Utrecht workshop on the contemporary relevance of the Erklären / Verstehen distinction in psychiatry, biology and neuroscience

I am at the first day of a workshop in Utrecht on the distinction between Erklären and Verstehen, or explanation versus understanding, organised by Annemarie Kalis (pictured). Interestingly, the first couple of talks played down the importance of the distinction.

Paul Ziche outlined the history of the distinction, arguing that the key philosophers we tend to think of as proposing the distinction and arguing for its importance had, in fact, a much more ambivalent view. Thus, for example, although Windelband distinguishes between the nomothetic and idiographic, he did so, we were told, in order to play down the distinction. It was not supposed to divide the natural from the human sciences. All sciences should involve both elements. Or, another key figure, Wundt, a professor of philosophy not psychology (and regarded as the most important philosopher of the time, conducted both experimental psychology but also descriptive social psychology which might be thought to fall on either side of the putative distinction. He opposed introspectionist psychology not for its intrinsic unreliabiliability but because, as a matter of fact, the introspectionist psychologists of his day were not careful enough in their experimental design.

Overall, the story PZ presented was a complicated one in which the distinction between explanation and understanding played no fundamental dividing role. What was more important were attempts to find some general abstract feature that science as a whole had in common.

What seemed a little surprising to me was that the suggestion that both of these instincts was broadly correct was not thought of as in tension. I would have expected that the general reasons for pessimism of successfully fitting sciences into two exclusive categories might also apply to the project of marking out the whole of science from the non-sciences as instancing one unitary category.

Albert Visser also argued against the importance of the distinction for shedding light on science. One general theme was that because explanation is just one aspect of scientific practice it should not bear the whole weight of individuating sciences. But further, explanation cannot be tightly characterised in the formal terms that would enable a sharp distinction from understanding. (He suggested it comprised a subjective as well as objective side though implied that no non-circular analysis could be offered.)

But perhaps the most interesting idea was that non-human sciences shared something akin to empathy or ‘inleving’. Of various examples given one was the way in which the early developers of non-Euclidian geometry explored it, with the aim of refuting it, from within. They dwelt within it as those engrossed in computer gains become absorbed in that.

Sanneke de Haan talking to ‘There's meaning everywhere - Beyond Erklären versus Verstehen in psychiatry’ gave a whistle stop tour of an embodied, embedded, enactivist view the distinction between psychological and physical symptoms . One lesson of the moral was that things are very complicated. But another was that it suggests that it is difficult to oppose the physical and the psychological. Both are aspects, she suggested, of a broader system: the physical processes being physiogical / biological processes that sustain life. But it also has consequences for thinking about causal relations. For example, being angry includes a number of phsyical processes and hence cannot be thought to be the causal effect of those processes. One theme picked up in questioning was why this wasn't a reductionist picture: what it was about the complicated picture was not just anti-eliminativist but also anti-reductionist.

Derek Strijbos spoke to the title Understanding the causes of mental illness: why Jaspers' distinction is still relevant. But he started by pointing out that there are a number of related distinctions in Jaspers. These include:
Inner vs outer
Conscious vs extra conscious
Meaningful vs causal
Revisable interpretations vs determinate laws
Particular vs general
Limited vs unlimited
Personally engaged vs detached.
But the key idea he - Derek - wanted to extract was the meaningful versus non-meaningful for fear of losing the subject matter of psychiatry or more particularly losing a vital source for generating causal explanations.

The background to the the talk was a comparison between Jaspers and Davidson. Both share, or seem to share, a kind of ontological monism but a methodological dualism. But whilst Davidson approaches this via anomalous monism, Jaspers makes things rather less clear by denying that understanding is causal. As Christophe Hoerl argues (2013), there is a tension between Jaspers’ view that understanding is factive whilst denying that it is causal. That makes it obscure the epistemic benefit of bringing understanding to bear. By contrast, Davidson attempts to save the 'because' of reason explanation through causal explanation. One feature of this, however, is that it trades on an impersonal notion of causation. The causation of general laws.

But DS suggested that a thinner notion of causation, such as interventionism, might equally accommodate the substance of understanding whilst allowing for a more personal and particular view of the relevant causation. Further, some tools in recent psychiatric research exemplify this approach such as experience sampling methods or van Os' personalised psychiatry. These suggest a space for a particular kind of particular causal factor.

I think I understood the negative element of the talk rather more than the positive. If by causation one means something like Hume’s second counter factual definition (that all things being equal, had the cause not occurred then neither would the effect) then denying that understanding is causal looks to deny it of much force. But the familiar problem of Davidson’s reconciliation of the competing constraints on understanding is that it does not provide sufficient force to the mental properties of events. It saves the causal effects of the events invoked in reason explanation but at the cost of making the mental properties irrelevant. But denying the denial of the causal efficacy of the states that are the subject matter of understanding, ie promoting their possible causal role (on this slim notion of causation) is not yet to say what they do aside from cause.

Gerrit Glas’ paper asked whether Jaspers was a methodological dualist. As often happens, by the end of the day my ability to concentrate was somewhat impaired but some key points included: Whilst at the level of science, Jaspers thought that where there as understanding there was always a basis in explanation, and hence he was a kind of dualist, at the clinical level the two forms were not merely juxtaposed. Rather, explanation was attuned to the kind of self understanding patients had of their illness and themselves. And, depicted in rather a complex diagram, GG argued that the relation of patient and illness was itself further affected by their own nature and that of the illness. Things were further complicated, however, by the idea that within different levels of analysis, both understanding and explanation have a role. (So it is not that they are apportioned or divided  by level.) For example, within scientific explanation there is a pretheoretical appeal to a notion of fit which is itself a matter if understanding.

Social Aetiology of Mental Illness (SAMI) Training Program 2014–2015 Postdoctoral Fellowship

The Social Aetiology of Mental Illness (SAMI) Training Program 2014–2015 Postdoctoral Fellowship.
Application Deadline is February 1ST 2014, 5:00pm EST

The Social Aetiology of Mental Illness (SAMI) Training Program is now accepting applications for the 2014-15 Postdoctoral Fellowship program.

The SAMI training program is a CIHR Strategic Training Initiative in Health Research Training Program based at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health and the University of Toronto, and includes international partners from across the globe. Fellowships are for 1 year, fully funded, research-based, and will help top-class research students further develop their skills in investigating the social aetiology of mental illness.

Deadline: February 01, 2014 (5:00pm EST). Please visit the SAMI Training Program website for more information on how to apply. Any questions can be directed to the program staff on-site today, Research Manager, Emma Ware, emma.ware@camh.ca.

Autonomy Summer School 2014 21-23 August, University of Essex

The Essex Autonomy Project is pleased to announce that bookings are now being taken for the Autonomy Summer School.

The programme for the 2014 Summer School focuses on three key areas. On day one we will be looking at the dilemmas surrounding mental capacity, on day two the focus will be on risk and decision making and on day three we will consider mental capacity legislation and the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. Each day will comprise of two teaching sessions, plus group discussion of case studies relevant to the topic, and will conclude with a lecture which presents the latest research from the Essex Autonomy Project.

For the first time, this year you are able to join the Summer School for one day only, two days or for the whole event.

Fees: £145 per day Early booking discount – pay £125 per day if booked before the 31st March (the fee includes teaching, course materials and lunch each day. Overnight accommodation can be booked separately from £40 per night, bed and breakfast).

Book all three days for the reduced rate of £375

To book your place please go to the Summer School pages of our website and click on ‘Apply’. http://autonomy.essex.ac.uk/summer-school

If you have any questions about the Summer School please contact:Becky Parsons

Administrative Assistant

Essex Autonomy Project

Tel: 01206 872717

 Working days: Monday and Wednesday

The middle sections of McDowell’s ‘Perceptual Experience: Both Relational and Contentful’

I’ve been reading McDowell’s recent paper ‘Perceptual Experience: Both Relational and Contentful’ [McDowell 2013]. Although I think I understand the broad outlines of the picture presented – which is not to say that there are no deeply puzzling aspects – I have been confused by the choreography in the middle. McDowell talks about an argument with a first and second premise. But he also talks about an argument which can be read in either a modus ponens or a modus tollens way. I’ve been puzzled by what he’s talking about. But I now think I have an interpretation. Crucially, there are two distinct arguments.

The argument that can be given either a modus ponens or modus tollens spin has the following elements. There is a premise which comprises a simple claim and a more complex conditional premise. There’s then a simple conclusion.

Presented as modus ponens, the simple premise is that:

• P1: the epistemic significance of experiences consists in their having content in the way they do.

The second, conditional premise is that:

• P2: If the epistemic significance of an experience consists in its having content in the way it does, then it cannot be by bringing environmental realities into view that experiences enable their subjects to know things about the environment.

Or more naturally:

• P2: If the epistemic significance of an experience consists in its having content in the way it does, then it cannot be that experiences enable their subjects to know things about the environment by bringing environmental realities into view.

The conclusion is that

• C: It cannot be by bringing environmental realities into view that experiences enable their subjects to know things about the environment.

Or more naturally,

• C: It cannot be  that experiences enable their subjects to know things about the environment by bringing environmental realities into view.

This modus ponens version leads to a highest common factor view of experience. The best experience does is to provide a defeasible warrant rather than bringing reality itself into view with conclusive warrant.

Read the other way round as a modus tollens argument, and holding the conditional constant, the conclusion is that it is not true that the epistemic significance of experiences consists in their having content in the way they do. One such view is Travis’ in which experiences play no content-bearing role. They are simply routes to the world for subsequent judgement. They enable the world to be in view for subsequent conceptual judgement. Here’s the description of that view:

We would be immune to the puzzlement those questions express if we accepted a relational conception of the sort that refuses to conceive the epistemic significance of experience in terms of content. On this view, experiences contribute to one’s having knowledge about one’s environment, but only by placing one’s surroundings in view. If one knows something about one’s environment through perception, that is because one has made something of things an experience places in view for one. One has brought them under concepts, exercising cognitive capacities that are extra to having the things in view. If someone has a knowledge-constituting warrant for a belief about how things are in her environment, the warrant depends on the epistemic credentials of the capacities she has exercised in applying concepts to things her experience anyway places in view for her. So the puzzlement does not arise. There is no application for the conception that causes it; there is no such thing as an experience that itself provides its subject with a conclusive warrant, or indeed any warrant, for believing something about her environment. [ibid: 149]

I don’t think that there’s a very strong argument against this position in this paper. We know that McDowell continues to think that it falls prey to the Myth of the Given and we know that Travis continues to think that it doesn’t. If I am at all on track with Travis his key idea is that it is an entirely acceptable view of the exercise of reason that it mediates between the conceptual (which exemplifies generality, understandings, occasionalism etc) and the non-conceptual (that which instances general concepts) so we do not need accept McDowell’s acceptance that there is almost a truth in the Davidsonian idea that the only thing that can serve as a reason for a belief is another belief. (Almost a truth because belief-like experiences can play just this role too. That’s the point of Mind and World’s transcendental empiricism.) But I will park this disagreement here. McDowell aims to show, at least, that it should receive no further support from the forced choice discussed here. He can head off a reason for thinking it obligatory. (That said, this does not seem to be the motive Travis himself has for his position which - mainly? - concerns, instead, the distinction between the conceptual, which admits of understandings, and the non-conceptual and the argument that making experience itself part of the conceptual is incoherent. For some attempts to get clear on that see this.)

Now one possible way to reject the conclusion that provides such a further motivation for Travis’ account would be to adopt the content view and attempt to head off the worry caused by the fact that contents can be misleading. Sadly it won’t do for reasons which have to do with the distinction drawn in ‘Knowledge and the internal’ between mathematics or logic and empirical knowledge.

We might be tempted by a thought on these lines: if one takes an experience to make knowledge available when it does not, that reflects some flaw in one’s cognitive conduct—haste, inattention, or whatever. That way, we could suppose an experience can conclusively warrant a belief about the environment, consistently with the requirement that one’s self-consciousness in enjoying it must put one in a position to know it has that epistemic significance. It is just that to avail oneself of that possibility of knowing the epistemic significance of an experience, one needs to ensure that one’s cognitive conduct, in exercising one’s capacity to know the epistemic significance of one’s experiences, is flawless. The idea would be that if one exercised that capacity without such flaws in cognitive conduct as haste or inattention, one would not be at risk of taking an experience to enable one to know something about the environment when it does not.
But the trouble with this idea is that it is not credible. Taking an experience to make knowledge available when it does not can be blameless. [ibid: 150]

So going back, both the MP/MT arguments depend on a conditional for which there is a distinct argument ie one which isn't the same as these MP and MT arguments. It happens earlier in the paper on p146 where the second premise is that experiences can appear to make knowledge about the environment available when they do not. The more complicated first premise is in this passage:

The epistemic significance of an experience must be available to the subject in enjoying the experience. It must reside in some aspect of the experience’s subjective character. So on the content conception, an experience’s having content as it does must be constitutive of its subjective character, in so far as its subjective character is relevant to its putting its subject in touch with her surroundings, or at least seeming to. [ibid: 146]

Now I think that McDowell accepts both of these. But they can seem, wrongly, to lead to the conditional which drives the MP/MT forced choice. So having set out that forced choice he has to explain why these two premises don't lead to the conclusion of this other argument: the conditional which drives the forced choice in the MP/MT argument.

Here the key thought is that a possibility has gone missing in the conventional view:

The premise that has been giving us trouble is that one can take an experience to make knowledge available when it does not. That does not show that when an experience makes knowledge available, it is not by bringing a suitable environmental reality into view for one. The point is just that the capacity to be in such positions is fallible.
We take in stride the fact that a capacity to know through perception such things as that there is something red and rectangular in front of one is fallible. We must, if we are going to suppose we ever have such knowledge. What makes it look as if the capacity cannot work in the way I have described— yielding knowledge whose title to count as such depends on experience making environmental realities present to us and thereby giving us conclusive warrant for beliefs about the environment—is the thought that knowing the epistemic significance of an experience that warrants a bit of knowledge we have through that fallible capacity would have to be an act of another capacity: a separate capacity to know such things, which would have to be in principle infallible. And the argument’s second premise is that there is no such infallible capacity. But the argument fails, because the capacity by which one knows the epistemic significance of one’s experiences is not another capacity, but just the capacity whose fallibility we anyway have to take in stride. [ibid: 151]

So at this point, to cut a longer story very short, the disjunctivism of McDowell’s account in ‘Criteria, defeasibility’, ‘Knowledge and the internal’, ‘Perception as a capacity for knowledge’ and others heads off the worry that the fallibility of observation impacts on the warrant of seeing when, in fact, all does go well. This includes the idea that the fallibility of the faculty of observation as a whole does not rule out the idea that ‘when all goes well’ one’s experience itself provides warrant sufficient for the truth of the belief; that the same faculty enables one to know how and that one knows; and the fact that, had one been in the bad disjunct one would not have known that has no negative implication for the possibility that if one is in the good disjunct one can know that.

Still, this paper makes something clear which hadn't been to me, at least, before. The content of experience can be the same in veridical and misleading cases, between the good and bad disjuncts. The word ‘content’ is used in this way. Content is a highest common factor. But there’s more to experience than its content, there is the way an experience has the content it does. This marks the key difference between being a case of seeing, or a case of having the world in view, and merely enjoying/suffering an appearance.

One further interesting claim is that visual experiences share a de se character. Seeings are de re but the broader class of visual experiences are de se:

Visual experiences as such, whether seeings or not, have content that enables those that are seeings to place their subjects in such relations to objects. But that is provided for, not by a de re character that belongs to the contents of seeings, but by a de se character that belongs to the contents of visual experiences as such. When I formulate an aspect of the content of an experience with the words “(There is) something red and rectangular in front of me”, “in front of me” is schematic for a much more specific placement, in relation to me, of an apparent red rectangular thing. That is enough to secure that if the experience is a seeing, it enables me to refer, with a visually grounded demonstrative, to the red rectangular thing I see. [ibid: 155-6]

What puzzles me here is why the de re character of a reference I chose to make of my experience - the sort of thing Travis starts his story with - belongs* to the content of the seeing and not the judgement made on its basis.
(*It is hard to know how to put this. It isn't that the content is de re articulated since the content of the good and the bad disjuncts are the same: de se. But the way the content of a genuine seeing comes about is de re.)

McDowell, J. (2013) ‘Perceptual Experience: Both Relational and Contentful’ European Journal of Philosophy 21: 144-57

Philosophers' Rally, Nijmegan 2014

I have been invited to be one of the three international speakers at the student philosophy rally at Nijmegan, Netherlands, in a couple of months. I must say that I rather like the idea of a rally and must resist the temptation to appeal for a storming of the palace afterwards. An army of philosophers!

The website is here.
http://philosophersrally.com/

And the blurb runs:
Philosophers’ Rally 2014: Selves & Persons24th & 25th April 2014, Radboud University NijmegenConfirmed keynote speakers: Simon Critchley, Tim Thornton, Katalin Farkas

On April 24th and 25th, the Radboud University Nijmegen will host the 2014 edition of the annual Dutch Philosophers’ Rally:  a two-day conference organized by students under the banner of the Dutch Association for Philosophy Students. The Philosophers’ Rally aims to offer talented students of all levels (undergraduate to PhD) an opportunity to present their own research and to become acquainted with the work of their peers. The Rally aims to be an inspiring platform where both young as well as very experienced philosophers can meet and exchange ideas.

The theme for this edition of the Philosophers’ Rally will be ‘Selves & Persons’:

The philosophical question ‘Who are we?’ shows up in many debates and contexts. The difficulty is that each time it surfaces, the meaning of ‘we’ may differ. It can mean ‘we’ as humans, as organisms, as citizens, as men or women, and a countless variety of other things. This shows that this question  transgresses different philosophical genres and ages. The common goal these different genres share is the quest for identity and recognition of what it means to be a self or a person, outside of their immediate context.

Thus, for the Philosophers’ Rally 2014 – held this year at Radboud University Nijmegen – we will be searching for answers to that question: what does it mean to be a self or person? And hopefully, that question will be answered from all possible philosophical angles, containing many different notions of selves and persons.

Psychopathy: what apology making tells us about moral agency

I see that the paper Gloria Ayob and I have written on psychopathy for Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics is now available from the journal's website. It is here.

The abstract runs:

Psychopathy is often used to settle disputes about the nature of moral judgment. The “trolley problem” is a familiar scenario in which psychopathy is used as a test case. Where a convergence in response to the trolley problem is registered between psychopathic subjects and non-psychopathic (normal) subjects, it is assumed that this convergence indicates that the capacity for making moral judgments is unimpaired in psychopathy. This, in turn, is taken to have implications for the dispute between motivation internalists and motivation externalists, for instance. In what follows, we want to do two things: firstly, we set out to question the assumption that convergence is informative of the capacity for moral judgment in psychopathy. Next, we consider a distinct feature of psychopathy which we think provides strong grounds for holding that the capacity for moral judgment is seriously impaired in psychopathic subjects. The feature in question is the psychopathic subject’s inability to make sincere apologies. Our central claim will be this: convergence in response to trolley problems does not tell us very much about the psychopathic subject’s capacity to make moral judgments, but his inability to make sincere apologies does provide us with strong grounds for holding that this capacity is seriously impaired in psychopathy.

On democratically selecting research ideas

I spent the day at a brainstorming session on mental health research at the University today (one of a series of ‘Grand Challenge’ workshops organised across a number of inter-disciplinary themes), aimed at outlining some key problems or issues that face mental healthcare and hence potential subjects for research.

It served as a good opportunity to meet another selection of researchers at the University interested in mental health, in addition to those who already are part of our Mental Health Research @ Uclan group. It was also very well attended by colleagues who work broadly in research support, meeting whom face to face is really useful. There are all sorts of tacit dimensions, especially concerning trust and collective action, which are poorly served by emails.

Four genuinely interesting topics emerged for development:  the use of electronic resources and game playing in the diagnosis and data collection especially concerning motor skills of those with dementia; the possible connection between dental hygiene and dementia; the use of tasers on the mentally ill including in clinical settings; and the wellbeing of call centre workers. All of that is a positive result for the day and it was well worth attending.

But I realised that there was also a counter-intuitive effect of the selection process, perhaps because of the initial highlighting of practical concerns for mental healthcare, perhaps because we were encouraged to see what issues emerged from conversation in groups that day rather than bringing along a prepared list of topics (as I had in case such be needed) and perhaps because we were encouraged in the morning to think very broadly or laterally and with no concern for the usual issues of what is fundable, or this year's intellectual or research fashion. This was that the connection between a topic being selected, a principal investigator being interested and possible funding streams being available came only as a matter of happy contingency. In the afternoon we were rather landed with the blue skies thinking of the morning. (Cf "That's a problem for Future-Homer. Man, I don't envy that guy!")

Voting on brainstormed topics in the abstract, rather than topics proposed explicitly by individuals, meant that there was at least a chance that what emerged wasn't researchable by those present. In my group this was only avoided by narrowing down the selected topic very dramatically and pragmatically to fit one of the two academics at the table in such a way that, sadly, the resultant topic had no obvious conceptual or philosophical spin. This makes me think that useful though the day was, it wasn't really the best way coping with the contingency and chance that often underpins new research.

What would be? Thinking back I realise that much of the philosophy of mental health I have researched, whether in the end individually or with others, has emerged from or been inspired by chance conversations but I am not sure that there is any clear pattern in the nature of the conversations. (They have not usually been started with the idea of articulating a research area in mind.) But ultimately it has never been a democratic process. That others (I mean others in general, not others to me) find a topic interesting is never, in the end, enough to motivate someone else also doing it. So shared ownership cannot be engineered by a democratic day but is a rather slower matter of seeing how topics appeal to others where, on any given day, not appealing is rather more likely than appealing. The alternative seems to be akin to a high risk speed dating session where everyone has to marry someone at the end of the process.

With this in mind, I again regret the passing from academia of the post work beer.