not let the sceptical argument go through. Once it does it seems merely dogmatic to attempt to deny it. Instead, Williams aims to show that scepticism depends on a theoretical view of knowledge which is neither obligatory nor natural.

Still, one might think that the sceptical possibility is the most natural aspect, not of everyday life but certainly, of philosophical inquiry. That is, as soon as one begins to think about knowledge, one realises that there is a central tension in what we take it to be and in our taking ourselves to have it. So in the end, Williams may trade intuitions about what is and is not natural.

If that is how things stack up then one way one might aim to break the deadlock is by considering the plausibility of what Williams opposes to epistemological realism (the view that our knowledge of the external world as a single type of knowledge sharing a common style of justification). What is the alternative? Contextualism.

Epistemological realism takes it that good justifications have a common feature: they start with our experience construed as not presupposing any knowledge of the external world and then work outwards to the external world. What does contextualism take all good justifications to have in common? Nothing (well, nothing substantial). Justification depends on, and varies with, context.

It would be good to learn more of what this involves (see Wittgenstein later). But if contextualism is a better account than epistemological realism (before we consider scepticism) then since scepticism needs a prior assumption of realism, that really would count against scepticism.

“But hang on. If there are two views of knowledge and justification in play: epistemological realism and contextualism (where the former leads to scepticism), then isn't the idea that this blocks scepticism merely dogmatism at one level up. At the ground level, sceptical hypotheses or ringers don't have to be true, they just have to be possible. Their mere undetectable possibility is enough to undermine knowledge - because even if our beliefs about the external world that is mere luck in the face of the ringers - and thus lead to scepticism. So equally at this higher level of abstraction (concerning knowledge of the nature of knowledge rather than trees etc), epistemological realism doesn't have to be true, it just has to be possible, for that fact to undermine, via the standard sceptical argument, ground level knowledge and thus lead to scepticism.”

I don't think so. After the sceptical argument is already up and running, then the fact that we have a stand-off between epistemological realism and contextualism might be enough to hand the victory to scepticism. (First, if we have already granted that we don't know that that! is a tree, then we will not likely know the nature of knowledge either and then, second, if we do not know that contextualism is true then we won't know that that! is a tree: a kind of mutually supportive sceptical collapse.) But Williams contests the argument before the sceptical argument is complete for the first time.

So the stand off between epistemological realism and contextualism is more neutral. It is played out on ordinary pre-sceptical grounds. Only if we have reason to think that epistemological realism is reasonable can the way the sceptic sets up his ringers be reasonable and thus, for the first time, make us concede that we don't have knowledge. But if our response to the sceptic's initial claim - that our knowledge of the world depends on a more certain knowledge of experience - was that that was an absurd idea (because, eg. I only learn to talk about my experiences long after I learn to talk about trees etc), then we would never have been worried about scepticism in the first place. Nothing would follow from the mere existence of sceptical ringers.

Williams, M. (1988) 'Epistemological realism and the basis of scepticism' Mind 97
Williams, M. (1996) Unnatural doubts, Oxford: Blackwell

15th International Philosophy and Psychiatry (INPP) Conference 2012 New Zealand

2011-10-24T15:38:00.001+01:00

I see that there is a website for next year's 15th International Philosophy and Psychiatry Conference between 5-7 July 2012 University of Otago, New Zealand.

The introduction reads:

The conference aims to go to the heart of debates about the nature of mental disorder, as it occurs in a multicultural setting. Psychiatric diagnoses, arising as they tend to from Western sources (for example, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), are often not well suited to the traditions of indigenous peoples. Recent neuroscience is beginning to acknowledge the influence of culture on the development of the brain in ways that can inform our thinking about mental disorders. Leading thinkers from within Māori culture will be among the conference’s keynote speakers, providing a very special opportunity for dialogue and exchange of ideas.

Abstracts must be submitted on the Abstract Submission Form (Oral Presentation / Poster, or Workshop) below. They must be submitted by Wednesday 7 December 2011.

Trying to teach 'Criteria, defeasibility and knowledge'

2011-10-21T18:56:00.005+01:00

(This is my attempt to summarise a class discussion of McDowell's 'Criteria, defeasibility and knowledge' though I have to say that, today, I rather felt like a vicar singing the hymn very loudly at the front.)

McDowell’s argument goes deeper and, in the end, concerns the nature of experience. But it is helpful to work up to that from his treatment of other minds. That’s what he does, too.

The problem of other minds starts from the assumption that whilst one can experience another’s behaviour, one cannot experience their mental states. (There is a trivial truth in this claim but it can also be taken to imply a significant epistemological point.) So the challenge is then to answer this question:

How can what we can experience (behaviour) yield knowledge of what we cannot experience (other minds)?

(In the philosophy of mind, this set up is usually accepted and the problem answered in its own terms. But McDowell aims to challenge the terms of the debate, to dissolve the problem before it starts. So I will ignore answers such as ‘the argument from analogy’ or ‘theory theory’.)

Behaviourism
One answer is to say that mental concepts are merely short-hands for behaviour. If so, a judgement about behaviour can support a logical deduction to judgement about mental states: behaviourism. BUT behaviourism is implausible (because of pretence / shamming).

Traditional view of criteria
So the erring Wittgensteinians put forward a weaker version of behaviourism. Mental concepts are not quite short-hands for behaviour but when those concepts are defined they include links to forms of behaviour. That is how little Ludwig learns the concept of pain, for example, by looking at others’ behaviour. So such behaviour is – a priori and by definition – good evidence for mental states. But – learning from the objection to behaviourism – such behavioural ‘criteria’ can be defeated / undermined. The behavioural criteria can be satisfied (that is, the right kind of behaviour can be present) but, for some reason or other, the appropriate mental state is not present (it is merely acting, eg.).

McDowell’s objection to the traditional view of criteria
It cannot give us knowledge of other minds. There is NEVER knowledge, even when there is no acting. Why not? Because if the criteria can be satisfied in the absence of the mental state, then even if all goes well and they are not defeated, still that is merely a matter of luck. All I am aware of is that the criteria are satisfied. But whether the other person really is in the mental state for which her behaviour is a criterion is beyond my ken: beyond anything I can experience.

McDowell’s alternative
The above objection suggests that the only way experience of others’ behaviour can yield knowledge of their mental states is if criteria are NOT defeasible. If they are satisfied, the other person must be in the right mental state.

There’s another consequence of that. Criteria are not types of behaviour at least when specified in non-mind-presupposing terms. If they were, and if they were not defeasible, then that would be behaviourism and we’ve already rejected that.

Two responses to that consequence:
1) a criterion is a criterion only in a context; it is a one-off arrangement of the elements. (This is like Williams’ contextualism but applied to the specific case of justification of knowledge of others’ mental states from behaviour.)
2) But it can be seen as a type as long as it isn’t given in non-mind-presupposing terms. All pain behaviour has the common feature that it expresses pain.

So what is going on?
There’s a positive story and a concession.

The positive story: the original assumption that judgements of behaviour are more secure than judgements of other minds is wrong. Once one has been inducted into a language (a language of other mental states), one can see in others’ behaviour, the expression of their mental states. One categorises the behaviour in terms of the mental states.
This positive story is helped by a historical diagnosis. Philosophers have only ignored the expressive possibility of behaviour because of an objectifying attitude to the body which is itself the result of Cartesianism because Descartes splits the mind off from a merely objective res extensa.

The concession: we do not always get things right. But when we do not that is not because the criteria are satisfied but defeated. But rather, we think the criteria are satisfied though they are not.
But this means that, as long things do not go wrong, what we experience is enough to reach out to (the expression of) other minds. The mistake is to think that there is something common between the cases of things going well or badly: the same behaviour. But there isn’t. In one case the behaviour expresses the mental state and in the other it is not. Thinking that there is means that we never have knowledge of other minds. If there isn’t then we sometimes have knowledge of other minds (when all goes well).

The link to the argument from illusion
The problem of other minds starts by taking behaviour which stops short of mental states to be all that can be experienced. Such behaviour is what is common between cases of things going well or badly.

Scepticism about the external world draws a similar conclusion from cases of illusions. Since we can confuse the experience of an illusion of a dagger and the experience of a real dagger, all that there can be to experience is what is common to both: the highest common factor. But if so, experience can never yield knowledge of the world since, if there is a dagger there, that’s merely a matter of luck.

Just as behaviour can be mind-expressing, so experience can be dagger-involving.

Extract on the transmission of tacit knowledge

2011-09-29T19:06:00.002+01:00

Collins on the capriciousness of tacit knowledge

In order to consider the transmission of tacit knowledge we will begin by drawing on two discussions from Harry Collins whose work we discussed in chapter 3. In both cases, we will highlight how assumptions Collins makes about the nature and transmission of forms of tacit knowledge put the idea that it can be communicated under threat. One virtue of the analysis offered in preceding chapters is that it does not, implausibly, suggest that tacit knowledge is particularly difficult to share.

First then, the empirical findings. In Changing Order, Harry Collins summarises a piece of sociological inquiry he carried out in the 1970s. He visited six of seven UK laboratories who were attempting to build a working laser which, although of a new design (a Transversely Excited Atmospheric pressure CO₂, or TEA, laser), had already been successfully built in other laboratories in the US, five of which he also visited. In one case, a scientist – Bob Harrison – who had already built one working model aimed to replicate it so as to have two working models. Despite this limited problem – a clear case of Kuhnian ‘normal science ‘ – and despite the availability of explicit instructions, Collins discovered a surprising difficulty.

[N]o scientist succeeded in building a laser by using only information found in published or other written sources. Thus every scientist who managed to copy the laser obtained a crucial component of the requisite knowledge from personal contact and discussion. A second point is that no scientist succeeded in building a TEA-laser where the informant was a ‘middle man’ who had not built a device himself. The third point is that even where the informant had built a successful device, and where information flowed freely as far as could be seen, the learner would be unlikely to succeed without some extended period of contact with the informant and, in some cases, would not succeed at all. [Collins 1985: 55-6]

Collins concludes that because it has three significant features or properties, the knowledge involved in laser construction is tacit knowledge.

In sum, the flow of knowledge was such that, first, it travelled only where there was personal contact with an accomplished practitioner; second, its passage was invisible so that scientists did not know whether they had the relevant expertise to build a laser until they tried it; and, third, it was so capricious that similar relationships between teacher and learner might or might not result in the transfer of knowledge. These characteristics of the flow of knowledge make sense if a crucial component in laser building ability is ‘tacit knowledge’. [Collins 1985: 56]

On Collins’ view, tacit knowledge is mysterious. Although, on this early view, it can only be passed on by accomplished practitioners, that is necessary but not sufficient for its transfer. It is capricious in that similar relationships between teacher and learner are sometimes sufficient and sometimes not. And it is invisible in its flow. Even the scientist whose ongoing attempts to build a laser Collins particularly studied, Bob Harrison, is unaware of the details of his own knowledge how to build the laser.

Harrison would not have been a lot of use as an informant at the beginning of his attempt to build Jumbo [his first working laser]; there is no way that he could have informed anyone about the necessity of having the leads from the capacitor to the electrodes as short as possible, for example, since he did not realise the importance of this himself. But, he did not know that he did not know. [ibid: 73]

Whilst much of the time Collins suggests that the knowledge involved in laser construction is practical, skill-like knowledge, it is clear, from the descriptions he gives, that it also includes elements that appear more like matters of fact or knowledge-that. Summarising this early empirical work more recently, Collins explicitly connects the ineffability of the scientists’ knowledge to Polanyi’s slogan.

[Y]ou may not know what you need to know and I may not know what I know. Thus, in the early days of TEA lasers scientists did not necessarily know that the inductance of the top lead was important but by copying existing designs they built in successful short top leads without knowing why. [NS]

Collins summarises his early view of tacit knowledge in a number of propositions which begin:

Proposition One: Transfer of skill-like knowledge is capricious.
Proposition Two: Skill-like knowledge travels best (or only) through accomplished practitioners...
Proposition Three: experimental ability has the character of a skill that can be acquired and developed with practice. Like a skill, it cannot be fully explicated or absolutely established.
From the three studies it seems firmly established that laser-building is something you do not know whether you possess until you have built a laser. Thus, laser building is invisible in its passage...
Proposition Four: Experimental ability is invisible in its passage and in those who possess it. [ibid: 73-4]

This presents a picture of the sharing of tacit knowledge which looks to be particularly difficult. Perhaps influenced by his view of Wittgenstein’s regress argument according to which it is not possible fully to specify a rule and thus there must be something more to a rule than its specifiability to underpin our mysterious ability to know what accords with it, Collins suggests that empirical tacit knowledge is similarly invisible to those involved.

If this account were true, it would suggest that teaching or sharing such tacit knowledge is, of necessity, fraught with difficulty. If such knowledge is invisible, even to those who possess it, then it cannot be demonstrated. As Wittgenstein puts it, the student has to guess the essential drift of the teacher’s practical demonstration. No wonder then that ‘ it cannot be fully explicated or absolutely established’. But if that is the case, the prospects for improving teaching methods are also dim. There will be no way to compare the results or potentially more and potentially less successful forms of demonstration and pedagogy.

But as we have argued in preceding chapters, there is no reason to think of tacit knowledge in this pessimistic way. If, for those with eyes to see at least, context-specific but still conceptually structured practical knowledge can be articulated and demonstrated in practice, there is no need to think of it as essentially invisible or essentially silent, to change sensory modality.

Collins’ account generalises from what seem to have been particularly difficult cases to all cases of tacit knowledge. Even thought as a matter of physical theory a piece of Kuhnian normal science, the actual construction of a complex laser from basic components was clearly a difficult and challenging task. Further, unlike everyday structured abilities, such as the ability to swim front crawl or butterfly, there seem to be difficulties in testing the component abilities. This is a particular feature of the context in which Harrison works and merits a separate summarising proposition.

Proposition Five: Proper working of the apparatus, of parts of the apparatus and of the experimenter, are defined by the ability to take part in producing the proper experimental outcome. Other indicators cannot be found. [ibid: 74]

In other cases, this is not true. One might have long-standing knowledge of how to make Yorkshire pudding: a structured capacity to assemble, mix and cook the basic ingredients. If so, a run of failures given a change of oven (the puddings fail to rise or are over cooked, for example) is evidence, at least, for one of a range of failures. Perhaps it is the oven or the particular ingredients which will also change from time to time. But if the same ingredients are, in the same period, yielding fine pancakes, that is evidence, at least, against a problem with the ingredients. If cognitive and practical knowledge, basic ingredients and methods all change or are introduced simultaneously then the predicament may be as Collins describes in proposition five. But that is not an essential feature of tacit knowledge.

Just because it is sometimes difficult to test whether someone has a practical ability does not mean that it is always (any more than parallel claims apply to knowledge-that). The transfer of skill-like knowledge need not be capricious. Practical teaching – such as of bike riding, or instrument playing – can be quite predictable. And in such cases, there is no reason to think that mastery is invisible.

McDowell's reply to Mind and World as transcendental anthropology?

2011-09-20T12:56:00.001+01:00

I have received a copy of John McDowell’s response to my paper ‘Mind and World as transcendental anthropology?’, a version of which is here.

“I am grateful for Thornton’s serious and longstanding engagement with Mind and World, here and elsewhere.

In this essay, he suggests that there is a tension between my avowal of therapeutic aims, on the one hand, and my positive “anthropological” offerings, on the other.

I think the suggestion of a tension is overblown. Thornton asks: “how … can an anthropological perspective be reconciled with a therapeutic aim?” But if this question arises about me, it arises already about Wittgenstein, who is, of course, the inspiration for my therapeutic conception of how to deal with the philosophical anxiety that I identify. It is surely undeniable that Philosophical Investigations is full of anthropological remarks. Consider, for instance, what Wittgenstein says in §25: “Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing.” And surely this feature of Wittgenstein’s text stands in no tension with a therapeutic conception of the task of philosophy, provided only that the anthropological remarks can be understood to have the character of reminders (cf. §127): not expressions of disputable philosophical doctrine, but statements of things everyone knows but some people perhaps forget, so that they fall into a frame of mind in which there seems to be a need for positive philosophical doctrine to address well-posed philosophical questions.

It is true that my contributions to philosophical anthropology — to go on talking in Thornton’s terms — are unlike Wittgenstein’s, in at least two respects that might seem relevant here. First, my contributions have a somewhat systematic character. And second, as Thornton notes, they draw on the philosophical canon. The main element in my attempt to dissolve the anxiety I identify about the very possibility of content is a roughly Kantian positive characterization of the perceptual experience of rational animals.

But — surprising though this may be — I want to claim that, even though there are those differences, my anthropological remarks are like Wittgenstein’s in having the character of reminders. To understand my characterization of the perceptual experience of rational subjects, one may need to learn a new vocabulary, or at any rate a new way of using some vocabulary with which one is already familiar. But I want to claim that if one really understands the language in which I give my description, it can only be as a result of some philosophically generated confusion — for instance what I try to unmask as a misconception of the intellectual obligations of naturalism — that one can find the description disputable.

My fragment of a philosophical anthropology — again, to continue talking in Thornton’s terms — might be called “transcendental”, in a narrower sense than the one Thornton cites from Jonathan Lear: its purpose is transcendental, in the roughly Kantian sense of being directed at alleviating an anxiety about the very possibility of thought’s being directed at objects. The only point of calling it “non-empirical”, which is what Lear extends “transcendental” to mean, is that it is not intended as a possibly disputable theory, something for which evidence might be demanded. I think that goes for Wittgenstein’s anthropological remarks also.

As I said, my anthropology is transcendental in purpose. I mean that to stand in contrast with saying that it is transcendental in content. My transcendental purpose is discharged by saying things that are meant to be in themselves mundane, such as to be obvious if it were not for philosophically generated blind spots. Lear’s contrast between “empirical” anthropology and a kind of philosophical anthropology that points to unsayable insights gets no grip on anything I do. I think this goes for Wittgenstein also, but arguing for that would take me too far away from Thornton’s essay.

Thornton suggests I am threatened with “slippage into a merely Quinean picture” — a picture in which there is no room for any idea of analyticity. He thinks this threat impinges on me because I reject “a two factor model with endogenous and exogenous elements”, and he thinks I should avert the threat by rehabilitating an idea of an endogenous factor, rescuing that idea from seeming to amount to an idea of an endogenous Given.

This seems off key to me. What I reject is a conception according to which endogenous and exogenous factors are supposedly intelligible independently of one another, but combine to account for the form and content of world views. The Given, conceived as in what Sellars exposes as a Myth-encumbered version of empiricism, would be an exogenous factor supposedly intelligible independently of any appeal to our intellectual capacities. As Thornton in effect notes, one can discard the Myth of the Given without discarding the idea that things are given — from outside, in an innocuous sense — in perceptual experience. And he is certainly right to urge that that innocuous acknowledgment of an exogenous factor should have as a counterpart an innocuous acknowledgment of an endogenous factor, rehabilitated by not being conceived as intelligible independently of anything exogenous. But I do not see why he thinks meaning, as it figures in the idea of truth by virtue of meaning that we lose if we fall into “a merely Quinean picture”, would need to be understood as wholly determined by the endogenous factor, as opposed to what I suggested, that it needs to be understood in terms of both factors. I do not see why Thornton is not satisfied by the picture I gave when I wrote the following (Mind and World, 157/L’esprit et le monde, 197 — a passage Thornton actually quotes):

When we reject the dualism of scheme and world, we cannot take meaning to constitute the stuff of schemes, on the dualistic conception of schemes. But that does not deprive us of the very idea of meaning. So if I am right that Quine’s insight is really a glimpse of the unacceptability of the dualism, perhaps we can rehabilitate the idea of statements that are true by virtue of their meaning without flouting the real insight.”

Retrospective expectation?

2011-09-13T13:50:00.004+01:00

In an introductory lecture today to give UCLan philosophy undergraduates a taste of a real problem and the sorts of options available to philosophy to address it, I put up the following passages from the Philosophical Investigations.

I see someone pointing a gun and say “I expect a report”. The shot is fired. - Well, that was what you expected; so did that report somehow already exist in your expectation?
Or is it just that there is some other kind of agreement between your expectation and what occurred; that the noise was not contained in your expectation, and merely supervened when the expectation was being fulfilled? –
But no, if the noise had not occurred, my expectation would not have been fulfilled; the noise fulfilled it; it was not an accompaniment like a second guest accompanying the one I expected.
Was the thing about the event that was not in the expectation too an accident, an extra provided by fate? - But then what was not an extra? Did something of the shot already occur in my expectation? - Then what was extra? for wasn’t I expecting the whole shot?
“The report was not so loud as I had expected.” - “Then was there a louder bang in your expectation?” [Wittgenstein 1953 §442]

I’m not sure in a brief lecture how many students will immediately have seen the problem here but I had three excellently philosophical responses. So, starting with the first question “did that report somehow already exist in your expectation?” there was a degree of agreement very quickly that the noise could not have existed in the expectation because it – that very noise – had not yet happened. (I did not expect them to see this as such a problem so easily.)

That pushed the discussion to the second option: that there is some other kind of agreement between the expectation and what occurred. Here I had no volunteers to make a suggestion for how it might work and didn't have enough time to try to draw one out. What I think of is something like a design specification, an advance blueprint, which might lay down some sort of condition that the actual noise meets and it would have interesting to get them to reflect on whether the Wittgensteinian worry that any such partial specification (missing out the accidental details of the actual event) would fail to capture the whole of the shot is really a good worry. (There are other regress-related reasons to be suspicious of the suggestion, of course.)

But in the end, there were three positive suggestions (from people who have done no university level philosophy and will not have looked at this topic before).

1: “It is something to do with past experience. A solution to the problem of induction will also solve this problem.” That seems a fine suggestion at this stage (second day! of three years) of the programme, though of course it does not really address the worry not of the justification for an expectation but rather how one can come to entertain it (its content) at all. Still, it was good to have a connection to another area of philosophy and maybe a proper solution to the problem of induction would indeed presuppose an account of intentionality.

2: “Maybe we don’t actually entertain expectations, we just talk as though we do.” This came right at the end and so I didn’t have time to draw out the underlying ideas. But being prepared to entertain such a revisionary possibility in the face of the philosophical puzzlement in the face of the ‘how-possible?’ question was rather bracing. (The speaker cannot have known of the Kripkean direction of travel here.)

3: “Perhaps it is only possible to form expectations in retrospect?” This struck me as brilliant (bloody brilliant, even). Grasping the nettle that the very noise cannot exist in the expectation because it has not happened yet but by contrast can after the fact – because one can think of that noise – the suggestion is that expectations are always formed retrospectively because we can see how they – at least – would be possible. I see a promising philosophical future for this student.

Phenomenology at the INPP

2011-09-02T14:23:00.006+01:00

It seems to me that one of the repeated topics of the INPP conferences is phenomenology and its application to psychiatry. Sometimes it is not the direct topic, which may be, instead, the nature of the person, conceived of as the primary subject matter for psychiatry. (In so saying one is denying, I take it, that sub-personal states such as disease states are the subject. Though what that in turn amounts to needs – in each context – some unpacking.) But, to return, in this latter context, phenomenology swiftly returns as what a concentration on the person as the proper focus for psychiatry also requires. If we are to think of the person as the proper focus then we had better embrace phenomenology. Well that, at least, has been a claim I have often heard at INPP sessions in the past.

(The contrast I have in mind is something like this. At a session on the nature of psychiatric taxonomy I do not expect to hear much about the way in which we might reason about it: what methods and tools we might use to frame an analysis. I expect, instead, just the – contested – analysis.)

So it was interesting to hear after the opening talk at this year’s conference by David Woodruff Smith, which articulated both a conception of phenomenology and how empathy might be both its method and its topic or subject matter (though I must admit to not getting much of a feel, in a short presentation, for what his conception of empathy was: an ability to grasp the nature of other people’s mental states and experiences or a particular experiential route to that) a question from Derek Bolton. If one does not assume a Kantian framework governing a priori constraints on how minds experience the world; and if one does not simply follow empirical scientific results; what standards of correctness, what particular routes of inquiry, underpin phenomenology?

If my notes are at all reliable, the answer started with the fact that Husserl himself had had a pre-Kantian phase whilst still using a phenomenological method and so Kantianism can’t be necessary. The approach should be ‘plainly’ phenomenological and thus does not need such a high level construction (as Kantianism, I inferred). Still experience is structured by interpretation and just as one has no need of empirical tests to test linguistic theories (eg about subject and verb order) so one can appeal to our pre-empirical grasp of a kind of basic mental vocabulary to ground the interpretation of experience.

I fear this does not do justice to Peter's answer. But it does leave the question: what is this low-level, non-hifalutin, non-Kantian structure on the assumption that the appeal to language was merely a metaphor. What is left to be the grammar of experience? I seem to have blind-spot every year to this issue: to what the short answer should be.

(Of course, the question of how philosophy ever works remains a problem pretty much in every approach. How can it be both distinct from empirical inquiry and yet purport to tell is anything about the world? With the death of conceptual analysis it is not as though phenomenology's rival approaches have much better answers. But this is less evident at INPP conferences because philosophy as such is rarely the topic of inquiry outside the repeated focus on phenomenology.)

Practice poster for INPP 2011

2011-08-16T15:53:00.008+01:00

I have never made a poster (here) before but have to for the INPP 2011 meeting. This has already taken all afternoon. Hmph.

Meaning, understanding and explanation

2011-08-15T21:11:00.000+01:00

This short pre-conference course before the 2011 INPP conference in Sweden examines the relation of understanding and explanation starting with Jaspers views, then more modern accounts of the distinction, Bolton and Hill’s attempt to draw them together and finally John Campbell’s very recent criticism of the assumption that causation in psychiatry is rationally structured.

Adrian Moore on ineffable knowledge

2011-08-12T11:01:00.002+01:00

[Another work in progress. Very rough.]

A different connection between Wittgenstein’s regress argument and tacit knowledge can be drawn from Adrian Moore’s book Points of View by charting his arguments for ineffable knowledge. (Moore himself retains the phrase ‘tacit knowledge’ for something else, something for whose existence he offers no explicit argument.) Whilst in one paper, Moore argues directly that conceptual mastery is a form of ineffable knowledge, in his book, this is placed in a broader context of responding to Wittgenstein. We will first follow that latter route.

Moore suggests that, in his discussion of understanding a rule or grasping a concept, one of Wittgenstein’s targets is the idea that our concepts answer to a ‘super-physical landscape’. Discussing the idea that there is a necessary connection between the concept of aunt and being female, for example, he suggests that Wittgenstein rejects the idea that such concepts ‘were things we just stumbled across, the one an inseparable part of the other’. But instead of charting such an independent super-physical or platonic realm, Wittgenstein’s discussion makes it clear instead that: ‘It is on our own contingent practices that we are focusing’ [Moore 1997: 128].

The connection between meaning or rules and contingency is this. Recall our summary of Wittgenstein’s regress argument and also Kripke’s reconstruction of it. It seems that nothing that can come before the mind’s eye, nor anything that can be put into words, nor any finite examples of past practice can determine a rule or a concept. What then explains our ability to go on in the same way?

Moore quotes, approvingly, a famous passage from Stanley Cavell who says:

That on the whole we... [make, and understand, the same projections of words into further contexts] is a matter of our sharing routes of interest and feeling, modes of response, sense of humour and of significance and of fulfilment, of what is outrageous, of what is similar to what else, what a rebuke, what forgiveness, of when an utterance is an assertion, when an appeal, when an explanation – all the whirl of organism Wittgenstein calls ‘forms of life’ [Cavell 1976: 52 quoted in Moore 1997: 128-9]

It is because of this shared background that we react in similar ways to explanations of rules and concepts and make the same projections of word use into the future. Lacking something like a platonic landscape to chart or a signpost that needs no further interpretation, it is a shared whirl of organism that underpins the conceptual order.

But if so, then this suggests that what seem to be necessary features of our concepts themselves depend on a background of contingencies. The contingencies do not merely concern the fact that, for linguistic historical reasons, the word for aunt is ‘aunt’ and female is ‘female’. Rather, the very idea that aunts are female seems to depend on the whirl of organism. Similarly the truths of mathematic and logic.

On a Wittgensteinian view, not only does 2 + 2 equal 4, but 2 + 2 must equal 4. ‘2 + 2 = 4’ is a rule. And yet – it is a rule only because of our contingent linguistic practices (and not just in the sense that we might have used different sounds or inscriptions to express it). [Moore 1997: 132 italics added]

But that idea seems simply false. As Bernard Williams puts it:

[I]f our talk of numbers has been determined by our decisions, then one result of our decisions is that it must be nonsense to say that anything about a number has been determined by our decisions. [Williams 1982: 95]

One response to this, which Moore considers but rejects, is to attempt distinguish between an empirical and transcendental interpretation of the role of contingency. Whilst within the empirical realm it seems simple false to say that the truths of mathematics or the greenness of grass, for example, depend on our whirl of organism, perhaps there is a way to advance such a claim at a transcendental level, off stage. On this approach, conditionals such as, had our language been different then grass would not have been green, do not express empirical possibilities or point to alternatives which are alternatives for us. But this leaves the thoughts apparently expressed as incoherent, as pure and utter nonsense.

Moore’s own response to the tension is nuanced and lies mainly outside the scope of this book. But one element connects to his claim that conceptual understanding is ineffable. In the face of the tension outlined, we are inclined to ask:

‘But what, ultimately, does somebody’s being an aunt consist in? What does something’s being green consist in?’ We cannot help asking these questions because we cannot help wondering about the basic form of that to which our representations answer. [Moore 1997: 134]

Such questions presuppose that our concepts answer to something: the underlying form of the world, its necessary background logical structure. Given the apparent insight from Wittgenstein’s regress argument that necessary features of our concepts themselves depend on a background of contingencies, answering these questions in their own terms leads inevitably, Moore says, to transcendental idealism but that is mere nonsense. Moore suggests that, instead, the questions should be rejected. But this is not just in order to try to escape the tension. Rather, it is because grasp of concepts or rules does not answer to anything.

Focusing self-consciously on our understanding, we recognize the deep contingencies that sustain it… [But] Our understanding has nothing to answer to. It is part of how we receive the world… If we do achieve such clarity, then what we actually get into focus is an arrangement of interlocking, mutually supporting practices that are grounded in one another’s contingency, a complex knotted structure that might easily have been different. [Moore 1997: 162]

So part of Moore’s response to the regress argument and the tension it seems to set up between necessity and contingency is to deny that conceptual mastery answers to anything. It is not representational knowledge. For that reason it is ineffable.

My understanding of English is a prime example. I would certainly count that as ineffable, even though it includes large tracts of effable knowledge such as... that the word ‘green’ denotes green things.
Understanding, of the sort that I have in mind, has nothing to answer to. Of course, I may think that I know what a particular word in English means and be wrong: I may think that the word ‘rabbit’ denotes hares as well as rabbits. If that is the case, then what I understand is strictly speaking an idiolect distinct from English. But I do still have my understanding... a mode of reception. It is not itself a reception. It includes my knowing how to exercise the concept green, for instance, which in turn includes my knowing what it is for something to be green. But this is not the same as my having an answer to any question. (Still less is it the same as my having an answer to the pseudo-question, ‘what is it for something to be green’.) [Moore 1997: 184]

Elsewhere Moore advances a similar line of argument more directly but which also more clearly connects back to the regress argument and the role of Platonism. (This is the direct argument mentioned above.) As reported in chapter 2, Moore criticises the view that there is any neat semantic marker for a distinction between knowledge-how and knowledge-that and argues that in many cases knowledge-how can be put into words, in accord with Stanley and Williamson’s views. Nevertheless, he also argues that there is a form of knowledge or understanding which is ineffable and which cannot be put into words. Conceptual mastery is such a case.

Consider my knowledge of what it is for an object to be green. On [Stanley and Williamson’s] view this is knowledge, concerning something, that that thing is what it is for an object to be green. But concerning what? A simple reply would be: ‘What it is for an object to be green.’ But what kind of thing is that? If I try to express my knowledge by indicating a green object and saying, ‘This is what it is for an object to be green,’ what can I be referring to by ‘this’? There does not seem to be any good answer. Nothing short of an unacceptable Platonism, it seems to me, can subserve the extension of their account to this case. I do not think that my knowledge of what it is for an object to be green is knowledge that anything is the case. Nor, crucially, do I think that it is effable. [Moore 2003: 177]

In the case of grasp of a concept such as green, Moore argues that the demonstrative approach fails to work. It could only work if something like the whole use of the word were available for demonstrative singling out. But failing platonism of that form, that cannot be the case. He goes on to suggest that where knowledge is ineffable, the attempt to put it into words can only result in nonsense. Further such nonsense really is nonsense. There can be no ‘suggestion that there is nonsense that captures in some more or less obscure way how things are’ [Moore 1997: 201]. Nevertheless, that attempt can produce something that has a role in showing even whilst it cannot say anything. Showing, however, is not merely a shorthand for saying in some more or less obscure way how things are. Rather: ‘To say of some piece of nonsense that it is the result of attempting to express the inexpressible is something like making an aesthetic evaluation’ [ibid: 202].

We will not follow Moore’s thought further along this trajectory of using nonsense to show something about our grasp of rules but rather examine the stage-setting already in play. Two elements inter-mingle in the claim that grasp of concepts is ineffable. One is the failure of a demonstration to express what one grasps when one grasps the concept of greenness. The other is the diagnosis of this that it is because that concept does not answer to or represent anything independent of it. Understanding the meaning of a word is not an instance of representing something as the case but rather a general precondition of any such representation.

My understanding is knowledge of how to acquire knowledge., then. But it is not itself true representation of how things are. It is not a representation at all...

My understanding is not true, nor true of anything, nor yet true to anything. But the fact that other people communicate with me as they do is reason for my having an understanding that will enable me to make good sense of them (as mine does). More generally, the fact that the world is the way it is is a reason for my having an understanding that will enable me to make good sense of it. And as for what ‘good’ means here: it means, not ‘right’, but... something more like useful. This is not to say that, granted the concepts I have, there is no right or wrong in how I use them to arrive at my interpretations. The point is rather that there is no right or wrong in the concepts I have. [ibid: 185-6]

The claim that grasping a rule does not answer to anything suggests a worry that such understanding cannot be a form of knowledge. Moore considers what he calls ‘the effability argument’ to the effect that answering to something independent is an essential feature of knowledge. Thus for example, strength is a capacity that enables one to do particular things in particular circumstances. But its success conditions are ‘simply the conditions in which the subject is in that state’. It is more or less useful but does not get anything right. Strength is thus not knowledge. By contrast, practical knowledge of how to make an omelette answers to facts about eggs and temperature. Had those been different, a given state of practical knowledge would fail. Thus, the latter is a form of representational knowledge. It is thus effable, according to Moore, because it can be articulated through suitable demonstratives.

How then can something which does not answer to anything independent of it count as knowledge? Moore aims to earn the right to call understanding a concept a form of knowledge by identifying three general marks of or indicators of knowledge: versatility (there is no relevant foreclosing of the possibilities it affords a subject), performance transcendence (evidence for its possession must be more than someone simply ‘bringing something off’) and rationality (it stands in logical relations to other cognitive states). Now whilst states which answer to something independent of them can meet these three conditions so also can ineffable knowledge because, roughly, by being the right sort of precondition of representational knowledge, it can inherit these three marks.

Moore is free to define ‘ineffable’ knowledge the way he wishes: as practical knowledge which is non-representational because it does not answer to anything independent of it. But it is not meant to be a purely stipulative definition. It is tied to a pre-philosophical sense of ‘ineffable’ because the meaning of ‘green’ cannot, he argues, be expressed in words. This in turn is reinforced by something like Wittgenstein’s regress argument. Only if platonism were true could one use a platonic conception of the real, underlying extension of our concepts both to explain to what they answer but also to be the object of a demonstrative to express conceptual mastery in words (as ‘green is that!’). Lacking platonism, the regress argument shows that no other attempt to capture one’s understanding in words will succeed. Any utterance will stand in need of an appropriate interpretation.

Even though this is not Moore’s own account of tacit knowledge it serves to locate a possible response to the regress argument which could be used to support a role for tacit knowledge. Concentrating on the negative moral of the regress argument, it seems that grasp of a rule or the meaning cannot be made explicit because any utterance stands in need of interpretation and that initiates a regress. Equally it cannot consist in any mental talisman akin to a signpost because that will also stand in need of interpretation. Kripke’s response to this accepts that, properly speaking, nothing is grasped in the way originally assumed. Understanding meaning is indeed tacit, though not in any clear sense knowledge, because it is a matter of projection based on not being out of step with a community. (Blackburn suggests that a similar account could be given for an individual.)

Moore’s response also accepts the negative thrust about what can be put into words (although in other cases of practical knowledge, such as omelette making, he happily endorses demonstrative expression). It is ineffable. We might say: tacit. But he nevertheless wishes to preserve the idea that it is knowledge even though this puts under strain the idea that it has content because it does not answer to anything and is thus (unlike omelette making) not representational knowledge.

In the next section we will attempt to outline more directly how an account of tacit knowledge can be drawn from Wittgenstein which shares the general pattern of Moore’s account as summarised here. (

Two claims will be key. One, is that Wittgenstein’s discussion allows more to be expressed than either Kripke or Moore accepts and that helps undercut Moore’s claim that conceptual understanding cannot be expressed. Second, part of the attraction of a substantive ineffable account of tacit knowledge stems from an only partial rejection of platonism. A more thorough going rejection of platonism removes this spurious support. But it will be helpful here to mention a further point of disagreement specifically with Moore’s account.

We said above that Moore mingles the claim that conceptual grasp cannot be expressed with the idea that it is non-representational. He says: ‘This is not to say that, granted the concepts I have, there is no right or wrong in how I use them to arrive at my interpretations. The point is rather that there is no right or wrong in the concepts I have.’ [ibid: 186]. This latter claim reflects a central theme in Wittgenstein’s later work referred to by commentators as the ‘autonomy of grammar’ [eg Hacker **]. It expresses the view that an explanation of conceptual connections in independent terms is impossible. They do not, for example, track independent platonic extensions. Following a rule is not a matter of going over in bolder pencil moves already somehow made.

One can, however, concede that claim whilst insisting that understanding a concept does answer to something: a normative pattern of use which prescribes correct instances which is reflected in the first part of the quotation above: This is not to say that, granted the concepts I have, there is no right or wrong in how I use them. That is the content of the substantive knowledge one has when one knows the meaning of a word or a rule. There is no simple link from the autonomy of grammar as a whole – the fact that it does not represent an underlying platonic structure – to the inexpressibility of what one understands when one understands a concept. One would need a further argument for this and in the next section we will attempt to undermine just such an argument.

Wittgenstein's regress argument and tacit knowledge

2011-08-10T17:35:00.004+01:00

Wittgenstein’s regress argument appears on a first reading to support a role for tacit knowledge runs as follows. The examples of correctly determining the direction that a sign-post points, or of the possibility of deviant reactions to explanations of how to continue, correctly, a mathematical series, suggests that everything that can be said still allows for misunderstandings. Since everything that can be made explicit apparently underdetermines the correct understanding, such understanding must instead be based on something unsaid and implicit. It must depend on tacit knowledge of the rule. Hence, on this account, the regress argument is stopped by an appeal to tacit knowledge.

This connection seems also to fit Wittgenstein’s own conclusion:

What this shews is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but which is exhibited in what we call “obeying the rule” and “going against it” in actual cases. [Wittgenstein 1953: §202]

Nevertheless, whilst there is something right about that line of thought, there is something misleading about it. That there is something misleading can be by three problems it faces.

The first problem with it as an interpretation of Wittgenstein is that it accepts part of what he criticises: a platonic picture of rules as rails ‘invisibly laid to infinity’ fundamentally distinct from our capacity to articulate them. That picture is easily prompted by the case of the deviant pupil. What that case, and others like it, seems to show is both that any finite set of examples underdetermines a correct understanding of the rule but also that such correct understanding must involve grasp of an extra-human or supernatural pattern. Since no actual human enumeration of the pattern seems enough to determine it, it must be extra-human. Hence the metaphor of rails laid to infinity.

With that picture of the way rules determine correct moves in place, there is a substantial role for tacit knowledge to bridge the gap between what can be made explicit in the sublunary realm and the ideal platonic rule. But if so, it seems that Wittgenstein offers support for a platonic picture he also seems to criticise. (To put this point in the terms used by McDowell: such a picture of tacit knowledge presupposes a rampantly platonic picture of rules [McDowell 1994].)

A second problem concerns the communication of knowledge of rules. Since explanations are insufficient explicitly to fix a unique rule, the tacit grasp of a particular rule cannot be a matter of knowledge even if it were, as a matter of fact, of the rule intended. Nothing could justify the selection from the infinite range of alternative options. But even this is problematic because of a third problem.

The final problem is accounting for the idea that tacit knowledge of a rule or the meaning of a word has some content to be known. As far as what can be made explicit, this approach is in the same position as Kripke’s sceptical account. But it differs from that in attempting to invoke something tacit. The problem, though, is that this means that nothing can be said by way of positive account of what the tacit knowledge amounts to since any attempt will fall prey to the Kripkean objections to explicitness. But if that is the case, what reason is there to think that what remains tacit is a ‘something’ at all? It may justify the label ‘tacit’ but only at the cost of undermining the idea of knowledge.

These three problems all stem from the idea that tacit knowledge is needed to plug a gap between what can be explained, or otherwise made explicit, and the full grasp of a rule which can be understood as a result. Wittgenstein undermines that gap, however, and thus that account of the support his argument gives for tacit knowledge. He suggests, instead, that there is a close connection between what a teacher can express and what a student can grasp in the examples which manifest the teacher’s meaning.

“But do you really explain to the other person what you yourself understand? Don’t you get him to guess the essential thing? You give him examples, – but he has to guess their drift, to guess your intention.” – Every explanation which I can give myself I give to him too. – “He guesses what I intend” would mean: various interpretations of my explanation come to his mind, and he lights on one of them. So in this case he could ask; and I could and should answer him. [ibid: §210]

“But this initial segment of a series obviously admitted of various interpretations (e.g. by means of algebraic expressions) and so you must first have chosen one such interpretation.”–Not at all. A doubt was possible in certain circumstances. But that is not to say that I did doubt, or even could doubt…[ibid: §213]

In §210. the interlocutor expresses the worry that since an explanation fails to determine the rule to be explained, a listener has to guess – from an infinite range of options – what rule was intended. The guess is needed to bridge the gap between what is actually expressed and what was really intended. But Wittgenstein’s response is to equate the what can be explained to another person and what might have been assumed to be epistemically optimal: what a speaker can explain to him or herself.

This equation might be thought – optimistically – to offer in the third person case the happy circumstances of the first person case: what one knows one intends in one’s explanation. But it might also be thought – pessimistically in the context of an inquiry which undermines the efficacy of mental templates to underpin one’s own grasp of a rule – to limit what is available to others to what is available to oneself. Either way, the connection undermines the idea that a guess is necessary to bridge a gap between first and third person cases.

§213 applies the moral of §210 to the explanation of a rule. Whilst some explanations can fail that is not the general case. (Just as in general sign-posts succeed in pointing.) Although Wittgenstein rejects substantive explanations of our grasp of rules, via mental mechanisms, he does not claim that there is a gap between what can be manifested and what must be understood, a gap that has thus to be filled by a tacit element.

Recognising that our understanding can be expressed in examples undermines the gap between the sublunary and the platonic and thus that potential role for tacit knowledge. It also blocks the worry raised above that such a model of the tacit understanding of rules or meanings would put under pressure the idea that there is something to be known, a content grasped. There is a content which can be expressed in examples or ongoing practice.

That might suggest that, on a proper understanding, Wittgenstein’s regress argument offers no support for tacit knowledge. And indeed, an interpretation, perhaps inspired by Kripke, which concentrates on the potential failures of explanations or the lack of efficacy of signposts seems to have things almost exactly the wrong way round. A pointing sign can be a paradigm case of what it is to make a direction explicit not implicit. Some ostensive examples can explicate the meaning of a word.

But there is, nevertheless, a tacit dimension for two reasons.

First, such explanations work for those with eyes to see or ears to hear. It is because we are the kind of subjects we are, with our shared routes of interest, perceptions of salience, feelings of naturalness etc., that we are able to use finite explanations, as we do, to communicate unending rules [Lear 1982: 386]. Because we share what Stanley Cavell calls our ‘whirl of organism’ we can respond to explanations in a way which does not threaten a regress of interpretations.

Wittgenstein’s deviant pupil illustrates what it would be to lack the right background and thus fail to understand or react to explanations by example as we do. Under such hypothetical circumstances, examples would need to be bound together under an interpretation but – again without the right background – there would be no way to encode that interpretation without a vicious regress.

Now it might be tempting to obviate the need for such a background by trying to articulate or encode how understanding depends on one’s interests, saliences and perceptions of naturalness. But any attempt to articulate that would also have to presuppose the background that underpins understanding of any such explanation. If we take full articulation to be an articulation which does not require possession of the shared background, then no full articulation is possible (because of the regress of interpretations). But for those who do share that background, it can be put into words piecemeal.

That is one reason to think of the background of shared routes of interest, perceptions of salience, feelings of naturalness as tacit. Making elements of it explicit is only possible against a background which cannot be simultaneously articulated to someone outside it. An explanatory project which attempted to take nothing for granted would be bound to fail. But on the other hand, articulating the bounds of sense from within is possible. Thus it is a nuanced view of the tacit.

The second main reason to think that understanding a rule is a species of tacit knowledge is as follows. Consider a rule which can be partly codified in an informal statement such as that the digits always follow the pattern: ‘0, 2, 4, 6, 8, 0 etc’ or more fully codified in an explicit mathematical formula or principle. Someone who understands such a rule may understand such a general principle or perhaps a set of related principles using some of them to explain others. They may thus be able to articulate what they understand the rule to be in general and context-independent terms. Nevertheless, even with such a codifiable rule, understanding it cannot be independent of understanding its instances. One needs to know, in Wittgenstein’s phrase, how to go on. It is a form of practical knowledge. Wittgenstein gives an example of someone who grasps a series either with, or without, having a formula in mind:

It is clear that we should not say B had the right to say the words “Now I know how to go on”, just because he thought of the formula – unless experience shewed that there was a connexion between thinking of the formula – saying it, writing it down – and actually continuing the series...
We can also imagine the case where nothing at all occurred in B’s mind except that he suddenly said “Now I know how to go on” – perhaps with a feeling of relief; and that he did in fact go on working out the series without using the formula. And in this case too we should say – in certain circumstances – that he did know how to go on. [ibid: §179]

In addition to this connection to practice, however, there is something implicit in this example. It is connected to particular cases. To understand the rule requires a grasp that this particular number is the next number in the sequence, for example. So grasp of a general concept, even one which can be explained in general terms, implicates a situation-specific sensitivity. But as the regress argument establishes, situation-specific judgements cannot be reduced to or captured in merely general terms.

Because grasp of a rule involves knowing how to go on, it is a form of practical knowledge. But it is, additionally, situation specific. This is what we take to be the best understanding of tacit knowledge.

Travis on determination / rule following

2011-08-05T10:27:00.019+01:00

A couple of years ago, I took some time off work to read Charles Travis’ Thought’s Footing and found it a difficult but rewarding read [Travis 2006]. I didn’t take any notes about how it works so I’ve had to go back to recall Travis’ version of the rule following considerations which has a number of interesting features. The main chapter is chapter 4 on determination although a later section (pp189-93) helps to shed light on the approach here.

In chapter 4, Travis takes as a central clue a passage later than the conventional rule following passages (I would say [Wittgenstein 1953 §§139-239]):

In §459 Wittgenstein notes,
We say ‘The order orders this – ‘ and do it; but also ‘The order orders this: I am to...’. We translate it at one time into a proposition, another into a demonstration, and at another into action.
It is the transition from order to action that matters here. For a proposition, the transition is from it, or understanding it bears, to particular facts as to things being as they are (for the various ways that might be) being, or not being, things being as the proposition says. What might effect such a transition? [Travis 2006: 122-3]

I think that, by taking this as his clue, Travis stresses two things. First, there is a transition or translation from the order to what we do with it (to what I would have said ‘satisfies’ it). That suggests a gap to be crossed in some way. It is more obvious when what has to be connected is an order and an action as they seem to be of different natures or ontological orders. (This reminds me of the other crucial passages nearby in the 400s which present a solution to the connection of thought and world.) But it is true of statements as well.

On occasion we see given such translations as right. For us to mean or understand words in some given way (as we do on an occasion) is for us to be prepared to see some such translations as right, others as wrong. [ibid: 129]

The second stressed aspect is that the translation is to something particular or individual. ‘In the imagery of §459, we make translations from proposition to action (more generally, to treatments of particular cases)’ [ibid: 129].

Travis then presents two rival accounts of this:

We...have two contrasting models of meaning and understanding. They differ importantly as to what it is to be prepared to make given translations of the sort of which §459 speaks. ...[ibid: 129]

The first account assumes that to mean words in some particular way is to be related to an explicit abstract or disembodied representation.

On that expansion [of what are in themselves, pre-philosophically, innocent banalities about meaning], an explicit specification of an understanding someone means words to bear is always possible in principle. To give it would be, inter alia, to produce a representation of things being as meant... That representation would be explicit, which is to say that it would have a very special property: unlike our ordinary representations, it would not admit of understandings (of things being as thus represented). [ibid: 121]

Travis puts initial pressure on this account by stressing that, in general, our words ‘admit of understandings’. So giving the example of Sid saying that the shoes are under the bed, Travis argues that this might mean any of many options. They might have to be completely under the bed. Or having their ends protruding might be allowed. Or, rather less likely for us or for Sid, ‘in a plumb line with the bed, but three floors down’ [ibid: 120]. So a condition of adequacy of the first account is that it singles out just one such interpretation.

One the first model... for Pia to understand the sign as she does is for her to relate in a particular way to a very special sort of (disembodied) representation. That representation requires the particular transitions it does independent of anything Pia is prepared to recognise, and independent of any understanding we may happen to share as to what it requires...[ibid: 129]
Such a representation would thus be a synopsis of the solutions to indefinitely many problems; a synopsis from which all those solutions are recoverable. One would not need Pia’s form of worldliness, or any other particular form, to manage the recovery. It might be a task for an idiot-savant. [ibid: 124]

Although initial pressure is put on this model, Travis goes on to introduce a rival, second account before assembing his key Wittgensteinian objections to the first. Those objections are that nothing could do the work that the disembodied representation is supposed to do. I’m less interested in those (because they are familiarly Wittgensteinian) than with the novel set-up. So to the second model:

On the second model... for Pia to understand the sign as she does is for her to be positioned to see the solutions to an indefinite range of novel problems as to which translations it requires – problems as to whether it requires doing this to the door now. For her to be so positioned is for her to share a competence we have to see how to take the sign, except where, for one or another special reason, she deviates in her understanding from that. [ibid: 129]

On this second account, to mean something by one’s words depends on the contingencies of the situation, or the ‘occasions’ in Travis’ key word, on the practical competences of speaker and hearer (‘Pia’s worldliness places her to deal with an indefinite range of potentially relevant, and sometimes unexpected, considerations’ [ibid: 124]) and the relation between the speaker and facts about what it would be reasonable to be taken to mean in the situation. That third point is one of the ways in which Travis is a kind of communitarian Wittgensteinian.

Travis suggests one is pushed towards the first, Fregean and disembodied representation by stressing the question: What is it that Pia thus meant? Or which way is the way she meant it? But the second account develops from ‘rotating “the axis of reference of our examination... about the fixed point of our real needs” [§108]’ [ibid: 128].

This ‘rotation of our axis of reference’ brings with it two crucial new features. One is that there is no longer any supposition of a unique right answer to the question in which way Pia meant her words. If a given candidate for a way she meant them merits, by the above sorts of considerations, counting as a way she did in fact mean them, that does not exclude any other substantively different candidates from meriting the same answer once they do come into consideration. The other is that, given the role of what is most reasonable is to play in the truth of an answer for a given candidate, there is room, or more, for personal meaning to be an occasion-sensitive affair. Whether Sid is most reasonably classified as one who meant ‘gold watch’ in such-and-such given way is entirely likely to depend on the circumstances in which, or purposes for which, that classifying is to be done. [ibid: 128]

So by p129 Travis has outlined two rival accounts of the way in which words are meant and understood, stressed the occasion sensitivity of meaning, strongly hinted at where the first will have difficulty and suggested something of the way the second will cope. All this comes in part by noticing that there is a translation between an order and an action and between a statement and a state of affairs. (The connection between these was already there in §459.)

The first account will not be able to bridge the gap that the need for translation reveals. That sounds familiar from any account of §§139-239. But Travis brings it out in the context of a neo-Fregean / neo-Russellian distinction about thought.

Sid tells Pia that her shoes are under the bed. Pia understands Sid’s words in a certain way. In particular, she takes him to speak on a certain understanding of shoes being under a bed. Now she enters the room. She encounters things being relevantly as they are (supposing how they are three floors down not to matter). She learns something, perhaps enough, of the conditions (circumstances) which then obtain. Three understandings of Sid’s words now become available. There is an understanding of them on which things being that way just is their being as Sid said. There is one on which it just is not. And there may be a third on which that much leaves the issue undecided. Other than the mentioned differences, these understandings may be very much alike. It may be that just one of them is the one that Pia’s understanding of Sid’s words requires. In that sense, just one of them is part of that understanding...

There is now a point about the availability of these three understandings. I start with another instance of just the same point. But for a certain successful enterprise on the part of Frege’s parents, there would have been no singular thoughts about him. Before 1848, there were none that anyone could think...

Some thoughts are only available to us given suitable acquaintance with our environment. And so it is with those understandings of Sid’s words I just mentioned. Pia’s shoes are positioned as they are with respect to the bed. There is then this understanding of Sid’s words: what they say is such that things being that way is things being as they said. Someone may thus understand them. One may only so understand them if one is suitably acquainted with things being as they then were. It is to things so being that one must be responding in having that understanding. An understanding thus unavailable to someone before a given time I will call novel (for that person at that time), and an understanding available anyway, even when that other one was not (or if it were not) prior relative to that novel one. [ibid: 129-30]

With this latter distinction in play, the gap covered by translation (of, for example, an order into an action) is between prior understanding and novel understanding. As the comparison with singular thoughts about Frege (and his account of such thoughts earlier in the book is excellent, by the way) makes plain, one is simply in no position to have the novel or situation-dependent thought in advance. That thought simply cannot come to mind, or be entertained, when one is framing a prior thought or understanding.

Elsewhere he gives this example:
A man in Ulan Bator is now standing before his yurt, sipping tea. (Make it ten o’clock his time.) I cannot think a thought, of him, that he is doing that—a thought which presents him as the one who must be some way for the thought to be true, and sipping tea before his yurt at ten as what he must be doing. I cannot do this, since I neither know, nor know of, anyone in Ulan Bator (though I am sure some people live there). I can, to be sure, think that everyone in Ulan Bator stands before his yurt at 10 and sips tea. What I thus think will be false if this man does not do that. The thought I thus think has a certain kind of generality which allows it to be true, or false, in this way. But as Frege points out (1914: 108-109, different example), that man falsifes my statement only given that he is in Ulan Bator—in present terms, only given that his being as he is participates in the instancing relation with that way for a thing to be. And it is just this last that I am not in a position to think—a corollary of not being able to think of him at all. Thinking a thought which is false, given his being as he is, is not the same thing as thinking a thought of him. [Travis 2011: 310-11]

In the context of Wittgenstein’s discussion of the expectation of an explosion and the explosion which satisfies, one cannot have had a situation-dependent thought about that explosion (of the form that! explosion) in advance. Still, there has to be some connection between prior and novel understandings.

[I]f an understanding of Sid’s words is one on which things being as they are... is things being... as Sid says, then that understanding should contain some understanding which requires the corresponding novel understanding(s) relative to it. It should be an understanding relative to which understanding Sid’s words as speaking of what is instanced by this... is a novel understanding, but, moreover, one which that prior understanding mandates... The issue it raises is how prior understanding can require novel ones. [Travis 2006: 130-1]
[W]ords can be true (or false) only where they bear a prior understanding that requires the right novel one. If they are made true by things being as they are, that is by virtue of an understanding available anyway... [131]

So this way of setting up the problem stresses in terms one doesn’t find in the Investigations just what is the gap between order or intention or understanding of a rule and action. There are two different kinds of thought in play (prior and novel). So how can the one determine the other? But unless they do, there can be no such thing as truth and falsity.

There follows a discussion of why a disembodied representation could not do the work. This culminates in this passage:
Where Sid meant that things were a certain way, acquaintance with conditions in the bedroom makes three thoughts (so understandings) available which otherwise are not: that things being thus is their being that way; that it is their not being that way; and that it, so far, leaves the matter undecided. Each corresponds to a different way Sid might have meant his words. Suppose these understandings to be novel for Sid at the time he spoke. On the first model, for Sid to have meant his words as he did is for him to relate to a certain disembodied representation. Suppose that things being as they are in the bedroom is their being as Sid meant. Then, on the model, for him to have meant his words as he did is for him then to have related to a representation of things as F, where but one of these three novel understandings is an admissable understanding of things being F (namely, the first one). What being F is rules the others out tout court. Suppose there is such a thing as being F. Then, the present point is, there is another – call it F* - which agrees with being F in point of all the understandings available to Sid prior to these novel ones, particularly, all those which are, as the above, translations from ‘order to action’ (from things being such-and-such way to things being thus), but which disagrees with F in re the novel understandings (the ones Sid could not have had, or entertained, at time of speaking). Things being as they are would be their being F, where that is a thought then available just w[h?]ere it would be their being F*; a then available understanding would be an admissable understanding of being F just where it was also an admissable understanding of being F*. What, then, could there be in Sid’s being as he then was which makes it a (disembodied) representation of things as F, and not one of things as F* that he related to in meaning what he said as he did? [ibid: 137]

I must say I find myself reading back from how I already think of the regress of interpretations argument to this dense passage. Thus, I take it that the gap between prior and novel thoughts permits a variety of bent interpretations which agree up to just this! novel, situation-dependent, thought but differ at just this point. The disembodied representation is something that can be a prior understanding and yet, somehow, fixes, by itself, just this! novel thought. But how could that be? Any concrete representation will stand there like a signpost and admit of a variety of interpretations. (I am not sure that there is textual evidence to suggest that Travis thinks this but there is a dilemma here. The embodied representation must either fix the novel understanding as it were mechanically or just contain the novel understanding. Neither works. The former for familiar Wittgensteinian reasons. The latter trivially once one buys the neo-Fregean distinction.)

(There is another element of the criticism to which I will return. On the criticised approach, the prior understanding somehow names the circumstances such that the later encounter - in the novel understanding - is not really novel but a kind of re-cognition of those circumstances. This is connected to the idea that properties are ingredients in situations that can be re-encountered as Frege the man was and involves a blurring of naming and predication. It is connected to the way Travis unpacks §429: If I say falsely that something is red, then nonetheless, for all that, it is not red. But I will try to summarise this thought some other day.)

One other difference from a conventional set up. All the talk of shoes under the bed is akin to all the examples of deviant pupils and does similar work. If those are to be ruled out by a proper account of understanding, that presents a challenge for either Fregeanism (Travis) or platonism (more familiarly). A deviant pupil does appear in discussion of §185 on p133 and Travis points out the luck that we can find a pattern in the way that he mistakenly hears the instruction: we might have made nothing of it. But in the main occasion-sensitivity stands to Wittgenstein’s pupil as the empirical does to the transcendental. Travis thinks that occasion-sensitivity is real and rampant and thus plays a more than merely formal role in shaping his account of meaning.

Frege, G. (1914) ‘Logik in der Mathematik’ in his Nachgelassene Schriffen: 219-270
Travis, C. (2006) Thought’s Footing, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Travis, C. (2011) Objectivity and the Parochial, Oxford: Oxford University Press
Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell

See this entry on ‘A sense of occasion’, this on ‘Reason’s reach’, this on ‘The twilight of empiricism’, and this on the discussion of rule following in Thought’s Footing.

Housekeeping

2011-08-03T16:33:00.004+01:00

I think that I am now on top of all writing except for finishing my book on tacit knowledge to which I will now devote myself exclusively.

Two draft chapters on explicit and tacit knowledge are now with an editor of a book on endovascular surgical techniques.

A review for Current Opinion in Psychiatry on ‘Recent developments for naturalising the mind’ is now in production.

A chapter on ‘Clinical judgement and tacit knowledge’ for Bill Fulford’s Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Psychiatry is with him for the review process.

My paper from Paris last summer on ‘Radical liberal values based practice’ is in production with the Journal of Evaluation in Clinical Practice.

After some problems in the review process the paper ‘Delusional atmosphere, the everyday uncanny and the limits of secondary sense’ was accepted for Emotion Review although sadly Lois described it as a ‘pointless paper’.

After rather less difficulty ‘The recovery model, values and narrative understanding’ was accepted for the OUP collection The Recovery of People with Mental Illness. For some reason, however, whilst fiddling with it in the review process, I realised that it is overly burdened and hedged about by qualifications. I suspect I wrote it too slowly.

My contribution to the Association for the Advancement of the Philosophy of Psychiatry Bulletin, ‘Why taxonomise anti-psychiatry?’, rashly written on the day of the call for papers, is no doubt waiting for other contributions to come in with a little more thought.

There is no news at all about ‘Why teach the philosophy of mental health?’ submitted ages ago to the Journal of Mental Health Training Education and Practice.

Finally, ‘Capacity, mental mechanisms and unwise decisions’ is out in Philosophy Psychiatry and Psychology18: 127-32

Quirkier things. Paul Hoff told me at our UCLan INPP meeting at Manchester a year ago that a paper I'd written five years ago (‘Facts, values and meanings’ (invited speaker) Zürcher Symposium für Klinische Psychiatrie Zurich March 2006) will actually be published in a translated collection in Swiss.

I hear that my paper ‘Mind and World as transcendental anthropology?’ (invited speaker) McDowell, l’esprit et le monde, McDowell, Mind and World Amiens October 2007 will also come out in a collection with a reply from McDowell. Given that - as was pointed out on this blog by Paul Witcombe - it contained a glaring error that I never changed, I am a bit embarrassed by this.

Having cleared the decks, I have been invited by Yvonne Bonner to submit a paper the oldest Italian psychiatric review RSF (Rivista Sperimentale di Freniatria). She says with disarming candour: "I do hope you will accept as I do believe Italian readers would probably discover an interesting philosopher that they haven't come across yet." But would they even probably discover an interesting philosopher?

Explicit knowledge and its transmission

2011-08-03T13:52:00.001+01:00

Another work in progress chapter.

Explicit knowledge and its transmission

The goal of knowledge, justification and the avoidance of luck

Medical science aims at truth. Why? Here is one reason. Medicine aims not just to understand the nature of the world but to intervene in it. For a given therapeutic aim and a belief – or set of beliefs – about how to bring it about, achieving that aim will in general depend on the truth of the belief (or set). Success given merely false beliefs would require the compensation of additional good luck. In general, truth unlike falsity is conducive to success. But if true beliefs explain therapeutic success, why aim not just for true beliefs but, more than that, knowledge? What is the value of knowledge?

In this chapter I outline some key issues in the analysis of knowledge which start from this question. One key problem is this. In the main knowledge is conveyed by testimony – through enculturation and upbringing, and explicit teaching and learning – and yet intuitive approaches to the analysis of knowledge which aim to capture personal responsibility for it would make this impossible.

One answer to the question raised comes from an intuition about the nature of knowledge. Knowledge can be undermined by luck. Suppose that a tennis fan forms an irrational conviction about who will be the winner of next year’s Wimbledon tournament which turns out, by chance, to be correct. His true belief, in such a case, is not knowledge. Whilst he may claim that he knew who would win, if the facts are as just described (that it was merely an irrational conviction), he did not know. Whatever has to be added to true belief to yield knowledge should address this widely shared intuition.

A longstanding traditional view holds that the addition is justification. Knowledge is justified true belief. The tennis fan lacks knowledge because he lacks a suitable justification for his belief, a justification that rules out the need for luck for the belief to turn out to be true.

Justification also plays a second role. It provides a means of aiming at true beliefs. It is one thing to worry that one’s beliefs about the efficacy of rival surgical techniques may not be correct, but quite another to work out how to avoid error. It would not be helpful to be told to replace any false beliefs with true beliefs. To hold a belief is to hold it to be true. (To hold that something is not the case is not to believe it.) Thus beliefs which are, in fact, false are not be transparently so to someone who holds them. But the advice that one should ensure that one holds only beliefs that are justified is helpful. And by aiming at justified beliefs one should in general succeed in reaching true beliefs since justification is, in general, conducive of truth.

This approach broad strategy is exemplified in the way Descartes approaches his epistemological project: the method of doubt.

Several years have now elapsed since I first became aware that I had accepted, even from my youth, many false opinions for true, and that consequently what I afterward based on such principles was highly doubtful; and from that time I was convinced of the necessity of undertaking once in my life to rid myself of all the opinions I had adopted, and of commencing anew the work of building from the foundation, if I desired to establish a firm and abiding superstructure in the sciences...

But, to this end, it will not be necessary for me to show that the whole of these are false--a point, perhaps, which I shall never reach; but as even now my reason convinces me that I ought not the less carefully to withhold belief from what is not entirely certain and indubitable, than from what is manifestly false, it will be sufficient to justify the rejection of the whole if I shall find in each some ground for doubt... [Descartes **: **]

Realising that some of his beliefs are probably false, but that he will not be able to determine which directly (for the reason above), Descartes decides to reject all those beliefs whose justifications are deficient. Since those cannot be knowledge this fits the role of justification outlined so far. But there are two further features of Descartes’ project which are attractive but misleading.

First, he takes his target to be anything that is not entirely certain and indubitable. Second, the justifications for beliefs he considers are those fully available to him (in his study) a view now called epistemic internalism. Taken together these drive him to conclude that the only thing that resists his method of doubt is expressed in the cogito: he thinks, therefore he must exist. Cogito ergo sum.

When reflecting on knowledge in the context of a philosophical discussion, even medical students tend to adopt both of these assumptions. They concede that they do not really know anything of which they are not certain and that certainty is a matter of, for what, they can personally vouch. This, however, rules out all but the most basic medical knowledge and threatens to undermine the point of much medical education such as lectures and textbooks. Whatever knowledge is, it can be shared and taught. In short, one can gain knowledge second hand through testimony: any form of transmission of knowledge through the reports of others contrasting with perception, reasoning, whether inductive or deductive, and memory. This obvious places constraints on how best to understand knowledge.

There is a second reason to be wary of the internalist version of the traditional picture. In the 1960s Edmund Gettier showed how to construct counter examples in which a subject had a true belief and a justification for it but the justification only worked through the intervention of luck. Smith and Jones have applied for a job [Gettier 1963]. Smith has good reason to hold that Jones will get the job and has ten coins in his pocket from which he concludes that the successful applicant has ten coins in his pocket. By chance, he himself gets the job and has ten coins in his pocket. Did he know that the successful applicant has ten coins in his pocket? No. A justification may fail to rule out the need for luck which undermines knowledge.

Diagnosis, testimony and internalism

Why does testimony not fit the internalist assumption made by Descartes (and the medical students) that justification depends only on factors which are reflectively accessible to the knower? The problem is that an individual cannot do enough to vouch for the status of knowledge transferred. For this to be possible, testimony would have to be justified in terms of, perhaps by being reduced to, processes which do fit an internalist analysis. But this is not possible.

Suppose, for example, that internalist accounts could be given of perception and induction (neither of which seems plausible). An internalist account of testimony would then be possible if testimony could be reduced to a combination of perception (of others, of their utterances, etc.) together with inductions from their previous reliability. David Hume attempted to outline just such a defence of testimony in his Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding [Hume 1975: 109-116]. But as the philosopher Tony Coady convincingly argues, no such attempt can work [Coady 1992: 79-100]. I will mention two criticisms of Hume which suggest the principled difficulty of any such attempt.

The first objection is that Hume’s defence depends on establishing inductive correlations between past instances of testimony and the truth of beliefs successfully communicated. But there is, in fact, much less evidence available to individuals than Hume supposes. Peter Lipton puts the point thus:

Hume’s discussion systematically hides the fact that our evidential base is far too slender to underwrite in this way even a small fraction of the testimony we rightly accept. Perhaps the main device Hume uses here is to appeal to the correlations we have observed to obtain between various types of testimony and the facts. This appeal to communal observation closes a vicious circle, since you can only in general know what others have observed on the basis of their testimony. The only evidence that you can legitimately appeal to consists of correlations between what you yourself have heard and what you yourself have seen, and this provides far less evidence than would be required to support inductively the wide range and variety of generalisations that would cover all the unchecked testimony you actually accept. [Lipton 1998: 15]

A second line of objection is that the observations that an individual might make are not themselves free from past testimony and thus cannot be used to justify it independently. The quickest argument for this is that observations are framed in language and language is taught through testimony.

Thus it seems that there is little hope of offering a non-question-begging justification of testimony, in internalist terms. Instead, whatever local checks might be carried out, we have to take the general reliability of testimony as a whole on trust. Successfully learning something by testimony is simply hearing in another’s utterance that something is the case. Whilst the ignorance or insincerity of a teacher or witness undermines such transmission of knowledge, one does not, and in general cannot, first ensure their knowledge and sincerity in non-question-begging, non-testimony-based terms.

The moral of this seems to be that one should reject internalism and argue that either justification, or something else playing that role, depends on factors that are external to a person.

Externalism

The most familiar version of epistemic externalism is reliabilism, according to which knowledge is true belief arrived at by a reliable method. Crucially, the knower need not know that the method by which she arrives at her beliefs is reliable (or anything about the method) as long as it actually is. And there is nothing akin to a justification for the knower (for which reason it is taken to be a rival to, not a variant of, the traditional justified true belief analysis). It goes some way to address the worry that individuals do not know enough of the pedigree of what they are usually taken to know. If a teacher is reliable, it is possible to gat knowledge from them second hand. But reliabilism faces the challenge of specifying just how reliable a method must be to deliver knowledge. Anything less than 100% reliable reintroduces the need for some luck for a resultant belief actually to be true. But restricting methods to 100% reliable threatens to make knowledge impossible.

A more promising recent version of externalism has recently been articulatedby John McDowell. Like traditional internalists he does think that reasons have an important role in knowledge. Internalists, however, construe justification as something under the complete control of a subject without need for luck, although Gettier cases suggest that luck is needed to promote a justified belief to a truth. McDowell rejects the view that:

reason must be credited with a province within which it has absolute control over the acceptability of positions achievable by its exercise, without laying itself open to risk from an unkind world. [McDowell 1998: 442]

On his account, even to have a justification - a ‘standing in the space of reasons’ - requires some luck. One is lucky not to be looking at an unrepresentative physiology or in distorting lighting conditions or not to be in the presence of a capricious lecturer. But given that initial luck, no further luck is required to transform one’s situation-based justification into true belief and hence knowledge. This idea is clarified by three further points:

1. A comparison with practical reason.
2. An anti-intellectual view of knowledge.
3. An anti-reductionist view of the kind of philosophical insight needed in epistemology.

Firstly, McDowell’s proposal about our authority over our justification can be compared with a view of practical reasoning which already seems natural:

The concept of what one does, understood as applying to one’s interventions in the objective world, cannot mark out a sphere within which one has total control, immune to luck. It is only if we recoil from this into a fantasy of a sphere within which one’s control is total that it can seem to follow that what one genuinely achieves is less than one’s interventions in the objective world. [ibid: 406 fn 16]

Although our actions are the result of an interplay between, on the one hand, our beliefs and desires and, on the other, contingent or lucky features of the world which shape the possibilities for action, this is not taken in general to undermine our responsibility for our actions. Likewise our epistemic status.

Secondly, McDowell combines his view that having an epistemological standing depends at least in part on a relation to the world with an anti-intellectualist view of knowledge. It can be brought out by considering his attitude to a contrast between what he terms ‘mediated’ and ‘unmediated epistemic standings’. If it existed, an unmediated standing would be one which was foundational, or an ‘absolute starting point’ of the sort hoped for by the Logical Positivists. That, sadly, is mere a myth and leaves only mediated standings, by contrast, which stand in rational relations to each other. Even perception is a ‘mediated standing’ because observation is theory dependent.

On one view of them, a mediated standing in the space of reasons is one for which an argument can be given, by the knower, from premises which do not beg any questions to a claim to knowledge. The argument might thus move from premises about how things look – their mere appearances about which which one supposedly cannot be mistake – to a conclusion to the effect that the subject can see that things really are thus and so. On this view, the space of reasons in general consists in the explicit arguments subjects can offer for their beliefs.

McDowell does not deny that there are some arguments relevant to one’s epistemological status. If a subject sees (or has seen; or hears; or has heard) that something is the case, then it must be the case. Furthermore, to be a subject capable of knowledge at all, he or she must be sensitive to the power of reasons. But he does reject the idea that the epistemic position of seeing or hearing that something is the case can be reduced to or constructed out of something more basic via an argument that the subject of the position could provide.

In the case of testimony, it is particularly clear that a hearer is not in general in a position to rule out possible sources of error in what a speaker says or other factors that would imply that a speaker does not know what he or she affirms. Thus, in general, a hearer cannot provide an argument from what he or she hears said to its truth. Nevertheless when unbiased by mistaken assumptions about the nature of knowledge, it seems clear that testimony can indeed provide knowledge. (Likewise one may not be able to frame an argument from the nature of the lighting conditions to the reliability of appearances, but, in good lighting, seeing how things look can furnish one with knowledge.)

McDowell’s response to this tension is to suggest that the attempt to give a reductionist account of having justification is mistaken.

The idea is, then, that one’s epistemic standing with respect to what one comes to know by testimony consists in one’s, say, having heard from one’s informant that that is how things are; not in the compellingness of an argument to the conclusion that that is how things are from the content of a lesser informational state. [ibid: 436]

So – and this is the third point flagged above – the tenor of the analysis runs in the opposite direction to what is normal. Rather than attempting to build up an analysis of knowledge by asking what more primitive concepts need to be combined to yield it, he takes knowledge to be a basic concept and then explores its relation to other concepts such as reason, justification and truth.

Reasons and responsibility

Knowledge can be undermined by luck. Even true beliefs based on the wrong or no reasons do not amount to luck. And hence there has been a focus on the reliable methods of acquiring beliefs such as looking to justificatory reasons. But on an internalist view the way we acquire most of our knowledge of the world – second hand through explicit teaching and implicit enculturation – is impossible. A more nuanced account accepts that sensitivity to reasons plays a role in knowledge but that one can simply be in a position to see or hear what is the case.

This, however, does not mean that a knower can simply be passive in the face of experience. There may be reason to believe, for example, that lighting conditions are misleading or that a RCT has been discredited or is from a unreliable laboratory or that a once reputable textbook is now out of date. Even though one can acquire explicit knowledge second hand without being able to offer an argument for the reliability of the source, one still needs to exercise epistemic responsibility in keeping up to date with changing evidence.

Coady, A. (1992) Testimony: a philosophical study, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Descartes, R. (1986) Meditations on first philosophy, Cambridge:Cambridge University Press.
Gettier, E.L. (1963) ‘Is justified true belief knowledge?’ Analysis 23: 121-123
Hume, D. (1975) Enquiries concerning the human understanding and concerning the principles of morals, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Lipton, P. (1998) ‘The epistemology of testimony’ Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 29: 1–31.
McDowell, J. (1998) Meaning knowledge and reality, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Tacit knowledge and practical and recognitional clinical skills

2011-08-03T11:51:00.001+01:00

A work in progress chapter for a clinical book.

Tacit knowledge and practical and recognitional clinical skills

Whilst the emphasis in thinking of the content of natural sciences is generally on impersonal explicit knowledge, there is also an important ‘tacit’ element. This is especially true of sciences, or science-based disciplines, which contain a practical aspect. Surgery is a clear example of this. Nevertheless, exactly what tacit knowledge comprises is still a matter of debate. How can something count as knowledge but remain tacit? Clues include its connection to know-how or ability, the fact in some sense it cannot be put into words but that it depends on practical contexts.

This chapter will start by looking to a pair of arguments for tacit knowledge by the chemist turned philosopher of science Michael Polanyi who first drew attention to in the middle of the C20 in two books: Personal Knowledge and The Tacit Dimension.

But first, what does Polanyi mean by ‘tacit’ knowledge? A clear statement runs thus:

I shall reconsider human knowledge by starting from the fact that we can know more than we can tell. This fact seems obvious enough; but it is not easy to say exactly what it means. Take an example. We know a person’s face, and can recognize it among a thousand, indeed among a million. Yet we usually cannot tell how we recognize a face we know. So most of this knowledge cannot be put into words. [Polanyi 1967: 4]

The suggestion is that tacit knowledge is tacit because it is ‘more than we can tell’. We cannot tell how we know things that we know tacitly. But what argument does he give for this? What are the limits on what can be said still leaving something that can be known?

In Personal Knowledge, Polanyi’s strategy is to examine how what can be said or, more broadly, articulated both leaves room for and depends on something outside what can be articulated. There are two key arguments of relevance to this chapter. One depends on limits on the kind of representation available to summarise explicit knowledge in science, thus indicating a need for tacit knowledge. The other depends on an analysis of what is involved in recognition (an argument which promises to impact on diagnostic judgement), which also connects to Polanyi’s views of how linguistic representation in general is possible. I will suggest that this latter argument is the fundamental argument but start with the former.

To examine the limits of scientific representation, Polanyi considers the understanding that a skilled surgeon has of the spatial configuration and orientation of organs in the body. He argues that this cannot be captured in a representation.

The major difficulty in the understanding, and hence in the teaching of anatomy, arises in respect to the intricate three-dimensional network of organs closely packed inside the body, of which no diagram can give an adequate representation. Even dissection, which lays bare a region and its organs by removing the parts overlaying it, does not demonstrate more than one aspect of that region. It is left to the imagination to reconstruct from such experience the three-dimensional picture of the exposed area as it existed in the unopened body, and to explore mentally its connections with adjoining unexposed areas around it and below it.
The kind of topographic knowledge which an experienced surgeon possess of the regions on which he operates is therefore ineffable knowledge. [Polanyi 1962: 89]

The claim here is that three-dimensional spatial knowledge is ineffable, or tacit, because it cannot be captured in a representation. Polanyi goes on to argue that even if all human bodies were identical and even if there were a map comprising cross sections based on ‘a thousand thin slices’ of the body, that in itself would not articulate the knowledge of a trained surgeon. Someone knowing merely the former ‘would know a set of data which fully determine the spatial arrangement of the organs in the body; yet he would not know that spatial arrangement itself’ [89]. An additional act of interpretation or imagination is needed. But because that act cannot itself be encoded in a representation, according to Polanyi, it remains tacit.

This argument is a little surprising. Polanyi concedes that the set of cross sectional representations, presumably alongside some further information about their inter-relations such as their order and distance apart, ‘fully determine[s] the spatial arrangement of the organs’ and yet denies that this amounts to an articulation of the three-dimensional understanding.

Without the further information about the relations between the set of maps, the maps alone would not be an articulation of the skilled surgeon’s knowledge. But then neither would they fully determine the arrangement of bodily organs. With that addition, however, why would this not count as an articulation of their knowledge and thus imply that it could be explicit knowledge?

A further possible clue to Polanyi’s thinking runs thus:

The difficulty lies here entirely in the subsequent integration of the particulars and the inadequacy of articulation consists altogether in the fact that the latter process is left without formal guidance. The degree of intelligence required from the student to perform the act of insight which ultimately conveys to him the knowledge of the topography, offers here a measure of the limitations of the articulation representing this topography. [ibid: 90]

But there remains something strange about this line of thought. If the integration of the partial representations, such as the set of cross sections, were left without formal guidance then it would be clear why the partial representations could not articulate the surgeon’s knowledge. But neither would they determine the arrangement of organs as Polanyi has previously asserted.

The difficulty with interpreting this argument is that of balancing the claim that spatial configuration is both determined by what can be represented but remains ineffable and thus tacit rather than explicit.

I think that the clue to its interpretation is to realise that whether a symbol logically determines anything always, according to Polanyi, depends on a tacit element. This is supported by a different argument.

I may ride a bicycle and say nothing, or pick out my macintosh among twenty others and say nothing. Though I cannot say clearly how I ride a bicycle nor how I recognise my macintosh (for I don’t know it clearly), yet this will not prevent me from saying that I know how to ride a bicycle and how to recognise my macintosh. For I know that I know how to do such things, though I know the particulars of what I know only in an instrumental manner and am focally quite ignorant of them. [ibid: 88]

Polanyi suggests that the skill involved in the example of recognising a macintosh is akin to the practical skill of cycle riding. In both cases, the ‘knowledge-how’ depends on something which is not explicit: the details of the act of bike riding or raincoat recognition. Whilst one can recognise one’s own macintosh, in the example, one is ignorant of how. Thus how one does this is tacit.

If this argument is successful it is of general significance because it would carry over to the recognitional skill which underpins all medical classification such as diagnosis but also all linguistic labelling generally. Indeed, Polanyi makes this connection explicilty.

[I]n all applications of a formalism to experience there is an indeterminacy involved, which must be resolved by the observer on the ground of unspecified criteria. Now we may say further that the process of applying language to things is also necessarily unformalized: that it is inarticulate. Denotation, then, is an art, and whatever we say about things assumes our endorsement of our own skill in practising this art. [ibid: 81]

This connection between denotation and tacit recognitional skills appears to be the fundamental argument for the importance of tacit knowledge for explicit scientific accounts. Polanyi summarises the connection thus:

If, as it would seem, the meaning of all our utterances is determined to an important extent by a skilful act of our own – the act of knowing – then the acceptance of any of our own utterances as true involves our approval of our own skill. To affirm anything implies, then, to this extent an appraisal of our own art of knowing, and the establishment of truth becomes decisively dependent on a set of personal criteria of our own which cannot be formally defined.... [E]very where it is the inarticulate which has the last word, unspoken and yet decisive... [ibid: 70-71]

Although this connection looks to be of fundamental importance in linking the tacit dimension between recognising particulars and the use of language in general, Polanyi seems to overstate his case in a way which has significance for understanding tacit knowledge. He says of bicycle riding and macintosh recognition that we know how to do them despite being ‘focally quite ignorant of’ the particulars by which we know how to do them. That thought seems to justify his slogan that we know more than we can tell. But whilst that is a dramatic claim, it does suggest a dilemma for tacit knowledge.

How can tacit knowledge be both tacit and still knowledge? To count as knowledge, there must be something, some content, to be known. But if it cannot be said or told, what sense is there to the idea that there is anything known? If, on the other hand, the content can be articulated, in what sense is it tacit? The paradigmatic way to articulate knowledge is in language and that seems to mark the knowledge out as explicit.

I suggest that the best solution to that dilemma starts by contesting both Polanyi’s slogan and his account of recognition. Polanyi says that one is ignorant of how one recognises one’s own macintosh. But that is a surprising claim. It would be very surprising – and undermine the veracity of the claim – if one could say nothing about how one recognises something as one’s own coat. It is surely more plausible that one might say: “I recognise that it is my macintosh because of how it looks here! with the interplay of sleeve, shoulder and colour.” Or, “there is something about the shape of the lapel here! that is distinct.” One might be able to say this even if one could not recognise a separated sleeve, shoulder or paint colour sample as of the same type or describe the lapel when it is unseen or give a precise name to the colour.

There are some recognitional judgements that do not depend on subsidiary elements (as recognising a macintosh by its sleeves or lapels). One might recognise a colour as the same as another in a variety of ways. One might judge the colour of a sample to be the same colour as a previously encountered one or as the very same (indistinguishable) shade as another adjacent sample. In such cases, the judgement of sameness of colour or sameness of shade might not be made in virtue of anything else (such as a label) but rather a direct judgement of sameness of colour or shade. Still, that is not to say that we know more than we can tell. We can express what we know by pointing to the samples and saying that they are the same colour or shade. In so doing, we express what we know.

The same goes for practical knowledge-how. If one knows how, and is able, to ride a bicycle then one knows that the pedalling should be like this! and the brakes applied progressively like this! It is not that one is ignorant of how to ride even if one does not pay attention to it. If one does not pay attention to how one is riding that does not mean that one cannot put one’s ability into situation-dependent words, but rather that one does not. (That one cannot without paying attention is trivial.)

The connection between practical knowledge and tacit knowledge on this account suggests the need for practical teaching to convey the relevant knowledge. Such tacit knowledge inherits the well known feature of bodily skills that learning them in general requires practice. The same is true for recognitional skills even though they do not require bodily dexterity. Here is one reason for that.

I have discussed recognising a particular macintosh as one’s own and also of recognising a colour. But there are differences. The former is literally a matter of re-cognising the very same entity. But recognising that something has the same colour as something else is not a matter re-cognising the same entity [Travis 2006: 189-93]. Colours are not entities but properties (whatever exactly the preferred scientific account of colour). To recognise something as having the same colour as something else is to judge it to be relevantly similar with respect to colour. In some contexts that might be judging that the same broad colour word applies to it, for example, ‘red’. In others, it might turn on being of indistinguishable shade to the human eye in standard lighting conditions. In clinical cases it might be within limits fixed by medical significance (is the blood sufficiently oxygenated?). To learn to ‘recognise’ or judge colour in such circumstances is an open ended skill requiring practice like other skills.

That however is the general nature of medical classification. It turns on applying diagnostic labels because of relevant similarities between individual cases and hence on context-dependent recognitional judgements. There is thus some continuity between bodily skills, such as the ability to perform a particular surgical technique, and recognitional skills.

Context-dependent recognitional judgements are a way of putting what one knows into words. But, unlike paradigmatic explicit knowledge they are not context-independent or general claims. Rather, they depend on the presence of what is judged. They are tacit or silent insofar as they cannot be put into words outside particular environments or contexts. Thus they contrast with the general and context-independent claims of much of science. Polanyi’s achievement was to draw attention to their importance, nevertheless, for science.

Polanyi, M. (1962) Personal Knowledge, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Polanyi, M. (1967) The Tacit Dimension, Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Travis, C. (2006) Thought’s Footing, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Re/Mis-reading Bolton and Hill

2011-08-03T09:44:00.005+01:00

As a quick reminder for when I can again get access to my books, now packed up in crates for a room move:-

Marking a student essay at the end of last week, I realised that I think of Derek Bolton’s and Jonathan Hill’s attempt to locate meaning in nature as having two key claims.

i) ‘the meaning (information) that regulates action is encoded in the brain’ [Bolton and Hill 2004: 86].

ii) Nature contains not just the patterns exemplified in billiard ball causation but also distinct patterns exemplified in intentional causation.

In my Essential Philosophy of Psychiatry I summarised the second point thus:

The explanatory power of everyday intentional or ‘folk psychological’ explanation derives from the causal power of reasons. But the historical division between reasons and causes voiced, for example, by Karl Jaspers puts this claim under threat. If, instead, one distinguishes between intentional and non-intentional causation, folk psychological explanation ceases to be exceptional and in need of special philosophical explanation and becomes instead a particular example of a more general phenomenon.

The second move is suggested in passages such as (if I had their book I am sure there would be a better passage):

The point is in brief that if the goal is explanation and prediction of intentional behaviour (complex organism-environment interactions), then the methodological assumption has to be that the agent is regulated by information about the environment, that is, by intentional states, either mental, or encoded in the brain, or both. It is, on the other hand, perfectly possible to do away with intentional concepts, but then only non-intentional behaviour can be predicted, for example, physical movements of the body. [ibid: 73]

So here’s the question for those with tidy minds. Are Bolton and Hill ‘bald naturalists’ in McDowell’s phrase or not? The first claim suggests that they are on the assumption that the states that what does the encoding can be described in bald naturalistic terms. That is, on the assumption that it is a reductionist statement. But of course, Bolton and Hill argue explicitly that it is not intended to be that. In my summary I said:

It is not intended as an attempt to reduce meaning or content to non-intentional terms. Such projects, according to Bolton and Hill, presuppose the fallacious distinction between reasons and causes and attempt to reconcile them by showing that one side is really an instance of the other.
Nor is the slogan a claim on behalf of the idea of Fodor’s language of thought hypothesis (discussed in the first section of this chapter). The authors reject representationalist or cognitivist explanations of mental content by invoking the later Wittgenstein’s attack on theories based upon static inner states or syntax. They present the following challenge.
[T]he point is that we can ask of any proposed model of encoding information: ‘In what sense is there anything semantic here?’ [ibid: 71]
Following Wittgenstein, they argue that what makes something meaningful is that it plays a role in the guidance of action.
[W]hat you have to add to, or have instead of, symbol manipulation, in order to achieve intentionality is the regulation of action, that is, meaningful (goal-directed, plastic) interactions with the environment. [ibid: 70]
Brain states do not encode meaning by embodying internal syntactic or sentence-like structures but by guiding action in accordance with norms.

But I took it that the encoding thesis was needed to do some work in making the application of intentional causation to humans less mysterious. I took it to be like that partly because, following the text, I approached the claims in the other order, so that the encoding thesis is used to explain or shed light on the otherwise dark talk of intentional causation when applied to people, a task the authors do indeed seem to accept. I summarised this idea thus:

How is it possible that reasons are a species of intentional causality? Is the information deployed in other intentional-causal sciences, such as biology, of the same order and explanatory of the meaning that is found in mental health care? The recent philosophical problem is not so much to determine whether reasons are causes but how it is possible that reasons are causes. The solution that Bolton and Hill propose is that the brain encodes meaning.

Having set up the problem this way, I wasn’t impressed by their deployment of Wittgenstein, was worried about the metaphor of encoding and was struck by the fact that it was brains that did this. All that suggested an implicit form of reductionism, albeit one not attempted in any detail, which contrasted with the idea that meaning or content is a whole person level phenomenon, not something for brains. Talk of brains guiding action was just a confusion etc etc.

But I now wonder whether the better way to read / use / teach Bolton and Hill’s idea is to ignore the encoding thesis and concentrate instead on the idea of intentional causation. If so then they should not be filed under ‘(unwilling) bald naturalism’ but something quirkier.

The basic naturalising move would then be not an encoding thesis to place meaning in something describable in more naturalistic terms: brains and brain states. It would be instead the claim of the ubiquity of intentional causation.

Now if there is to be no gap between this idea when applied to the dances of bees and to folk psychological accounts of people – a gap otherwise needing to be filled by the encoding thesis – this will place not just a thin notion of information out there in the world (on my previous reading the encoding thesis codes between full blown human semantic intentionality/intensionality and the thin information supposedly carried by brains and bees alike). Nor will that information be – as I would prefer – an abstraction from human semantic intentionality/intensionality: a facon de parler, a convenient short-hand. It will instead be a world full of semantic meaning, more McDowellian than McDowell. Pan psychism.

OK it is obviously not what the authors would intend. But I will at least try to re-read their claims in this way when I get the book back.

Bolton, D. and Hill, J. (1996; second edition 2003) Mind Meaning and Mental Disorder, Oxford: Oxford University Press

On seeing Magritte again

2011-07-26T13:17:00.003+01:00

I went down to Tate Liverpool for the Magritte exhibition at the weekend. Arriving some minutes earlier than our booked time, we popped into a nearby cafe for a swift espresso. Paying attention to the proprietor, the coffee and my best beloved, I simply took it that there was a mirror on the wall on the far side of the cafe, reflecting, on the wall opposite it, what might have been pictures or possibly a menu, albeit in a font too small to make out words from that distance. Some minutes later, a head crossed the mirror and I realised that there was no one standing in the cafe to be so reflected. The ‘mirror’ was a serving hatch into a second adjacent room. I had erroneously ‘seen’ it ‘as’ a mirror. But having realised my error, no amount of thought or conscious attempts to re-arrange the visual elements could get me back to the experiential state I’d been in. It remained resolutely thereafter a gap through to another room, not a reflecting surface.

I thought of that as I went round the exhibition shortly afterwards. The Tate has done an excellent job in gathering together a substantial collection. Many of the Magritte’s I remembered from posters hanging in student rooms were there in the flesh. In the flesh, the workmanship was all the more impressive. But, at the same time, I found it difficult to see the pictures either anew or to see them again as I had at first, years ago. My temptation was simply to tick off familiar images. Huge apple filling room? Tick. Train coming out of fireplace? Tick. Picture of outside view occluding the same view? Tick.

What was it like to see these images (if not, previously, the actual pictures) before? I recall two key aspects. First, it came as a surprise to see (modern) art so carefully realistic (even if not in the same league as say Richter or Bechtler). The elements were captured with enormous skill and realistically even if that was put under pressure by the second element: the punchline conceptual dislocation. When I first saw them, each image niggled in some way and called to be looked at more. (It is worth saying that some pictures do not call for that. Jack Vettriano, I suggest.)

But at some point between then and now, they have become, for me, representations in another sense. They simply stand for the general type: a Magritte, even if that genus subdivides into the one with shrouded lovers, the rain of bowler hatted men, the bird shape cut in the sky or whatever. It is hard to look at them again and to see them either differently (to find something new in them) or as I first saw them, with that mixture of surprise and fascination.

I can’t help thinking that one can only see Magritte once.

Primitive normativity

2011-07-20T09:41:00.026+01:00

Whilst I was on holiday in USA last week, Richard Gipps told me he’d come across an old paper of mine on Wittgenstein, McDowell and the problem in Kant’s schematism and had been thinking about the relation between the view I’d tried to articulate there and Hannah Ginsborg’s (pictured) views in her widely circulated pre-press paper ‘Primitive normativity and scepticism about rules’. That gave me the incentive to read her paper, which I’ve had on my to do list for a few months now. Hers is an interesting position.

If I follow it, the idea is that there is a middle path between, on the one hand, the kind of full blown (adult?) normativity of someone who, eg., intentionally adds 2 who thus continues ‘2, 4, 6, 8, … , 1000’ with ‘1002’ because those are the instances of the plus 2 rule and on the other, a clever parrot, trained to tap out those numbers for purely dispositional causes. The middle ground has some notion of correctness, unlike the latter, but not an explicit articulation of the rule. A child, eg., might continue offering a pattern of numbers taking them to be correct but unable to conceive them as the explicit rule plus 2. Here are a couple of accounts of this, the first from a review of Hattiangadi’s book, the second from the paper:

[T]here is a case to be made for the view that certain instances of behaviour, and in particular uses of linguistic expressions, can be intelligibly regarded as correct or appropriate in a way which does not presuppose our thinking of them as meaningful, or as subject to standards of correctness imposed by the speaker’s or community’s intentions. (I argue for this view in my ‘Primitive Normativity and Skepticism About Rules’ (forthcoming in Journal of Philosophy), and in sections four and five of my ‘Inside and Outside Language: Stroud’s Nonreductionism About Meaning’ (forthcoming, details given above).) For a simple example, we can consider the cases of ‘going on’ behaviour discussed by Wittgenstein in Philosophical Investigations, in particular the pupil at §185 who continues the ‘+2’ series with ‘1004, 1008’. As I see it, we do not first have to attach a determinate meaning to ‘+’ in order to deny that a pupil who goes on in this way is going on correctly or appropriately. There is something that is ‘primitively’ correct, or correct simpliciter about continuing the series ‘2, 4, 6, 8, … , 1000’ with ‘1002’, in that our taking ‘1002’ to be the appropriate continuation does not depend on our having specified a rule or standard with which ‘1002’ can be said to accord. An even simpler example is afforded by Wittgenstein’s case, also in §185, of the pointing hand. It strikes us as correct or appropriate to look in the direction of wrist to finger-tip rather than finger-tip to wrist, but this does not seem to depend on our antecedently having acknowledged a rule determining the correct response to a pointing hand, or having understood the pointing gesture as having one meaning rather than another. The point of these examples can be carried over to the use of linguistic expressions. If a child has been taught the use of the term ‘green’ in connection with an initial sample of green objects, and then goes on to apply the term in a novel case, we can think of her, and she can think of herself, as using ‘green’ appropriately in the new case, but this need not presuppose that we think of ‘green’ as having a determinate meaning, in particular as meaning green rather than grue. [Ginsborg 2011]

Imagine a child who is familiar with the numerals and able to recite them well into the hundreds, and who has just now learned to count by twos, that is to recite numerals in the sequence 2,4,6,8 and so on. Suppose that on one particular occasion she recites the numerals up to ‘40,’ and then goes on, as we expect, with ‘42.’ Moreover, she does so unhesitatingly, with an apparent assurance that this is the appropriate continuation. Now we stop her. ‘Why did you say ‘42’? Shouldn’t you have said ‘43’ instead?”
How we imagine her replying will depend on how we imagine that she learned her new skill. We might suppose that before learning to count by twos she was familiar not only with the numerals but also with the words ‘plus’ and ‘addition,’ and, relatedly, that she was able to give answers to simple addition problems. In that case she might have been taught to count by twos by being given successive addition problems: she was asked to add two to 2, then to 4, then to 6, and so on. A child who had learned counting by twos in this way could explain that she had said ‘42’ because she had been adding two and because two added to 40 makes 42. Although she might not use words like “rule” or “justification,” this would amount in effect to a justification of her response in terms of its according with a rule which she had antecedently adopted. She would be citing a rule which she had been following up to this point (the “add-two” rule) and claiming that, in this particular case, the number she had given was an application of that rule.
But we could also imagine the child’s having learned to count by twos without receiving any specific instructions, but rather in the same way that she learned to count by ones, that is to recite the series of natural numbers. A child does not learn to count by following instructions like ‘Add one to the previous number,’ but rather by following the example given by other people, and responding appropriately to their encouragement or correction. She learns initially by rote memorization, first of the numbers up to twenty, and then of the decades (“twenty,” “thirty,” and so on), but at a certain point she becomes able to recite sequences without relying exclusively on memory, at which point it becomes clear that she has acquired a capacity to count on her own.11 We could imagine a child learning to count by twos in much the same way, by listening to other people reciting ‘2,4,6,8..’ and following their example. Such a child could go on confidently with ‘42’ after ‘40’ , even if she had not heard this sequence before, or did not remember it, without being able to answer, or even understand, the question ‘what is 40 plus 2?’.
Now it is possible that a child who had learned to count by twos in this way could come up with an explanation of why she had said ‘42’ after ‘40.’ In particular, she might have arrived on her own at a conception of what she was doing at each step of the process, and she might now be able to articulate that conception by saying, for example, that each number she had said was ‘two more’ than the one before, and that 42 came next because it was ‘two more’ than 42. But it is at least equally likely that the child would be unable to say anything to explain or justify her having said ‘42,’ not just because she lacked the appropriate vocabulary, but because she lacked any conception of what her saying ‘42’ after ‘40’ had in common with her having said ‘40’ after ‘38.’ And yet this does not seem to rule out her reacting with surprise and puzzlement to the suggestion that she should have said ‘43’ instead. Rather, it seems plausible to imagine her insisting, with no less conviction than a child who was able to cite the add-two rule, that ‘42’ was the right thing to say after ‘40’: that it “came next” in the series, or “belonged” after 40, or “fit” what she had been doing previously.
...
It is part of my proposal that a child’s continuing the series with ‘42’ or applying the word ‘green’ to a green spoon can be explained in the same naturalistic way that we explain the parallel behaviour in the case of the parrot. But, I am suggesting, the situation of the child is different from that of the parrot in that she takes herself, in continuing the series with ‘42’ or saying ‘green’ when shown the green spoon, to be responding appropriately to her circumstances in the primitive sense of “appropriate” which I have described. [Ginsborg forthcoming]

This idea is in the same ball park as my paper on Wittgenstein, McDowell and Kant’s schematism because both are concerned with how one gets full blown normativity and conceptuality off the ground. The problem of the schematism is what guides a subject in bringing a concept (with its intrinsic universality) to bear on an individual? Whilst it seems clearer how one can draw out deductive consequences from more general claims to more specific consequences, the move from particulars to the general concepts that apply to them – a normative relation – is much less clear. That’s Kant’s problem of which he says:
[T]his schematism of our understanding, in its application to appearances and their mere form, is an art concealed in the depths of the human soul, whose real modes of activity nature is hardly likely ever to allow us to discover. [Kant 1929: 183]

But whilst it is in the same ball park, I am not sure how close the connection is (that I want to make a connection is my problem (and perhaps Richard’s) not Ginsborg’s, I hasten to add, but tempting given her cv). That, I suspect, turns on what the felt problem is. The problem of the schematism stems from the idea that it should be possible, at the very least, to gesture towards an account of how individuals or particulars come to be subsumed under general concepts. Ginsborg’s problem is not directly that. One motivation for it stems from a response to Kripke’s way of setting up the challenge, another as a response to Hattiangadi’s attack on idea of the normativity of content which has consequences for a response to Kripke. In fact, in the review of Hattiangadi, the idea is explicitly put forward as a defence of an essentially normative view of meaning. The dialectic runs something like this. A normative view might be defended on these lines:

The normativist, that is, can appeal to the intuition that we understand what it is for a term to be meaningful only by understanding that certain uses of it are correct and others are not correct. If the notion of a term’s being meaningful depends in this way on the notion of its having a correct use, then the dispositionalist is in trouble, since we can perfectly well make sense of a person’s being disposed to use a term in a certain way, and hence, on the dispositionalist view, of her using the term meaningfully, without helping ourselves to the thought that her uses can either be, or not be, correct.

But this faces an objection that actions or utterances are not correct tout court but rather correct as the actions they are or aim at. They are correct relative to an intentional description. But that undermines the project to explain meaning in independent terms of correct use.

The difficulty is, rather, that this non-descriptive element seems to depend on the prior assumption of an applicable standard. If this is so, then we cannot make sense of someone’s using an expression correctly on a given occasion unless we are already assuming a standard of correctness applying to uses of that expression. And that in turn requires, either that we assume that the expression has a meaning, or that we take the individual or her community to have determinate intentions with respect to the use of the expression. That would seem to put paid to the suggestion that we can think of facts of meaning, or intentional content more generally, as constituted in part by facts of correct use.

And at this point, primitive normativity comes to the rescue. I’m not sure why this should be a worry, however. It seems to suggest that the normativist is, like the dispositionalist, a kind of reductionist about meaning but with an unusual reduction base: primitively correct actions. I take it, by contrast, that the normativist typically objects that there’s something missing in the dispositionalist’s reduction, something normative about meaning, but not as saying that that normative element is itself independent of meaning and forming a rival reductionist project.** (That’s why one should object to the forced choices about the nature of normativity that Kusch offers, eg.) But what of the idea of primitive normativity as such?

Two thoughts. The first is that there is something like this in Diamond’s description of developing attitudes towards either order pencils by length or counting objects. One might, she suggests, acquire mastery of counting or length ordering without yet thinking of there as a number or an ordering which commands (thinking of Wright) or determines the process. One might recognise procedural rules without yet having the idea that, aside from a clear violation of these, there is a further standard in getting the number or the order right. She discusses this idea in the context of thinking that a proof establishes a necessity. Once, however, one makes the move to thinking that there is a correct number or order ‘out there’, there’s no going back and seeing the process in the initially less regulated way. Second, I'd need to do some more work to see the connection between this middle ground and what would be a middle ground in the schematism problem (a middle ground such as David Bell’s).

Still, I’m initially suspicious of Ginsborg’s middle position (and there’s no point in keeping a blog if I don’t ‘publish’ such initial thoughts: I can come back) for this reason. Correctness in making a move requires some conception of what it is that one is trying to do, some grasped normative standard (ie I’m stuck with the second part of her dialectic). The very same movement or utterance described in theory neutral terms might be incorrect in a different context. So I’d take Ginsborg’s example to be one in which the articulation of the conception is minimal and demonstrative. There’s no further articulation available to the child than saying that this! is the correct move after that! when doing this! kind of thing, the thing he is doing today and here. Tomorrow, he might reserve the right to be playing a different game (of which he may be able to give no name) and do thus something different. So sameness is still relative to a rule even if the rule is only picked out by what I am doing. To dig beneath this, I suspect, is not to point to a more primitive normativity but rather to lose the normativity.

Ginsborg says:
Now it is possible that a child who had learned to count by twos in this way could come up with an explanation of why she had said ‘42’ after ‘40.’ In particular, she might have arrived on her own at a conception of what she was doing at each step of the process, and she might now be able to articulate that conception by saying, for example, that each number she had said was ‘two more’ than the one before, and that 42 came next because it was ‘two more’ than 42. But it is at least equally likely that the child would be unable to say anything to explain or justify her having said ‘42,’ not just because she lacked the appropriate vocabulary, but because she lacked any conception of what her saying ‘42’ after ‘40’ had in common with her having said ‘40’ after ‘38.’
But if the child has no conception that saying ‘42’ after ‘40’ has something in common with her having said ‘40’ after ‘38’ I do not see how this can be a normative practice. (One possibility: it is not one normative practive but as many practices as there are pairs of numbers. But what of the day when the child seems, as we might say, to add in 4s? Saying ‘44’ after ‘40’ is not always - primitively - wrong, surely? So if not many practices but just one then, I suspect, we do indeed need there to be some conception of the relevant similarity between the various moves for it to be a unitary normative practice.)

Ginsborg’ says ‘As I see it, we do not first have to attach a determinate meaning to ‘+’ in order to deny that a pupil who goes on in this way is going on correctly or appropriately.’ That may be true. The child may not know that in going on ‘2, 4, 6, 8, … , 1000’ and then ‘1002’ they are following the ‘plus 2’ rule or whatever codification might be offered from Peano’s axioms. Still, they do need to master a conception of what they are doing with a determinate enough meaning if it is to have normative consequences at a distance (even if they are gappy in the distance). Failing that, it is not a normatively governed practice at all.

(** I should perhaps not be so quick. One may, like Brandom, think that there is a point in reducing a normativist account of content to a more primitive normativity such as beating one another with sticks. But at this stage in her dialectic, Ginsborg does not seem to have motivated ruling out a whole hearted non-reductive normativism. She has not suggested why we must or should feel her pain, though there may be independent reasons for it, depending on what brand of naturalist one is.)

Ginsborg, H. (2011) ‘Oughts and Thoughts: Rule-Following and the Normativity of Content, by Anandi Hattiangadi’ Mind
Ginsborg, H. (forthcoming) ‘Primitive Normativity and Skepticism About Rules’ Journal of Philosophy
Thornton, T. (2007) ‘An aesthetic grounding for the role of concepts in experience in Kant, Wittgenstein and McDowell?’ Forum Philosophicum 12: 227-45

Wittgenstein's 1940s conversations on Freud

2011-06-25T15:49:00.001+01:00

Gloria and I met up with Michael, who is doing our philosophy and mental health course, last week in our local pub, to think about a possible essay topic on Wittgenstein’s response to Freud. Sadly both he and I were a bit disappointed on re-reading the Cyril Barrett edited collection (Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief) just how thin, uneven and mixed were the comments on Freud. (A couple of interesting thoughts. Wittgenstein contests Freud’s idea that Freudian theory would be unpopular or unappealing. The opposite is true, LW suggests. Also, despite the ubiquity of sexual themes in the interpretations, there are few explicitly sexual dreams “Yet these are common as rain” Wittgenstein observes.)

What I think both Michael and I expected, and is there in part, is a criticism that Freud illicitly blurs a scientific reading of his project (as a set of empirical generalisations about the working of the mind) with a more hermeneutic view. As one might expect, Wittgenstein does not so much directly contest the idea that there might be a scientific psychoanalysis as criticise the actual project (not ‘Project’, I hasten to add) as somehow internally inconsistent. It can’t both trade in symbols as a kind of literary criticism and also be scientific. (‘He has not given a scientific explanation of the ancient myth. What he has done is to propound a new myth. The attractiveness of the suggestion... is just the attractiveness of a mythology.’ [ibid: 51]) But this thought is only partly articulated.

What is more of a surprise, and I think it was Gloria who put her finger on this, is that Wittgenstein is as forgiving as he is about the symbolic interpretation aspect. Now he does say: ‘Freud remarks on how, after the analysis of it, the dream appears so very logical. And of course it does. You could start with any of the objects on this table which certainly are not put there through your dream activity and you could find that they all could be connected in a pattern like that; and the pattern would be logical in the same way.’ [ibid: 51]

Still, in general in these remarks, he seems quite happy to concede that there’s something OK in itself about this style of interpretation. It is only in conflict with the idea that it is scientific. But, given for example the comment just quoted, that seems in an odd tension with the rest of Barrett’s collection in which Wittgenstein grants that aesthetic and religious language answer only to standards internal to those language games but, because they do so answer, they have a kind of objectivity. Given some of the comments in play on Freud, I would have expected the thought that, had psychoanalitic interpretation so answered to standards, it would have had its own objectivity. But it does not and thus so much the worse for Freudian theory. But that does not seem quite to happen here.

On misunderstanding Miro's iconography

2011-06-25T15:11:00.000+01:00

A work trip to London this week gave me a chance to catch the Miro exhibition at Tate Modern. (In addition: the Schiller play at the Donmar Warehouse: fine production but somehow familiar and irritating plot.)

The exhibition has a broad historical sweep: from early paintings such as The Farm to late burnt canvases. Whilst it is never going to be as impressive as the Fundacio in Barcelona and has fewer gloriously playful works, although this may be matter of perception (see below), there is a strong sense of historical coherence.

But the most striking aspect of the exhibition for me was a feature of the curator’s notes. The historical sweep of the works is mirrored by an account of the political context in which Miro worked. The rise of fascism in Spain, for example, forced Miro’s move towards realism in Still Life with Old Shoe. The notes read: “He went into exile in France in late 1936 but the Civil War dominated all aspects of his work. Still Life with Old Shoe is the key oil painting of this moment, capturing the sense of disjuncture even in mundane objects. It is both everyday and wildly disconcerting.”

Thus we learn of a picture in which what I would previously have thought to be a whimsical and friendly little Miro bird with a Ready Brek glow was painted at a time when Miro was increasingly following, and worried about, the battle for air supremacy and itself represented the horrors of aerial bombardment. Whether this is really supported, quotations go some distance to showing the extent to which Miro himself took his paintings to be commentaries on the very serious matters of the time. It is not so much the works themselves but the works juxtaposed with this depressing political backstory which seems wildly disconcerting.

Recent developments for naturalising the mind

2011-06-20T21:34:00.001+01:00

(This is now out in Current Opinion in Psychiatry.)

The philosophy of mind and psychiatry seem to be complementary disciplines investigating the same central issues. What is the nature of the mind, of the brain and body, and of their relation? And indeed much of the work of both disciplines is concerned with those central issues.

Over the last fifty years, philosophy has evolved a number of broad theories of the nature of the connection. They have ranged from the Churchlands’ eliminativist denial that there are mental states in favour merely of brain states [Churchland 1989], through forms of type-type reductionism such as type-type identity physicalism, which identifies types of mental state with types of physical state; behaviourism, which identifies types of mental state with types of behavioural state and functionalism, which identifies types of mental state with types of second order functional state [Fulford et al 2005: 613-66]. These last three approaches all aim to shed light on the mental in other terms (physical, behavioural and functional). They all face the challenge of avoiding, in Ned Block’s terms, chauvinism and liberalism (ruling out possible minds or allowing in too much) [Block 1980].

More modestly, Donald Davidson’s anomalous monism identifies each token mental event with a physical event (they are one and the same event) [Davidson 1980]. But what unites different mental tokens as instances of the same mental type (a shared kind of belief or sensation) is not given a physical reduction but rather explained through links to an irreducible rational pattern. Finally, there are positions which attempt no such reduction of the mental to the physical often emphasising the irreducibility of the qualitative aspects of mental lives – their qualia – or their intentionality or mental content.

One position in this debate which, whilst still not mainstream within straight philosophy of mind has enjoyed popularity within the philosophy of psychiatry is enactivism, discussed in two recent summaries [Drayson 2009, Potter 2010]. Its starting assumption is to stress the embodied, extended, embedded and enactive nature of the human mind and to use bodily interactions with the natural environment to account for features of the mind including both intentionality and qualitative aspects of experience. It contrasts with the still dominant orthodoxy of representationalist theories of mind which postulates mental representations characterised in information processing terms to carry (as ‘vehicles’) or encode mental content running on the brain as a kind of computer. Although varying in its explanatory aims, enactivist approaches share the assumption that the mind is extended beyond the boundaries of the skull. (One way in which enactivism cannot be easily be mapped onto the debate discussed in this review is that it concerns not the extra-cranial constitution of mental content but rather the extra-cranial mechanisms that carry or encode that content.)

I suspect that the popularity of enactivism in the philosophy of psychiatry is that it promises a translation between traditions. There has been continuity within European psychiatry between descriptive psychopathology and the philosophical tradition of phenomenology, exemplified in the work of Merleau Ponty, by a stress on embodiment. Work by Stanghellini and Fuchs are examples of this philosophically and phenomenologically informed approach to understanding psychopathology [Stanghellini 2004; Fuchs 2009]. In the UK and USA books by Ratcliffe and Gallagher also draw on phenomenology whilst also engaging with Anglo-American analytic philosophy [Ratcliffe 2008, Gallagher 2005]. Since enactivism shares with recent phenomenology assumptions about the role of the body but has been developed to address the agenda in Anglo-American analytic philosophy of mind, it promises to be a bridge between that and the problems of understanding psychopathology.

If the problem of understanding the relation between mind and body is made more difficult by the challenge of either accounting for (or somehow dismissing) the qualitative aspects of experience and its intentionality, some recent developments have challenged some assumptions about these aspects. In this review, I will focus on the latter issue starting first with accounts which attempt to locate mental states in nature by reducing them and then mentioning an alternative non-reductionist form of naturalism.

Representationalism

The orthodox approach to shedding light on the intentionality of mental states is remains representationalism of which Jerry Fodor’s early work was a very clear statement [Fodor 1987]. He combined the idea that the systematicity and compositionality of thought is explained by structured mental representations or symbols in a language of thought with a variant of a causal theory of how the symbols come to have worldly content or reference: the asymmetric dependence theory which is designed to explain how false thought or misrepresentation is so much as possible.

Fodor’s recent book, LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited, restates and develops this picture taking what he calls ‘pragmatism’ as the key target, the idea that thought’s key role is action rather than representation ‘So, one of the ways in which LOT 2 differs from LOT 1 is in the single-mindedness with which it identifies pragmatism as the enemy par excellence of Cartesian realism about mental states’ [Fodor 2008].

An alternative form of representationalism accounts for the possibility of falsity not merely through a complex causal mechanism, or what typically causes a representation, but through the idea of biological or proper function and thus what the representation is biologically designed to represent. This approach – teleosemantics – came to prominence through the work of Millikan who distinguishes between biologically mechanisms which produce representations, such as perceptual systems, and mechanisms which ‘consume’ them [Millikan 1984]. These might include mechanisms designed for predator evasion. It is the contribution that the representation makes to the consumer mechanism that determines its content: such as representing the presence of a predator.

This is an ongoing research programme [Macdonald and Papineau 2006]. But it has recently received a substantial and sustained criticism which threatens to undermine the key idea of mental representations deployed to explain the everyday intentionality of mental states.

Challenges to representationalism

In a summary of attempts to naturalise content through the idea of biological representations, Peter Godfrey-Smith expresses pessimism. ‘I doubt that teleosemantics, or any theory like it, will deliver the direct, reductive, puff-of-papal smoke solution that the 1980s literature envisaged’ [Godfrey-Smith 2006: 66]. His reason is that 30 years of philosophical theorising has delivered something in the same area but more basic.

‘One of the intuitions that has driven teleosemantics is the idea that rich biological concepts of function pick out a special kind of involvement relation between parts of organisms and their environments. Edging even closer to the semantic domain, there is a kind of specificity or directness that an evolved structure can have towards an environmental feature that figures in its selective history… But this relation is found in many cases that do not involve representation or anything close to it.’ [ibid: 60]

A more general critique of reductionist accounts of mental content is provided by William Ramsey in his book Representation Reconsidered [Ramsey 2007]. Ramsey points out that a lesson from the history of the philosophy of mind is that, as Dan Dennett noted, it is nearly always possible to describe physical processes in representational terms but it is never necessary. Just as one can avoid biological descriptions by describing biological systems in lower level physical and chemical terms, so representational terms need not be used. What then justifies the use of representational terms for complex systems? What is the explanatory benefit? Ramsey calls this the ‘job description challenge’. He argues that all the dominant approaches to explaining intentionality fail this test.

Take the case of a Venus fly trap which, according to Fred Dretske’s teleosemantic analysis, is supposed to have an internal trigger which responds to movement and thus signals the presence of insects [Dretske 1988]. Drekske says ‘there is every reason to think that this internal trigger was selected for its job because of what it indicated, because it told the plant what it needed to know.’ [ibid: 20]. But Ramsey asks why we need think of this in representational terms in addition to thinking that because of the lawlike connection between movement and plant closure plants with the trigger would be selected. ‘[T]here is no reason to think that structures recruited because their states have the property of being nomically dependent on some condition are also recruited because they carry information about that condition’ [Ramsey 2007: 135]. This mirrors the case of the ﬁring pin in a gun which bridges the gap between pulling the trigger and firing the round. That lawlike connection is why the pin is part of the design. But there is no reason to think that the ﬁring pin is a representation of anything.

Dan Hutto draws support from such criticisms of the attempt to locate representational content at sub-personal levels in his version of enactivism: ‘radical enactivism’ [Hutto 2010]. Arguing that other forms, such as Alva Noë’s, illicitly smuggle in sub-personal cognitive notions, his own builds in no assumption that content or meaning can play a role lower than the level of whole people [Noë 2004]. Nevertheless, he still wishes to appeal to some notion of primitive normative directedness: a kind of teleosemiotics which offers continuity between non-linguistic animals and humans. But how exactly the enactivist view of extended and embedded cognition contributes to making intentional content at the level of whole people less mysterious remains a matter of debate.

Challenges to interpretivism

Although reductionist naturalism is the dominant approach to meaning or content, there is another approach to locating meaning in nature which is to subscribe to a picture in which there are distinct and somewhat independent levels. Thus, in the tradition of Jaspers, whilst brain events are susceptible to scientific and lawlike explanation, mental events including the speech, action and experiences of whole people, are subject to understanding, which fits them into rational patterns.

This general approach has come under scrutiny in the philosophy of psychiatry, recently. Dominic Murphy, for example, has attempted to show how Marr’s threefold distinction between levels - computational theory, representation and algorithm, hardware implementation: [Marr 1982: 25] - can be applied to psychiatric explanation.

Murphy points out that Marr thinks of the levels in epistemic terms: as different ways of understanding the same system. One can determine its goals, the algorithm by which it determines those goals or the physical set up which implements that algorithm. But one might think of them as describing distinct forms of organisation in nature or distinct causal structures pitched at different ontological levels: ‘higher levels are made up of lower level things, and at each level things interact with each other rather than with things at lower levels’ [Murphy 2008: 103].

In psychiatry, however, neither of these pictures is quite right, according to Murphy, because there are different systems operating at different levels, unlike the epistemic view, but the different levels interact, unlike the latter view. Thus whilst Marr’s description of levels suggest that they are partly independent (the computational level constrains but does not determine the causal mechanisms that implements it), Murphy suggests that in psychiatry causes described at one level will have effects at another so that useful generalisations will cross levels.

John Campbell is more radical and argues that the very idea multi-level model of explanation in psychiatry results from a pre-Humean assumption about the intelligibility of relations tracked in causal explanation [Campbell 2008, 2009]. He gives, as an example, a discussion of thought insertion by Christopher Frith. Frith claims that whether or not inappropriate firings of dopamine neurons are found in subjects who experience thought insertion, that fact cannot be used to explain their experiences as it would shed no light on why that kind of symptom, rather than another, was produced by such firing. To shed light, Frith assumes, we need an account pitched at a particular level: in Frith’s case that of a sub-personal but still cognitive model of mechanisms supposedly responsible for thought insertion.

Campbell suggests that the assumption that there is a right level of explanation which clarifies things in the way Frith desires is the result of a pre-Humean view of causal explanation. Resisting the idea that the right kind of cause and effect have to be intelligibly, rather than merely brutely, related undercuts the motivation for the levels of explanation picture.

Just as we find it natural to expect there to be an intelligible mechanism underpinning material causal connections – even if this assumption lacks any genuine a priori justification – so Campbell also suggests that in the case of mental causation we expect there to be a rational connection between propositional attitudes. The rational link between two propositional attitudes is our paradigm of a mental causal mechanism. Again, however, whilst the idea that mental causation is underpinned by rational connections is natural and compelling, it lacks a priori justification.

Weakening the requirement on rationality also promises to ease the problem of account for delusions. If rationality is at the heart of interpretability and if that is at the heart of mentality, what are we to make of the apparently mental and apparently non-rational psychopathological experiences and states?

In her recent book Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs, Lisa Bortolotti draws a key distinction between ‘conformity with’ and ‘subscription to’ norms of rationality [Bortolotti 2010]. If we assume that radical interpretation is tied to the first (as a methodological and thus a constitutive thesis) there are problems with real cases of inconsistency. If we retreat to subscription, we can defend actual inconsistency at the ground level but then, if subscription doesn’t imply in general conformity, it is no help in the ascription of mentality . So Bortolotti concludes that if there is no connection between subscription and conformity then the link between rationality and the ascription of mentality is lost. Further, drawing on empirical work on the reasoning of those not suffering from delusional states, Bortolotti argues that this is entirely plausible.

The question both of Campbell’s and Bortolotti’s criticism of the assumption of the role of rationality raise, however, is how light is shed on the mental in general without it. Placing utterances, actions and other states and experiences in a rational pattern seems to be a good way to shed light on what it is about them that counts as expressive of minds. Indeed, an extreme example of this wide view is Michael Thompson’s Life and Action which connects philosophy of mind exemplified in debate about what makes something an action with broader concepts of morally charged social practices and the nature of life itself [Thompson 2010]. In complete contrast to a reductionist focus on the micro-structure of our minds, Thompson looks to the broader context in which we live our life, act and pursue morally charged practices. But this leaves the challenge of how this broader canvas can be related back to psychiatry.

References

Bermúdez, J.L. (2005) Philosophy of Psychology, London: Routledge

Block, N. (1980) ‘Troubles with functionalism’ in Block, N. (ed) Readings in Philosophy of Psychology, London: Methuen.

Bortolotti, L. (2010) Delusions and Other Irrational Beliefs, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Campbell, J. (2008) ‘Causation in psychiatry’ in Kendler, K. S. and Parnas, J. (eds) Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press

Campbell, J. (2009) ‘What does rationality have to do with psychological causation? Propositional attitudes as mechanisms and as control variables’ in Bortolotti, L. and Broome, M. (eds) Psychiatry as Cognitive Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Churchland, P. (1989) A Neurocomputational Perspective: the nature of mind and the structure of science, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Davidson, D. (1980) Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Drayson, Z. (2009) ‘Embodied Cognitive Science and Its Implications for Psychopathology’ Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology 16: 329-40

Dretske, F. (1988) Explaining Behavior, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Fodor, J. (1987) Psychosemantics: the problem of meaning in the philosophy of mind, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Fodor, J. (2008) LOT 2: The Language of Thought Revisited, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Frith, C. (1992) The Cognitive Neuropsychology of Schizophrenia, Erlbaum

Fuchs, T. (2009) ‘Embodied cognitive neuroscience and its consequences for psychiatry’ Poiesis and Praxis 6:219-233

Gallagher, S. (2005). How the Body Shapes the Mind, New York: Oxford University Press

Godfrey-Smith P. (2006) ‘Mental Representation and Naturalism’ in Macdonald, G. and Papineau, P. (eds) Teleosemantics, Oxford: Oxford University Press pp. 42-68

Hutto, D. (2010) ‘Radical Enactivism and Narrative Practice: Implications for Psychopathology’ in Fuchs, T., Henningsen, P., Sattel, H. (eds) Coherence and Disorders of the Embodied Self, Stuggart: Schattauer pp43-66.

Marr, D. (1982) Vision, San Francisco: W. H. Freeman

Millikan, R.G. (1984) Language, thought and other biological categories, Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press

Murphy, D. (2008) ‘Levels of explanation in psychiatry’ in Kendler, K. S. and Parnas, J. (eds) Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Noë A. (2004) Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press

Potter, N. (2010) ‘Recent developments in philosophy of mind and psychopathology’ Current Opinion in Psychiatry 23: 542-545

Ramsey, W.M. (2007) Representation Reconsidered, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

Ratcliffe, M. (2008) Feelings of Being: Phenomenology, Psychiatry and the Sense of Reality, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Stanghellini, G. (2004) Disembodied Spirits and Deanimated Bodies, Oxford: Oxford University Press

Thompson, M. (2008) Life and Action: Elementary structures of practice and practical thought, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

Woodward, J. (2003) Making things Happen, Oxford: Oxford University Press

The gap between actors and characters

2011-06-19T15:35:00.006+01:00

Stuck in a gap between trains home, Gloria and I popped into the Forum and fell to discussing being in the audience of live events. She described listening to a difficult Beethoven piano concerto – it may have been the Emperor – and taking some pleasure in the thrill of the achievement of playing it itself: of getting through it correctly (whatever else would also be involved). I can understand that as an issue but not an issue for pleasure. As soon as there’s any doubt about technical competency (or in the case she was describing, the ratio of it to difficulty), my pleasure drops. And, as part of the same attitude, Gloria suggested that were something to go wrong, she’d want to hear the piece through again. A perfect one off achievement is key. That latter thought I share.

By contrast, a few years ago I saw an RSC production at the Swan, possibly a history, in which suddenly the characters / actors in their regal garb were joined, disorientatingly, by a woman in jeans and a headset who told us that a member of the audience had suffered some sort of seizure and there would be a short break while the paramedics carried him out and off to hospital. A couple of minutes later, the actors resumed, picking things up from just before the interruption. Aesthetically, however, the interruption didn’t bother me at all.

In the last few weeks I’ve seen a few contrasting performances. Since the Jacobi Lear in Glasgow, there’s been a play about Fred Dibnah at the Bolton Octogan (an explanation of the cultural phenomenon on which the play was based to anyone not living in the UK in the 1980s would require the full resources of Travisian occasionalism); The Price at the Lancaster Round (£5 standing on the stormiest of nights; and another play in which the first act serves no obvious plot function but rather, causally, prepares the audience to be able to hear the second half correctly); and Dunsinane in Edinburgh (an oddly balanced play but with a smashing performance by Siobhan Redmond; easier to see in Edinburgh to have the mocking humour defused by the laughter of a largely Scottish audience). In thinking critically about the plays and performances, I realise that I have an oddly shifting gestalt experience of the realm of acting and the realm of character. I watch plays without a full suspension of disbelief. And hence no more than momentary disruption if there is an unscheduled break in the action: if contingencies intervene.

By contrast, in for example watching good films, my attitude to the actors is as to their characters. Hence a kind of bodily anxiety for the fate in No Country for Old Men of Carla Jean Moss at the end. But there’s no problem in watching Darrell D'Silva and Katie Stephens in the RSC Antony and Cleopatra (pictured) earlier this year and seeing them performing their characters. There doesn’t seem to be a gap between actor and role but there is a distinction. Perhaps it is – to hint at the familiar issue of cover versions – because the performance is an instance of a universal: a dated particular which instantiates a play to which I can return. On the night, we simply get what happens on that night with the actors responding, including, possibly, to audience members having attacks.

I think I would have the same attitude to popular forms of music but not, eg., the Emperor. Perhaps because it is part of the craft of jazz, say, that contingency is embraced and that includes the local facts of the night it is. By contrast, I can’t shake the idea that one’s attitude to classical music is sub specie aeternitatis.

Changes to Collins and Evans' Periodic Table of Expertise

2011-06-16T10:32:00.006+01:00

Harry Collins writes:

For the better part of a year we, at Cardiff, have been mulling over the Periodic Table with a view to creating a 'second edition' but we weren't intending to say anything much about it.

Events at S5, however, particularly the contribution of the Argumentation theorists, made it sensible to have a short unscheduled discussion of it. The result was that everyone agreed that some additional categories were sensible but people were unsatisfied with the rearrangment that had been suggested. So I have put up some of what emerged on the website [HERE] in the form of a PowerPoint presentation.

We throw this out for discussion and nothing sudden is planned. Modifying the PTE is a serious thing and we won't do it for a good while and then only after long discussions and only if widely thought necessary.

In due course we will also put up an account of SEESHOP5 and something about 'The Campaign for Real Argument'.

Cheers
Harry

Report from SEESHOP 5

2011-06-13T12:09:00.011+01:00

I’ve spent a delightful couple of days in Cardiff as a guest of Harry Collins and Rob Evans’ SEESHOP 5. In case it is of broader interest, I’ve transcribed my rough notes below. Whilst in general its main concerns are not mine and I am embarrassed in such circumstances how little I properly research the empirical issues on tacit knowledge, it seems very helpful to get a kind of snapshot of this empirical programme.

William Thomas kicked off with an overview of history’s interest in Wave 2 social science (STS) and a suggestion that history could borrow more recent work on expertise to examine, for example, the development of operational research in the bringing of science to bear on the war effort in WWII.

Theresa Schilhab addressed a worry stemming from the relation between interactional and contributory expertise. The former involves the kind of non-coal-face expertise of people who lack a particular concrete skill but can still discuss the skill as though they had it. This suggests that they have appropriate conceptual mastery even if there are related things they cannot do. But she was worried that this might be challenged through brain imaging results.

She began by commenting that enactivism has come to dominate thinking about the neurological underpinnings of conceptual mastery. She then discussed a couple of empirical examples of brain imaging. First, it indicates brain activity in areas responsible for smelling cinnamon, for example, is found in those merely thinking of it. Second, different areas of the brain are involved in thinking about objects which were, as a matter of fact, manipulable and those not for subjects prompted to sort objects not according to this but rather another distinction. She used this to motivate the problem: if activity or direct experience underpins conceptual mastery, and if one person has not had the relevant practical experience whilst another has, how could they have the same concept (eg of cinnamon)? Translated into the context of SEESHOP, what of someone with practical and interactional expertise versus someone with just the latter?

Her suggestion was that early life establishes a basic set of concepts and that subsequent ability to think, for example, abstract thoughts was based on this foundation. This seemed a modern retread of Lockean empiricism. It did prompt the question in my mind: what mediates the process of abstraction from early concrete thoughts to later abstract thoughts? Is that process itself conceptually mediated and if so what explains the possession of the concepts involved in the translation (concepts that permit the generation of an abstract concept from a concrete concept)?

But the way the worry was set out seemed to me just a mistake. If we think that brain activity is constitutive of conceptual mastery, it might follow. But the brain imaging results don’t establish that constitutive claim (that the brain activity just is the conceptual mastery) nor an enactivist version of it (which is what was initially flagged). A representationalist, for example, could accommodate the imaging data so it alone does not support enactivism. (Who is to say what the semantic significance of the brain activity is? Perhaps it is an interesting output of thinking the thought.) Nor does it support the constitutive reading since one might simply say the observed brain activity is some part of the causal underpinning of a conceptual mastery. But if it is merely part of a locally sufficient causal story (ie sufficient given our make up), then differences in brain activity between the active and the indolent need not have any implications for concept individuation (this is just multiple realizability in the philosophy of mind applied to concept possession). My hunch is that the underlying worry would need something like an enactivist or other practical account of concept mastery tying concept possession directly to contributory skills rather than this detour via brain imaging.

Robert Crease (pictured) discussed the recent history of worries that particle accelerators might destroy the world and the interestingly different responses made to those by scientists. For example, should they be rebutted by theoretical or empirical arguments? (Such as: ‘the same conditions would have occurred on the moon but it’s still there, albeit with some large holes’ versus ‘theory rules it out’. Sadly scientists in their careful way tended to say merely that such catastrophic results were ‘implausible’.)

Perhaps the most optimistic element of his account was his description of the Daily Show’s take. They filmed the ‘point: counter-point’ structure of the scientists and a particularly influential horticulturally grounded scaremonger in such a way that it displayed the context: the madness of turning the choice of whom to trust to the media. But the lingering question was how such questions should, in general, be assessed, of whether one should simply assume trust in the scientists or hand it over to non-scientific lawyers was central to the SEESHOP agenda.

(Darrin Durant suggested that a particular answer could be given by addressing whether, in the context, the scientists concerned were implicated in a politics one does not want. In the case of black hole creation there seems no particular reason to be suspicious of their motives. By comparison, the politics of the science of nuclear waste, he suggested, were highly suspect. I wasn’t sure why politics should play this role rather than any other potentially distorting factor. One could say that one should examine whether, in the context, there is reason to have doubts. Later over dinner Darrin explained why it was a matter of politics but this margin is too small to contain his convincing answer.)

Mark Addis reported on an AHRC funded project of being a resident philosopher in the construction industry. The background was two recent reports on the under performance of UK construction: eg poor business models, lack of capacity, talent, purpose, leadership but also only 3% profit on projects and a general lack of trust. One response to this from government policy was a trend towards increasing IT involvement and away from expertise (although this move is contested by industry bodies). Similarly the Construction Skills Council had called on the adoption of an approach called ‘lean construction’ despite the controversy about what it means and whether it should be adopted.

His project’s aims included both ground level issues for improving construction industry but also meta-level reflection on how this reflected back on philosophy including impact. The method included inter alia identifying problematic assumptions about knowledge and organisation and the aim to replace a model of construction activity which starts with knowledge predating thinking about doing predating doing with a rival account starting with doing, a narrative of the outcomes leading to a new explanation of doing.

Nicolas Schunck attempted to locate a notion of ‘commonness’ behind the idea of collective tacit knowledge a kind of collective lack of disagreement rather than explicit agreement. This might be an interesting idea but he wanted to approach it through a worry about language: that language articulates ‘immediacy’ in such a way that distances us from or distorts what was pre-articulated: ‘commonness’. But his account of what was added was just the conceptualisation. To talk of a storm moving thus and so adds storm individuation, movement, a direction etc. But why that was a distortion wasn’t clear. Surely the notion of distortion would only be falsity at the level of articulation? And what went missing seemed to be simply its not-being-articulated status.

The problem though was that he then wanted to break the rules of his own game and say something about the pre-articulated, to compare it with the articulated (by saying that things were added or subtracted), to persuade us of the distortions. If he were right, however, he would be in no position to do this. Taken seriously, his position would surely collapse back into every day (empirical) realism. That is all we have access to, by his own rules. (He did suggest that we had a glimpse of the pre-articulated in what changed when someone says of a cosy social setting: this is nice. If only philosophical insight / gesturing at the preconceptual was just a matter of hanging out in socially awkward ways: my career would have been so much better.)

Harry Collins described what he called the ‘domain specific discrimination’ of physicists. He’d been sent a paper from an academic physicist, published in a radical physics journal, which argued that the current multi-million dollar industry aimed at detecting gravity waves could not work. He had sent this to a number of highly reputable physicists and asked them whether they would read or generally take seriously such a paper. It turned out that they would not although none offered a technical argument against the paper. They would instead rely on a judgement that the paper had too many ‘markers of crankness’. But, argued Harry, that is an essential recognitional skill given the number of new papers. The anti-relativity industry, he suggested, had had enough time to make an impact but has not been successful.

There followed three papers on what’s apparently called ‘argumentation studies’ (AS) and its relation to SEE. Gabor Kutrovatz outlined various normative approaches to assessing expertise. He had examined blogs in Hungary discussing both the issue of whether the moon landings were faked and the issue of H1N1 vaccination and counted the kinds of moves made by participants. Few used structural arguments compared with both simple deference to experts or pretending expertise themselves. Gabor Zemplen outlined how an AS approach could be applied to codify Newton’s changing views of the physics of colour. Jean Goodwin outlined what she thought was a model of a way to provide a reason for members of the public to trust experts whose expertise they could not directly assess. Within a kind of black box model of interaction of citizen and expert she proposed a ‘blackmail and bond transaction’ in which the expert has both to be explicit, provide an explicit account of their expertise and undertake to stand in risk of loss of status. As Rob Evans pointed out, however, her black box contained only one expert and thus didn’t address the deep problem of conflicting experts. As was also pointed out, trust and accountability can be opposed and this seemed to be a model of the latter.

Sadly at this point my netbook ran out of steam. I recall that Mike Gorman described the experiences of a couple of humanities students working in science labs and Evan Selinger and Andrew Berardy outlined a proposal to use TFL teaching techniques to teach students interactional expertise in thermodynamics in order to address issues in sustainability. One interesting nugget was that thermodynamics has a kind of generally accepted codified exam in its conceptual mastery. They proposed to add the imitation game to that to test tacit knowledge.

I gave a paper exploring my worries about balancing the tacit and the knowledge statuses of tacit knowledge and got some interesting questions. One worry I did take away both from that session and from the workshop as a whole was this. More than once ‘tacit’ seemed to be opposed not to ‘explicit’ but ‘explicable’ and that is surely a mistake (a mistake of not distinguishing between sense and reference). (Cf my earlier worries about robots and cycling here.)

Zeno's Coffeehouse

2011-06-09T09:13:00.000+01:00

Here is a link to Zeno's Coffeehouse. The site says:

Zeno of Elea, a pre-Socratic philosopher, was born about 490 B.C. His style of argument was to assume, provisionally, the position of the opponent, and then to derive impossible conclusions from it, thus establishing the absurdity of the assumption. In the spirit of this Reductio Ad Absurdum dialectical approach to critical thinking, our Coffeehouse activities will tackle from time to time so-called 'common sense views,' analyzed critically.

Cultural narrative and ideology

2011-06-06T09:52:00.004+01:00

Running through my email this morning before starting the day I realise I have so much work that has to be done quite quickly that it is hard to prioritise and thus to start any of it. So here’s something that doesn’t have to be done urgently and yet appeals rather more, an email from a colleague:

Hi Tim
I was sent this question from one of my PhD students in Australia and I thought it would be something that would set you thinking:
Do you know what the difference might be between a cultural narrative and an ideology?
As ever, answers on a postcard!
Bernie
Dr Bernie Carter
Professor of Children's Nursing

Well as is obvious from previous posts, I have the no expertise on this sort of thing and no proprietary rights on how any of the key words ought to be used (such as the rights that might accrue from having popularised a fruitful way to speak of ‘narrative’ or ‘ideology’). But what might the differences be? Or, perhaps better, what would one want a difference to do?

Assuming that there’s something right about the sociologist Daniel Bell’s description of action oriented political beliefs to capture the nature of an ideology, how does that line up with what a cultural narrative might be? Two thoughts spring to mind as to how one might weight that phrase. First, putting weight on ‘narrative’ might be to stress the idea that it is something that is actually told or repeated. Second one might stress its role in cultural identity.

So, a narrative repeated to forge an identity. One example of that might be Old Testament accounts of the tribes of Israel. There seems much evidence that such stories were told and retold and served to rationalise who the tellers and hearers were in eschatological terms. Another might be the way history seems to have been lived as present in Northern Ireland to keep alive both rival community identities and to maintain a set of ongoing, but historically grounded, grievances.

A third example is the repetition of John Major’s thought (or at least a thought like this one) “Fifty years on from now, Britain will still be the country of long shadows on cricket grounds, warm beer, invincible green suburbs, dog lovers and pools fillers and, as George Orwell said, 'Old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’ and, if we get our way, Shakespeare will still be read even in school.” I suspect that almost no part of this is generally true of Britain (‘warm beer’ for example, suggests that John Major didn’t actually drink real ale) but it serves – for some at least – as a kind of cultural ideal.

I could imagine that a culture or community or population could frame a cultural narrative in the terms of a political ideology: a country, perhaps, in the grip of a social revolution seeing the revolution as a kind of teleological inevitability. But in the main, surely ideology and cultural narrative will look quite different? No UK political party has explicitly campaigned for cricket grounds, warm beer and bicycling old maids (it is always the economy, stupid). But John Major clearly wanted us implicitly to associate preserving the values linked to that list with his party.

"It is impossible to generalise knowledge from one individual subjective case"

2011-06-02T12:04:00.014+01:00

Having met Stephen Tilley at the Mad Activism workshop at UCLan, he sent me his edited book: Tilley, S. (2005) Psychiatric and Mental Health Nursing: The Field of Knowledge, Oxford: Blackwell and I’ve been slowly browsing through it. It is an interesting book for a variety of reasons but one of which is a kind of failure. (Though as Dylan sang: ‘There’s no success like failure. And failure’s no success at all.’)

Tilley obviously intended the book to represent views of what makes nursing knowledge characteristic according to a number of different institutions (which it does) but also for authors representing those differing views and institutions to enter into some kind of dialogue by reading each others’ chapters and having a series of commentaries. The judgement of some of the non-UK commentators and, I think, Tilley himself, is that that didn’t happen. The book ends with some discussion of why not.

But one theme which does seem to crop up in a number of places is the issue of the unity or not of nursing knowledge and – relatedly – its distinctness from other forms. The Institute of Psychiatry view, according to one chapter, is that there is simply psychiatric knowledge to which nursing can contribute.

The most explicit statement of at least the possibility of a contrary view is expressed by a German commentator Susanne Schoppman who suggests that the various chapters express different but possibly complementary views (of course if they are indeed sources of knowledge, they must be complementary) from:

natural science,
social science,
psychoanalysis,
humanities,
subjective individual case.

Of all but the last, she says: ‘It is possible to discuss and argue about the validity and generalisability of a certain knowledge. However it is clear that knowledge generated in this way is always theoretical, textbook knowledge. Whereas it is impossible to generalise knowledge from one individual subjective case’ [ibid: 210].

This I think goes to the heart of my worries about the Mad Activism workshop (eg about worries about validating individual experience in a PhD viva) and in general about a too quick ascription of knowledge by experience. There is of course something worrying about small sample sizes. Even Wittgenstein comments:

If I say of myself that it is only from my own case that I know what the word "pain" means—must I not say the same of other people too? And how can I generalize the one case so irresponsibly? [Wittgenstein 1953 §293]

But the worry in the quotation from Schoppman seems instead to be that there is something essentially ungeneralisable from ‘subjective individual cases’ whilst at the same time they do afford a kind of knowledge. What can that knowledge be? I suspect: knowledge of what it is like to have some particular experience. But not even hypothetical Mary’s experience of the what-it-is-like-ness of red when she emerges from her black and white prison since that can be shared by all enjoying a view of the same tomato.

That, I think, pushes the nature of knowledge to the limit. It is acquired automatically and without epistemic effort. (That is not to say that there is no effort involved in living the life that gives rise to it.) Best I think not to call it ‘knowledge’ but ‘experience’ and legislate that it is never correct English to say that such experiences are sharable. They are always tokens, never types. But once we’ve said that, we have, again, left debates about nursing knowledge, or knowledge of rival other forms, behind.

Philosophy for Nursing at UCLan

2011-06-01T19:24:00.003+01:00

I have been drawing up a programme of philosophy for nursing here at UCLan. It may not be picked up by my managers but in case it is of interest to others, my rough notes are here.

*******************

Contemporary nursing is increasingly challenging. But it is not merely technologically, scientifically or empirically testing. It is also conceptually difficult. An increasingly technological approach to intervention in and management of illness has also to be balanced with an ethics of care. But understanding that balance is not itself a matter for technology, nor ethics, alone.

Future – especially graduate entry – nurses will need to be able to think through fundamentally difficult issues and exercise complex judgements balancing different kinds of evidence and different perspectives and values; balancing general guidelines with individual people. That calls for skills and abilities in thought and judgement underpinned by a broader understanding of the fundamental intellectual tensions within healthcare today.
This short course comprises two sibling 10 CAT modules at levels 5 and 6 on ‘Conceptual Issues in Nursing’ and ‘Reflecting on Nursing Practice’.

Conceptual Issues in Nursing examines some key issues about the target of nursing care. What is illness or disease or disorder? Does mental illness even exist? Is illness a strictly biological factual notion or does it depend on values? And if diagnosis does depend on values, does this matter? Can it be used to characterise a distinctive recovery model? If so, what kind of argument can be offered for it? How do values impact on capacity? And is coercion ever justified?

The aim of this module is to give students a greater understanding of the concepts of illness and disorder in general to complement their knowledge of specific illnesses and disorders and approaches to treatment and management of those in their care..

Reflecting on Nursing Practice concerns three broader perspectives

Thinking about values
Thinking about evidence
Thinking about individuals

It aims to give students greater reflective understanding of the kind of thinking necessary for good nursing practice in these three broad areas and to stimulate an interest in continuing reflection and professional development.

Both modules draw on, and reflect, the published research of the course tutor.

Arguing for the correctness of a recovery model

2011-05-27T18:18:00.001+01:00

I have been working on the middle section of my draft chapter for the OUP collection on recovery (Rudnick, A. (ed) The Recovery of People with Mental Illness Oxford University Press) plonked previously on this blog. Originally - as is obvious in the Thornton & Lucas JME paper - I was far from convinced that an argument for the model articulated worked. (That I was not was a bit of a surprise. Whilst I do not go around advancing theories of things, I have always taken illness to be normative at all levels.) I think I am now more convinced and I think this passage now makes that a bit clearer. Comments to my email would be very welcome.

Arguing for the correctness of a recovery model

It is one thing to articulate a possible recovery model distinct from a bio-medical model (and simultaneously partly to characterise the bio-medical model). It is another to argue for it. I will now try to sketch the beginnings of an argument for a recovery model for mental health, construed on these lines. To do this, I will employ a contrast with physical health.

The argument is as follows. A non-normative or non-evaluative approach seems initially at least to be a promising approach to physical health and the aims of physical healthcare. That however can safely be conceded providing that there are reasons to distinguish between mental and physical health. Since there such reasons, these can be used to argue for a contrasting recovery model for mental health.

Note two preliminary points about the strategy. First, there are plausible objections to a non-normative conception even of physical health. But does not undermine the argument for a recovery model for mental health. If anything, it strengthens it. Second, however, the overall argument is open to counter-attack. I will sketch some lines of defence of the recovery model against this but concede, in the end, that it is an ongoing debate.

A non-evaluative approach seems to be a possible picture of physical health and hence for recovery from physical illness which does not amount to a recovery model. It could instead be thought of as a bio-medical approach to physical health. On this view, the aim of physical healthcare is a return from a state of illness – whether evaluatively or non-evaluatively understood – to a state identified in non-evaluative or plainly factual terms. One version of this approach would be to define the state in statistically normal terms (I will return to a second version, shortly).

Whether or not it is successful in the end, a statistical model of health has at least an obvious advantage over a statistical model of ill-health (based on the idea that illness is a statistically unusual state). Such a model of ill-health has the problem that for some features of human nature, deviation from the norm in one direction may not be, in itself, unhealthy at all. Having a very high IQ or being able to run very quickly is not equivalent to having a very low IQ or low mobility. Since a statistical model of health – by contrast with its lack – can be based on what is normal rather than abnormal, it does not face an analogous problem. Furthermore, it avoids a implausible idealisation of health. One can be healthy – that is, not ill – without being at the peak of physical condition. The fact that one would prefer to be fitter, stronger or more muscled does not imply that one is not healthy as one is.

Nevertheless, to escape some obvious problems for it, some qualifications to a statistical approach would have to be built in. Thus, for example, what is normal for a 20 year old may not be normal for an 80 year old. The same state of health may be expected for the latter but an illness for the former. So health would have to be what is normal relative to an age. Further, it may even be statistically normal for most members of particular groups of people (small children, the elderly) to have some illness or other in some or other biological (and/or perhaps psychological) system. If so, health would have to be defined as what is normal for each such sub-system rather than for the whole person at any one time.

Whether this strategy of careful selection of an appropriate reference group can work across the board is, however, open to question. Take the cases of obesity across whole affluent communities or dental cavities across whole populations. These are cases where what is statistically normal for the group in question does not seem to fit pre-philosophical intuitions about health. It is hard to see how a particular sub-group or other reference population could be selected to set the standard for physical health without begging the question: without, that is, the group being selected for being healthy.

For present purposes, I can, however, park that question since, on one assumption about the nature of mental health, then whether or not a statistical model of physical health can be defended against the objection just raised, it seems much less plausible for mental health. If, in line with the quotation from ‘Making recovery a reality’ at the start, mental health has something to do with living a particular kind of life, then it cannot – absurdly – be construed as a statistically average kind of life. It has instead to be thought of as a particular kind of life, valued and hoped for by the individual concerned, the kind of life connected to their identity. If the starting assumption is granted (that mental health has something to do with living a particular kind of life), it threatens the idea of defining the endpoint of recovery for mental health in statistical and hence non-normative or non-evaluative terms. A specific endpoint would be correct for, or suited to, each individual. And thus recovery would properly be aimed at a specific and normatively characterised or valued endpoint. This serves as a partial argument for a recovery model.

(In setting out a condition on a recovery model, I have suggested that it has to offer a substantive conception of health, or something like it, so as to count as a model rather than merely an approach. The need for the qualification – ‘or something like it’ – should now be apparent. The recovery approach – on which I am basing an articulation of a model – takes the aim of mental healthcare to be more than a narrow construal of health but a significantly richer mode of being. Not just a state or capacity but something like an ongoing set of choices and practices. Whether this is a broad conception of health or a conception of something broader than health such as wellbeing I will leave aside.)

This line of argument for a recovery model is not decisive because a crude model of a statistically normal kind of life is not the only potential alternative that would have to be ruled out. I will briefly outline two more.

First, one could define mental health not, absurdly, as the living of a statistically normal life, but as the possession of statistically normal mental capacities: capacities, for example, to make autonomous life choices. This approach might face the same kind of objection to the statistical approach to physical health I left parked a little earlier. Anxiety, for example, may well undermine the capacity to make rational choices but if it is normal in industrial countries it will count as a healthy state. But there is a more fundamental problem. How can mental capacities be so much as identified without presupposing a notion of human flourishing that they support. What, in other words, are the capacities for?

This general objection is connected to a specific issue raised elsewhere in philosophy. Key capacities for mental health, as exemplified in the recovery approach, surely include the capacities for autonomous choice. But the identification of such capacities – before the issue of considering what is statistically normal – cannot itself be a plainly factual matter. Such capacities are governed by what Donald Davidson calls the Constitutive Principle of Rationality [Banner 2010, Davidson 1980]. Rationality is not merely a statistical normal pattern of reasoning [McDowell 1985]. It involves, essentially, a notion of what one ought to think in the face of such and such reasons, evidence and values. And there is thus no hope of identifying the capacity for choice in neutral terms.

A second rival to the recovery model for mental health can be articulated by returning to another issue left hanging a little earlier. The statistical model is merely one form that a non-normative, non-evaluative approach might take for physical health. A more promising approach would be one based on biological function. Familiar in the case of illness or disease through the idea of failure of function, accord with function could serve as the correlative definition of health. On this approach, one’s physiological systems are healthy insofar as they are behaving in accord with their biological functions. And the same approach might be applied in the case of mental faculties.

The key line of objection this approach is to question whether the articulation of the biological functions of mental traits can be viewed as independent of, rather than presupposing, a conception of human flourishing. The challenge for a plainly factual account is that only some of the actual evolutionary history of happenings accord with the normative account of what a trait is selected for. So by what principle of choice are some picked out to exemplify the trait’s purpose? The obvious answer is not available to a non-normative account: via an understanding of what contributes to a value-laden conception of human flourishing. This remains a matter of lively debate. On it turns the issue of whether an account of health based on accord with biological function is an alternative to the recovery model I have articulated or merely a disguised form of it.

Postscript on Arthur Frank’s Letting Stories Breathe

2011-05-26T17:17:00.001+01:00

After writing an earlier entry on Arthur Frank’s Letting Stories Breathe, I have now had the following thought. There is a suggestion in the book that narratives can accrue two kinds of truth. There is the familiar idea that stories can tell it as it is. They can be literally true. But there is another kind of truth: a truth in the story which inheres in it merely in virtue of the story being told. (That is not quite right but I hope Frank would forgive this crude summary.)

Now if that is right (that is, if that is what the book says, whether the second claim is actually true in the first sense or not; by its own lights it might be true in the second sense merely by being said!) why assume that a lover of stories would aim, in his account of stories, at the first pedestrian sort of truth? Surely, the kind of truth proper to a story is the one unique to it: the truth in stories. And if that’s the case, then surely the point of the book is not an ‘-ology’ of stories, as I suggested, but a story about stories. And thus that is how one should judge the idea that stories sing reality into being, or whatever. It is a much nicer idea.

Sass and the need for an anti-resolute reading of the later Wittgenstein

2011-05-19T10:50:00.011+01:00

I have realised that, having been marking essays for the last few days, I have only a couple of days to rewrite a paper for Emotion Review which includes a criticism of Louis Sass and a draft of which was here. One reviewer said it should be published as it stood but the other, Sass himself it turned out, understandably didn’t like the criticism of Sass in it. Responding to all his objections would require commenting in detail on about 20 pages of Wittgenstein so, in a 4,000 word paper whose original main theme was not actually Sass, that is not practical. (The paper now has three worked examples and a general claim about how to interpret the others. It will be up to readers to work out what they think.) But Sass’ first criticism is interesting and worth commenting on. He says of my paper that:

It is basically in the vein of those “new Wittgensteinians” who have a rigorous and rather exclusionary notion of what Wittgenstein would countenance as possible forms of meaningful discourse or understanding. Others in this tradition are James Conant, Cora Diamond, and Rupert Read. The position is best known for its re-interpretation of Wittg’s early book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, in which that book is seen as an essentially meaningless quasi-joke whereby Wittgenstein gives his readers the impression he is saying something, but then pulls the rug from under the feet of his readers; and in which the famous final line, “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must remain silent,” is viewed as itself a completely meaningless pseudo-statement. (The “new Wittgenstein” approach is not a unitary position, by the way, but a set of sometimes only loosely associated interpretative claims; some elements of the new Wittg are less relevant here, such as the idea that the early and later Wittgensteins should be seen as more congruent than previously assumed.)
I think that in this paper, there should be some acknowledgment of the above-mentioned ongoing debate re Wittg interpretation (referred to above as the debate re the “new Wittg”), both for the sake of clarifying just what sort of argument is being offered here, and also because that would avoid (what might be interpreted as) a dismissive tone—as if it were a simple matter of revealing the “correct” interpretation of Wittg, which would clearly show that Sass is simply in the wrong. Well, as this very well-informed author knows, there are many people who disagree with the version of the new Wittg mentioned above, including Hacker (see final chapter in the book The New Wittgenstein); and this is an ongoing and complex debate, perhaps ultimately an undecidable one. The new Wittg’ian position I mention above has been presented in a fascinating, often brilliant manner, and has reinvigorated various aspects of Wittgenstein studies; but there are also a great many problems with sustaining this new Wittg.ian position, some of which are outlined in the Hacker chapter just referred to, and some of which Sass alludes to in an earlier response to Rupert Read in the journal Philosophy Psychiatry Psychology or PPP.

The objection is that, like Rupert Read’s criticism of the use of Wittgenstein’s description of solipsism to shed light on other aspects of schizophrenia, it presupposes a recent and contested approach to Wittgenstein sometimes called the ‘New Wittgenstein’ [Read 2001, Crary and Read 2000].Since this approach to Wittgenstein is controversial (it is contested by such authorities as Peter Hacker, for example), it cannot simply be taken for granted as countering Sass’ own work.

This is a fair point and suggests that there cannot be a simple refutation of Sass’ hermeneutic project. But it is worth outlining something of the nature of the New Wittgensteinian approach. In The New Wittgenstein, Crary and Read suggest that this label gathers together approaches to the early and later Wittgenstein. In the former case, the ‘new’ approach is more familiarly known by its supporters as the ‘resolute’ approach. It is the approach which ‘resolutely’ accepts the nonsensical status of almost the whole of the Tractatus Logico Philosophicus and takes nonsense to be just that. What cannot be said, cannot be said and – in Frank Ramsey’s phrase – cannot be whistled either. Hacker’s critique of this approach (in his ‘Was he trying to whistle it?’ [Hacker 2000]) concerns the early Wittgenstein.

It is rather less clear what the ‘New Wittgenstein’ picks out when applied to texts after the Tractatus (such as the Brown Book). But Crary and Read suggest that it refers to a) therapeutic interpretations which b) take the rejection of external or platonic standards for judging language to be incoherent rather than merely false and thus c) do not see Wittgenstein’s critique as undermining pre-philosophical conceptions of objectivity [Crary and Read 2000: 3-4]. It excludes, in other words, both Kripke’s sceptical reading of Wittgenstein and Crispin Wright’s philosophical theory building. It is far from clear that Hacker, for example, who explicitly criticises sceptical readings of Wittgenstein, opposes a ‘New Wittgenstein’ approach to the middle and later period Wittgenstein including the §500 explicit view of nonsense (see below). So if Sass is to defend his account of the Brown Book as one which opposes a ‘New Wittgensteinian’ conception of philosophy as therapy, he will need to substantiate how he differs from this now more standard reading of the later Wittgenstein. (Simply opposing a ‘resolute’ reading of the early Wittgenstein is not enough.)

A different way to make this point is this. Sass can object to Read’s criticism of Sass as follows. Whilst Read, as a resolute reader, says that the passages of the early Wittgenstein that Sass invokes are strictly meaningless, there is a reputable anti-resolute view that says both that Wittgenstein intended them to be a special kind of nonsense which could still communicate an insight and that that is a reasonable intention. So Sass can use that special kind of nonsense to shed light on schizophrenia. But, by contrast, it is not clear that there can be an anti-resolute reading of the later Wittgenstein because the resolute reading of the early Wittgenstein reads into that early work what he says explicitly in his later work. He discusses the example of the orders ‘Bring me sugar’ and ‘Bring me milk’, which make sense, but not the combination ‘Milk me sugar’. He goes on to say, ‘When a sentence is called senseless, it is not as it were its sense that is senseless. But a combination of words is being excluded from the language, withdrawn from circulation.’ [Wittgenstein 1953 §500]. So on this later view, nonsense is simply a lack of sense. (That is the view behind the Brown Book.) A resolute reading of the later Wittgenstein is standard rather than unusual. But Sass needs an anti-resolute reading if his response to Read will also work here.

The only candidate I can think of as such an anti-resolute reader is Jonathan Lear who does think that Wittgenstein has to do philosophy by gesture, pointing beyond the limits of sense. If this is Sass’ view, he will need to do rather better than Lear in filling out the nature of this transcendental insight and then link it back into these Brown Book passages.

Crary, A. and Read, R.(eds) (2000) The New Wittgenstein, London: Routledge

Hacker, P.M.S. (2000) ‘Was he trying to whistle it?’ in Crary, A. and Read, R.(eds) The New Wittgenstein, London: Routledge
Read, R. (2001) ‘On approaching schizophrenia through Wittgenstein’ Philosophical Psychology 14: 449-475
Sass, L.A. (1994) The Paradoxes of Delusion, New York: Cornell

Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell

Wittgenstein, L. (1958) The Blue and Brown books, Oxford: Blackwell

Outline for a potential short course on the philosophy of psychiatry

2011-05-12T17:49:00.000+01:00

Charlotte Blease is teaching a five week x two hour course on What is psychiatry? over at Queens University Belfast. That prompts me to ask what I would teach, preferably - in my daydreams - in a room at the Castle Green Hotel in Kendal with access to Alexander’s Bar afterwards.

To be taught over five weeks of 90 minute sessions with meditative musing, over a pint, afterwards.

1) What’s special about psychiatry?
Psychiatry bridges some key divides. It crosses between mind and brain, understanding and explanation, individuals and their particular experiences and patterns in populations, bio-medical facts and values.
Modern psychiatry – arguably! – began with Karl Jaspers’ work a century ago and so this session examines his attempt to balance the ‘brain mythologies’ of his time with understanding. This leads on to both a model of phenomenology, to explore the ‘what it is likeness’ of experiences, and empathy: our shared access to how one experience leads to another. But is understanding really distinct from explanation? And do we need empathy to understand one another?

Reading: extract from Jaspers.

2) Szasz, anti-psychiatry and the reality or otherwise of mental illness
Whilst Jaspers combined philosophical and psychiatric interests, the recent focus (in the anglo-american world) on the philosophy of psychiatry has been in response to arguments against psychiatry from anti-psychiatrists. Thomas Szasz seems to advance two sorts of argument for the merely mythic status of mental illness. Are they persuasive? What else might they highlight about the nature of mental illness?

Reading: extract from Szasz and Kendell

3) Is mental illness value laden and does it matter if it is?
The debate about the reality of mental illness seems to turn on differences of opinion about the presence of values in psychiatric diagnosis. But, according to Bill Fulford’s analysis, the real issue is the status of physical illness. If illness, whether mental or physical, is essentially evaluative, why is there so much more debate about mental illness? And is Fulford right that there cannot be a value-free account of dysfunction based on whizzy evolutionary theory?

Reading: extract from Fulford

4) The DSM, reliability and validity and the loss of sadness
A key element of psychiatry is diagnosis of mental illness based on a classification or taxonomy. Since the WW2, the main aim of this has been ‘reliability’ which is a measure of how much clinicians agree in making the same diagnosis of the same condition. But recently, the concern has shifted to validity. Does psychiatric classification gets things right, does it cut nature at the joints? How could we begin to answer that question? One particular issue of recent debate is the boundary between sadness and depression. Is there a danger of pathologising what is an everyday, if regrettable, condition?

Reading: extract from Horwitz and Wakefield

5) Psychiatry and the relation of mind and brain
Since Jaspers’ day, our knowledge of the relation of mind and brain or mind and underlying biology has increased dramatically. But how much does this help with deciding what is and is not mental illness?

Reading: extract from Fulford et al.

Seeshop 5 programme

2011-05-10T16:14:00.000+01:00

I do not know whether it would still be possible for anyone to attend this, but here is the programme for Seeshop 5 in Cardiff in June.

Dan Hutto's professorial lecture...

2011-05-10T09:27:00.000+01:00

... is here.

Obligations to oneself?

2011-05-07T17:02:00.004+01:00

I have failed, today, to go and run the Hawkshead 15km trail race. On waking, oddly exhausted, this morning, neither Lois nor I felt at all in the mood. Lois offered the following argument:

The fee for race entry (paid months ago) is ‘sunk capital’ and should no longer affect a calculation of what to do on the day. If, on the day, various factors counted against doing it, then we should not. And there were factors: not feeling physically great; heavy rain forecast; my having run the course last week and found it rather unpleasant; some ongoing muscular twinges; the fact that the alternative would involve a fine and leisurely breakfast with the Saturday Guardian etc. Whilst none of the reasons individually would have been sufficient to stop us running under other circumstances, collectively they tipped the balance of a utilitarian calculus.
Further, were one not to accept the ‘sunk capital’ view of the lost fee, it had had a worthwhile effect – worth the fee – of making us run often and pleasantly over the last month.

Three things struck me about reasoning whether to go or not.

1) The very possibility of not doing the run once mentioned seemed to exert a kind of platonic force. I have a similar issue with mid-week pizza. I enjoy cooking, properly, most evenings, enjoying the custom or habit of cooking for an hour from 7pm, listening to an arts review programme on the radio. But if that custom is partially disrupted, for example, by my getting home late, and I deliberate about whether to cook, then if the possibility of eating a frozen pizza is so much as mentioned (by Lois) that is enough to bring it about. I suspect that if we could train the cats to squeak ‘Pizza!’ in Cat or whatever it would still be. Hearing mention of the mere possibility of eating pizza, its presence as an unbidden thought, seems to mandate pizza, independent of any attempt by me to ‘author’ the thought through deliberation.

2) As is the case with excuses for social invitations, the number of reasons seemed to count against them. One single reason, forcefully stated, would have seemed more persuasive than a number. But in other cases (eg. choosing which holiday destination or bicycle to buy) assembling individually insufficient reasons and weighing them up is exactly the right thing to do.

3) Despite the obvious plausibility of the rational utilitarian calculus, I struggled to accept it. The fact that I had undertaken to run the race seemed to establish an obligation which was still in force even if not dominant, in the end, all things considered. Its continuing force was reflected in my regret. But that seems quite odd. Unlike a social gathering, the organisers would not feel let down by an absence. So the parties of the agreement establishing the obligation seem to be my past and later selves, the present self being unable to dissolve it. Had I decided merely a day or so after signing up to pull out, that would have been fine. But having lived with the decision for a while – the very reason we’ve been running so much in Lois’ post-script thought – it seems to establish an independent or autonomous obligation not to be dissolved, even if to be outweighed, through later rational deliberation.