The cost of the 'Question concerning technology'

At a phenomenology reading group yesterday  there was a surprisingly positive reception for Martin Heidegger’s Question concerning technology. Within a community of health researchers, one reason for this seemed to be a kind of anti-scientistic suspicion of the overuse of an impersonal technological approach to patients. Heidegger’s suspicion of modern technology’s view of the world as merely a kind of resource resonated with worries about modern medicine. The mood that resonated is expressed in the snide final sentence of the description of the role of the Rhine in contemporary thinking.

What the river is now, namely, a water power supplier, derives from out of the essence of the power station. In order that we may even remotely consider the monstrousness that reigns here, let us ponder for a moment the contrast that speaks out of the two titles, “The Rhine” as dammed up into the power works, and “The Rhine” as uttered out of the art work, in Holderlin’s hymn by that name. But, it will be replied, the Rhine is still a river in the landscape, is it not? Perhaps. But how? In no other way than as an object on call for inspection by a tour group ordered there by the vacation industry. [Heidegger 1977: 5]

But it seemed to me that that the cost of this reassurance was high: his suspicion not, I think, of scientism but of science itself. It is suggested here:

It remains true, nonetheless, that man in the technological age is, in a particularly striking way, challenged forth into revealing. That revealing concerns nature, above all, as the chief storehouse of the standing energy reserve. Accordingly, man’s ordering attitude and behavior display themselves first in the rise of modern physics as an exact science. Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces. Modern physics is not experimental physics because it applies apparatus to the questioning of nature. Rather the reverse is true. Because physics, indeed already as pure theory, sets nature up to exhibit itself as a coherence of forces calculable in advance, it therefore orders its experiments precisely for the purpose of asking whether and how nature reports itself when set up in this way. ... The modern physical theory of nature prepares the way first not simply for technology but for the essence of modern technology. [ibid: 21]

(There is also a lovely distinction between history and chronology:

But after all, mathematical physics arose almost two centuries . before technology. How, then, could it have already been set upon by modern technology and placed in its service? The facts testify to the contrary. Surely technology got under way only when it could be supported by exact physical science. Reckoned chronologically, this is correct. Thought historically, it does not hit upon the truth. [ibid: 21-2] )

If I follow the broad picture, the way in which the world reveals itself to us in the modern era, the era of both modern science and industrial production, manifests the essence of technology. That essence is the form that the world takes for us. Further, although Heidegger thinks that there is something wrong with this way, what is wrong is not a matter of falsity. Truths are revealed to us through the technological gaze. One thing wrong seems to be that this way of understanding the world excludes all others. From within it, it seems that this is the only way to latch onto the world. It takes a Heidegger to spot, because of clues still present and hinted at in a line from Holderlin, that this is not so. A poetic revealing of the world, by contrast, permits the idea that still other ways may be available.

The logic of the passage about science seems to be that what is wrong in the way the world is revealed to us through the conceptual spectacles of the essence of technology is already present in the way that natural science takes the world to fit the realm of mathematicised natural law. So if there were a way to step aside from a technological gaze it would involve rejecting the rise of scientific accounts of nature. Heidegger does not seem to reject merely a philosophical addition to science: the scientistic assumption that there is no more to nature than natural science reveals. It seems that with the sentence “Modern science’s way of representing pursues and entraps nature as a calculable coherence of forces” that science itself is already at fault.

This may all be my misunderstanding but if not it seems that the cost of the framework that Heidegger offers to my colleagues is too high. As well as rejecting a scientistic assumption that the world is merely the disenchanted realm science describes, we have also to reject its disenchanted descriptions of the disenchanted bits of the world described despite the truth that seems to inhere in them. So scientific medicine would have to be thrown out wholesale rather than merely put to the service of person centred care.

I also wonder what the marks of someone who had achieved the view Heidegger points towards would be. It was, apparently, there in the poetic response to the world of the ancient Greeks and their wholehearted embrace of art not as a mere cultural industry. For them, a life of silver chalice making perhaps. But what would it be now?

Heidegger, M. (1977) 'The question concerning technology' in Heidegger, M. The question concerning technology, and other essays. New York: Harper & Row

Missed link to RDoC

My Frontiers paper (2015) ‘Against explanatoryminimalism in psychiatry’ Frontiers of Psychiatry 6: 171 is now out in proper format. But I realise that I missed a trick by not connecting it to issues raised in particular by Steve Hyman's Oxford lectures last month: the rise and rise of RDoC. This was suggested to me in an email over the weekend by a psychiatrist:

"Hi Tim,

I came across a copy of your recent paper “Against explanatory minimalism in psychiatry.” As I am not trained in philosophy, parts of it definitely “went over my head.” But, it seems to be quite relevant to a contemporary problem in American mental health research. That is, the National Institute of Mental Health is very focused on a neuroscientific model of mental health, and more specifically the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) framework:

https://www.nimh.nih.gov/research-priorities/rdoc/index.shtml

This is controversial because it is impacting the types of projects that are and are not funded by NIMH, independent of scientific merit as determined by the review panels. Although not explicitly mentioned in your paper, the topic of your paper seems quite timely and relates to very pragmatic issues that is already having a profound long-term effect on psychiatric research. The RDoC framework is shaping the types of questions people are training to answer – with a huge emphasis on the “lower” levels of analysis, such as genetics/genomics, biomarkers, and at best, neural circuits, and much less on the actual lived-experience of people with mental illnesses."

Vivas

I have a couple of PhD vivas this week (and a third where my role is merely chair) and getting home after the first, which had a happy outcome and went well by all the usual standards, I was as bad tempered as, on reflection, I always am. Given that they simply comprise a friendly questioning conversation, why should that be? Perhaps it’s because they are a disturbing parody of an academic conversation.

A fellow philosopher reported on Facebook last year that she had been asked a question at a conference which began: “I want to re-ask an earlier question but more aggressively…” What possible role could aggression have in academia, she wondered. Clearly it shouldn’t have any but I think I can see why it might seem to have one.

On the assumption that asking philosophical questions is a matter of weighing reasons for beliefs, and assuming that we don’t have a general theory of good and bad reasons (logic only goes so far), then one must accord them weight them ‘from within’ for which process a characteristic experience is an inner exclamation of ‘But that’s a terrible reason!’. In polite conversation and said of someone else’s commitment – rather than the abstract possibility of a reason – saying that would sound, and possibly be, aggressive. In academia, between equals it wouldn’t be or even sound so. (There really is no need for aggression in academia.) But because of the power imbalance in a viva such an expression is something to be avoided with a potentially nervous PhD candidate. So part of the stress of the viva is that a commitment to exploring reasons brings with it characteristic experiences of bad reasons (as well as good, but they are easy) which have then constantly to be masked. For two hours.

Second, I take my role in a viva to be primarily exploring the student’s reasons for saying and doing what he or she has in the thesis not simply imposing my views of what he/she ought. It is often a matter of exploring the costs of adopting particular views. Sometimes this leads to agreement on a matter. In other cases, not and the prospect of suggested corrections to the thesis. But in a number of cases, even after some iterations, one doesn’t ground out the issue and, practically in the circumstances, the only thing to do is let the matter drop. A PhD is, after all, merely an academic apprenticeship. But as part of a conversation aimed at getting at the truth, such lacunae are hugely frustrating. So as well as letting the particular issue drop, one has also to hide the frustration of doing this.

On reflection, though, that’s not the best way to describe things. If the conversation were simply ‘aimed at getting at the truth’ then one would usually also offer solutions. That’s what I’d do at a conference or in the pub. Although I sometimes do this in vivas in order to ask a further question, as an end in itself, it is not very helpful as part of an exam. So again there’s an internal tension in this case between the apparent regulative ideal of the conversation – seeking out the truth – and its role as an exam.

I noticed yesterday that my fellow examiner referred in media res to the ‘interesting conversation’ we were all ‘having together’. But it is a weird parody of a conversation leaving no one satisfied.

Against explanatory minimalism in psychiatry

My anti-John Campbell paper is out in a very preliminary form with Frontiers of Psychiatry, just a couple of days after being accepted.

Interesting (and worth bearing in mind in the future) that one gets to see who reviewed it.

So thanks to:

Daniel D. Hutto, University of Wollongong, Australia
Dawa Ometto, Utrecht University, Netherlands

Kendler’s ‘Toward a limited realism for psychiatric nosology based on the coherence theory of truth’

Some of our philosophy and mental health students have been looking at Kenneth Kendler’s paper ‘Toward a limited realism for psychiatric nosology based on the coherence theory of truth’ prompting me to look at it. It is odd. I think my confusion is more psychological than philosophical, however.

The paper unleashes the meta-induction. Most past theories have proved to be false and most theoretical terms did not successfully refer. Thus, by induction, most of our current theories will prove to be false and have non-referring theoretical terms. What makes this a particularly poignant argument is that it deploys a form of inference widely assumed to play a key role in science against science. Kendler summarises this thus:

In discussions for and against scientific realism, strong support for the instrumentalist position has come from what has been called the ‘pessimistic induction’ (PI) argument (Psillos, 1996). Considering the history of scientific theories in any particular discipline (e.g. astronomy, genetics, physics, psychology), over time, older theories have continuously been replaced by newer ones. This in fact often defines scientific progress. Thus, sitting in the present, we can look back at earlier theories, since replaced, and see entities and processes referred to by these theories that are no longer considered to be real. For example, planets do not travel in epicycles as they circle the earth, ether does not exist and inheritance is not (typically) Lamarckian in nature. [Kendler 2015: 1115]

He then goes on to list a number of non-referring theoretical terms from the history of science originally set out by Larry Laudan. This then motivates an application of the meta-induction to psychiatry. Kendler comments:

Anyone with a smattering of knowledge of psychiatric history would have little problem in creating a list of 12 abandoned psychiatric disorders that at one time were widely used and considered true but are no longer considered useful and would perhaps be judged to be ‘false’. One such list would be: (i) paraphrenia; (ii) neurasthenia; (iii) phrenzy; (iv) periodic hallucinatory insanity; (v) drapetomania (Cartwright, 2004); (vi) monomania (Esquirol, 1845); (vii) lypemania (Esquirol, 1845); (viii) demonomania (Esquirol, 1845); (ix) anxiety-happiness psychosis (Leonhard, 1979); (x) cataphasia, (Leonhard, 1979); (xi) confabulatory euphoria (Leonhard, 1979); and (xii) hysteria. The PI argument applied to current psychiatric disorders argues strongly against what might be called a ‘hard’ realism model for psychiatric disorders. [ibid: 1116]

In the face of this Kendler makes two suggestions. The first is that whilst particular diagnostic categories may prove mistaken, the idea that there are some real psychiatric illnesses looks more secure. ‘we can be much more confident about the existence of the liquid than the particular bottles in which it is now residing’. Strangely there does not seem to be much of an argument for this and to defuse the meta-induction. I am sure he is right but I think we need to be told why the inductive inference can rationally be expected to fail on this point. Earlier, in an apparent spirit of fairness, Kendler mentions Putnam’s no miracles argument for scientific realism. But he does not mention it again nor does he investigate whether it could apply to some areas of science but not others nor how it intersects with the meta-induction.

Second, he suggests that we should adopt a particular view of truth with respect to psychiatric theory.

The standard approach to truth is the ‘correspondence theory’, which assumes that a statement (or theory) is true if it corresponds to a stable, mind-independent reality. This is a plausible way to think about the elements of the periodic table, but it is poor way to think about psychiatric disorders. [ibid: 1117]

Again, there is no diagnostic move to explain why the Periodic Table is exempt from the meta-induction and hence merits a correspondence approach. But:

For psychiatric disorders, we need a less ambitious version of reality. A humbler approach can be found in the coherence theory of truth. This theory postulates that something is true when it fits well with the other things we know confidently about the world. [ibid: 1117]

And then a little later we have the application of this to psychiatry:

What do we mean in this metaphorical space when we want to say that a diagnosis is ‘real’? Before answering that, let’s consider the simpler question: ‘What do we mean in this metaphorical space when we want to say that one diagnostic concept is more real than another?’ Here, the answer is simple. To be more real means to be connected to more already existing pieces and/or to be connected by stronger strings. So what then do we mean to say a diagnosis is real? We might say it is ‘pretty well’ connected with the other pieces, that it is ‘pretty well’ integrated into our accumulating scientific data base. In other words, a diagnosis is real to the degree that it ‘coheres’ well with what we already know empirically and feel confident about. [ibid: 1117]

The idea seems to be that some areas of reality and some claims as to truth are governed by one kind of truth and others governed by another. Note that this isn’t saying that the kinds of facts vary – which one might think for, say, the facts expressed in moral claims by contrast with natural scientific claims – so much as that the kind of truth varies. A redundancy theorist of truth, for example, might, also for example, think that understanding or grasping moral facts requires a special design of mind whilst grasping physical facts does not. Different ontologies, same conception of truth. This is not Kendler's way. The benchmark for psychiatry is just lower/humbler than for chemistry. What it is for something to be true in psychiatry is not just differently constituted (for example in a mind-dependent way) but actually easier. To call something true for psychiatry should involve less than for chemistry.

But the reason my confusion is more psychological than philosophical is that I cannot believe that Kendler really believes any of this. That is, that saying that schizophrenia exists is somehow making a quite different kind of linguistic move (disciplined differently as a move) than saying plutonium exists ie measured against the world differently. Surely he doesn’t think that one can just pick theories of truth willy nilly? In reply to a suggestion (by PZ) that this worry presupposes a hostility (by me) to a coherence theory of truth, I do not think so. I would be happy to take a coherence theory seriously - I used to be a Davidsonian, after all - but not a pick and mix attitude to theories of truth. Surely if one thinks a coherence theory is true then it sets the standard for truth, punkt. It doesn't set what one concedes is a lesser standard.

And against what standard could a theory of truth be ‘humbler’? Is the truth of the coherence theory of truth itself a matter of correspondence or coherence? My hunch is that talk of ‘humbler’ implies that Kendler thinks that the truth of this meta-question is really truth as correspondence. But that in turn suggests that truth generally is really correspondence and the local adoption of coherence isn’t serious. It’s just a way of speaking.

If so, I don’t understand why anyone would think that serious worries about the validity of disease categories could be lanced by playing with theories of truth. So at the psychological level, I cannot believe that Kendler really believes in a mere coherence theory of truth and hence I cannot see how that could thus provide genuine solace for real worries about psychiatric taxonomy. That all seems too easy. So why did he write it?

Kendler, K. (2015)‘Toward a limited realism for psychiatric nosology based on the coherence theory of truth’ Psychological Medicine (2015), 45, 1115–1118

Steve Hyman's Loebel Lectures

At the end of the third Loebel lecture by Steve Hyman, the motivation for some of the more radical sounding claims from the second lecture became clearer. The more radical claims included the idea that because decision making processes are subserved by unconscious processes, our sense of agency for such decisions is misleading. (At the workshop I glossed his 'not veridical' as simply false. He flirted instead with incomplete. But I think that 'false' captured the intuition.)

One slide from the second lecture went as follows:

The eliminativist view (self, minds agency as illusion) misses important facts.

Evolution seems to have invested a great deal in our capacity-limited serial processor (consciousness) that serves as an important connector with parallel processing unconscious systems.

Impairment in sense of agency: a toxins stressor

Sense of being controlled: psychosis

Impairment in recognition of minds: autism spectrum

Yet from a neuroscience view, intuitions of eg. of agency, are not veridical. Rather they are proxies for unconscious processes.

Now this starts with a softening move in the comment about evolution. Further, in three cases, a lack of a sense of autonomy or sensitivity to others' agency is pathological. But there is that robust final comment that intuitions are not veridical but proxies for something else.

And this suggests a different reading of the earlier comment about evolution as having provided us with a useful fiction rather than a truthful awareness. Steve suggested I had him right on this.

One example he gave, again before today, was that of unconscious grasp of grammatical rules. He reamarked:  "When I am talking, I am not thinking 'now I need a verb'. These systems are not accessible by introspection."

But in my own talk earlier, I argued that the was no problem with high level intentional actions and context coming together to guide lower level basic actions and these being underpinned by motor capacities whose working is not available to consciousness. To take the industry standard example, crossing the road may lead to ironwork-avoiding action but also draw on unconscious adaptation of footfall to cope with slippery leaves. Or to use Steve's own example, in giving a talk about agency I may need to say something about crossing the road. But expressing / exercising that thought can simply draw on unconscious knowledge of grammar. I don't see any threat to agency here. 

(It would be revisionary of an understanding of agency that did require that no part of an action was not available to consciousness. But surely there is no reason to think that that is widely held?)

However, today's lecture concerned addiction and offered a kind of Pavlovian story of how dopamine plays a role in training the brain to attend to the scene at hand, as marking that something in the scene is better than expected. This role is then usurped by drugs that mimic that function. The thought as then that because the biochemical explanation explained how it could be that plant extract chemicals could overcome human free choice, this was the correct causal story of what happened. But it is typically not a story that is available to, or even consistent with the rationalising stories told by addicts.

So that was the real context for the rest of the worry that agency is a myth sold to us for evolutionary advantage but not for truth. But it leaves open a much more modest almost disjunctivist possibility. Agency goes wrong in the case of addiction, to be sure, and knowledge of the predicament also goes wrong. That's the bad disjunct. But in the good, there is no inference from the presence of something unconscious to agency's myth.

Commentary as pre-prepared anticipation or incoherent ad lib?

I am about to go and listen to the second of the 2015 Loebel lectures in Oxford for which I am one of a happy handful of commentators. After the lecture there will be a dinner with my fellows, the distinguished speaker Prof Steve Hyman and the organisers. After that, I doubt that my philosophical brain will be at the height of its powers. (My numbskulls pack up early these days.)

So this prompts the question: should I have guessed what will be said this evening and pre-prepared my commentary due tomorrow (even then, in advance of the final concluding lecture)? Or should I wing it on the morning?

The third option - the Caol Isla option (see 1:55mins-) - is not to be repeated.

I guess, as I sip a pint of Oakham Citra, I have already implicitly made my choice. But I fear that neither option escapes a charge of rudeness.