How is experience supposed to be a positive reason for belief in Mind and World?

I’ve been working on final edits to the second edition of my book on McDowell and I’m increasingly confused by something that, surely!, should have bothered me much more in the past. It concerns the status of experience as a reason for belief, which is one of the most obvious features of the Mind and World account.

In the first version of my book, I took the following as a key statement of McDowell’s empiricism.

In a particular experience in which one is not misled, what one takes in is that things are thus and so. That things are thus and so is the content of the experience, and it can also be the content of a judgement: it becomes the content of a judgement if the subject decides to take the experience at face value. So it is conceptual content. But that things are thus and so is also, if one is not misled, an aspect of the layout of the world: it is how things are. Thus the idea of conceptually structured operations of receptivity puts us in a position to speak of experience as openness to the layout of reality. Experience enables the layout of reality itself to exert a rational influence on what a subject thinks. [McDowell 1994: 26]

This passage combines two key notions. First, experience has a conceptually articulated content. This is important because of McDowell’s assumption that rational relations connect only conceptualised relata. So if experience is to provide a rational friction on thought by the world it must be the case that experience is conceptually structured. Second, and following from that requirement, experience is, when all goes well, a form of direct openness to the world. This in turns leads to German Idealism because if experience is conceptually structured and is also, at best, a form of openness to the world, then the world, too, is conceptually structured. But I’m not worried about that bit today. Rather, it’s what I didn’t notice before because I focussed on the idea that experience couldn’t play this role unless it were conceptually structured. What I didn’t think about is how it could play a rational role even if it were so structured.

By contrast with later work, on the Mind and World picture, experiences contain the very same kind of propositional content as is contained in judgements and, further, in the specific judgements they can, when all goes well, rationalise.

A judgement of experience does not introduce a new kind of content, but simply endorses the conceptual content, or some of it, that is already possessed by the experience on which it is grounded. [McDowell 1994: 48-49]
Note that grounding need not depend on an inferential step from one content to another. The judgement that things are thus and so can be grounded on a perceptual appearance that things are thus and so. [McDowell 1994: 49 footnote6]

The link from experience to belief is not an inference. Elsewhere McDowell says:

In the conceptual activity I am mainly concerned with, that of making observational judgments, what matters is the rationality exemplified in judging whether things are thus and so in the light of whether things are (observably) thus and so. The content of the item in the light of which a judgement of this kind has its rational standing is the same as the content of the judgement itself. The only inferences corresponding to the rational connection in question would be of the “stuttering” form, “P; so P.” [McDowell 2009: 32]

So the connection between experience and subsequent full blown judgement is not an inference, unless of this vacuous stuttering form. So what is it? Experiences are not themselves perceptual beliefs. They need not be actively endorsed. There is a gap between experiences and active endorsements of them in judgements. So what kind of link is there between experience and judgement? The gap (to be bridged) is stressed in the following passage from Mind and World.

I said (§4) that when we enjoy experience conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity, not exercised on some supposedly prior deliverances of receptivity. And it is not that I want to say they are exercised on something else. It sounds off key in this connection to speak of exercising conceptual capacities at all. That would suit an activity, whereas experience is passive. In experience one finds oneself saddled with content. One’s conceptual capacities have already been brought into play, in the content’s being available to one, before one has any choice in the matter. The content is not something one has put together oneself, as when one decides what to say about something. In fact it is precisely because experience is passive, a case of receptivity in operation, that the conception of experience I am recommending can satisfy the craving for a limit to freedom that underlies the Myth of the Given. [McDowell 1994: 10]

If one goes no further than reporting one’s experience as containing the claim that things are thus and so, one still has to determine whether to endorse that claim oneself. If one endorses it, one claims to see that things are thus and so (if the experience is a visual experience). If not, one restricts oneself to saying it looks to one as If things are thus and so. In a “looks” statement, that is, one withholds one’s endorsement of the claim one reports one’s experience as containing. [McDowell 2009: 228]

Elsewhere he sets out Sellar’s account on which his own is closely based (in these regards, at least).

The conceptual episodes Sellars is concerned with, when he speaks of visual experiences as claims, are not as such cases of judging. Even if one does judge that things are as they look, having them look that way to one is not the same as judging that they are that way. In some cases, perhaps, one does judge that things are a certain way when look that way-acquiring the belief that they are that way by freely up one's mind that they are that way. But more typically, perceptual belief-acquisition is not a matter of judging, of actively exercising control over one's cognitive life, at all. Unless there are grounds for suspicion, such as odd lighting conditions, having it look to one as if things are a certain way-ostensibly seeing things to be that way becomes accepting that things are that way by a sort of default, involving no exercise of the freedom that figures in a Kantian conception of judgment. So there is a disconnection between perceptual experience and judging. [McDowell 2009: 11]

As in the key statement from Mind and World I quoted above, this passage suggests that experiences have a content, contain a claim (or rather many claims), that can be endorsed in a judgement. They share the same content, the sort of thing that could be put forward as a claim. That is what the idea of experience as conceptually structured buys for McDowell. But how does an experience provide a positive reason for a judgement? The following passage, which starts with an example that emphasises the distinction between experience and belief, also contains a suggestive metaphor.

Consider a person who thinks her visual experience does not put her in a position to say how things are in some respect. But she later realizes she was wrong about that, and says something on these lines: I thought I was looking at the tie under one of those lights that make it impossible to tell what color things are, so I thought it merely looked green to me, but I now realize that I was seeing it to be green… Our subject accepted the less committal proposition, but having an impression is not to be identified with accepting such propositions, any more than it is to be identified with accepting the more committal proposition that constitutes the impression’s content. An impression is something like an invitation—a petition, as Robert Brandom puts it in his contribution to this volume—to accept a proposition about the objective world. Our subject refused the invitation, but responded to it to the extent of accepting a proposition about how things looked to her. But one need not respond, even to that extent, to the invitation to belief that an impression is. [McDowell 2002: 278]

I mis-remembered Mind and World as also using the idea of experience as invitation to believe but I do not think it does. It’s here in the later collection Reading McDowell [Smith 2002]. McDowell’s response here is to a challenge Barry Stroud issues.

McDowell nonetheless puts his problem of how experience can give rational support to empirical judgments as that of accounting for “the way appearances can constitute reasons for judgements about objective reality” (p.62). His answer appeals to “rational relations” between experiences and the judgments about the world that we make on the basis of them (p.52), and he appears to think of those relations as holding between the contents of the experiences and the beliefs (p.166). “Because it looks square,” he says, is “easily recognized” as giving a reason to believe “It is square” (p.165); it is the person’s reason for believing that the object is square. But is it recognized as a reason because we discern a certain “rational linkage” between the content of the experience and the content of the belief? I think the content of an experience alone cannot give a person reason, or be a person’s reason, to believe something. The content of an experience is typically expressed in a proposition, and propositions are not reasons, nor do they make other propositions reasonable. Propositions are true or false, not reasonable or unreasonable, justified or unjustified. Even if one proposition implies another, it does not justify, support, warrant, or make reasonable that other proposition. What is justified or reasonable or supported or warranted is a person’s accepting a certain proposition, or rejecting it, or taking some other attitude toward its truth. [Smith 2002: 89]

McDowell’s response to this worry includes the following thought:

Stroud writes: “‘Believe’ is perhaps not the best word to capture the attitude of acceptance or endorsement involved in perception, especially if it suggests actively making up one’s mind.” But my problem with the suggestion is not met by insisting, correctly enough, that belief-acquisition can be involuntary. My problem is that I think we need an idea of perception as something in which there is no attitude of acceptance or endorsement at all, but only, as I put it, an invitation to adopt such an attitude, which, in the best cases, consists in a fact’s making itself manifest to one. [McDowell 2002: 279]

I don’t know why this didn’t seem baffling to me before. Before repeating the metaphor of invitation, McDowell here stresses: “I think we need an idea of perception as something in which there is no attitude of acceptance or endorsement at all”. He needs that because experience is supposed to be what provides the grounds for perceptual beliefs and thus cannot simply be – cf Davidson's experience-free picture of justification – a full blown perceptual belief itself. But now, if it is anything less than accepting a claim – which is what is supposed to follow from the experience, not be the experience – what less than that would have any rational sway on subsequent belief at all? An invitation would have to be one which had a good chance of being accepted, not just one of a set of contradictory invitations found on the doormat of a popular socialite. It must be more than just some sort of hypothetical content, such as the antecedent to a conditional. It must be more than just the claim that could be made using a sentence. As Charles Travis puts it:

An English sentence is not in any way committed to things being some one way rather than another. It does not pretend, or purport, that that is how things are. If one understands the English sentence ‘Pigs swim’ one thereby has it on no authority at all that that is how things are. It would be a gross misunderstanding to see English as thus saddled with such a preposterous collection of contradictory commitments. [Travis 2004: 61]

I’ve always focused on the account of how experience might have the right sort of shape to carry a claim that could be endorsed in a subsequent judgement: its having a conceptual articulation modelled on Sellars’ Myth of Jones (according to which we just should not be worried about states containing claims modelled on explicit judgements). But I’ve insufficiently worried about how it was ever supposed to provide reason for that judgement. Of course, this is the focus of that Travis article: to say that there’s no logical space for a notion of representation that does what McDowell needed it to do. But it had not occurred to me until now how little McDowell ever offered by way of an account of the evidential or rationally compelling status of the content supposedly contained in an experience on subsequent judgement. Unless the experience is in some partial sense always already endorsed, what weight can it carry for subsequent judgement?

The decisive moment in the conjuring trick looks to be stressing how the same content can be both contained in an experience and also endorsed in a judgement, not saying why the experience provides any reason at all to do that.

McDowell, J. (1994) Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
McDowell, J. (2002) ‘Responses’ In Reading McDowell, N. Smith (ed.), 269–305. London: Routledge.
McDowell, J. (2009) Having the World in View. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Smith, N. (ed.) (2002) Reading McDowell. London: Routledge
Travis, C. (2004) ‘The Silence of the Senses’ Mind, 113: 59–94.

Spandrels as counter-examples to evolutionary-theoretic accounts of mental disorder

Because of the debate in one of the modules of the Philosophy and Mental Health Programme we teach, Gloria and I fell into discussion of spandrels as part of a critique of evolutionary theoretic approaches to the concept of mental illness, disease or disorder.

One example of implicit reference to this is in a discussion of Boorse by Elselijn Kingma in Analysis. She comments:

A final interpretation of design as Nature’s intent is closely related to ‘natural’. This should capture the idea that Nature intended there to be men and women, but it did not intend blind people. The latter are an accident, perhaps a ‘freak of nature’. Since I, and I suspect Boorse, reject an appeal to intelligent creation, the most obvious place to justify an appeal to design or Nature’s intent is evolutionary biology. This is not an attractive position for Boorse, however, who explicitly rejects the idea that evolution is relevant to physiological function and health (1976: 85). To evaluate this solution in detail goes beyond the scope of this paper, but if, as I suspect it must, this solution appeals to a difference between polymorphisms that are maintained by natural selection, such as eye-colour and sex- differences, and polymorphisms that are not maintained by natural selection, such as heart-defects, then it must at the very least dispose of the following problem. It must give a non-question begging account that explains why certain traits that are maintained by natural selection, such as sickle cell-anaemia, are nevertheless diseases. Since natural selection can enter into the explanation of both diseased and healthy traits (Sober 1980), this seems neither easy nor obvious... [Kingma 2007 italics added]

One of our students expressed the following eminently reasonable worry (in fact three good concerns) about the appeal to sickle-cell anaemia as a potential counter-example.

The reference to sickle-cell anemia isn’t entirely convincing to me. For one, this seems to be a fairly unique example, which is often the sole reference (at least that I’ve heard) for this type of argument about nature selecting disease. While, yes, one example is enough to disprove a general theory, are there any other examples of this conflict? I have a hard time thinking of conditions exactly like sickle-cell in this way, though there are certainly no shortage of traits originally selected by evolution which have become maladaptive in our present environment (insatiable hunger, metabolic problems, our capacity for salt-retention and resulting hypertension). The other argument I can see is that it’s actually sickle-cell trait (heterozygous allele) which has been selected by evolution; sickle-cell disease (homozygous allele) may be understood as an unfortunate consequence of that selection.

The problem for an evolutionary-selective account that Kingma flags stems from the thought that some things are maintained by natural selection but are nevertheless diseases. And hence the norm of maintenance by natural selection cannot be the norm whose failure is being tracked by, and hence sheds light on, intuitive judgements of illness, disease and disorder.

It seems to me, however, that this is rather the point of spandrels in thinking about natural selection. Spandrels are features maintained by natural selection. In other words they are selected. But they are not selected-for: the spandrel does not possess a function that would be appealed to in giving a natural selective explanation of fitness. This is implicit in our student’s comment that it is the ‘sickle-cell trait (heterozygous allele) which has been selected by evolution; sickle-cell disease (homozygous allele) may be understood as an unfortunate consequence of that selection’. It seems to me that this isn’t quite right. It is the sickle-cell trait (heterozygous allele) which has been selected-for by evolution. The sickle-cell disease (homozygous allele) is the spandrel: a feature selected but not selected-for. It occurs and is maintained because of the former and some biological laws and laws of probability, I imagine. Maintaining is thus disjunctive: occurring as either what is selected-for or what is selected but not selected-for.

This suggests that the misstep was to think of the relevant norm for assessing disease as being maintenance, instead of function or selection-for. But it leaves open whether, nevertheless, a spandrel such as sickle-cell anaemia serves as a counter-example to a general evolutionary-theoretic approach to disorder. It would, if there is no way to answer the challenge Kingma raises: It must give a non-question begging account that explains why certain traits that are maintained by natural selection, such as sickle cell-anaemia, are nevertheless diseases.

But it seems to me to be plausible that there are resources available to evolutionary theorists if they alter their gaze. Sickle-cell anaemia (homozygous allele) counts as a disease because it produces dysfunctions in the cardiovascular system. Short lived, too large red blood cells cannot perform the functions that explain, in natural-selective terms, the existence of the cardiovascular system. It is because of its effect on the performance of this that sickle-cell anaemia counts as a disease. Hence there are two natural selective characterisations in play: the disease is maintained as a spandrel because it rides piggy back on the heterozygous allele, which confers selective advantage in, let’s call it, the malaria-protecting system but itself, in the form of homozygous allele, is biologically dysfunctional in the cardiovascular system. One explains its prevalence; the other its disease status.

If so then it seems that spandrels can be accommodated without counting as counterexamples. The norm of disease might still be natural selective dysfunction as far spandrels are concerned. It is another question, however, especially in the case of mental illness whether there is a principled and non-question-begging method to pick out functions, spandrels and dysfunctions without merely relying on antecedent assumptions about what is and is not an illness, disease or disorder.

Kingma, E. (2007). What is it to be healthy? Analysis, 67, 128–133

The subject matter of the new Centre for the Study of Compassion

Today I went to the launch at UCLan for the Centre for the Study of Compassion including a memorial lecture by the new professor, Patrick Pietroni (pictured) on ‘What does a compassionate university look like?’ And then a talk by John Ballatt on the Darwin International Institute for the Study of Compassion (DIISC) scholarship programme.

The Centre’s key research areas include:

• the role of compassion in health and wellbeing 
• compassion in education and organisations 
• mentoring and compassionate leadership 
• mediation and compassionate approaches to justice 
• the role of compassion and cooperation in establishing sustainable communities

The mood or tone of both of today's talks was on the multidisciplinary basis for the proper study of compassion (and hence, too, an emerging DIISC network). Patrick Pietroni pointed out that compassion might be proximal, in the response to the needs of someone present (raising a question of the psychology why some such appeals command compassion and some do not) or distal. His talk stressed the latter, giving a number of examples of projects which helped people. In one, processes to aid the resettlement of refugees cut the time they spent in cramped B&B hotels in London from 24 to 6 months. Another subtly linked (through representations of where everyone lived shown in a communal room) isolated elderly in high rise accommodation with similarly housed single parents such that they came to support each other. The stress was on practical general strategies or systems to produce good effects. It did not matter whether anyone had had any personal I-thou feelings to those who partook of the systems. One simply had to think through, accurately, their needs.

Both he and John Ballatt also stressed the multitude of disciplines on which any study of compassion should draw, in the former’s case connecting theology’s focus on the golden rule, anthropology on pro social behaviour, social science and the spirit level, psychology on imprinting and empathy, the biology of altruism and its genetic explanation via completion, neurology’s interest in mirror neurones etc. Various disciplines could feed their perspectives into a spectrum of foci from the personal, to the social, to the environmental which in turn would feed into interventions in quite distinct areas (eg mentoring in the NHS, compassionate universities etc).

I couldn’t help wondering, though, what kind of placeholder ‘compassion’ was. For example, would it matter whether a system with sufficiently virtuous ends was ruthlessly efficiently run by soulless bureaucrats? And how would that relate, say, to the Biblical widow generously but practically uselessly donating her mite? Once compassion can take as its focus the mindless environment, is it clear that this is the same virtue as that involved in fellow-feeling? If it can be elicited from listening to the fourth movement of Mahler’s Fifth Symphony (singled out by Pietroni), how does that compare with practical effectiveness, as the systems approach emphasised?

By the end, I half wondered whether ‘compassion’ played the same role as ‘quality’ does in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Some thing, or property, or virtue that always lies on both sides all the many distinctions mentioned today. If so, does that matter providing some tacit grasp of the good is shared and communicated by examples rather than flowing from some more explicitly univocal concept?

Univie Summer School on Philosophy and Psychiatry

Call For Application (Deadline: February 15, 2019)

PHILOSOPHY AND PSYCHIATRY

Univie Summer School – Scientific World Conceptions (USS-SWC) July 1–12, 2019

The Univie Summer School – Scientific World Conceptions (USS-SWC) – until 2014 under the label "Vienna International Summer University" – will be held from July 1 to 12, 2019. The topic of the two-week course is „Philosophy and Psychiatry“ The main lecturers are Rachel Cooper (Lancaster University), Dominic Murphy (The University of Sydney) and Tim Thornton (University of Central Lancashire).

As an international interdisciplinary program, USS SWC brings graduate students in close contact with world-renowned scholars. The program is directed primarily to graduate students and junior researchers in fields related to the annual topic, but the organizers also encourage applications from gifted undergraduates and from people in all stages of their career who wish to broaden their horizon through crossdisciplinary studies of methodological and foundational issues in science.

The topic of the two-week course is „ Philosophy and Psychiatry “:

By its very nature, psychiatry – the medical specialism devoted to mental healthcare – raises as many conceptual as empirical questions. The philosophy of psychiatry is a rapidly emerging field which draws broadly on philosophical traditions – centrally analytic philosophy and phenomenology – to address a range of questions as broad as the demands made on psychiatry to address problems of human suffering, distress and disorder. It is also an area where philosophical methods, accounts and theories can be applied to and thus tested against psychiatric and psychopathological phenomena. But at its heart lies the question of whether, since psychiatry sees itself as part of medicine, the medical conceptualisation of illness and disease can be articulated in such a way that it properly applies to the distinct ‘problems of living’ that psychiatry addresses in response to the crisis of legitimacy often raised. This summer school will address a number key questions which impact on mental health care.

Application form and further information: http://www.univie.ac.at/ivc/SWC/

The Main Lecturers:

Rachel Cooper (Lancaster University) http://www.lancaster.ac.uk/people-profiles/Rachel-Cooper

Dominic Murphy (The University of Sydney) https://sydney.edu.au/science/people/dominic.murphy.php

Tim Thornton (University of Central Lancashire) https://www.uclan.ac.uk/staff_profiles/prof-tim-thornton.php

Guest lecturer:

Raffaella Campaner (Università di Bologna) https://www.unibo.it/sitoweb/raffaella.campaner/en

USS-SWC operates under the academic supervision of an International Program Committee of distinguished philosophers, historians, and scientists. Its members represent the scientific fields in the scope of USS-SWC, make contact to their home universities and will also support acknowledgement of courses taken by the students. USS-SWC is organised every year by the Institute Vienna Circle of the University of Vienna. http://ivc.univie.ac.at/ http://www.univie.ac.at/ivc/ http://wienerkreis.univie.ac.at/

Opening

Venue: Kapelle, Institut für Ethik und Recht in der Medizin, Campus der Universität Wien, Entrance 2.8

Time: Monday, July 1, 2019, 9 a.m.

Further Information www.univie.ac.at/ivc/SWC

Since 2010 USS-SWC is a part of the curriculum of the doctoral programme "The Sciences in Historical, Philosophical and Cultural Contexts" http://dkplus-sciences-contexts.univie.ac.at/

There is an exchange programme with Duke University (North Carolina): http://international.univie.ac.at/outgoing-students/non-eu-student-exchange-program/kom-2-bewerbungsunterlagen/

For further inquiries, please send email to martin.kusch@univie.ac.at or consult the IVC's Web site

Inquiries:

Organisation:
Robert Kaller
Institute Vienna Circle
Spitalgasse 2-4, Hof 1, 1090 Wien ivc@univie.ac.at
Tel. +43-1-4277-46504

Scientific director:
Prof. Martin Kusch
Department of Philosophy
University of Vienna martin.kusch@univie.ac.at

Idiographic Approach to Health

Idiographic Approach to Health

Edited by:
Raffaele De Luca Picione, University of Naples Federico II
Jensine Nedergaard, Aalborg University
Maria Francesca Freda, University of Naples Federico II
Sergio Salvatore, University of Salento
A volume in the series: Yearbook of Idiographic Science. Editor(s): Sergio Salvatore, University of Salento. Jaan Valsiner, Niels Bohr Professor of Cultural Psychology, Aalborg University.
In Press 2018
The concept of health is a challenge of great complexity in terms of theoretical, methodological and intervention within the idiographic frame.

Health cannot be considered an abstract condition, but a means, a resource aimed at achieving objectives that relate to the ability of people to lead their lives in a productive way - individually, socially, and economically. Health is a process that is not based on the definition of standards and categories on the basis of which typifying the states of health. Rather, it has to be considered a process, on a large scale and on many entangled levels, aimed at generating a culture of the health as a resource for individuals and communities and to promote skills needed to transform these resources into developmental goals.

The notion of health, indeed, defined and interpreted in terms of "state" and not of process, meets the immediate paradox of being an indicator of normativity by reason of which we risk a proliferation of new and potentially infinite forms of "deviation". The approach of the idiographic sciences (see previous volumes of the Yearbook Idiographic Science Series, by same publisher IAP) considers that every psychological process (but in general every process, from organic to the social and cultural ones) is characterized by a contextual, situated and contingent dynamics. That dynamics is always characterized by a never-ending opening of its cycles and great variability. Conditions of stagnation and hypostatization are characteristic of all forms of disease (physical, mental and social) that sclerotize relational links between people and their environments. Health is therefore a process that presents oscillation in the same way of any developmental process that has moments of crisis and rupture in order to re-organize new forms of relationship with the social and cultural environment.

This book represent a fruitful way to deep many cogent issues and to dialogue with an idiographic perspective in order to discuss the concept of health, to define its cultural meanings and possible polysemy (e.g., wellness, care, hygiene, quality of life, resilience, prevention, healing, deviation/normality, subjective potentiality for development, etc.), its areas of pertinence and intervention (somatic, psychological, social) trying to offer possible alternatives to the "normalization" of health and creating new incentives for the reflection.

CONTENTS
Series Editor’s Preface: Health: The General in the Unique, Jaan Valsiner. Health: A Current Challenge for the Idiographic Sciences, Maria Francesca Freda, Raffaele De Luca Picione, Jensine. Nedergaard, and Sergio Salvatore. SECTION 1: THE DYNAMIC CONSTRUCTION OF BORDERS BETWEEN HEALTH AND ILLNESS SECTION 1.1: CRITICAL ANALYSIS OF THE HEALTH NOTION. AN IDIOGRAPHIC LENS ON THE TOPIC. DIFFERENT PATHS BETWEEN GENERALIZATION AND IDIOGRAPHY. Five Inconsistencies in Scientific Discourse, Sven Hroar Klempe.The Enigmatic Soul of Health: From Balance to Inscape, Robert E. Innis. Values and the Singular Aims of Idiographic Inquiry, Tim Thornton. Psychopathology: Mental Illness and Relationship Between Idiography and Health: The Case of Transsexuals’ Experience, Roberto Vitelli. SECTION 1.2: HEALTHCARE RELATIONSHIP AND POSSIBLE FUNCTIONS OF IDIOGRAPHIC APPROACHES.Crisis of Medical Institution: An Idiographic Approach, Annalisa Venezia and Chiara Marangio. From Medicalizing Discourse to Situated Practices. From Reification to Semiotization of Processes of Sensemaking: The Function of Psychological Scaffolding in the Experience of the Disease Within the Healthcare Relationship, Raffaele De Luca Picione, Francesca Dicé, and Maria Francesca Freda. Communicative Partnership Between More Than Two: When a Child Becomes a Patient, Jensine Ingerslev Nedergaard and Elise Snitker Jensen.SECTION 1.3: THE CARE OF SOCIAL CONTEXT. THE EXTENSION OF IDIOGRAPHY TO WIDER FRAMES. Growing up in the Suburbs: Stories of Adolescents at Risk and of Their “Maestri di Strada”, Santa Parrello. The Generational Shift in the Family Business: Defining the Condition to Plan the Intervention, Barbara Cordella and Assunta Capasso. SECTION 2: NARRATIONS OF HEALTH AND ILLNESS SECTION 2.1: THE NARRATION OF THE UNSPEAKABLE. HEALTH AND ILLNESS IN ONE’S OWN EXPERIENCE. Disquieting Experiences, Borders, and Healthcare Processes, Lívia Mathias Simão and Giuseppina Marsico. “I Get Along Without You...”: On Billie Holiday, Clichés and Psychological Truth, Yair Neuman.Lessons of Pathosophy—And Implications for Medical Care, Elin Håkonsen Martinsen. SECTION 2.2: THE MODELLING OF NARRATIVES PROCESSES IN THE CLINICAL CONTEXT. Narrative Functions to Support the Meaning-Making Process During Cancer Traumatic Experience in Pediatric Oncology, Maria Luisa Martino and Maria Francesca Freda. The Power of Self-Narratives in Health, João Tiago Oliveira, Miguel M. Gonçalves, João Batista, and Adrián Montesano.Commentary: The Enchantment of Stories, Luca Tateo. SECTION 2.3: THE IDIOGRAPHIC CHALLENGE OF NARRATIONS IN THE RESEARCH PROCESSES. The Idiographic Science Perspective Applied to the Treatment of Younger Women with BRCA Mutation, Emanuela Saita, Sara Molgora, and Chiara Acquati. Risk and Prevention: Women’s Experiences of Barriers to Cancer Screening, Daniela Lemmo and Adele Nunziante Cesàro. The Role of Narrative in Promoting Changes in Illness Transitions of the Life-Span: An Idiographic Approach, Andrea Smorti and Chiara Fioretti. Author Biosketches.

Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences – Volume 11, Issue 1 (June 2018)

“Dear Colleague,

I'm pleased to inform you that the new issue of the international online journal Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences has been published, it is freely readable at:

www.crossingdialogues.com/current_issue.htm

Volume 11, Issue 1, June 2018

ORIGINAL ARTICLES

M. Aragona
The influence of Georg Simmel on Karl Jaspers' empathic understanding (Verstehen)

M. Aragona et al.
Translation and cultural adaptation of the Arabic version of the List of Migration Experiences (LiMEs)

A. M. Petta et al.
Cultural adaptation of the Lifespan Memory Interview in the Asylum Seekers (LMI-AS)

NEGATIVE EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS

V. Pettinicchio et al.
Unaccompanied foreign minors victims of violence: a comparison between new and old arrivals in Rome

HISTORY OF MENTAL CONCEPTS

M. Aragona

Causal understanding: Max Weber and the interpretation of human actions

DIALOGUES

R. Henman
A Response to Maung's Commentary on Moreira-Almeida and Araujo

Dialogues in Philosophy, Mental and Neuro Sciences proposes and includes Original Papers, Negative Experimental Results, History of Mental Concepts, New Ideas and Dialogues, as described in the guidelines for the authors.

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Simplicity in writing and thinking

I’ve been having a short email discussion of writing with a correspondent from East Molesey. I had suggested that, when reading fiction, I do not positively enjoy good style. Rather, I merely dislike bad style, which sticks out and is obtrusive.

(Cf: Again, our eye passes over printed lines differently from the way it passes over arbitrary pothooks and squiggles. (But I am not speaking here of what can be found out by observing the movement of the eyes of a reader.) The glance slides, one would like to say, entirely unimpeded, without becoming snagged, and yet it doesn’t skid. [Wittgenstein 1953 §168])

Good prose, I suggested, is invisible. And hence, one mistake I had made in one co-authored philosophy piece was picking a co-author who had substantial style aims. I, I suggested (obviously naively), had had none except to render myself invisible.

East Molesey replied “Odd that you think you don’t / should not show in your writing. Perhaps you view what you are doing as letting the ideas and arguments do the work and not your words and your thinking - curious if so!”

Putting this response aside I then stumbled across an article from a week ago in the Guardian on ‘How to write a great sentence?’.

The article raises, and flags some complications in, the issue of why one might aim for a simple writing style.

One very natural way to think of all this is as writing or language as a code for prior thought. One thinks the thought and then finds the right and simplest words with which to express it. Wittgenstein comments about a French politician who thought that French was unique as the only language in which the word order is the same as the order of concepts in thought.

This case is similar to the one in which someone imagines that one could not think a sentence with the curious word order of German or Latin just as it stands. One first has to think it, and then one arranges the words in that strange order. (A French politician once wrote that it was a peculiarity of the French language that in it words occur in the order in which one thinks them.) [Wittgenstein 1953 §336]

Wittgenstein suggests some exercises of saying a sentence while thinking the thought, saying one without thinking the other and thinking the other without saying the first. His suggestion seems to be that the thought is in the words not prior to them. He also draws an analogy with the interdependence of notes and their expression in music.

But if so, what of the strange sentence discussed in the Guardian article attributed to Kate Moss: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels"? Suppose one thinks that the way those words are used is odd. The article provides a reason to think so. It says:

Skinny, usually an adjective, is here turned into an abstract noun, paired with another abstract noun, nothing. And yet skinny is also quasi-concrete, because where it lies in the sentence suggests that it can actually be felt, just as food has a taste. But feels also retains its non-sensuous sense of intuiting or experiencing something: skinny feels good. As the sentence ends with the snap of a stressed syllable, our perspective has been altered in a way that feels true, even if we don’t share the sentiment. Reality has shifted a little and then clicked back into place.

If the words are used in some strained (by contrast with normal), novel and non-standard context, then what thought was expressed - oddly - by those words in this non-standard way? What would be the underlying thought stripped of the odd way of putting it? (If that sentence is not weird enough, one can always ask it of one that more obviously is.)

Following the line of thought in John McDowell's account of Davidsonian truth theories, I think the only way to state the thought expressed with words oddly used is with the very same words used in the same odd way. The sentence "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels" states that / means / is true iff nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

One has to have ears to hear the second part of that long sentence in the right way. Truths about meaning require the right audience. So I'd say, in response to the question my correspondent asked: the ideas and arguments should/do indeed do the work as expressed in the words and thoughts. Preferences about style are preferences about thinking and thoughts.

The Guardian article goes on to note the way that linking words are much less used to carry implications from one sentence to the next now compared to the past.

Sentences have become less shackled to each other. Those written a few hundred years ago typically began with a whereof or a howsobeit, to resume an unfinished thought. And they used lots of conjunctive adverbs, those connecting words like moreover, namely and indeed. Such adverbs are in historical retreat. The use of indeed peaked in print in the 18th century and has been declining ever since. The number of howevers and moreovers has been falling since the 1840s.

That raises a nice related example. Imagine we had a two sentences or thoughts:

• Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels.

and

• Don't eat that Yorkshire pudding! 

(It doesn't matter that this is an injunction. One might say: no one should eat the Yorkshire pudding. But an injunction makes the normative nature of the inference more explicit.)

In the past (if the history in the article is correct), we might have written or said, with a suitable connection:

• Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. So, don't eat that Yorkshire pudding!

Despite the word 'so', the reader still needs to see the force of the connection from the previous sentence to the new next one (So, don't eat that Yorkshire pudding!). We might worry about this and decide to flag the connection. "So, don't eat that Yorkshire pudding!" follows from the previous sentence. The whole thought involves a movement from the first sentence through to the end of the second.). What better to flag this than the word 'so'?! Hence:

• Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels. So, so don't eat that Yorkshire pudding!

But now the following thought should come just as naturally. Despite the word 'so' appearing at the start of the second sentence, the reader still needs to see the force of the connection from the previous sentence to the new next one. What better to flag this than the word 'so'?!

etc.

Just as we might need eyes to see or ears to hear the words used as they are in Kate Moss' sentence, so we need eyes to see or ears to hear how one sentence is a reason for the next, to grasp the whole thought expressed. The style and the thought say, and need to say, the same.