Review of Tanney, J. (2013) Rules, Reason and Self Knowledge, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

Rules, Reason and Self Knowledge gathers papers written since 1995 on a number of overlapping subjects with a helpful introduction which attempts to draw out the main themes. A retrospective collection allows for different possibilities of lumping and splitting. In this case, Tanney presents the collection in four non-chronological sections on ‘Rules and normativity’, ‘Reason-explanation and mental causation’, ‘Philosophical elucidation and cognitive science’ and ‘Self-knowledge’. I will not say anything about the final section, but the first three sections can all be seen as an attempt to criticise a dominant picture of the philosophy of mind which arose, in part, through the criticism in the 1960s and 70s of the ‘strong current of neo-Wittgensteinian small red books’ (ie. ‘most of the books in the series edited by R.F. Holland, Studies in Philosophical Psychology, including Anthony Kenny, Action, Emotion and Will, London, 1963, and A. I. Melden, Free Action, London, 1961.’) against which Davidson thought of himself (and Hempel) as swimming [Davidson 2001: 261, 4]. This collection can be thought of as a defence of, and perhaps a late addition to, that Routledge & Kegan Paul series. It pitches Wittgenstein and Ryle against Davidson, Putnam and Fodor. One aim is to ‘reintroduc[e] Wittgensteinian territory into the contemporary landscape’ [Tanney 2013: 162].

The picture of mind Tanney opposes turns on a view of ‘folk psychology’ as a referential and causal theory of action, commensurable with a neuropsychology of, perhaps, the very same inner states. She contests the nature and scope of such an explanatory stance. Two broad areas of criticisms concern the connection between this view action explanation and rules and normativity, a key focus of interest of both the Wittgensteinian authors of the ‘small red books’ as well as contemporary philosophers such as McDowell and Brandom.

In the first section of the book, ‘Rules and normativity’, Tanney argues that human action (‘doings, sayings, thinkings and perceivings’ [ibid: 2]) can be assessed along a normative dimension but this is not the result of normative properties of mental states construed individualistically. The norms are somehow there in advance. Rule following activity cannot itself be explained folk psychologically because folk psychology presupposes rule following ability.

The third section of the collection, ‘Philosophical elucidation and cognitive science’, addresses a second broad criticism connected to rules and normativity: the cognitive psychological explanation of rational abilities – such as Fodor’s Representational Theory of Mind – cannot work because it is defeated by regress arguments found in Wittgenstein and Ryle. If the mind performs computational operations on representations, then the rules governing those operations will also need to be represented and that initiates a regress of rules.

A distinct line of criticism concerns the best way to understand explanation of human action by appeal to reasons. On the opposed picture of mind, such explanation works by referring to internal states of an agent which both rationalise and cause actions. Tanney rejects the first element (that it refers to internal states) and the way, at least, in which the second (the rationalising element) and third (the causal element) are understood. (It may be more accurate to say that she simply rejects the third element but there is nuance in this.) Rather than understanding psychological explanation as referring to first- or second-order physical properties of an individual, Tanney suggests that they serve as ‘tools that help us keep track of [the subject] by carving out aspects of what she says and does that we can, to a greater or lesser extent, understand’ [ibid: 147].

In what seems to me to be the strongest essay in this second section, ‘Why reasons may not be causes’, Tanney attacks Davidson’s argument that reason explanation must also be causal to distinguish a reason for an action from the reason and only causation promises to give an account of the ‘mysterious connection’ between reasons and actions. Tanney argues that causation does not provide a satisfactory addition and that no addition is in fact needed.

Firstly, taking the example of Oedipus unknowingly killing his father, there is no need to add causation into the account because it is not needed to distinguish between his reasons for killing the threatening old man and any more ‘Oedipal’ desires to kill his father. The latter are irrelevant to explaining his actions because he does not believe the old man is his father. Thus it does not serve as part of a reason he has for killing the old man. In the case of overridden reasons, Tanney assumes that Oedipus does know that the old man is his father and that in addition to his Oedipal desires (to kill him) he also has moral qualms about killing his father. Nevertheless, these qualms are overridden by his own desire to survive when threatened and so he kills his father. Given this scenario, Oedipus’s Oedipal desires do not form part of his reason for killing his father even though they are reasons he has. They are not his reason because they are overridden by his moral qualms. Davidson would explain this by saying that the Oedipal reason is not causally active in this case: that causation makes the difference between a reason and the reason. But as Tanney points out, this assumption is unwarranted once an account of competing reasons is given which trades only on rational and motivational concepts. A difference in the space of reasons can make the difference (between a reason one has and the reason one acts) instead.

Tanney concludes that, once a more complex story of weighted reasons for actions is in place, there is no need to add a causal element to reason explanation. She then goes on to suggest a deeper underlying motive for thinking that there must be some such causal addition. This is that there should be a determinate relation between reasons for action and action: that the former should be a sufficient condition for the latter. But she suggests that this is too strong a requirement to place on rational explanation. Sometimes reasons just are insufficient for action.

The paper also addresses broader worries about anomalous monism which are related to now more familiar qualms. But this initial challenge to the efficacy of Davidson’s ‘Actions, reasons and causes’ to justify a causal theory of action against the qualms of the neo-Wittgensteinians is a key element in this collection.

This negative argument against a philosophical theory of action explanation is combined with a further, and I think less successful, positive claim about the nature of action explanation itself. In ‘Reason-explanation and the contents of the mind’ Tanney considers the case of someone running out of a building. She suggests that being told that the building is on fire can serve as a proper and complete explanation for that action: ‘all we need to relieve our puzzlement is a wider view of the context or the circumstances in which the action takes place’ [ibid: 136]. In saying this, she contrasts her view with one that requires that the explanation has to include, or presuppose, the conception of the circumstances that the agent herself has.

Some explanations will have to mention the agent’s conception of the circumstances. This will be so when the agent has a misconception that explains her action. Suppose the building was not on fire. The woman might have fled because she thought it was. But it does not follow from the fact that some explanations will have to mention the agent’s conception of the circumstances that all explanations do – even, say, when there is no misconception involved. [ibid: 136]

The danger with this line of thought is that it risks moving too quickly from the pragmatics of action explanation to a substantial ontological claim. The motivation for the assumption that pragmatics is a reliable guide to what is / is not presupposed by action explanation seems to be an independent assumption about the nature of the subject’s conception of her circumstances should Tanney’s conclusion be rejected: that such conceptions are hidden or inner. In fact, she expresses the opposite worry by denying that ‘in appealing to how she conceives her situation, we must be homing in on something hidden or inner’. Such a comment implies that the idea of a subject’s conception of her circumstances is itself innocent and might, indeed, be implicitly presupposed by all action explanation even when not explicitly mentioned. But this does not seem to be her actual conclusion. I suspect that fear of invoking something hidden or inner motivates downplaying this element entirely, even in an innocent version, in favour of what is explicitly in full view and outer: the circumstances in which actions take place.

I worry that this combination of a successful therapeutic rejection of philosophical theorising coupled with a less convincing revisionary move is also present (along with much of value) in one of the other clear highlights of the collection: ‘De-individualising norms of rationality’, which connects Davidson’s account of action explanation with the role of rules and normativity. In the first section. Tanney offers the following thumbnail sketch of one version of Davidson’s position which is worth quoting in full.

In ‘How is weakness of the will possible?’ Davidson suggests that the judgment that manifests the relative ranking of reasons — i.e., the result of deliberation — is an “all things considered judgment”. An all things considered judgment is “doubly relativized”. First it is relativized according to the way in which the desire would be satisfied in the commission of the action (say, as in the prima facie judgment: “Spending the weekend in Barcelona is desirable insofar as it is likely to yield adventure”). It is relativized also according to its place with respect to other desires and in light of the agent’s beliefs, principles, and values. This judgment might be something like: “In light of my ranking the opportunity for adventure over prudential concerns, and in light of my beliefs about what spending the weekend in Barcelona will involve, and so on, spending the weekend in Barcelona is desirable”. According to Davidson, this all things considered judgment is conditional in form and thus, like the singly relativized judgments that logically precede it, does not entail the kind of judgment which is a necessary concomitant to intentional action. Again, this latter judgment — which Davidson identifies as an intention — must be unconditional, or derelativized. So the logical gap that exists between the contents of prima facie evaluations, or sentences describing them, and the contents of intentions, or sentences describing them, is still preserved on the extended model between all things considered judgments and actions. The move from a doubly relativized judgment like “Assuming that I have considered all relevant things, I ought to spend the weekend in Barcelona” to an unconditional (derelativized) judgment like “I ought to spend the weekend in Barcelona” is not a move that is prescribed by first-order logic since, presumably, some piece of relevant information not considered might always defeat the claim that I ought to spend the weekend in Barcelona. Thus, the failure to make such a move in one’s thinking cannot (yet) be taken to exhibit a kind of logical inconsistency. [ibid: 27-8]

We get to this point via the fact that the elements in a standard Davidsonian account of action contain pro-attitudues and beliefs such as:

·         Any act of mine which is likely to yield adventure is desirable

·         Spending the weekend in Barcelona is likely to yield adventure

But these will generate conclusions to a practical syllogism of this form:

·         Any act of mine which is my spending the weekend in Barcelona is one I may judge to be desirable

which seems too strong because other factors might make some such acts undesirable. So Davidson changes the form in ‘How is weakness of the will possible?’ to make the premises and conclusion all expressions of merely prima facie desirability: Any action of mine is desirable insofar as it is likely to yield adventure thus permitting trumping by other factors.

But now the problem with the account is that there is a gap between the outcome of the practical syllogism if, as Davidson thinks, the ‘action itself must correspond to something stronger than a ‘prima facie’ evaluation that the act is desirable in a certain respect; it must correspond to an unconditional or all-out, singular judgment expressing the desirability of a particular action’ [ibid: 25-6] So by what rational step does one get from a relativised prima facie judgement to an un-relativised all out judgement? One thing that is needed is a ranking of competing prima facie reasons. And this is the all things considered judgement (NB not an unconditional all out judgement) of the passage above. This judgement – which Tanney suggests might be ‘In light of my ranking the opportunity for adventure over prudential concerns, and in light of my beliefs about what spending the weekend in Barcelona will involve, and so on, spending the weekend in Barcelona is desirable’ – still does not imply an all out judgement and no such logical transition is available in standard logic.

So the patch (in Tanney’s phrase) Davidson adds is an extra principle, the principle of continence, that I ought to act in accordance with my all things considered judgment. This has the additional virtue that its violation promises an account of akrasia. The akratic subject is guilty of irrationality, according to Davidson, because he violates this second order principle. So the akratic helps illustrate – through a kind of deficit study – the structure of the normal case. But that prompts the question of whether the patch really helps. The key objection is that the principle is not sufficient without begging a question of its own application. The problem is: ‘if my implementation of the principle of continence, say, is needed to move me from an all things considered judgment to action, then why is not a higher-order principle of continence needed to tell me how I am to implement the principle of continence non-akratically, and so on?’ [ibid: 35]

At this point Tanney deploys the regress argument to this initial target, thus connection Davidson’s account of action explanation with Wittgenstein’s rule following considerations.

Is my holding the principle of continence, for example, tantamount to my having a pro-attitude toward my acting in accordance with my all things considered judgment?...
Perhaps the principle of continence is the content of an all things considered judgment. Then I judge, all things considered, that I ought to act in accordance with my all things considered judgments. Now the internal regress is explicit. If holding the principle (judging that I ought to act in accordance with my all things considered judgment) were explanatory of my rational abilities at all, it would only be if the connection between my all things considered judgments and my actions were presupposed. But this was precisely the connection that the principle was invoked to explain.[Ibid: 36]

The problem doesn’t just lie with the norm expressed by the principle of continence. That is only one aspect of practical reasoning. Others include the links between perception and judgement, conceptual links within judgement as well as judgement to action. But no patch – no higher principle grasped by the subject – will be able explain the subject’s ability to play what Tanney elsewhere calls the ‘rule following game’. So the patch is not sufficient to explain the ability. But nor is it necessary.

Grasp of the principle of continence is supposed to dictate how the agent acts once he has weighed up his ‘all things considered’ judgement. It glues that judgement to a corresponding action. But in this case, that would be either a judgement that it is better to return to the park or a judgement that it is better to stay on the tram. The outcome depends on the relative strength of those desires. On Davidson’s account, the akratic is only irrational because, despite the fact that his all things considered desire is (in the example) to stay on the tram, his desire to return to the park trumps the principle of continence which would make him act on the desire is to stay on the tram and thus he returns to the park. But, as Tanney argues, if his all things considered judgement is to stay on the tram, then merely by his status as ‘an agent, a deliberator, a practical reasoner’ he should correct his impulse to return to the park. ‘After all, what is the point of his deliberating if he is not going to act in accordance with his deliberations? Indeed, why would he get as far along in the deliberation process as to reach the all things considered judgment if he will not act in accordance with it?’ [ibid: 34]

So the higher order principle cannot play the explanatory role Davidson wants for it. That is not to say that it cannot play a diagnostic role in explaining what has gone wrong with someone’s thinking. But it cannot be an ‘object of cognition’ which explains normal success.

In filling out this latter point, Tanney goes on to reject the idea that tacit knowledge of the principle would be explanatory. The key objection is that this also begs the question of tacitly deploying the principle correctly. Going tacit doesn’t change things. A related alternative is to think of grasp of the principle as a kind of causal instantiation of it in such a way that causally yields correct moves. But this blurs normative rules and causal laws. Causal determinants of action cannot also prescriptively guide action. From this, she concludes that conformity with the norms of rationality is not a cognitive achievement.

There is a strong intuition that we need to make out an internal connection between norms and the individual who acts in accordance with them in order to make sense of the intuition that she acts because of the norms. A disposition to act in accordance with the norms does not seem to give us the right kind of non-contingent relation required for explanation. But, I argue, this relation cannot be made out as a cognitive one such that the norms themselves are objects of knowledge or desired ends and a person engages in reasoning to implement or satisfy them. This is because the “reasoning” here will presuppose the dispositions that attributing these very norms was meant to explain. [ibid: 42]

Now this denial turns on an explanatory connection and seems right to me. It’s a rejection of the ‘intellectualist legend’ Ryle also targets. But I still want to hang onto the idea that following a rule correctly can be a case of my having grasped it. In fact, I think that this is a key distinction between rule following and rule accord (a distinction Tanney deploys herself in the third section of the book ‘Philosophical elucidation and cognitive science’ to attack Fodor). Section 6 of the paper is aimed against just this idea.

Perhaps attributing to me knowledge of a norm of rationality does not explain my rational abilities either directly, or via second-order explicational abilities, by the arguments above; but perhaps my having knowledge of the norms consists in my ability to justify my actions. And perhaps my having this second-order ability is necessary for me to be considered truly rational. If so, maybe we can make out the sought after “internal” connection after all. My following a rule or obeying a norm, as opposed to my merely acting in accordance with it, might consist in my ability to justify my actions in light of the principle prescribing it. [ibid: 42]

Tanney points out a distinction between justifying a move in chess by citing a rule and justifying a rational action by citing a rational norm. In the former case, the justificatory move is not itself a move within a chess game but a comment on it. But in the latter, the justificatory move is of just the same sort as the ground level move it was supposed to justify.

I am not sure that I follow this objection. It seems to be a justificatory analogue of the explanatory argument before. In the latter case, the charge is that one cannot deploy higher level principles to explain rule following behaviour because that explanation would beg the question. If rule following behaviour needed explaining, this would not explain it. So in this case, the analogue would be that rule following behaviour cannot be justified by appeal to rules because the justification would beg the question. If it needed justifying, this would not justify it. Such an argument has echoes of Carroll’s ‘Tortoise and Achilles’. But it seems to assume that the only successful justification of rule following behaviour would have to work from a perspective outside rule following altogether. To justify the grasp of a particular rule, one would need to justify the very idea of rule following at all. But that seems an unreasonable demand. An intermediate position would connect an individual’s grasp of a rule with their ability to explain and to justify their behaviour in accord with their conception of the rule but only to those with ‘eyes to see’. Such a justification might consist in offering example moves.

Tanney concludes:

But in what sense, then, do the norms of rationality govern thought and action if they are not properly construed as objects of cognition? The answer is that they set up the practice of ascribing thoughts and action. This is a point often made by Davidson in discussions about the principle of charity. The principles of rationality seem to play the same kind of role. They are not rules or norms that figure in our attributive practices. They are presupposed by it. But if they ground the practice of interpretation, it would be a category mistake to explain features of the practice by individualizing them. [ibid: 44-5]

There seem to me to be two senses of ‘individualise’ available. On one, rational demands result from a kind of personal bootstrapping of normative force from non-normative elements. But, like Wittgenstein’s regress of interpretations, such justification or explanation faces a vicious regress. On the other, it means something like: play a role in a subject’s mental life. Tanney appears to reject both. But rejecting the latter makes the difference of rule following and rule accord lie merely in the eye of the interpreter.

A short review can only flag a potential worry. In other papers such as ‘Playing the rule-following game’ and ‘How to resist mental representations’ the distinction between following a rule and merely according with a rule plays an important critical role and so it cannot be quickly assumed that the contrast is then downplayed or undermined with more careful analysis. But there seem to be a number of places (eg ‘To insist that someone cannot solve the puzzle unless she somehow conceives the rules (even if she cannot articulate them, even to herself) and acts in the light of her conception of the rules is simply dogmatic... Acting in accordance with the rules is solving the puzzle in certain cases.’ [ibid: 85-6]) in which a criticism of a substantive philosophical theory of a subject’s conception apparently leads to a denial of any role for such a conception and there is an emphasis, instead, on the circumstances in which rule following abilities are reasonably ascribed by others on the basis of behaviour.

If that impression is correct then there is an historical parallel. One of the criticisms raised against the small red books of the neo-Wittgensteinians – whether fairly or not – was an undue sympathy to some form of philosophical behaviourism. Whether anything of that worry applies to this latest addition to that tradition is merely one of the many reasons it merits careful study.

References

Davidson, D. (2001) Essays on Actions and Events, Oxford: Clarendon Press

Tanney, J. (2013) Rules, Reason and Self Knowledge, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press

A sense of embodiment

I was told by a friend whom I had not seen in a while that, used to a life of the mind, he had recently been jolted into thinking more about what it was like, practically, to be embodied. Not the matter of the intellectual idea that embodiment plays a key and irreducible role in our being the subjects we are. One might hold such a view - enactivism, for example - in the academic and theoretical way one holds any epistemological or ontological thesis. But rather, he said, he had thrown himself into getting fit, working out and learning to dance.

This seems to be a sequence in increasing order of commitment to a sense of embodiment. One might get fit merely in order to move one's Cartesian ego about more effectively. Knowing the contingencies one might, more or less resentfully, put in the work to see more of the world. Working out is, perhaps, a step further. More than just moving the point of origin of one's visual field, it seems to be a requirement for a broader series of sensorimotor contingencies having to do with different sorts of practical abilities. Still, I can imagine a kind of grudging Cartesian being pulled so far by the unfortunate fact of being tied to a body in a bit more than just the way the captain sits on the bridge of a ship. But there may be no greater sense of embodiment than is captured by awareness - with Descartes - of the inadequacy of that analogy.

The idea that seems to push beyond that and to a real sense of embodiment is the third of my friend's resolutions. To see the point and appeal of dancing is not merely a concession to embodiment but a revelling in it. That there is such an appeal suggests that even if Cartesianism were a true account of our predicament as subjects it would, nevertheless, not ring true, to follow Bernard Williams' desideratum for philosophy.

INPP 2013 travelling symposium

Zipping up on the west coast line after an informal meeting with few people at Bill Fulford's house in London to mull over broadening the intellectual resources for philosophy and psychiatry, I am thinking a bit about what might happen to academic conferences in a recessional period. This year, there might have been a single INPP conference in Italy but for understandable reasons (“It’s the conomy, Stupid!”) it didn't happen. In the UK at least, we have benefitted from a travelling symposium (Durham, Kings College London, Oxford) and I like to think that, although I didn't lift a finger to help with the organisation, I had something to do with its conception (over a coffee or two with Werdie van Staden, Grant Gillett, Derek Bolton and Angela Woods at the INPP meeting at Otago, Dunedin last year).

I really enjoyed the Durham day on the future of phenomenology. (My own paper attempted to address phenomenology and how bridges might best be built between analytic philosophy and phenomenological accounts: how 'we' might borrow 'their' results and the familiar worries that any such accounts of psychopathology raise.) I got a chance to talk to Angela Woods about the use of twitter but also Nev Jones (who put the first version of the fifth, I think, part of her talk under erasure; if I had done that my irony would have been ironic whilst hers, more powerfully, wasn't), author of the consistently interesting Ruminations on Madness blog (note to self: I will list the blogs I read which are, unlike my own, somehow serious and grown up. Three spring to mind as quite brilliant.)

I am skipping Kings sadly because I have too much work to do to attend it but will pop down to the Oxford session. In a future world where big conferences are too much of a financial stretch, I rather like this Cricket test series reworking.

Notes for a talk on Sass and Parnas ‘Explaining schizophrenia: the relevance of phenomenology’

Sass and Parnas argue that:

1: That phenomenology can offer explanation as well as description in virtue of the connections (of phenomenological implication) between mental aspects.

2: That the connections charted in phenomenology cannot be captured within analytic philosophy of mind.

I will examine 2. (On a suitably relaxed conception of explanation, 1 seems fine.)

Sass and Parnas’ basic account of schizophrenia

[T]he core abnormality in schizophrenia is a particular kind of disturbance of consciousness and, especially, of the sense of self or ipseity that is normally implicit in each act of awareness... Ipse-identity or ipseity refers to a crucial sense of self-sameness, as existing as a subject of experience that is at one with oneself at any given moment... This self or ipseity disturbance has two main aspects or features that may at first sound mutually contradictory, but are in fact complementary.
The first is hyper-reflexivity -which refers to a kind of exaggerated self-consciousness, that is, a tendency to direct focal, objectifying attention toward processes and phenomena that would normally be ‘inhabited’ or experienced as part of oneself.
The second is diminished self-affection -which refers to a decline in the (passively or automatically) experienced sense of existing as a living and unified subject of awareness.
These mutations of the act of awareness are typically, perhaps necessarily, accompanied by alteration in the objects or field of awareness – namely, by disruption of the focus or salience with which objects and meanings emerge from a background context... disturbed perceptual or conceptual ‘grip’ or ‘hold’ on the world. [68-9]

Why explanation in addition to description?

The features of the basic account connect to other features: a kind of holism.

Two sorts of relation: synchronic and diachronic.

Within the first or synchronic realm, we discuss three kinds of relationship: equiprimordial, constitutive, and expressive - all of which involve not causation but a kind of phenomenological implication. [63]

Overview of the views they reject

They reject the restriction of relevant connections to i) rational reason relations and ii) psychophysical laws. They also reject the constitutive principle of rationality.

It should be evident from the above that discussion of mental causation in recent analytic philosophy has focused largely on the question of the rational coherence and potential explanatory significance of individual mental contents, eg., the belief that there is an Italian restaurant on the corner; the desire that one eat an Italian meal. Only phenomena that can be said to contain (or be describable in terms of) this sort of ‘propositional content’ are capable of serving the kind of rationalising or justificatory function that is required by the practical syllogism... It is here that the distinctness of the phenomenological perspective becomes important. [76]

This constitutive type of relationship does not, incidentally, conform to either of the two types of explanation that are countenanced by many recent Anglo-American philosophers: it is neither ‘a psychological link holding between states of affairs or events’ nor ‘a relationship of making intelligible holding between sentences’ ... - the latter being the only form of mental causation accepted by many analytic philosophers...[79-80]

Many Anglo American philosophers have been persuaded by Davidson’s claim that mental explanation, or the very possibility of the ascription of mental states in the course of interpersonal understanding, simply requires that one be able to assume that the essential rationality of the person being understood or explained, and that, when such an assumption cannot be made..., the only alternative is to resort to explanation of a physicalistic sort. [75]

The argument for phenomenology as explanation as well as description turns on the nature of phenomenological implication. Could the various forms of phenomenological implication be understood within a broader notion of Anglo-American philosophy?

Phenomenological implication does not fir Anglo-American philosophy

Consider, for example, our concepts of diminished self affection, hyper-reflexivity, and loss of cognitive perceptual ‘hold’: these are not reasons nor are they causes, at least of a physicalist kind. [76]

In our view, the three facets..., and also the form and emblematic content of experiential life, are linked together in relationships of necessary implication rather than contingent correlation or causal interaction. The implications in question are not, however, logical (like the practical syllogism) but, rather, phenomenological in nature... [81]

Three sorts of synchronic relation

The connection between hyper-reflexivity and diminished self affection is equiprimordial. Why?

Indeed, it might be argued that these two disturbances are really one and the same phenomenon, the very same distortion of the intentional arc that we are merely describing in different words. Whereas the notion of hyper-reflexivity emphasizes the way in which something normally tacit becomes focal and explicit, the notion of disturbed ipseity emphasizes a complementary aspect of this process, the fact that what once was tacit is no longer being inhabited as a medium of taken-for-granted selfhood. Thus neither is more basic than the other; they are equiprimordial aspects of a fundamental (noetic) disturbance of the act of awareness.
A clear theoretical grounding for this view is provided by the philosopher Michael Polany’s... account of the vector of conscious awareness as a continuum stretching between the object of awareness (what he calls the ‘distal’ pole), which is know in a focal or explicit way, and that which exists in the ‘tacit dimension’, ie. which is experienced in what Polanyi terms a more subsidiary, implicit or tacit manner. A tacit or subsidiary awareness of kinesthetic and proprioceptive sensations serves as the medium of prereflective selfhood, ipseity, or self-awareness (the ‘proximal’ pole of the vector of analysis) , which, in turn, is the medium through which all intentional activity is realized. [78]

The connection between these and disturbed perceptual or conceptual ‘grip’ or ‘hold’ on the world is constitutive.

In emphasising the foundational role of hyper-reflexivity and diminished self-affection [a diminished sense of existing as a subject of awareness or agent of action], we are not suggesting that they exist independently of or prior to the noematic disturbance: they are not the cause but the condition of possibility for the disturbance of cognitive-perceptual hold. [79]

(This constitutive type of relationship does not, incidentally, conform to either of the two types of explanation that are countenanced by many recent Anglo-American philosophers: it is neither ‘a psychological link holding between states of affairs or events’ nor ‘a relationship of making intelligible holding between sentences’ ... - the latter being the only form of mental causation accepted by many analytic philosophers...[79-80])

These look like transcendental arguments.

If one’s attention turns from the distal world to the proximal ‘sensibles’ of one’s sensory fields it seems impossible that one also has the world in focus.

The third kind of synchronic relation is expression.

Take, for example, a delusion about dissolving, being controlled by an influencing machine, or being constantly recorded by video cameras. This sort of delusion may be understandable, not because it plays a role in a logical syllogism, but because it actually expresses or emblematizes, in relatively concrete form, more general or formal features of the prevailing state... of ipseity disturbance. [80]

Clearly expression need not fit any kind of psychophysical law. But it is presupposed by ‘a relationship of making intelligible holding between sentences’. That is, if we cannot assume relations of meaning, we cannot assume this kind of relation.

Diachronic relations

Primary hyper-reflexivity:

Here we use the label ‘operative hyper-reflexivity’ to denote a process afflicting the more fundamental levels of intentionality – a process in which the normally transparent field of experience becomes increasingly disrupted by unusual sensations, feelings, or thoughts that would normally remain in the background of awareness but that now pop into awareness and come to acquire object-like quality...
A failure of self-affection necessarily disrupts the flow of affective and conative processes, largely because the condition of altered auto-affection and disturbed tacit-focal structure does not furnish a sensitive milieu in which affection by the object can elicit spontaneous response or channel the intentional flow into purposeful or willed activity. [82-3]

Consequential hyper-reflexivity:

Primary ‘irritation’ and ipseity disturbance do, however, attract further attention, thereby eliciting processes of scrutiny and self-exacerbating alienation...Thus a more primary ipseity-disturbance seems to allow, perhaps to inspire, and more reflective turning-inward and self-alienation of a mind that comes to take itself as its own object.[83-4]

Compensatory hyper-reflexivity:

The primary disturbances of ipseity do not merely elicit fairly automatic consequences; they also inspire defensive compensatory forms of hyper-reflexivity. Patients may attempt, for example, to reassert control and re-establish a sense of self by means of an introspective scrutinising... ‘I hold fast to my spot and drown myself in it down to its very atoms’ [84]

The fourth is closely related to the basic account whilst the fifth and sixth are – apparently – causal consequences of it. But these look like rationalising explanations. Eg ‘attract further attention, thereby eliciting’ and ‘Patients may attempt to reassert control by means of scrutinising’. They look like rational reason explanations.

Intermediate conclusion

Having said that psychological links between events intelligible relations between sentences do not exhaust the possibilities, Sass and Parnas quote Taylor. What of Taylor's point?

[I]t is often just taken for granted that if a relationship involves conferring intelligibility, it must hold between sentences or at least representations of some sort... But the way in which my form of embodiment makes, for example, ‘lying to hand’ or ‘too unwieldy’ intelligible descriptions of some object is utterly different. The first term is not a representation or made up of representations. It is a really existing agent in the world... ‘Knowing our way about’ is not a capacity that can be analysed into a set of images on one side and a reality portrayed on the other. [Taylor 1993: 326-7]

Embodiedness makes the world available. But we can reject ‘representationalist’ accounts of mindedness without rejecting the transcendental arguments which may articulate the necessity of embodiment. For example, Strawson’s Kantian argument that the ascription of mental predicates presupposes a bodily subject.

Phenomenal implication need not be incompatible with the resources of Anglo-American philosophy. What’s more, the latter may help shed light on different kinds of ‘implication’.

But a familiar worry returns...

Polanyi plays up role of body in the form to structure. But could think of the space of physical sensation and visual experience.

If one attends to the visual field / sensations, it seems one cannot attend through them to the world beyond. (Not entirely clear what the modal status of this is. Consider the example of the from...to structure applied to words and meaning. But let’s assume that the locus of attention can only be in one place (cf McDowell’s discussion of Sellars)).

The tension: the basic account draws plausibility from the everyday cases of the from... to structure but this does not seem to capture a fundamental disruption of subjectivity. Eg the Preston station example. So cases which make focal normally tacit aspects of the visual field or bodily sense do not seem to go far enough. There need be no disruption of subjectivity.

What of a disruption of a more fundamental sense of self (‘Ipseity or vital self-affection may verge on ineffability’ [2003: 230]) eg., the transcendental unity of apperception? Suppose in some sense a breakdown of the tacit connections to bodily identity threatens the ‘I think’ that can accompany all my representations? The problem is that this swapping of the tacit and the focal goes beyond what we can get a hold of. What kind of disruption of the bodily would have this effect on the unity of thought?

Arthur Frank at the 'Research that lets stories breathe' workshop at UCLan

The following are my rough notes of Arthur Frank’s presentation this morning at a one day workshop on narrative based social science research (socionarratology). As before, Frank spoke very fluently to written notes and it was hard not to think that, as a narrative theorist, he also rather enjoys telling stories.

I was struck by his comments at the end. He has a reasonably restrictive view of what a story is. It must have plot, character, suspense and require imagination of the listener. So the comments part way through the talk that stories play, in effect and not that he put it this way himself, the role of concepts in a Kantian account - a precondition for the world making any kind of sense - are all the more striking. (At the risk of flogging a dead horse, the dilemma for narrative approaches to social science is that either one offers a substantial but restrictive view of stories or narratives but thus limits the application of the approach to many social phenomena (which will not involve stories so understood) or one lets pretty much anything count as a story but in which case the approach threatens to blur with any other qualitative form of social science or understanding.) Since Frank thinks that the concept of story is restrictive (there are definite membership conditions) but also that experience must be - transcendentally, as it were - structured by or as just such a story to be so much as intelligible, then that is a brave claim.

The talk

“In research there is a key question of priority of what to do and why one is doing it, its objectives. The former will seem needlessly complicated unless latter is decided. What’s a story? The answer is dark and deep. There is no easy relationship between humans and stories.

The talk will consider two popular culture quotations.

First, a verse from the 1960s pop song ‘Pack up your sorrows’ by the folk duo: Richard and Mimi Farina which came to mind recently.

‘If somehow you could pack up your sorrows and give them all to me,

You would lose them.

I know how to use them.

Give them all to me.’

Typically, subjects of narrative analysis have sorrows, are sick. Some have become competent practiced story tellers. Others are unaccustomed. We make a sort if promise that we know how to use them and that they will lose sorrow. Interviews are a form of offing of oneself as a sympathetic witness.

To do research is at some point to lose the thread. At such points, one needs a simple statement to get back on track. Ask: who am I? The song offers an answer to that. (Currently sceptical of the template of academic journals to meet this idea.)

Three ways of lightening sorrows.

1: by just listening. Just doing the interview. Giving attention. Hence having little by way of interview guide, though not listening without judgement.

2: by amplifying stories. Academics have a public voice. Hence can give credibility to the people whose voice may otherwise get post. Cf Bernie Carter’s work on children or in an example to which we will return later, homeless people.

3: connect people’s voices to each other. Researchers hear many voices. All research is inherently comparative. Cf C Wright Mills: task of sociology is to connect personal trouble to social issues.

None of these tasks requires much analysis. Pretty basic stuff. Most mileage when really basic. Stories dark and deep, but also learnt by children.

Second popular quotation, from Terry Pratchett:

People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it’s the other way around.

Stories exist independently of their players. If you know that, the knowledge is power.

Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped spacetime, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling . . . stories, twisting and blowing through the darkness.

And their very existence overlays a faint but insistent pattern on the chaos that is history. Stories etch grooves deep enough for people to follow in the same way that water follows certain paths down a mountainside. And every time fresh actors tread the path of the story, the groove runs deeper.

This is called the theory of narrative causality and it means that a story, once started, takes a shape. It picks up all the vibrations of all the other workings of that story that have ever been.

This is why history keeps on repeating all the time.

So a thousand heroes have stolen fire from the gods. A thousand wolves have eaten grandmother, a thousand princesses have been kissed. A million unknowing actors have moved, unknowing, through the pathways of story.

It is now impossible for the third and youngest son of any king, if he should embark on a quest which has so far claimed his older brothers, not to succeed.

Stories don’t care who takes part in them. All that matters is that the story gets told, that the story repeats. Or, if you prefer to think of it like this: stories are a parasitical life form, warping lives in the service only of the story itself.

It takes a special kind of person to fight back, and become the bicarbonate of history.

No analysis of stories can teach you what you, as a person, are not prepared to learn. Socionarratology aims to level the playing field between the idea that people shape stories and the reverse idea that stories shape people. Both are true.

Experience depends on us already knowing stories. The normal idea is that the experience comes first and then its telling in a story. That leaves out the idea that stories precede experience. But then they make a second entrance. (The real trickster in a story is the story itself.) Stories pull patterns out of the chaos of life: the things that happen, the real, the blooming buzzing confusion. The primary work of stories (the work of stories not persons) is to turn the chaos into something symbolically representable which can then be evaluated. Who acted well, and badly, who made choices, who had bad luck?

We don’t, strictly speaking, have experiences but rather discover them out of the confusion in which we are immersed. So narrative analysis should ask what stories people already knew which made it possible for them to have that experience. The story of most interest isn’t the subsequent telling but the story that makes the experience possible. One could not, eg., see anything sensible whilst driving through the countryside unless one already had a story of so driving.

Pratchett: stories exist independently of their players. The story shapes the person. The researcher also a player in a story. Knowledge is power. So how are we to make that power work for us and empower the people we study? It would be going too far to say that one can take control of one’s story. That is a popular phrase but not possible. Better to think of being able to say ‘no’ to particular stories. Hence socionarratology is closely tied to narrative therapy. It can help people say no by opening up reflective understanding of the stories in which people are players. So a degree of choice by understanding what different stories - eg. a patient story - requires of one.

Pratchett: stories as “great flapping ribbons of space time”

Cf Bakhtin in the 1920s on chronotope. Time and space.

Cf the clinic. Combines time and space.

Stories don’t just describe cronotopes but are also cronotopes. Children learn stories to

Cf Frank Kermode’s ‘Sense of an ending’. Stories humanise time.

One should always distinguish the work people do from the work stories do. The total is ‘holding their own’. For humans, it is to sustain dignity in the face of adversity. The first step of which is creating order out of chaos, to humanise time and space. Chaos is having no narrative.

Narrative analysis studies how people are holding their own, against forms of adversity. Three aspects to the work:

1: stories describe people holding their own. Medium.

2: telling the story is a means of holding one’s own. Means.

3: stories get in the way of people holding their own. Either their own or other people’s.

But if stories shape people, resiliency depends on internalising helpful stories. People are the agents (NB not agency in the active sense) / players of stories and the stories hold their own.

Empirical example: effects of multigenerational unemployment. 6 months of unemployment significantly drop chances of getting a job. So employment stories grow thin because they are not told and so people don’t configure their worlds that way. Ie don’t have the narrative capacity to become players in employment stories. Stories as deeply etched grooves. People tend to slip into stories, such as patient stories, because they are deeply etched. It is rare to resist.

Narrative analysis seeks to determine which story are empowering and which are dangerous. Cf Pratchett’s comment about the king’s third son. People are experts on their own lives, they know their own stories. But they often don’t know which are good and bad for them. They know what they are doing, but not what their doing does, to echo Foucault.

Since stories shape people, the stories don’t care who takes part. That’s part of the Pratchett quote and he also talks of parasites but ‘symbiosis’ seems a better word. Stories still needs people to tell them and hence needs them as hosts. Pratchett shares a weak theory of human agency with most social science. So when someone tells you a story, you should ask how the story is using the person who tells it to get fatter. This is a problem for the researcher though not the storyteller. Weak agency isn’t entirely bad news because stories help us in three ways:

1: they keep us company

2: show us useful ways to act

3: give us courage to act.

Socionarratology is more pedagogical than analytic since the latter require an object whereas the former a dialogue. As researchers we need to take seriously what we study. Cf Actor Network Theory. It takes physical stuff in labs very seriously. Scientists may use equipment but so also the equipment uses the scientist. The aim is to take stories as seriously as ANT theorists take equipment. Further, just as ANT authors like Latour don’t give clear guidance on how to do ANT, so socionarratology needn’t offer prescriptive guidance.

A good example of socionarratology is the book ‘My dog always eats first’ by Leslie Irvine.

Irvine visited homeless people with companion animals – dogs – going with vets, who were trusted by the owners and hence could gain access. The book describes the kinds of story people tell as types. Two, among others, are: protection narratives and redemption narratives.

In former, the dog scares off someone who threatens the storyteller. In redemption stories, the dog can play one of two roles. The storyteller starts off with self destructive behaviour. In some, the animal is taken away leading to its loss or death. And that gives the teller the resolve to give up the behaviour. A kind if sacrifice. Or, a variant, the animal stays but provides motivation for self care and hence care for the animal. Although there could be any number of possible eventualities for homeless people to experience, still only a finite number of deeply etched grooves are followed. The story grows fat. In some, speaking parts are even ascribed to the dogs. The dog tells the owner not to smoke and drink, for example.

Irvine found that there were various kinds or degrees of homeless living. She sketches some ideal types of homelessness. And she found that for these different types, there were distinct kinds of stories told. So ‘travellers’ – one kind of homelessness – did not tell protection stories. We may not think of homelessness as a coherent plot. But Irvine shows that there is a collection of narratives that makes this possible.

This is not always true. In Nazi concentration camps, the conditions were so ‘assaultive’ that no narratives could survive or be formulated. Homelessness may be bad but it isn’t Auschwitz. It admits narrative formulation.

Note that Irvine does not try to synthesis a metanarrative. She does not flatten out differences or formulating a common synthetic story. We should attend to the different stories. But there aren’t usually very many stories.

A symbiosis between the homeless person, the animal and the story that allows them to be the kind of person they are. Companion story as well as animal.

Irvine also found her subjects to be moral actors with strong operational conceptions of the good, towards which they are orientated. Hence ‘my dog always eats first’ is a statement of moral competence, an Aristotelian telos. Irvine shows how the stories, about the good, are also the means of living more organised lives than might otherwise be available.

By the end of the book, the apparent difference of AF and the homeless is lessened.”

(In questions Frank said that he was not really offering on ontology of stories as mind-independent entities. (I suggested that like ANT he might be saying something false in order to say something else true.) Rather, his way of speaking, echoing Pratchett, was a pragmatic way of carrying out sociological research. So my postscript here seems right after all.Some closing remarks ran thus:)

“Not everything is a narrative. Not all narratives are stories though all stories are narratives. Stories have characters, plots, suspense. They can go one way or another way. They invoke imagination. If there is no imagination needed to understand the speaker, it isn't much of a story. So we have first to ask, do we have narrative? Sometimes people just don't tell stories.

If you begin ethnographic contact with a subject ask: whose agenda predominates? Signing a consent form, one declares an agenda. So there are difficulties in asking an omnibus question such as 'tell us tell me how your life is going'. One can warn the subject that the agenda is thus and so but will come to an end and then one will invite a further account.

There is a huge difference between information and stories. People may be more or less reluctant story tellers. If they are reluctant, one – as a researcher – may need to coach then on the basis of a prior knowledge of what makes a good story. Lay guides to story telling can be good social science interview guides too.

Frank is, these days, interested mainly in the narrative itself. Narrative analysts need to share this interest for a while. One needs to read and think about lots of stories from a lot of sources so that one can later ask: who tells this kind of story. One cannot tell where the deeply etched grooves are from a limited selection.

Finally, what of the question ‘where am I in this?’ The passive mood is very poor social science. The researcher is there taking up space and so should feel free to use the word ‘I’. Frank wrote a memoir and this gets telling his own story out of the way. Hence his research isn't about him. Not a fan of autoethnography”

A manifesto for philosophers marking social science PhDs?

I had the privilege to act as the internal examiner for my colleague Karen Wright today. Following a unanimous recommendation in the pre-viva reports, the two externals (Michael Coffey (pictured) and Theo Stickley) and I also agreed a recommendation of a PhD award with minor corrections. (Of course, this is just a recommendation to the degree awarding powers of the University, as we emphasised with due correctness.)

Now it is a feature of PhDs at my university that the director of studies is often present as a silent witness to proceedings and after today’s happy occasion the DoS, my rather excellent colleague Gill Thomson, commented, in the nicest possible and uncritical way, that she thought that I had given her student something of a grilling. This might be, she conceded, in part a feature of her own perception and position: hearing but unable to respond to questions. But I suspect that it is more likely the action at a distance of the philosophical habit of thinking that the nicest way to greet a colleague's birthday festschrift collection is to give them a good kicking and then publish the result. But it prompts me to ask, what should a philosopher do in a social science PhD viva. What should be our manifesto?

It may be easier to approach this from the contingency of PhD work in my School. We like to ground empirical work exploring the experiences of patients or health-workers in a methodological framework which owes something to some dead German philosophers. I 'll assume that this is standard. (My external colleagues today suggested that it wasn’t, in fact, but I will ignore that detail for the moment.) If so, what should we, fairly applied philosophers, do in vivas?

Here’s my suggestion though first I want to reserve the right to do anything appropriate. Like the academic contract which finishes with the comment: ‘and any other reasonable request of the head of department’ no manifesto should be restrictive of what is best in local particular circumstances. Phronesis rules. But the paradigm role might be something like this:

To take the descriptions of the framework within which empirical findings are presented and explore what is meant by the student by them.

Part of this approach is that one should not attempt to ‘combat’ an invocation of Heideggerian phenomenology, for example, by bringing to bare what Wittgenstein might say, had no mention been made of him. (Here is a contrast with my role in a philosophy PhD viva.) So the idea is to take only things which are there in the text and invite a clarification of what they mean to the author in the light of other things written. The manifesto idea is that there is no need to do anything more than that. Further, one can learn something from the resolute reading of Wittgenstein in this sense: the role is not to police the limits of sense by ruling out some things as obviously nonsense or foolish but to offer an immanent critique in a standing invitation to the candidate to explain what might be meant by them by even non standard combinations of words.

In fact, I think that this is pretty much what I do as a philosopher in residence in a school of health. Surely, therefore, there is no ‘grilling’ involved? Just reflecting on what students have written in their own words, reflecting it back to them and inviting them to make sense of what they themselves have said. Pussy cat stuff, really.

Nature and artifice at Center Parcs

Against my expectations – my wildest expectations, perhaps – of a couple of days before, I spent the weekend at Center Parcs (a half term weekend, what’s more). There was a reason: good company and my partner’s god-motherly duties coupled with unexpected contingencies. But it gave me a second opportunity (after about ten years) to experience a peculiarly domesticated version of nature and to reflect on how it isn’t so very unusual in the UK with its couple of millennia of close living and domestication of the the natural environment.

For those who don’t know, Center Parks is a kind of middle class re-invention of a working class holiday camp. Butlins and Pontins were situated at seaside resorts. Cabins, access to the beach, and red coated entertainment officers made for a dense package which flowed and then ebbed in the 1970s with the growth of cheap package holidays to countries with more reliable sun. Center parks arrived from Europe in the 1980s as a less vulgar and more subdued version in which the entertainment focus had been diluted with a bit of Thoreau. Cabins were now cleverly hidden from one another. Entertainment was more subdued: redcoats now bird knowledgeable wardens. The specific climax of the beech transformed into a more general atmosphere of woodland.

So a weekend at one of the handful of Center Parcs in the UK is a weekend in a cabin in the woods. There is a surprising volume of birdsong. Deer wander through the trees. Rabbits and birds are oddly close to hand. It is an encounter with nature for people living in the great urban density of the UK. 

I should say that there is range of other things to do aside from bump into nature, under some understanding of it. With enough money, one might spend most of the day playing sport, practicing archery, playing on quad bikes etc. The key – free once there – element of all the venues is a substantial swimming pool with water slides, rapids wave machines etc. But despite all this, the architectural packaging of the site is as an encounter with nature. Everyone rides bicycles around a car free zone on paths through woods.

And that prompts the question: what kind of conception of nature is available? I want to add two comparisons.

1: Yosemite. Weirdly, Center Parks is a bit like Yosemite. Both have a dense area of accommodation. Both try to balance commercial facilities – bars etc – with a nature orientation. At both, people who might normally spurn public transport delight in free, centrally provided shuttles. But there is a big difference. Wander outside the accommodation area at Yosemite and you stumble into Ansel Adams territory. Nature with a capital N. Break through the boundary fence at Center Parks and you arrive in the middle of the surrounding agricultural farmland. So the play with nature is somehow more artificial.

2: The Lake District. The English Lake District is in no sense a wilderness. (No part of the UK really is,  with the possible exception of Knoydart in Scotland.) It is not the result of nature alone. The landscape, pretty though it is, is the result of a mix of farming, quarrying and small scale industry (eg explosives). Still, it does not derive from a conception of what countryside should look like but from an evolution of the landscape. So it isn’t so directly artificial.

Having run round the perimeter of Center parks, I returned home to do a similar length run on Scout Scar in the evening (about 7km). In the former case, the run stretched my suspension of disbelief, partly because it made me bump up against the perimeter fence (no doubt the focus of attention in a dystopian novel) and thus emphasised the artificial. On the Scar, the natural boundary of the cliffs give a view of 20 miles into the Lake District. Although without human intervention it would, no doubt, be wooded (like all the now bare Cumbrian fells) and is thus an artificial environment, its vegetation kept in check by sheep and a herd of Galloway, it is unbounded, the location fixed by geology rather than commercial planning. And this seems to be what makes Center Parks seem to be playing - albeit very successfully - at being in nature. Wander in any direction and one can look out at what seems more real, prior, beyond it and thus realise that it is merely plonked into the surrounding countryside in four places in the UK and 22 in the rest of Europe.