The gap between actors and characters

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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.