"Propriety and yet strict meaninglessness"

There has been an interesting debate going on on two blogs (here and here) which focus on the philosophy of psychiatry. One passage in a recent post by Richard Gipps nicely summarises a line of thinking I think I share with him.

Whilst I think it is entirely wrong to blithely accept that we know what is meant when someone tells us, or we tell ourselves, that we have had the experience or thought that (e.g.) nothing is real, I really can't accept that what is actually happening is that the someone in question is having a particular experience that they merely happen to thematise (narrativize) in this manner. As N says, the question then remains as to why it is so entirely natural for the someone to thematise it thus... What I would rather urge is that the content of the experience is given precisely through that avowal of it which makes use of the notion of 'unreality'.
But yet, or so it seems to me, this need not cause us to become complacent in assuming that we (could) know (that there could be such a thing as knowing) what it would mean to talk of an experience (as) of everything being real or unreal. We know what it is for a dollar or a smile or a problem to be real; do we really - really - understand what it would mean for the world to be real or not? Isn't "the world" precisely that within which discriminations of the reality of this or that are made? Isn't the world a transcendental precondition for necessarily localised talk of 'reality' or 'unreality'? Isn't it to 'sublime the logic of our language' - to ignore the necessary background context within which the concept of 'real' operates and to try to use it about the context itself - to carry on in this way?
One aspect of the model I would, then, use for making sense of the twin utter propriety and yet strict meaninglessness (although is it really right to call it 'meaningless'? I have a feeling that doesn't quite make the point I'm aiming for) of talk of depersonalisation or derealisation is secondary sense. We are drawn to using the terms in the ways we do by the experiences we have. That we are so drawn is not something which could be justified by reference to the content of the experiences; rather, our being-thus-drawn is the 'beginning, and not the end, of this [particular] language-game'. It is the condition of our finding it intelligible. Wednesday is fat and Tuesday is thin; happiness is up and sadness is down; sopranos are high and basses are low; anger is red and envy is green; and so on. We know how to use the relevant terms in their everyday deployments, and then we redeploy them spontaneously and groundlessly to express or report such further experiences and phenomena. I know how to talk about unreal diamonds, and then I find myself using the same word to characterise the very being of others. The logic of my language is sublimed (I cannot - however hard I try, with however much sincerity - mean it in the way I normally mean 'real'). But, damn it, that really is the only way to describe the experience!

Richard seems here to be probing the same issue I have become interested in. The appropriateness of the use of words in secondary sense seems to play a constitutive role in individuating experiences such as that the world feels unreal. The experience is the experience it is because of the appropriateness of using this set of words. This is how Wittgenstein describes it:

§125. The feeling of the unreality of one’s surroundings. This feeling I have had once, and many have it before the onset of mental illness. Everything seems somehow not real; but not as if one saw things unclear or blurred; everything looks quite as usual. And how do I know that another has felt what I have? Because he uses the same words as I find appropriate.
But why do I choose precisely the word “unreality” to express it? Surely not because of its sound. (A word of very like sound but different meaning would not do.) I choose it because of its meaning.
But I surely did not learn to use the word to mean: a feeling. No; but I learned to use it with a particular meaning and now I use it spontaneously like this. One might say--though it may mislead--: When I have learnt the word in its ordinary meaning, then I choose that meaning as a simile for my feeling. But of course what is in question here is not a simile, not a comparison of the feeling with something else.
§126. The fact is simply that I use a word, the bearer of another technique, as the expression of a feeling. I use it in a new way. And wherein consists this new kind of use? Well, one thing is that I say: I have a ‘feeling of unreality’--after I have, of course, learnt the use of the word “feeling” in the ordinary way. Also: the feeling is a state. [Wittgenstein RPP I]

But despite the fact that just these words are the right words (I think that ‘right’ is the right word), they are not used in the standard, primary sense. And hence Richrd’s ‘twin utter propriety and yet strict meaninglessness’.

Now, however, what seems interesting to me is that there seem to be cases where such a spontaneous use is shared. One might reply: I know exactly how you feel. But what of cases where the use is not shared? What happens if one simply cannot do anything with it? In a paper I wrote some years ago I pushed the line that the only criterion we have for secondary sense is such shared reactions. What I meant was that there was no content to the claim that there was any kind of sense to it once that broke down (by the way: I’m not naturally a communitarian Wittgensteinian). Now whilst I do not wish to say that that’s false it seems to be much less interesting. It is a kind of surd fact that we have no reason to call such a case ‘sense’ rather than a fact that might helpfully explain anything else.

But that still leaves the issue that Neil Pickering raised a year ago: does secondary sense ever impose a rational obligation? Is ‘right’ right?

So good they named it twice

Having a long standing interest (see eg here, here and here) in the way that cover versions of songs or artworks stand in dialogue to originals, I must add a link to the much discussed Welsh cover of the Jay-Z song and the Guardian article that drew my attention to it.

What, however, strikes me most about this instance is not so much general aspects of the relation of the original to the cover (although see the post script) but something specific about these particular relata. The original is a straight hymn of praise to New York (“where dreams are made of”, sadly). It is a city where “There’s nothing you can’t do, Now you’re in New York”. Of course that is deeply implausible of the city’s substantial underclass and thus simply asserting it is naive and even rather vulgar. But would it ever be possible to sing so simply the praises of any city, even one in a Scandinavian social democracy which had taken The Spirit Level to heart?

The cover (although its authors are not from the town) sings the praises of Newport in an altogether more realistic, nuanced way. Newport isn’t entirely good but despite that, all things considered, it is to be praised. That seems a more convincing sentiment. Putting it like that, though, isn’t quite right either. It is the localness of the singer’s (fictional) relation to the town which frames his take on the details that make up the song and which do not even need to be weighed for a positive view. So even though Newport is a ‘concrete jungle, [with] nothing in order’ this does not matter because:

And I’ll be Port forever
Yes it is my lifeblood
These streets they are a part of me
The yin to my yang
The Craig to my Bellamy

Whilst there is something sometimes worrying about such localism (an us and them opposition scary near exiting football matches) it allows for the rest of the cover to make gentle fun of the local details. The indirection of the sentiment is summarised nowhere better then in the way the song knows that it is not without surprise simply to repeat the town’s name in the chorus. We have to be enjoined:

Let’s say some more Newports, Newports, Newports

Returning to the simple tone of the original is rather a disappointing experience, a bit like Mozart’s apparently accidental dismissal of the lack of flair in Saleri’s gifted tune in Amadeus.

PS: Interestingly, mentioning this to Gloria over a glass of wine last night, she reported that she’d been presented with the cover without any refence to an original. She had, in Wittgenstein’s analogy, then happily played along at trains with no knowledge of what a train was, and still took some intrinsic pleasure in the game/song.

Professors

I’ve been asked to serve on the professorial appointments committee of the University of Wolverhampton. After the first such meeting, I was impressed by the strictness of the criteria they apply. For one thing, the criteria form a conjunction rather than, eg, the kind of weighted cumulative disjunction (OK there must be a proper phrase for that) that readers of DSM are familiar with. Thus candidates do not merely have to meet, strongly, say three of five general criteria but rather all five. Of course, part of the point of then having a committee to assess these is that some judgement gets to be exercised.

One place where that judgement is needed is checking that the right local standards apply to different disciplines. So an engineer who has gained £600,000 of research funding has done about as well as a historian who has raised a tiny fraction of that. This reminds me of my favourite Kuhnian idea: that the tables in textbooks that seem to show how well supported by data a theory is actually show what good support in a local discipline comprises. (Chemists have to get things right to four places of decimals. Physicists need to be within an order of magnitude.)

But I was left wondering whether there should be a kind of personality to professorial appointments. It isn’t obvious to me that different kinds of university (eg. those that specialise in links to industry and in ‘knowledge transfer’) all need the same kind of professor. Do we really have a clear enough antecedent grasp of ‘professor’ that we couldn’t tolerate different notions?

(Some years ago, Neil Gascoigne and I came up with a kind of definition of ‘professor’ in philosophy, albeit one which would reduce the numbers massively. If Smith is a professor it should be possible to grasp what going on in a Smithian manner would be in a new area of philosophy but in such a way which isn’t explained as a Jonesian manner. ‘Smithian’ should be an irreducible projectible predicate.)

W: Wittgenstein says p, therefore p is true.

(As a quick break from working through my huge email backlog...)

I went to Simon Hailwood and Logi Gunnarsson’s workshop on Psychological and Self-Alienation at the University of Dortmund last week which is one a series of three workshops on alienation (alienation and the environment; and alienation and politics, being the other two themes). As is sometimes the case with themed workshops or conferences, it wasn’t immediately clear whether the theme provided a genuine unity either within the one workshop or across all three. But my hunch is that any such unity would be as much made as found. It would be a very strange coincidence if ‘alienation’ simply picked out the same sort of issues in all three areas. So it may be too soon to tell.

I gave (for the fourth time) a paper on Sass and Wittgenstein and the uncanny but encountered for the first time a deep suspicion from a couple of american philosophers. Their worry was that I subscribed to some such principle as

W: Wittgenstein says p, therefore p is true.

(I should perhaps be a bit more careful in picking out things that Wittgenstein claims rather than says, of course. I was struck by an entry in the new Acumen book Wittgenstein: Key Concepts in which Heather Gert cuts through all the difficulty about the statement:

There is one thing of which one can say neither that it is one metre long, nor that it is not one metre long, and that is the standard metre in Paris. [Wittgenstein 1953 §50]

by arguing that there is textual evidence through comparisons that Wittgenstein does not assert in propria persona any such thing.)

They also expressed some concern about using philosophers’ names as a shorthand for positions (I’d described myself as an ex-Wittgensteinian and labelled a view of content ‘broadly Davidsonian’). It dawned on me that their suspicions were those I have of a strand of or mood I think I see in Continental philosophy in the UK in which the exegetical task of working out what Kant, eg., means completely drowns out the question of whether that view is true. (I hasten to add that I think that this is an occasional weakness not an essential feature.)

Now of course I would not have read as much Wittgenstein or Davidson or McDowell as I have if I didn’t think that they were often right about things or at the very least had some kind of insight. There is also a standard charitable hermeneutic approach which is that the plausibility of the view ascribed is a measure of interpretative success (which obviously need not be true). But over and above those two assumptions, all the best work on Wittgenstein takes the form of arriving at an interpretation by articulating an argument for it.

Perhaps this is particularly true of Wittgenstein (whose texts invite active interpretative work) but the main problem with W (exemplified, eg., by Gert’s article) is that one would need to know what p was to use the principle, but the work of identifying p (through argumentative articulation) makes W redundant.

Jolley, K.D. (ed) (2010) Wittgenstein: Key Concepts, Durham: Acumen
Wittgenstein, L. (1953) Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Blackwell

Dr Natalie Banner

Whilst I was away at Simon Hailwood and Logi Gunnarsson's workshop on Psychological and Self-Alienation at the University of Dortmund last week (following two weeks walking in Scotland), Natalie Banner had a successful PhD viva with Matthew Ratcliffe and Johan Seibers.

Her abstract reads thus:

Decision-making capacity is an increasingly important medico-legal concept. The recent Mental Capacity Act employs a cognitive, process-based test of capacity, but in many psychiatric conditions pathological beliefs and values impair capacity even when the decision-making process is logically coherent. In such cases, capacity assessments implicitly rely on normative epistemic and evaluative standards. This raises a worry for the capacity test‘s reliability, objectivity and tolerance of differences in beliefs and values.
There is currently little conceptual research on capacity and the normative standards underpinning its assessment. This thesis makes an original contribution to research by employing a number of philosophical approaches to map out a conceptual terrain within which questions about the substantive standards of capacity assessment can be framed.
Focusing on the nature of epistemic standards and third-person judgements about decision-making, the thesis examines the normative constraints determining what counts as a recognisable reason for a decision. It employs the theoretical apparatus of Davidson‘s project of Radical Interpretation to explore the epistemology of interpretation, interrogating the conditions under which intentional attribution and the provision of reason explanations for behaviour are possible. It is contended that beliefs are intrinsically rational and intersubjective, and that judgements of irrationality are only possible against a background of shared belief between interpreter and observed agent. This view is defended against the objection that rationality is too stringent a constraint on belief.
A misconception giving rise to this objection is then diagnosed. Drawing an analogy with Wittgenstein‘s rule-following considerations, it is submitted that the constitutive normativity of belief need not be codified in order to exert a genuine constraint on intentional behaviour. Rather, the norms of belief ought to be construed as emerging from shared practice. This indicates that normative judgements are disciplined through expertise and experience, rather than adherence to abstract principles. Finally, the implications of these insights for conceptualising and assessing capacity are considered.

14th INPP conference Gothenburg, Sweden

The website for next year's International Network for Philosophy and Psychiatry (INPP) conference in Gothenburg, Sweden is now here.

I have been asked to run one of four pre-conference afternoon long short course. Mine will be on: Meaning, understanding, explanation. I promise it will be interesting!

Another review of the Broome and Bortolotti collection

Here is a nice review from the The British Journal of Psychiatry (2010) 197, 78–80

When philosophers have applied their minds to mental illness, their aim has sometimes been to highlight the shortfalls and inconsistencies in prevalent concepts of the nature of mental disorders. At worst, this has led to the view that mental illness has no real existence and that it serves only as a means of stigmatising and excluding those who do not conform to expected patterns of behaviour. Although this has often been interesting and illuminating, it has been of little help to those of us who have to understand and treat those with mental illness. It has certainly not led to any reduction in the demand for psychiatric services. However, the approach in this book is refreshingly pragmatic and free of ivory-tower scepticism. As a result, it demonstrates the important contribution that philosophers can make when they accept the reality and complexity of mental illness.

This contribution is one that is becoming of increasing importance with developments in neuroscience, such as brain imaging and molecular genetics, as applied to mental illness. Science is able to investigate normal and abnormal mental functioning in ways that are becoming increasingly fine-grained. This is throwing into sharp relief puzzles about the interface between brain disturbance and abnormal experience. It also emphasises the need for scientists to have a clear concept of what it is that they seek to investigate before they begin the process of framing testable hypotheses. One psychopathological phenomenon that is discussed at length in this book is delusions. Are these top-down, the products of disturbed information-processing, or bottom-up, an immediate, non-inferential experience? Or is the deluded patient better regarded as inhabiting an alternative reality in which abnormal ideas arise in the context of a more pervasive disturbance of how the world is perceived? The experiments that are performed and the ways in which results are interpreted will depend on the answers that are given to questions such as these.

Matthew Broome and Lisa Bortolotti have assembled a stellar cast of contributors to this volume. They bring together philosophy and neuroscience in an attempt to give an account of psychopathology that is more detailed and penetrating than the standard descriptions and definitions. The quality of the writing and analysis is uniformly excellent without becoming inaccessible to a clinical readership. The combination of rigorous conceptual analysis and neuroscience will take psychiatry in new directions in future years. This book offers an important route map to that future.

John Callender Consultant Psychiatrist, Royal Cornhill Hospital, Aberdeen AB25 7ZH, Scotland, UK. Email: jscall@doctors.org.uk