Right-Brain Psychoanalysis

Last night I attended a presentation on learning styles at my daughter’s school. The speaker, an educational psychologist, pushed the left brain-right brain asymmetry as the source of two different cognitive styles: auditory-sequential and visual-spatial. I’m left-handed, so presumably my brain has more cross-wiring than right-handed people’s brains. Even so, characterizing the left hemisphere as “auditory” is misleading.

Briefly, the argument is this: Empirical evidence consistently demonstrates that (for right-handers especially) language is processed mostly in the left hemisphere. This is true for both spoken and written language. Language is processed sequentially, and sequence is a function of time. There is some evidence suggesting that the left hemisphere is more sensitive than the right in detecting short time intervals. What the right hemisphere adds to linguistic processing is the awareness of affect, attitude, interpersonal context: connotation rather than denotation, holistic rather than sequential. Many of the relevant connotational cues are visual: body language, facial expression. And there is independent evidence supporting right-hemispheric dominance in processing visual-spatial information.

However, other connotational cues are auditory: tone of voice and inflection, so-called “melodic speech,” which is also predominantly a right-hemispheric function in most people. The right brain is also presumably better at conjuring up mental images of what a string of language is talking about: the objects, events, and scenes being described, the array of signifieds toward which the linguistic signifiers point. The right brain is also better at divergent thinking: coming up with alternative ways of imagining or thinking about or representing something, which I believe implies the ability to generate alternative linguistic descriptions of something.

So now I find myself thinking about implications for psychotherapy and analysis. Language is the dominant medium for pretty much all techniques, suggesting a left-hemispheric bias. Cognitive-behavioral praxis involves a systematic parsing of thoughts and behaviors in an attempt to identify mismatches: irrational perceptions and attitudes and beliefs, inappropriate behavioral-linguistic responses. Treatment involves breaking into the sequence that links environmental cue, thought, and action, then consciously attempting to restructure this sequence in a more rational way.

In contrast, psychoanalytic technique deals primarily with the unexpressed, the repressed, the unformulated. As the person speaks, the analyst looks for clues to what is not being said: slips, tone of voice, facial tics, bodily movements. Through free association the client begins producing linguistic strings that haven’t been structured consciously into appropriate and rational discourse. Guided imagery encourages the client to picture memories or events or situations in the mind’s eye. Progress is made by bringing more and more unconscious material into awareness, playing with it, integrating it with conscious but discrepant thoughts, and eventually letting it settle into a holistic scheme of coherent personal meaning.

In short, doesn’t it seem that cognitive-behavioral therapy is a left-hemispheric praxis whereas psychoanalysis emphasizes right-brain activity?

Still, psychoanalysis focuses on linguistic expression. In part this is an artifact of analysis being an interpersonal process: it’s hard to know what someone else is thinking without their putting it into words. Also, though, there is a presumption that consciousness is inherently linguistic. Thought and language seem inextricably linked, such that thought is a kind of unspoken linguistic process and language is thought made accessible to others. Thoughts which cannot be expressed verbally aren’t really thoughts, it is argued. Further, analysis has historically depended on the analyst’s ability to interpret the client, and interpretation is always verbally communicated.

But what about images, pictures, physical structures? To create visual-spatial things requires conscious attention, contemplation, imagination, and manipulation. Collage, haphazard rearrangement of components, even demolition: these activities both embody and generate meaning, even if that meaning cannot be put into words. Must the analyst insist that the client drag the right-brain stuff across the corpus callosum into left-brain language processing? Why not just let the client express the non-linguistic stuff non-linguistically, through image, movement, intonation, manipulation? The explicitly analytic role of the analyst is regarded as less important than the client’s self-analysis. And even if the client never explicitly formulates his or her insights in words, the changes in perception, affect, energy, desire, proactivity, freedom of expression, personal integration, and so on are the most important outcomes.

On the other hand, perhaps because I’m left-handed I value bilateral integration. Being able to express divergent and holistic thoughts and images verbally seems like a good thing. And being able to deal with images and structures and intonations and affects without having to talk about them also seems like a good thing.

Creating Hybrid Objects

I’m continuing with my reading of Graham Harman’s fascinating Guerrilla Metaphysics. Here we find him elaborating on José Ortega y Gasset’s exploration of metaphor. Ortega had selected as an example a line from the Catalonian poet Josep Maria López-Picó, in which Picó says that the cypress tree “is like the ghost of a dead flame.” Harman explores the stripped-down essence of this poetic phrase — “a cypress is a flame”:

If someone tells me that a cypress is like a juniper, what happens is that my attention is absorbed by a set of remarkably similar qualities; I am adrift in a world of attributes of things. But if someone tells me that a cypress is a flame, then I have entered the magic world of a cypress-flame-feeling-thing. Since the two images are unable actually to melt together instantly by way of their truly minimal common qualities, the cryptic essences that my life senses in them remain before me in a kind of permanent collision. My exultant feeling of the cypress and my exultant feeling of the flame attempt to fuse with one another, but without final resolution: their hard carapaces crack as they fill each other with molten plasm. And as Ortega admits, “even when a metaphor is created we still do not know the reason for it. We simply sense an identity, we live exultantly in this being, the cypress-flame.” This new being may be constructed out of feelings, but given Ortega’s object-oriented concept of feeling, it is actually a new thing that has entered the world, and not just a private mental state of mine. To create such an object is to de-create the external images that normally identify it, reshaping the plasma of their qualities into a hybrid structure. What we call a style, says Ortega, is nothing other than a specific mode of de-creating images and recreating them as feeling-things. (p. 109)

I find this explanation of metaphor as a hybrid feeling-object really quite helpful. Though I’m not sure I’d draw quite so sharp a distinction between the pairings cypress-juniper and cypress-flame, this is a relatively minor quibble that actually supports Harman’s case for realism. He says that in observing the similarities between a cypress and a juniper, one becomes immersed in a plasmic medium of attributes cut loose from their objects. But these attributes can congeal themselves into a new merged object called “evergreen.” For that matter, even two separate cypresses become linked together in the plasm of multiply-shared attributes, forming the merged object “cypress.”

A cypress and a flame eject from themselves certain shared attributes into the plasm, most notably the flamelike shape of those tall thin varieties of cypress that so often line Mediterranean roadsides and driveways. Should we assert then the obvious simile: the cypress-juniper object is like the cypress-flame object? I think yes, while recognizing that similarity isn’t the same as identity. The cypress-flame hybrid object is pulled together inside the plasm from attributes of the component elements “cypress” and “flame” and the observant and imaginative mind of the poet. This is one style of assembling a hybrid object. Another style relies on sexual reproduction as a means of transmitting genetic material. DNA carries biochemical attributes that afford both individuation (this tree, that one, the other one…) and speciation (these cypresses).

Some time after human beings showed up on the earth they began reflecting on the things that surrounded them in their environment. These early humans became able to think about individual trees and tree attributes and tree collectives, and together the humans ssigned names to these things. But thinking and naming is only one style for spawning the proliferation of hybrid objects within the plasm. It’s a style that didn’t arrive on the scene until the universe had already amassed billions of years of object-creation successes. One particular genetically-created species of tree and the cognitive-linguistically-created species named “cypress” share many attributes, but they aren’t identical to each other. Human cognition, social construction, genetic reproduction: these are but three of the many different styles for configuring hybrid objects. Different styles generate different kinds of objects which, when again cut loose from themselves inside the plasm of attributes, also share certain similarities with each other. But again, similarity isn’t the same as identity.

I haven’t even finished Harman’s chapter on metaphor, let alone the whole book, but based on what I’ve read so far I presume this is the direction he’s guiding his readers.

Sonic Unconscious

“The unconscious is structured like a language,” says Lacan — a loosely-linked array of signifiers decoupled from signifieds, possibly connected on the back end, behind the unconscious, to the primeval Real. On the front end, in the Symbolic Order, the conscious self is spoken by the Big Other. Here’s an excerpt from my novel Prop O’Gandhi, where the eponymous hero (formerly known as Ulrich Daley) is getting in touch with the sonic unconscious and with the Voice of the Other whose Face appears to him in the bathroom mirror…

Only once before had Prop “heard voices,” as they say. At a Jesus-freak commune in North Africa, long before he became Prop, Ulrich had learned to position himself in that realm between wakefulness and sleep where, from the deep past, mystics wait. In the semiconscious twilight he became aware of a physical pressure bearing down on his prone body. Then he discerned the voices: low, muttering, guttural, incomprehensible. “Jesus come into my soul,” Ulrich petitioned within himself. Suddenly the voices stopped, the pressure lifted. Had the voices been the angels of God to whose summons he had at last responded, or had the dark angels tried to take him and failed? Maybe he had been eavesdropping on an internal dispute among supernatural beings without their being aware of it. Never again, except in memory, was he to hear those inhuman grumblings.

Later during that same week Ulrich would receive, by the laying on of hands, the gift of tongues. The phrases he would speak, though possessed of a structure and a rhythm, an apparent grammar and syntax, carried no conscious meaning. The little group of expatriated hippie neo-Christians espoused an explicit theology of tongues-speaking: God could understand what was being said, and that was good enough for them. Words were spoken that the Hearer could understand – this was the important thing. Understanding your own speech isn’t important. When you speak words you can understand, pretty soon you start conforming the words to the understanding, instead of simply saying what God wants you to say. What you need is a gift of speech that bypasses consciousness altogether, that makes connection with the super-consciousness of mystical presence. Surprisingly even now, long after Ulrich had forsaken the faith, he could speak in tongues if he wanted to, whenever he wanted to. He still didn’t know what the words meant.

This new voice, the Voice of the Face, was nothing like those other voices. “For one thing,” Prop thought matter-of-factly, “I can understand the words.” He supposed it was possible that the Voice didn’t understand its own words – “like tongues,” he speculated, “except this time I’m on the receiving end of the line. Maybe when I answer he has no understanding of what I say. But I don’t think that’s true,” Prop concluded, for he and the Voice could carry on a rudimentary conversation. It simply seemed to Prop that the Voice wasn’t much interested in chatting.

Most of the time the Voice issued commands: Go to the grocery store and buy three dozen eggs; open a new checking account and deposit in it a small sum of money; draw with a black marker a particular configuration of arrows and numerals on your right forearm. The Voice didn’t explain why Prop should undertake these seemingly arbitrary actions. If he asked, the Voice ignored him. On the other hand, if Prop asked, say, where the thick black arrow pointing toward his wrist was supposed to intersect with the “9” he had been told to draw onto his right forearm, the Voice would clarify. Surprisingly, when Prop held up his arm for the Face to see whether he had done it correctly, the Voice said nothing. It seemed as though the Face was unable to see. Thinking that perhaps the Face was incapable of redirecting his gaze to the right coordinates, Prop held his right forearm above his left shoulder, where the Face always seemed to be looking. Still the Face showed no recognition; still the Voice made no comment. Within the realm of the spoken word the Voice could instruct and Prop could respond to the instructions; only then could they understand one another. But for Prop O’Gandhi there was no knowing whether he was doing it right.

If you follow the words through the Symbolic order, do you ever reach the other side, touching or even penetrating the sonically Real that surrounds you? Here’s the text of a piece of music, composed in 1969 by Alvin Lucier, entitled “I Am Sitting in a Room”:

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

These aren’t the words to the tune; the words become the tune through the recursive process of speaking, recording the speech, playing the recording of the speech, rerecording the recording, etc. Here’s a recording of Lucier’s original performance of this piece. This is a quick version; other performances, in other rooms, with other recording devices, take longer to complete their inevitable transformations. Still, if you’re short on patience, listen to the first couple of rounds then jump ahead to the end.

Kant+Sade = The Lacanian Ethic

There’s one more thing I wanted to note in Subjectivity and Otherness (2007), Chiesa’s book about Lacan. I’d forgotten what it was, but now it’s come back. It has to do with the primeval energy force that for Lacan is the source of creation of everything, including the unconscious: the immanent “sprite of the current” that’s perpetually active behind the scenes, assembling and setting everything in motion, including the unconscious from which human subjectivity emerges. Here Chiesa shears off from Lacan and starts linking him to Kant and Sade in a way that I found intriguing.

I’ll quote at some length from Chiesa (p. 170):

I have repeatedly pointed out that what one finds in the place of the real object that cannot be refound is not just the self-conscious representation of the objects of everyday reality, but also the unconscious Real-of-the-Symbolic (the object a); Seminar VII primarily associates the latter with the superegoic jouissance of the commandment, which is something “intemperate” in itself — since it paradoxically becomes “crueller and crueller as we offend it less and less” — and constitutes the other “obscene” side of the positive moral law. More importantly, Lacan shows how the “inner voice” of the superego which “substitutes itself” for the primordial Real — negatively represented in the Symbolic by the “dumbness” of das Ding — is its “opposite and the reverse,” yet, unexpectedly, taken at its purest, it is also “identical” to it.

(Allow me to pause briefly to let the reader savor not only the density of Chiesa’s language in explaining the already-abstruse Lacanian texts, but also the relative clarity of my own summaries (lol). Though Chiesa seems impatient with his readers’ dull-wittedness (“I have repeatedly pointed out…”), I still find his writing difficult to parse — which of course gives me liberty to rewrite his text as it suits me without anyone being the wiser.)

In his first sentence Chiesa repeats himself but he also seems to contradict himself. Earlier he said that the undead Real as a “hole” in the Symbolic is not the same as the always-already missing objet a, which acquires its meaning inside the Symbolic itself and which represents that which has been cut off (castrated) from the self through socialization (I see my clarity is already getting muddied). My understanding was that the hole in the Symbolic isn’t the lost object that’s always being sought in the Other, but rather the void through which the undead archaic Real occasionally irrupts. The void doesn’t induce the desire to find or to be the lost objet a; rather, it stimulates new creation in the Symbolic, which simultaneously swallows up and makes forever inaccessible another part of the Real. But we move on…

According to Chiesa, Lacan associates objet a with “the superegoic jouissance of the commandment.” To be embedded in the Symbolic order, the self has to be castrated from the primeval Real, a Real that is “killed” by being drained into the Symbolic. But the self derives pleasure from this painful excision, because by it the self is assigned a place the social order, an order that’s “commanded” by language imposed by the Other on the self. The command becomes “crueller and crueller as we offend it less and less,” says Lacan: this is because the more we embed ourselves in the Symbolic the more we’re cut off from the Real. Symbolic castration is a continual trauma to which we voluntarily subject ourselves. So the “law,” defined in the broadest terms as the Symbolic order itself, the “Word,” the psychosocial reality defined by language — the law claims virtue in embedding us in society, but its “obscenity” is its cruelty in leaving us cut off, with some part of us always missing or “holed.”

Chiesa says that, for Lacan, the superego substitutes for the primordial Real, both as the absence of the Real thing in itself and as the opposite of this absence. This absence and its opposite can’t be equated with the positive and negative features of the commandment, which operates within the Symbolic. Is it equated with the pleasure-and-its-opposite nature of jouissance? That doesn’t seem quite right either, since jouissance is the self’s emotional response to the bipolarity of the Symbolic commandment — which means that jouissance has to come after the Real has already been killed by the Symbolic. But “substitute” doesn’t necessarily mean “representation” or “trace”: the superego occupies the empty place that’s been vacated by the Real. So the superego needn’t resemble the Real-as-void any more than the Symbolic description of a thing resembles the thing-in-itself (see preceding post on this lack of correspondence between Real and Symbolic in Lacan).

But then we get the phrase that seems to overturn all that preceded it:

…yet, unexpectedly, taken at its purest, it is also “identical” to it.

So here is a seemingly irresolvable paradox: the superego both substitutes for the primordial Real and is identical to it. This identity suggests that the Real possesses the bipolar properties of the superego: it both incorporates and cuts off; it induces both pleasure and pain. We already observed in the prior post that, per Chiesa, Lacan regards the Real as something like the Holy Spirit, an immanent force that’s integral to the world itself. Does this mean that the Holy Spirit manifests this bipolarity of the superego? We move on to Chiesa’s next two paragraphs:

This is where Kant’s philosophy and Sade’s novels come on the scene, and reveal their utmost ethical significance and danger. According to Lacan, both Kant and Sade attempt to force their way to the Real of the Thing — and thus return to the pure jouissance of the primordial Real — precisely by radicalizing the ambivalent nature of the superegoic commandment in opposite ways, by transforming it into a universal maxim to be understood as “pure signifying system.” Indeed, such an (asymptotic) purification of the Symbolic, the complete symbolization of the Real, can eventually achieve a real-ization of the Symbolic, its disappearance…

More specifically, Kant’s ethics and Sade’s “anti-ethics” similarly endeavor to exacerbate and final break with the dialectic between law and desire as inherent transgression which Saint Paul expressed in the following way: “If it had not been for the law, I would not have known sin [transgression].” The lack of mediation between law and desire in favor of one of the two should hypothetically give rise to either a pure jouissance of the Law, in the case of Kant, or an — ultimately indistinguishable — pure law of Jouissance, in the case of Sade. In other words, the Kantian categorical imperative “Act in such a way that the maxim of your action may be accepted as a universal maxim” is nothing but a reduction of the law to its pure form; the Sadean imperative “Let us take as a universal maxim of our conduct the right to enjoy any other person whatsoever as the instrument of our pleasure” is nothing but the reduction of the law to its object, to the “right to jouissance.”

The idea is this: Kant regards his ethic as intrinsic to the universe, a natural universal law, so it’s natural for a human to act in accord with this ethic. Because the ethic is intrinsic to human nature, following the ethic brings pleasure in its own right — the pleasure of being at one with the universal — regardless of whatever other benefits the person might derive from ethical behavior. The Kantian ethic valorizes the kind of middle way of Aristotle and Confucius, along with the communal Golden Rule — in other words, it’s an ethic that’s familiar and sort of comforting. But Sade, whose ethic is very different indeed, shares something with Kant: he too believes that his ethic is a law of nature. According to Sade, because self-gratification naturally produces pleasure, it must be a natural law and therefore good. The forces of violence and destruction clear the way for new creation, so to act as an agent of these forces is to resonate with the universal spirit of creativity. Inflicting violence on others, or even to have violence inflicted on oneself, would therefore stimulate a natural pleasure of being in tune with the universal forces.

What’s important from Lacan’s perspective is this: the person who subscribes to the Sadean ethic derives pleasure from violating Kant’s ethic, while the follower of Kant is pleasured by violating Sade’s ethic. So what would be the result of combining the Kantian and the Sadean natural ethics, polar opposites of one another but both intrinsic to nature itself? Presumably whoever acts in accord with this bipolar ethic would simultaneously experience both pleasure and its opposite. This pleasure-antipleasure admixture would result from ethical action regardless of whether the actor is following the mandate of the Kantian pole or the Sadean. This for Lacan is the pleasure-pain of jouissance. It arises whether a person follows a law or violates that same law, because violation too operates according to law. The universal law of the real is bipolar, and so is the natural affective response.

So, to summarize (sort of): By being inscribed in the Symbolic order, the individual experiences loss of the Real. The Symbolic order operates according to a Law by which the individual becomes more and more fully incorporated into the Symbolic, more closely connected in communal bonds with others. But another Law is at work: the other who subjects the individual to the Law derives pleasure from exerting power and destroying something in the individual, and the individual derives pleasure from violating Law. To seek one kind of lawful pleasure is, paradoxically, to seek the pain of violating the inverse law. Desire is thus always infused with this ambivalent affect of jouissance. Fully pursuing this bipolar pleasure-pain of desire, becoming more and more fully inscribed in a Symbolic order that simultaneously includes its own opposite, paradoxically brings the person into closer and closer contact with the bipolar Real. Law and jouissance, emerging as replacements for the Real as the Real is progressively killed by the Symbolic, paradoxically transform themselves into a new Real that pushes through the Symbolic. It’s like a Möbius strip: you walk along one surface until eventually you find yourself on the other side.

The Unconscious God of Lacan

[This is the third and probably last in a series on Chiesa's 2007 book Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan.]

In his immensely helpful A Clinical Introduction to Lacanian Psychoanalysis (1997), Bruce Fink asserts that, for Lacan,

The real… is what has not yet been put into words or formulated… This real, according to Lacan, has to be signified through analysis: it has to be spoken, put into signifiers. As Jacques-Alain Miller has put it, analysis involves the progressive “draining away” of the real into the symbolic. (Fink, p. 49)

By Fink’s account, then, the analysand’s experience while undergoing Lacanian analysis is quite compatible with relational psychoanalyst Donnel Stern’s fine 2003 book Unformulated Experience (see link in prior post). But Stern, whose representational understanding of language is influenced strongly by Gadamer’s hermeneutics, separates himself from Lacan, who disconnects truth from direct human experience of the real.

Truth for Lacan is found in error, misapprehension, nonsense, word-play, and the weird juxtaposition of dreams. (Stern, p. 9)

For Lacan truth need have no connection whatever to the Real, because the Symbolic order “kills the Real.” It’s in these unplanned and unexpected lacunæ within the Symbolic that the Real is able to irrupt, however briefly, before being absorbed in language or repressed again. This is “the Real of the unconscious,” the main focus of Lacanian analysis. (It’s also, I think, the basis for Zizek’s parallax and Badiou’s event.)

But it’s not clear in what way the unconscious contains or connects to the Real, if the unconscious consists of a loosely structured assemblage of linguistic signifiers disconnected from the signifieds to which they are sutured in consciousness and by which they are assigned meaning in the Symbolic order. Signifiers are Real in the trivial, non-linguistic sense of being material entities comprised of physical marks and phonological elements. The more important question is this: are the signifiers of the unconscious connected, on the back end as it were, to the primordial Real, the things-in-themselves, a connection that is severed by crossing the Symbolic threshold into language? Or, to say it another way: The Symbolic order castrates the unconscious subject from the Real in order to embed it in a social reality defined in terms of the Other of language. Is there an “Other of the Other,” by which the Symbolic retains some trace of a connection with the structured order of the Real?

At first Lacan answered in the affirmative. The name of the Father, around which the Symbolic is organized, pointed beyond all those who occupy the role of father in actual families to a primordial Father who validates the Symbolic order. The Symbolic Other of the Symbolic Other is like Descartes’ non-trickster God who assures us that our understanding of things corresponds to God’s understanding. Later, though, Lacan disavowed this idea of a God-the-Father of the Symbolic. But though the Other of the Other was no more to be found in Lacan’s psychological cosmogony, there remained the primal creative energy from which everything springs, a Real and absolute Other. However, the individual cannot know this Other directly; its existence must be inferred only after it has already been “killed” by the Symbolic. All that remains of this primal Real is the hole in the Symbolic where it used to be: the Real as already-dead, as undead, as “not-One.” The pure primal Real remains forever barred to sentient humanity. This undead Real isn’t the always-missing objet a of the Symbolic that results from castration, from the self being cut off from the Real and incorporated into the Symbolic, but rather a hole in the structure of the Symbolic itself, a no-thing rather than a missing thing.

Though the primal Real remains forever inaccessible to humans, it is the engine that generates everything in the world, including humanity. The unconscious, being something like a language but not actually embedded in the Symbolic, maintains contact with this pre-sentient animal Real. Not only that, but this Real generates and energizes the unconscious itself. So if the unconscious is structured like a language, does its structure correspond to or emerge from the primal Real? Apparently so. Chiesa says that, for Lacan, the primal Other is the Holy Spirit, the immanent elan vitale, the “sprite of the current” that creates everything, including the unconscious, ex nihilo.

This Real as primal force isn’t the object of empirical scientific knowledge, which is a Symbolic investigation of the Imaginary appearances of the world rather than of the Real world itself. The only contact with the primal Real occurs outside of and prior to both the Imaginary and the Symbolic, in the unconscious. As Lacan once said, “God is not dead; God is unconscious.” Though the Symbolic in effect kills the Real by absorbing it into itself, the undead Real continues to make itself known through the hole in the Symbolic, a hole that can only be entered through the unconscious. The primal Real thus constitutes a void, a non-thing in the unconscious, that occasionally makes itself evident within the Symbolic. It is from this unconscious void that all new Symbolic knowledge emerges, a creative disjuncture that can only glimpsed after it has already been closed up again within the Symbolic. (This idea of the creative void of the unconscious Real corresponds, I believe, to Badiou’s idea of the void and the event.) What breaks through the void is something like the Holy Spirit, the not-One, the pure multiple of inchoate creation. Says Chiesa:

for Lacan, the creation ex nihilo of the signifier on which human thought depends is truly materialistic; Lacan’s creationism is a form of antihumanist immanentism… the Symbolic emerges as an immanent consequence of the primordial Real. Yet the point of creation ex nihilo is also the point of infinity: what precedes it can only be thought as impossible (to think) — one cannot think the primordial Real, or the point of creation. (p. 137)

Lacan says in Seminar VII that the Symbolic

has been functioning as far back in time as [man's unconscious] memory extends. Literally, you cannot remember beyond it, I’m talking about the history of mankind as a whole.

Concludes Chiesa on this issue of Lacan’s primal Real:

the points of creation and destruction (of history) are a strict logical “necessity,” but they can be posited only through retroactive or anticipatory mythical speculations. This is how the finitude of man as parlêtre engendered by creation ex nihilo opens a “limited” space of infinity, the “absoluteness of desire” that must be opposed to the eternal immortality of the undead — that is to say, the primordial Real, pre- or postsymbolic “nature” as not-One. (p. 138)

This summative statement clears up some things while muddying others. Briefly, though, with respect to Meillassoux’s agenda, Lacan doesn’t believe it’s possible to touch the Real either before or after human finitude, nor is it possible to assert that what sentient humans understand about the Real has any correspondence with what the Real is like in itself.

[ADDED 4 SEPTEMBER] As I said in my last two posts about Chiesa, Lacan’s inversions and convolutions about the Real seem not just unnecessarily complex but counterintuitive and at odds with empirical research. Lacan and Stern share the underlying psychoanalytic perspective that an individual’s conscious awareness expands by formulating in thought and language what remains unformulated in the unconscious. Stern probably preserves too much of the Real by retaining the representational view of language, whereby the content and structure of the Symbolic order can be directly mapped onto the content and structure of the Real which it formulates. But to contend that conscious formulation kills the Real, which continues to haunt the Symbolic as an undead hole or non-thing, goes too far in the other direction — it’s kind of like saying that flour and eggs and sugar are killed by the cake into which they’ve been baked. Language and thought are essential to human survival in the Real — they are, one could say, integral to the human Real. The perceptual and cognitive tools by which the human mind apprehends and structures information presented to it by the Real need not correspond directly to the thing in itself, but it must, I think, describe characteristics of the thing if it’s to be pragmatically useful — characteristics that exist in the Real independent of human apprehension. But now I’m stepping dangerously into the philosophical territory of speculative realism, about which I know barely enough even to be slightly dangerous to myself.

Lacan’s Inverted Structuralism

For Saussure, a language is a structured system comprised of signs. A sign consists of two paired elements: the signified, or the concept associated with the sign; and the signifier, or the sound made when the sign is spoken. A sign has no meaning in and of itself; rather, it derives its meaning from all the other signs within the linguistic structure in which it participates. And the connection between any given signified and its signifier is arbitrary: the sound of the word is (with a few exceptions) unrelated to its meaning.

According to Chiesa (Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan, 2007, pp. 48-49), Lacan disrupts Saussurean structuralism in three ways. First, Lacan contends that the signifier “logically precedes and causes the signified.” I suppose technically this is the case: infants make all sorts of vocalizations before they understand what these sounds mean in their language. But this seems like a trivial point. In translation, mapping words from one language to another based on how they sound is a futile undertaking. E.g., the word spelled “pain” in French has nothing to do with its phonological analog in English. Translation operates by focusing on common meaning elements, or signifiers.

Second, Lacan observes that the same signifier can have more than one signified connected to it; i.e., the same word can have multiple meanings. The complement is true also of course: the same concept can be expressed by more than one word. But what interests Lacan is that the particular meaning to which a signifier is pointing can be discerned only through context. Only after the entire sentence has been spoken is it possible for the hearer to decide with relative certainty what the speaker intended to mean by each of the words included in that sentence. In other words, it’s the structure and sequence of signifiers that determines the meaning of an utterance.

Third, the structure of the sequence of signs determines the structure of the subject who speaks them. I think what Lacan means here is that neither the listener nor the speaker knows what the subject means by what she says until after she’s said it. The words are spoken, then the meanings are assigned to the word string, then the intentionality of meaning is assigned to the speaker. Because speech takes place in a social context, the subject who speaks is embedding herself in a Symbolic order the meaning of which is already determined by the Other. Therefore, in speaking to a listener, the subject is in effect being spoken by the Other to another. The subject becomes a structural artifact of language.

It’s in Lacan’s threefold divergence from Saussure that his famous epigram “the unconscious is structured like a language” is to be understood. According to Lacan, the unconscious is made up of signifiers loosely and multiply linked to each other. In speech the unconscious strings together sequences of signifiers and routes them through consciousness, attaching them to signifieds. Signs — signifier-signified pairs — never refer to actual things in the world; they refer only to each other. But it’s in the act of pairing signifier to signified that the subject-as-unconscious is assigned meaning as a self-conscious element within the Symbolic order. The subject in effect becomes a linguistic object.

Now I’m sure there’s a whole lot to be said for looking at subjects and language in this way, but to me the whole scheme strikes me as a kind of Ptolemaic cosmology replete with epicycles and wheels within wheels that add a seemingly sophisticated complexity to phenomena that could be greatly simplified. In this case, though, the simpler understanding is also the more intuitively obvious one. People experience things; people think about the things they experience; people come up with words to describe their experiences to others. It’s not just the signifiers that are unconscious; the signifieds are too — as Donnell Stern said, “all thought is unconscious.” When we speak we consciously and spontaneously call up from the unconscious a sequence of signs in which sound and meaning are already paired up. The hearer might not know which meaning to assign to the word string until it’s been fully spoken, but the speaker can know. The speaker probably doesn’t make a radical and sequential distinction between signifier and signified; i.e., she probably doesn’t formulate a complex thought and then assign the words to those thoughts as a separate conscious act. Thought and language are more closely linked than that: we think linguistically most of the time. And the thought-word sequence is assembled in real time: the barrier between unconscious and consciousness is permeable and flexible.

Doubting Lacan’s Imaginary-Symbolic Split

“What will you do with all that I say? Will you record it on a little thing and organize soirées by invitation only? — Hey, I’ve got a tape by Lacan!”

Lorenzo Chieza begins his 2007 book Subjectivity and Otherness: A Philosophical Reading of Lacan with this funny little remark from Lacan’s Seminar XVII. Even the act of numbering the seminars with Roman numerals reveals a kind of reverence reserved in America for only the most momentous of events, like the Oscars and the Super Bowl. Lacan would seemingly have been in an excellent position to acknowledge the importance of the other’s gaze in establishing self-image. I want to write maybe two or three posts about this book before sending it back to the library along with whatever memories I might have retained of it.

Though Lacan’s description of the etiology of self-image diverges from empirical evidence (1), his contention that self-image begins as a reflection of others’ image of the self is well-supported by the research (2). What I have a hard time grasping is Lacan’s radical distinction and split between the Imaginary and the Symbolic in the formation of the self. Recognizing one’s image in a mirror depends on the very same sort of identification with the perspective of the other that’s foundational to language acquisition. Adopting others’ perspective on how they see you is of a kind with adopting how others talk about you. Visual images may affect the viewer in ways that may elude conscious awareness or verbal description. But the same could be said for mood or body language or tone and volume of speech. For that matter, it’s possible to listen to speech, to understand its meaning, and to respond with intelligible verbalization of one’s own, and still the personal impact of the other’s words may resonate at a level beneath the threshold of conscious awareness.

The difference, presumably, is this: the Imaginary presentation of self-as-reflection creates the illusion of one’s wholeness and completeness, whereas the Symbolic representation of self-as-description cuts the self up into a multitude of separate verbal signifiers. Also presumably, the creation of the Imaginary whole self precedes the symbolic castration that resolves the Oedipus complex and embeds the self in the social and linguistic order dominated by the name-of-the-Father. Language separates the self from its idealized self-image and shatters its unity into a multiplicity of words. At the same time, the self attempts to restore its lost wholeness in part by assembling an ego-ideal: a collection of features, and the words for describing these features, that project (to oneself and to others) the semblance of wholeness within the Symbolic order. Of course there’s always something missing, not least because language itself is a radical divider of wholeness, and so the self continually strives to restore this lost and irretrievable ideal self-image through a variety of futile efforts.

As I noted in the prior post, children typically don’t recognize their own reflection until after they’ve already begun both understanding and speaking language. And as shown in a recent experiment, magpies demonstrate their ability to recognize themselves in the mirror not by preening proudly before an idealized self-image, but by trying to remove the splotch of paint that makes the image less than perfect. I would expect that a child or a magpie would first recognize herself not by seeing in the glass an Imaginary ideal and applying it to herself, but by noting how performing discrete physical movements of individual body parts result in the same movements being performed by the reflection’s corresponding body parts. In other words, recognizing one’s reflection depends on discriminating parts from whole.

Now of course it wasn’t mine to experience, but I observed no evidence of trauma associated with my daughter’s learning to use language. She seemed quite eager to demonstrate her understanding of others’ words and especially her newfound ability to make herself understood verbally. Like other infants she added words rapidly to her vocabulary. It’s true that her first spoken word was “Da,” by which she firmly and forever established herself in my personal Symbolic order. But her second word was “green,” from which I’m unable to derive any sort of general psychological insight. Much of this early language facility seemed unrelated to her issuing demands for getting her needs met. Of course language acquisition followed hot on the heels of her ability to crawl/walk/run, her increasing adeptness at manipulating physical objects, her imitative ability, her ability to perform increasingly complex tasks, and so on. Language emerged in her repertoire, on developmental schedule, as one of the many skills every normal human acquires at an early age. And she seemed very pleased indeed with her ever-increasing competence.

At the same time, each of these skills didn’t arise fully formed: a lot of repetition was involved, a lot of trial and error. Learning to walk means falling down again and again. It’s sometimes painful, more often frustrating — a consistent source of negative feedback debunking one’s perfect and complete self-image even before language acquisition begins. But little kids seem to exhibit surprisingly little frustration in learning to speak. Our daughter demonstrated admirable tolerance of her parents’ persistent inability to understand what she was telling us. Patiently she would repeat herself again and again until at last we got it; then she seemed just as pleased with our learning as we were with hers.

In short, the Ideal-Symbolic split, the Oedipal castration, the loss of completeness — none of our daughter’s supposed early trauma made itself manifest to us, none of it seemed to make her unhappy. Instead, she seemed quite pleased with herself and her ever-expanding human competency. I don’t recall her spending much of her early childhood developing self-discourses intended either to describe or to repair her shattered Ideal ego. That didn’t happen until, oh, about ten years later.

Linking Empirical and Philosophical Psychologies

In a prior post I contended that empirical psychology is continually constructing a vast and intricate Correlational Matrix that occupies a middle ground between the Real and the Theoretical. The Matrix is a sort of language composed of variables linked together by statistical associations. Psychological researchers operate inside this Matrix, traversing it, extending and tightening it, talking about it as if it were an autonomous structure of signifiers having no reference outside of itself. However, it’s possible to subject the Matrix to systematic transformations that move it closer either to the world of raw phenomena or to the realm of ideas for understanding phenomena. The Matrix of empirical signifiers, seemingly suspended in midair, is anchored on both sides of the divide between the physical and the mental.

But what does the Correlational Matrix tell us about human psychological phenomena? How are we to interpret the information it contains? For example, a section of the Matrix might show statistical correlations of varying strengths between children’s verbal ability, age, social role-taking, parents’ responsiveness to children’s attention, parents’ intelligence, and school success. Are these variables connected to one another in a deterministic and causal fashion, like the Law of Gravity? No: the connections are probabilistic. Typically in psychological research the statistical correlation between variables is a weak one, exceeded by the unexplained and apparently random variation between individuals. Also, the causal directionality of the statistical associations between variables isn’t always direct or easily demonstrable. Rather than a tight and elegant construct, the Correlational Matrix is a loose and complex tangle held together by a multitude of weak and tenuous connections.

Does the seemingly haphazard state of the Correlational Matrix reflect the haphazard state of empirical psychology? Is it a sign of immature theorization or inadequate methodology that the Matrix doesn’t tighten itself up? Or does the Matrix accurately describe the messy and indeterminate Real of psychological phenomena? If so, is it possible that the Matrix needs to get even bigger and more intricately interconnected than it already is? I’d say that’s the general historical trend in empirical psychology. Broad general paradigms and simple causal relationships rarely serve as well as specific, complex, multivalent explanations. Here again the Matrix is like a language: the vocabulary, grammar and syntax don’t gradually lead to a convergence onto a smaller and smaller number of sentences that people speak to one another; instead, the elements and rules of structuration afford an ever-increasing divergence of what people potentially can and actually do say.

Because empirical psychology functions as a language, enabling researchers to think and to talk to one another about phenomena, it should be possible to translate this language into terms that non-psychologists can understand. After all, the theory of gravity can be stated as a mathematical equation linking precisely-defined constructs describing physical reality, but the theory can also be stated in ordinary English sentences. Shouldn’t we expect as much from scientific psychology?

Suppose a psychologist were to say that children’s social role-taking ability accounts for 50 percent of the variance in the age at which they first recognize their own reflection in a mirror. How would a non-psychologist make sense of this assertion? Is it that role-taking causes self-recognition? Not necessarily — both might be caused by some other variable, and even so the connection between the two variables is far less than 100 percent. Is it that role-taking plus one or more other variables fully predicts age of self-recognition? Not that either: the other causal variables may not be known, and they probably intercorrelate with each other, so that no matter how many causal variables are added, the statistical model never really approaches 100% explanatory power. Even if it did, how would we understand the unique contribution of one predictive variable among many? Are they directly additive, such that role-taking plus a few other abilities combine into the ability to recognize oneself in a mirror? No: the statistical relationships are usually much more intricate than that. Not only that, but the specific relationships among variables differ from one individual to the next, both in their statistical interconnections and in their combined predictive power.

Perhaps the best one can do is to assert that, say, the age at which any given child is able to recognize itself in a mirror is an idiosyncratic combination of a variety of other competencies that can be identified, in varying degrees and combinations, in all children. The psychological variables account both for individual differences and for common features across humanity, but in a complex and non-deterministic way. One could regard the variables as immanent vectors flowing within each human and between all humans. These vectors intertwine complexly with countless and probably uncountable other vectors, serving simultaneously as sources of individuation and as strands that link people together to a greater or lesser degree. It’s possible to trace the trajectories of these psychological vectors as they flow within and between us, combining with one another in ways that add structure to individual and collective experience. At the same time this structuration is immanent and indeterminate and complex, manifesting itself in any number of ways that might not have been anticipated and that might not be readily accessible to conscious awareness.

Further, because we’re talking about human psychology, we acknowledge that some of these immanent vectors combine in a way that generates sentience and agency. As a consequence, humans can become aware of the vectors flowing through them and can willfully deflect and channel those vectors to some degree, further confounding any attempts to develop fully deterministic scientific models.

Considering the Correlational Matrix in this way — as a specialized language for describing the immanent vectors of individuation and commonality, and for tracing their trajectories and complex interconnections within and between people — it’s easier to see the correspondences between empirical psychology and the more philosophically-oriented psychologies of Freud and Lacan and especially of Deleuze and Guattari.

Magpie Self-Reflection

I’ve posted about mirror self-recognition before, both to illustrate Tomasello’s usage-based theory of language acquisition as a social role-taking skill and to present empirical evidence conflicting with Lacan’s theory of the Imaginary. Now researchers in Germany have demonstrated experimentally that magpies can recognize themselves in a mirror.

The experimental protocol is very similar to the one used by developmental psychologists to demonstrate self-recognition in human infants. A bit of colored paint is placed on the magpie’s feathers in a place where the bird can’t see it. The bird is placed in front of the mirror. If after seeing its own reflection the magpie begins attempting to remove the paint from itself, it can be inferred that the bird recognizes itself in the mirror. And this is precisely what the researchers discovered. This link to the study summary contains video clips of the magpies viewing themselves and attempting to remove the paint. Watching Gerti’s vigorous yet futile efforts to peck, scratch, and rub the offending mark off her feathers offers compelling testimony that she understands that it’s herself she sees in the mirror.

Researchers chose magpies for their investigation because other research had found magpies and related species (crows, ravens, jays) to be unusually intelligent. They have unusually large brains relative to their body mass. They’ve been observed in the wild modifying found objects for use as tools for obtaining food. And they’ve shown exceptional social intelligence, being particularly adept at picking up social cues from others. Magpies who rob other birds’ stashes of food take more trouble when hiding their own, a behavior suggesting that they expect their fellows to share the same larcenous intent they themselves have. When a predator encroaches on a magpie flock’s territory, for example, the first magpie to spot it will take up a position near but out of reach of the predator, emit its warning cry, and point its beak in the direction of the predator. When other magpies heed the warning and arrive at the scene, they too will point their beaks. If they pointed in the same spatial direction the original magpie was pointing, they would be showing imitative behavior (impressive enough in its own right for a bird brain). But it turns out the other magpies, arrayed at varying angles relative to the first bird, all point their beaks toward the predator, despite the fact that their eyes, placed on either side of the head, make it impossible to see the predator while pointing at it. By warning one another through pointing, magpies demonstrate that they understand the communicative intent of their own and their associates’ gestures.

In order to understand the other’s pointing gesture, a creature must be able to regard the other as similar to itself, with similar kinds of intentionalities. To follow the pointing finger or beak, the creature must be able to see the world from the other’s perspective, following the other’s line of sight to the object of attention. This intentional social role-taking ability is regarded as an essential prerequisite to language acquisition in humans: eventually the physical pointing is replaced by intentionally gazing directed toward the object of joint attention, and eventually by speech, in which the words are used as symbolic pointers directing the hearer’s attention to the referential object.

Social role-taking is also regarded as a prerequisite to recognizing one’s own image in a mirror. If the other points in my direction, I need to be able to understand that I am the object of the other’s attention. I thus need to objectify myself in order to understand the other’s communicative intent. By regarding myself as an object of the other’s attention, I’m also able to regard myself from outside myself, as if I were looking at myself from the other’s perspective. This self-objectifying ability is presumably what’s required if I’m going to recognize myself in a mirror — an act that requires me to see myself from a distance, as others see me.

Most higher primates, dolphins, and elephants can do it. Some breeds of dog — a subspecies of wolf bred for sociability with humans — can do it. Monkeys and other mammal species apparently cannot. Remarkably, it turns out that at least one species of bird can do it.

Empirical Psychology as a Language

That the knowledge base of empirical psychology is built, study by study, on the interplay between cumulative mean and individual deviation (1); that collectively the field consists of a vast Matrix of variables and their statistical intercorrelations having indeterminate relationship both to the Real world of phenomena and to pure Theory intended to explain these phenomena (2) — together these observations suggest that empirical psychology is something like a language. The variables are the nouns; the statistical associations are the verbs linking subject and predicates; the research methodology provides the grammatical rules for generating well-formed sentences.

In a structuralist construal, the language of empirical psychology would be a self-contained system, insulated from the Real, imposed from the top down on the society of psychologists and those who pay attention to their work. There would be no basis for asserting that psychology signifies anything about the Real; rather, network of constructs and variables derive their meaning only from one another. E.g., “depression” and “altruism,” “numeracy” and “effort justification” make sense only with respect to the other psychological variables in the matrix. Unlike natural language, the empirical language of psychology quantifies the strengths of the connections among the elements of the language, but the idea is the same. In natural language the strengths of interconnections could in principle be quantified by analyzing patterns of word use among networks of language-speakers or strength of neural connections in the brains of individual language-speakers — in other words, by subsuming natural language within the language of empirical psychology.

From the structuralist perspective, the language of empiricism speaks the psychologist. The specific sentences the researcher generates — i.e., what studies s/he conducts, on what variables, using what data collection and analysis methods — are determined by the structure of the Correlational Matrix itself. And certainly this is true to a considerable extent: the accepted theoretical paradigms and the array of relevant variables to which these paradigms might apply together suggest fruitful lines of future inquiry. One could imagine building an AI program which would, by systematically traversing the Correlational Matrix, spit out lists of research studies likely to generate statistically significant results, much as pharmacological AI programs identify specific molecules that might offer greater-than-random likelihood of proving clinically efficacious.

Even more distinctively than in its formal and quantitative structure, the language of empirical psychology differs from natural language by virtue of its rapid expansion. Virtually the entire vocabulary and grammar of the Correlational Matrix came into existence within the last hundred years. And while from the outside empirical psychology may seem static and self-enclosed, researchers are continually adding new variables to the Matrix. To an extent the Matrix expands itself: variable A always tacitly contains its opposite, a synthesized variable that combines A with X also suggests combining A with Y and Z. But for the most part researchers expand the Matrix consciously. One psychologist wants to extend Theory into previously unexplored territory; another becomes conscious of some aspect of the Real that hasn’t yet been subjected to the sort of systematic operationalization required for plugging it into the Matrix. The language of empirical psychology is continually expanding outward from the surface of contemporary use, creating an ever-broader platform from which to extend itself ever farther.

In its dynamism, empirical psychology illustrates something that structuralist accounts often fail adequately to acknowledge: languages grow. To say that languages “evolve” is to ignore their intentionality. People use language to describe something about the world to others. New linguistic elements may catch on in a spontaneous emergent way that looks like evolution, but they catch only when language users use them while communicating intentionally with one another. If the intent were merely to keep the conversation going, to sustain the interpersonal matrix without regard to the Real, then there might be no need to add words to the vocabulary. But if communicators want to talk about something, then it’s important to get the words right. And if they want to talk about something new, they’ll need to come up with new words. In a dynamic, usage-based context, all language maintains contact with the Real. And it’s in attempting to expand this contact within the intentional interpersonal realm of empirical psychology that the Correlational Matrix maintains contact with the Real of human experience.

Between the Real and the Theoretical

Statistical analysis is the most important mathematical tool used in psychological research. Mean, standard deviation, correlation coefficient, and so on: these are ways of summarizing empirical data in ways that are more readily amenable to testing hypotheses. If someone were to say that, on average, people raised in wealthy households make more money than those raised in poor or middle-income households, this isn’t a theory; rather, it’s the generalization of a statistical regularity calculated from specific data sets.

It’s possible to propose any number of reasons why a statistical association consistently turns up in the data. Causal relationships can be proposed, and data collection protocols will be designed to evaluate whether, over time, changes in one variable are followed by changes in the other variable. Perhaps other variables account for the statistical association — inherited wealth, social class, social networks, intelligence, quantity/quality of education, parental expectations, self-confidence, goal-orientedness, external locus of control, etc. These intervening variables too can be measured and evaluated statistically to see whether they account for some or all of the observed relationship between the original variables. Still, what you get in the end is a larger and larger matrix consisting of an array of variables interlinked by statistical relationships of varying strengths.

If they think about it, psychological researchers probably regard this Correlational Matrix as occupying a middle ground between the Real world and Theory. Between the Real and the Matrix are the gaps between the thing itself and how the thing is presented to the scientific observer. Ways of formalizing the definitions of things, of assigning specific data elements to them, of collecting the data, of summarizing the data arithmetically, of drawing inferences statistically — each of these moves, crucial to empirical research, interposes something between the Real and how the Real is perceived and conceptualized by human beings. It’s difficult, perhaps impossible, to specify the size of these gaps between the Real and the empirical. Perhaps the distance traveled is too great, leaving the Correlational Matrix of empirical psychology completely isolated from the Real, a vast and intricate structure of signifiers that’s entirely disconnected from what, with the systematic discipline imposed by scientific method, they’ve been constructed to signify.

On the other hand, the Matrix of variables and statistical associations isn’t Theory either. Theory is an abstract conception of entities and forces, of causes and effects, intended to explain the world as it presents itself to us. Popper taught us that theories can never be directly verified by empirical observation. But they can’t be directly falsified either. In order to enter the empiric fray a Theory must be transformed into a scientifically testable hypothesis, in which the abstract concepts and relationships are framed in material, observable terms. The abstract idea of intelligence must be defined in concrete terms: the score on a self-administered intelligence test, say, or the speed and diffusion of neural activity in response to specific stimuli as registered on some sort of MRI scanning device that hasn’t been invented yet. The theoretical relationships between abstract concepts must also be specified concretely; e.g., the magnitude of the statistical correlation between IQ test results and annual gross pre-tax income as documented in federal tax forms gathered from a systematically sampled representative subset of the population. Theorized causality must also be stated in empirical terms, for example through repeated measures over time subjected to time-series analyses and causal modeling statistics.

The connection between Theory and its empirically-testable concretization can become extremely attenuated. When empirical results don’t support the hypothesis, the researcher is apt to reject the hypothesis not because it has been refuted empirically but because the hypothesis was an inadequate expression of the Theory from which it was derived. So it is that Theory can survive any number of empirically mediated, presumably adverse encounters with the Real. When this sort of thing happens, one begins to wonder whether the Correlational Matrix actually occupies a middle ground between the Real and the Theoretical. Maybe it’s something else altogether: not the midpoint on a line but the third point of a triangle.

Rolling the Dice-Universe

My prior post on After Finitude looked at Meillassoux’s agenda for revivifying realism within continental philosophy. He wants to establish a basis for asserting the “facticity” of the world – its existence as an absolute independent of what and how people think about it:

We must grasp in facticity not the inaccessibility of the absolute but the unveiling of the in-itself and the eternal property of what is, as opposed to the mark of perennial deficiency in the thought of what is. (p. 52)

Prior rationales for the world’s facticity have relied either on God’s vouchsafing the truth of the world’s existence (Descartes) or on the reality of the world being structured in such a way that humans are able to perceive and to understand it (Kant). Both of these arguments ultimately rely on the world’s accessibility to human thought, on its intrinsic reasonableness. It’s a small step then to assert that there is a reason for the world’s reasonableness; i.e., of all the possible universes that could have come into existence, it’s hard to believe that chance alone would have generated one that is intrinsically comprehensible regardless of the minds doing the comprehending. Even more improbably, the universe retains its comprehensibility: the principles on which it is organized remain stable, effects predictably following causes rather than events randomly occurring or cause-effect relatonships changing capriciously from eon to eon or even from moment to moment. All this consistent reasonableness seems to imply that the universe came into being in such a way as to present itself to minds like ours; i.e., that the universe itself is contingent on sentience, such that sentience can only emerge in a universe where sentience “works.”

In other words, it is not absolutely necessary that causality governs all things, but if consciousness exists, then this can only be because there is a causality that necessarily governs phenomena. (p. 89)

At this point metaphysics throws up its hands. If the universe operates according to causal necessity, we can never know why this extremely unlikely possibility turned out to be the case. Meillassoux has no answer to this “why” question either. What he wants to question is the line of reasoning which suggests that a reason must be found. He does so by critiquing the improbability hypothesis; i.e., the idea that, among the vast number of a priori possibilities, a universe operating on the basis of stable cause-effect relationships would have been the one to manifest itself.

The idea that there is some underlying reason why, despite impossibly long odds, we live in a stable understandable universe is what Meillassoux calls the “necessitarian inference.”

The implicit principle governing the necessitarian inference now becomes clear: the latter proceeds by extending the probabilistic reasoning which the gambler applied to an event that is internal to our universe (the throw of the dice and its result), to the universe as such. This reasoning can be reconstructed as follows: I construe our own physical universe as one among an immense number of conceivable (i.e. non-contradictory) universes each governed by different sets of physical laws… Thus, I mentally construct a ‘dice-universe’ which I identify with the Universe of all universes, bound globally by the principle of non-contradiction alone, each face of which constitutes a single universe governed by a determinate set of physical laws. Then, for any situation given in experience, I roll these dice in my mind (I envisage all the conceivable consequences of this event), yet in the end, I find that the same result (given the same circumstances) always occurs; the dice-universe always lands with the face representing ‘my’ universe up. (p. 97)

Meillassoux’s critique of this hypothesized dice-universe is three-fold. First and all-too-briefly, Meillassoux (following Jean-René Vernes) contends that the whole logic of narrowing down from a priori possibilities to a single actuality is itself a product of human thought. In fact, the only real and absolute a priori is the universe as it is. The potentially limitless number of possibilities from which the actual emerged are actually the products of human imagination, contingent on the a priori fact that the really existing universe generated beings with the ability to imagine the nonexistent. There is no intrinsic reason to assert even the hypothetical reality of possibilities preceeding the actual.

Second, Meillassoux observes that, even if these a priori possibilities were real, the logic of statistical improbability doesn’t apply. Calculating the probability of an event’s occurrence depends on the ability to enumerate the possibilities; e.g., the chances of rolling a die and getting a 3 is one in six because we know a priori that the die has six sides, only one of which displays 3 pips. But what if someone rolls a die and you don’t know how many sides it has? Or what if, instead of turning up one of its sides, a rolled die transforms itself into a bird and flies away, or splits itself into two dice? In that sort of crap game all bets are off. It’s not possible to quantify, even theoretically, the universe of all the possibities of which the actual universe is an element or a subset. The possibilities may be infinite and inconceivable, or they may be zero. Therefore, says Meillassoux, statistical reasoning can’t legitimately be applied to the problem.

Third, just because we can presumably enumerate the universe of possibilities a priori doesn’t mean that each possibility is equally likely. E.g., suppose you roll a 6-sided die and it turns up a 3 ten times in a row, or a hundred times, or a million times. On grounds of pure chance this outcome is almost infinitesimally unlikely, suggesting that some other principle is at work causing the die to turn up 3 over and over again. But if we’re playing with a loaded die, the other five sides never come up because they can’t – they’re hypothetical possibilities that can never actualize themselves. As Meillassoux observes, chance itself is nothing other than a certain type of physical law (p. 99).

Contacting the Real

The theory of primary and secondary qualities seems to belong to an irremediably obsolete past. It is time it was rehabilitated.

So Quentin Meillassoux begins his extended essay After Finitude (2006, English translation 2008). Briefly, a primary quality is a property of the world (e.g., the shape and size of an object); a secondary quality is the way a person subjectively experiences a property of the world (e.g., the color of an object). It’s become almost axiomatic to deny the very possibility of detecting primary qualities because all our awareness of the world is mediated by our sensations of these properties: we can detect the world only in the way we detect its presentation to us. This isn’t to say that the world doesn’t exist outside of our awareness of it: it’s just that we have no direct access to the world.

Meillassoux finds it ironic that, at the very moment in history when science began developing methods for decentring knowledge of the world from human subjectivity, philosophy began insisting that no such absolute knowledge could be attained. In its persistent linguistic turn, continental philosophy asserts that truth is a property not of the world but of statements, and that the words we use to describe the world gain their meaning not from the world but from the structural interconnections between the words. Language came to be understood as an interconnected system of meanings detached from the features of the world the words purport to signify. So the word “hot,” as well as the concept to which the applies, gains its meaning not from the features of the world but from its contrast with the word “cold” in ordinary social discourse. Meillassoux observes that this disconnect between signifiers and signifieds is dogmatically asserted by philosophers even as scientists refine the measurement systems intended to disconnect the words “hot” and “cold” from their manifestation to our senses.

[T]he Copernico-Galilean decentring carried out by modern science gave rise to a Ptolemaic counter-revolution in philosophy… While modern science discovered for the first time thought’s capacity to accede to knowledge of a world indifferent to thought’s relation to the world, philosophy reacted to this discovery by discovering the naivety of its own previous ‘dogmatism’, seeing in the ‘realism’ of pre-Critical metaphysics the paradigm of a decidedly outmoded conceptual naivety… [S]cience’s decentring of thought relative to the world led philosophy to conceive of this decentring in terms of thought’s unprecedented centrality relative to the same world. Since 1781 (the date of the 1st edition of [Kant's] Critique of Pure Reason), to think science philosophically has been to maintain that philosophical Ptolemaism harbors the deeper meaning of scientific Copernicanism. Ultimately, philosophy maintains that the patently realist meaning of the claims of modern science is merely apparent, secondary, and derivative; the symptom of an attitude that is ‘naive’ or ‘natural. (p. 118f.)

Meillassoux regards the Ptolemaic counter-revolution in continental philosophy as a big mistake. He maintains as philosophically sound one of the fundamental premises of empirical science:

all those aspects of the object that can be formulated in mathematical terms can be meaningfully conceived as properties of the object itself. (p. 3)

He’s not very thorough in justifying mathematics’ unique status in achieving direct and absolute contact with the Real; rather, he tends toward proclamation:

it is meaningful to think (even if only on a hypothetical register) that all those aspects of the given that are mathematically describable can continue to exist regardless of whether or not we are there to convert the latter into something that is given-to or manifested-for. (p. 117)

In reading along with Meillassoux my first reaction was to minimize the distinction Meillassoux makes between language and mathematics. Isn’t mathematics, like language if not more so, a structured system of signifiers decoupled from the things in the world they signify? Doesn’t any single number or operation derive its meaning from the others in the larger system? Doesn’t advancement in scientific understanding depend in part on the human invention of new kinds of mathematics; e.g., the number zero in the 2nd century or so, the contemporary situation in physics where future advances in N-dimensional string theory depend on mathematical theory that hasn’t yet been completely thought through and formalized? Perhaps most importantly, aren’t the mathematics of scientific formulae and hypotheses mapped onto theoretical constructs that must be stated linguistically?

While I still think all that’s true, I think it’s fruitful to follow Meillassoux’s lead and extend the recision of the philosophical Ptolemaic counter-revolution from mathematics to language. Like mathematics, language is a tool for separating the world from our direct experience of it. When something “goes without saying,” it’s inextricable from subjective and intersubjective experience — this is how infants and other animals experience the world. To say something about the world is to call someone else’s attention to a particular feature of the world. To arrive at interpersonal understanding of meaning is at least in part contingent on arriving at an agreement about what the words refer to in the world. Science formalizes the process of linguistic precision by continually refining the “operational” definitions of terms. Operationalization is an intersubjective process, but the agreement refers specifically and precisely to the way in which a term describes a feature of the world that’s not dependent on the perceptions of any particular scientist. Operationalization entails a formalization of language that veers toward mathematics, further blurring the distinction between these two registers of thought.

It’s not necessary to assert that mathematics or language represent the real world, or that mathematico-linguistic structure mirrors the structure of the world. It’s also not necessary to assert a raw materialism, in which scientific knowledge entails the direct apprehension of the world as it presents itself to us. Meillassoux observes that

very few truths can be attained through immediate experience and that generally speaking, science is not based upon simple observations, but rather upon data that have already been processed and quantified by ever more elaborate measuring instruments. (p. 114)

Scientific assertions about the world aren’t just refined observations; they are, says Meillassoux, “part of a cognitive process.” It’s “only” necessary to claim that empirically-grounded cognitive processes, of which science is a particularly refined version, make it possible to describe the world in a way that’s at least partially separable from our subjective and intersubjective experiences of it.

Meillassoux acknowledges that he’s not able — yet — to demonstrate the ability of mathematics to give us access to the primary qualities of the world. Rather, he’s making an argument for pursuing a line of philosophical investigation broadly construed as “speculative realism.” He wants to reopen to serious inquiry “the most urgent question which science poses to philosophy;” namely, the possibility of arriving at true thoughts about the world that don’t depend entirely on human subjective thought processes. Meillassoux wants to answer this question through mathematical realism; I think he should extend this exploration also to linguistic realism.

Usage-Based Social Structure

I’ve been quoting long passages of Berger and Luckmann because they address the relationships between subjective and objective realities. They say that, largely through routinized social interaction, everyday reality comes to be regarded as objective by those who participate in it. To reiterate part of yesterday’s quote:

It is important to keep in mind that the objectivity of the institutional world, however massive it may appear to the individual, is a humanly produced, constructed objectivity… The institutional world is objectivated human activity , and so is every social institution. In other words, despite the objectivity that marks the social world in human experience, it does not thereby acquire an ontological status apart from the human activity that produced it.

In prior posts about psychology I’ve distinguished the more pragmatic, dynamic, usage-based structuralism of Chomsky and Tomasello from the more architectural and static structuralism of Saussure. The usage-based psycholinguists contend that consciousness doesn’t invoke pre-structured entities stored in the unconscious; rather, consciousness actively structures loosely-linked unconscious material on the fly according to present circumstances and intentions.

In their discussion of social roles Berger and Luckmann present what amounts to a usage-based conceptualization of social structure. Roles are stereotyped performances that take their meaning within the institutionalized social order. But B&L say that roles are more than just a component of the social order: The roles represent the institutional order. Institutions are represented in a variety of ways — in language and other symbol systems, in laws and codes, in institutions, in physical objects and their arrangements, etc.

All these representations, however, become “dead” (that is, bereft of subjective reality) unless they are ongoingly “brought to life” in actual human conduct. The representation of an institution in and by roles is thus the representation par excellence, on which all other representations are dependent.

Suppose I have a lot of knowledge about everyday social reality — symbol systems, values, expectations, common-sense understandings of the way things are, institutions. Roles, expectations of role-taking attitutes and activities, social situations in which particular roles are invoked. And now I’m at large in the world, carrying around in my head a representation of the larger social structure in which I’m embedded. This knowledge isn’t conscious, since at any given moment I only need a little bit of it to guide my thoughts, actions and interactions. It’s also not rigid, since in our world social institutions have very fluid boundaries that overlap in unpredictable ways. I need to be able to call up from my unconscious representation of everyday social reality those particular structures that serve my needs right now, in this particular situation. And I need to be able to act spontaneously and, yes, creatively while I traverse that small sector of the multiply-interconnected and dynamic institutional matrix which I happen to be traversing. So I call up from my loosely-structured and unconscious representation of social structures various components that I can assemble into a complex role performance, possibly a novel and unprecedented performance, that still falls within the accepted parameters of everyday institutionalized social reality. I don’t need to understand the whys and wherefores of these social structures: I just need to be able to use them when I need them. They are role-playing machines with which I generate novel yet socially stereotypical scripts.

The Reality of Everyday Life

From The Social Construction of Reality (1966) by Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann. Part One: “The Foundations of Knowledge in Everyday Life.”

“The reality of everyday life is taken for granted as reality… While I am capable of engaging in doubt about its reality, I am obliged to suspend such doubt as I routinely exist in everyday life…

“Compared to the reality of everyday life, other realities appear as finite provinces of meaning, enclaves within the paramount reality marked by circumscribed meanings and modes of experience. The paramount reality envelops them on all sides, as it were, and consciousness always returns to the paramount reality as from an excursion. This is evident from… the reality of dreams or that of theoretical thought. Similar “commutations” take place between the world of everyday life and the world of play, both the playing of children and, even more sharply, of adults. The theater provides an excellent illustration of such playing on the part of adults. The transition between realities is marked by the rising and falling of the curtain. As the curtain rises, the spectator is “transported to another world,” with its own meanings and an order that may or may not have much to do with the order of everyday life. As the curtain falls, the spectator “returns to reality,” that is, to the paramount reality of everyday life by which the reality presented on the stage now appears tenuous and ephemeral, however vivid the presentation may have been a few moments previously. Aesthetic and religious experience is rich in producing tensions of this kind, inasmuch as art and religion are endemic producers of finite provinces of meaning.

“All finite provinces of meaning are characterized by a turning away of attention from the reality of everyday life… It is important to stress, however, that the reality of everyday life retains its paramount status even as such “leaps” take place. If nothing else, language makes sure of this. The common language available to me for the objectification of my experiences is grounded in everyday life and keeps pointing back to it even as I employ it to interpret experiences in finite provinces of meaning. Typically, therefore, I “distort” the reality of the latter as soon as I begin to use the common language in interpreting them, that is, I “translate” the non-everyday experiences back into the paramount reality of everyday life. This may be readily seen in terms of dreams, but is also typical of those trying to report about theoretical, aesthetic or religious worlds of meaning. The theoretical physicist tells us that his concept of space cannot be conveyed linguistically, just as the artist does with regard to the meaning of his creations and the mystic with regard to his encounters with the divine. Yet all these — the dreamer, physicist, artist and mystic — also live in the reality of everyday life. Indeed, one of their important problems is to interpret the coexistence of this reality with the reality enclaves into which they have ventured…

“Moreover, language is capable of transcending the reality of everyday life altogether. It can refer to experiences pertaining to finite provinces of meaning, and it can span discrete spheres of reality. For instance, I can interpret “the meaning” of a dream by integrating it linguistically within the order of everyday life. Such integration transposes the discrete reality of the dream into the reality of everyday life by making it an enclave within the latter. The dream is now meaningful in terms of the reality of everyday life rather than of its own discrete reality. Enclaves produced by such transpositions belong, in a sense, to both spheres of reality. They are “located” in one reality, but “refer” to another.

“Any significative theme that thus spans spheres of reality may be defined as a symbol, and the linguistic mode by which such transcendence is achieved may be called symbolic language… Language now constructs immense edifices of symbolic representations that appear to tower over the reality of everyday life like gigantic presences from another world.”

What Structure Means to Me

The human environment is populated by real phenomena. Through sensory-perceptual systems we can detect and interpret information generated by phenomena — their color, shape, pattern, sound, velocity, etc. We can then categorize and organize these phenomena in a variety of ways, depending on the particular salient features under consideration. So, this particular thing can be a dog, an animal, a chocolate Lab, the neighbor’s pet, Fido, the cause of the yellow spots on my lawn, the source of all that barking, the dog that likes to be scratched under the chin. Each of these ways of categorizing the real phenomenon is embedded in and derived from a larger structural order. The structural order assigns a particular kind of meaning to the environment. This meaning is conveyed linguistically, so that the structure can be understood by the community of language-speakers in approximately the same way.

It’s possible to imagine phenomena as they really are, disembedded from the various systems of meaning by which we understand them. But we can’t actually encounter the raw thing in itself: even the sensory signals we receive from phenomena are organized by our perceptual systems so that we can make sense of the input. Raw phenomena exist, but from our human perspective they are an abstraction, the result of a thought experiment in which we strip phenomena of all the meaningful structures in which they’re always already embedded. Likewise we can imagine empty structures unpopulated by real phenomena. However, it may be impossible to generate a structure out of thin air without at least imagining the kinds of phenomena that would populate it. More often we abstract the structure beyond the bounds of the specific phenomena available to us.

From memory we are able to call up mental representations of specific phenomena: events, people, objects. We can also call up a variety of cognitive-linguistic schemata whereby we can make sense of phenomena, directing our attention to specific salient features in order to assign them to appropriate categories in various cognitive-linguistic structures. The linkages between phenomena and schemata are multiple and loose, so we can match them up on the fly according to our needs and intentions and whims of the moment.

Because of these loose multiple connections it’s possible for us to embed familiar phenomena in unfamiliar structures, and to extend existing structures to new phenomena. However, this doesn’t mean that structures exist in memory decoupled from representations of real phenomena, that signifiers float free of signifieds. Neither do signifieds float free of signifiers: our memories aren’t occupied by ghosts of raw phenomena decoupled from the various schemata by which we are able to incorporate them into structured systems of meaning. The connections between phenomena and structure, between signifier and signified, are loose and many-to-many. Together, phenomena and schemata constitute an unlimited variety of alternate virtual realities, any one of which can be activated by attention, intention or contagion and assembled in real time.

Cognitivist Apologetic

During the death of this blog I’ve continued to haunt some of my favorite other blogs. In a recent discussion on American Stranger (see blogroll), Traxus and Parodycenter provoked me into defending empirical psychology from charges of naivete, the valorization of consciousness, complicity with technofascism, hostility to psychoanalysis, and all sorts of other offenses against humanity and the revolution. So I wrote three comments back to back, not so much as a point-by-point response but as a kind of substrate for how empirical cognitivism might be viewed: as a field of inquiry among many others rather than as a “totalizing discourse” about minds. For those of you who weren’t participating or following along with the original discussion but find this sort of thing interesting, here are my three comments.

* * *

Even if empirical psychologists had a strong and reliable model of human cognition, individual human differences override the general regularities. Everybody has different genetically-endowed capabilities and drives, different experiences in the world, different others to interact with. So even on just the input side the material that is available to memory and the relative strengths of neural associations is going to be vastly different from one person to the next. Outputs would be all over the scatterplot.

And that’s just on a purely behavioral level, as if inputs were mechanically processed by the brain into theoretically predictable outputs. The cognitive paradigm acknowledges and demonstrates that individuals also exercise different ways of processing inputs based on things like intentionality, preference, bias, attention. These intermediaries between I and O may be conscious or unconscious, freely chosen by autonomous subjective agents or bent by cultural macroforces like economics and power. Collectively, these intermediaries are regarded as “cognitive,” mostly to distinguish them from environment and physiology.

If anything, then, the cognitive paradigm is less deterministic than the behavioral one. Structuralism in the way Europeans talk about it never had much of an influence on the American-dominated empirical psychology from which cognitivism emerged. Even somebody like Chomsky, who proposed one of the early structural models of psycholinguistics that eventually led to cognitivism, looks like a pragmatic instrumentalist when compared with somebody like Saussure. For Chomsky linguistic structure is an instrumental capability for intentionally manipulating language in order to generate unique sentences. So he talks about “generative grammar” as a very flexible tool for assembling signifiers on the fly to suit the speaker’s purposes. He does propose that human brains are uniquely structured to handle generative grammars, making him kind of Hegelian in that regard. But if anything the advance of cognitivism has led the field to dismiss Chomsky’s unique-brain-structure argument as an unnecessary holdover from idealism. The human brain evolved from other primate brains; human cognitive-linguistic abilities evolved from other primate abilities.

* * *

The working empirical psychologist isn’t typically driven by philosophy or grand theory. Some start out with an inclination to use science as a sort of rhetorical device, to stage demonstrations of favorite theories. This inclination is quickly trained out of you. Empirical investigations are informed by an attempt to understand phenomena that so far have not been investigated or have eluded prior efforts to pull them out of randomness. Sometimes the theory makes the researcher aware of classes of phenomena that it might be able to account for; sometimes the phenomena are compelling in their own right; sometimes they’ve been partially accounted for by competing theories and the question is whether the new theory suggests an alternative, perhaps a more complete, understanding.

A specific study takes place within a narrow band of theory and empiricism. In writing up the findings the researcher might cite one or two broadly-known figures who signify the general field of endeavor, but for the most part the citations are very specific to the empirical question under investigaion, and usually very recent. The field as a whole expands somewhat amorphously from the surface rather than building depth or structure or moving linearly down well-defined trajectories. Rare is the pitched dialectical “throw-down” between competing theories. In experimental design the battle is almost always waged against “the null hypothesis” = phenomenological randomness.

* * *

In the cognitive paradigm, consciousness isn’t a structured assemblage of content; rather, consciousness is a dynamic interface where a specific set of assembly procedures is mapped onto a particular subset of content (perceptions, memories, ideas) in a way that generates structured and meaningful output — thought, speech, behavior, etc. The content, the toolkit of procedures, the array of alternative prefabricated structures that can be imposed on content — all of it remains unconscious until it is called up, either intentionally or not, by the conscious interface. So as the individual moves through the continuous present the vast majority of her cognitive capability is unconscious. The content of the unconscious is loosely interconnected in a distributed and multiply-connected matrix. The structure of the unconscious is more virtual rather than actual: content can be assembled on the fly according to any number of structuration paradigms and procedures.

Some pre-canned structures are easier for consciousness to summon than others, based on habit or demonstrated pragmatic value — so even this dynamic structuring work of consciousness becomes stereotypical, nearly automatic, almost unconscious. Some virtual structures rarely become actual in consciousness: maybe they’ve never been tried before, maybe they’ve failed miserably before, maybe they’ve become associated with unpleasant emotions or memories so they don’t readily pop to the surface, etc.

It might be possible to exercise an individual’s cognitive structuration processes so that the passage between unconscious and conscious becomes freer and more flexible. You might make the person aware of automatic and stereotypic ways of thinking, do “free association” exercises in which material is dynamically structured in unaccustomed ways, identify obstacles in memory and affect that repress certain structures, identify past events that cause habitual structures to be applied transferentially to inappropriate situations, etc.

Collapsing the Triangle

We’ve been discussing Donald Davidson’s triangular epistemology whereby our awareness of ourselves, other people, and the world all hang together holistically through the intersubjective verbal interpretation of experience. Jonathan Erdman isn’t persuaded — he continues to wonder how he can ever know that the world and other people aren’t just a figment of his imagination. Jason wondered whether Erdman wasn’t being modernistic in his solipsism. I think Jason was on to something.

Maybe in modernism each of the three sides of the triangle takes its turn at trying to become the sole basis for awareness. Through Descartes rationalistic self-consciousness becomes the basis for all knowledge, leading to solipsism at the limit. In Lockean empiricism the world shapes the mind through the senses, tending toward an extreme behaviorism where the self is a product of the environment. In continental Structuralism it’s the other that creates the self through language, economics, or some other societal force.

These are perhaps the most significant “totalizing discourses” of the modern age, in which the three interrelated components of human awareness get reduced to a single dimension that effectively denies the other two. Each of these attempts to collapse the inherent interdependence of self, world and other proves absurd when taken to the limit.

Triangular Knowledge: Davidson

In light of ongoing discussions here and at Theos Project, I thought I’d summarize an essay by American philosopher Donald Davidson on the subject of knowing one’s own thoughts and the thoughts of others. Davidson’s position is quite consistent with Tomasello’s use-based theory of language acquisition and related empirical findings. It’s perhaps also compatible with Gadamer’s hermeneutics, though they come from very different philosophical traditions. I know, for the most part, what I think, want, and intend, and what my sensations are. In addition, I know a great deal about the world around me, the locations and sizes and causal properties of the objects in it. I also sometimes know what goes on in other people’s minds. In these first three sentences Davidson identifies the “Three Varieties of Knowledge,” the interrelatedness of which he explores in his 1993 essay of that name.

Davidson acknowledges that probably the most common approach is to assert the primacy of self-knowledge because of its directness and relative certainty, then to derive knowledge of the external world from it, and knowledge of other minds from observing others’ behavior. He wishes to show that this approach is wrong. No one form of knowledge can be derived from either of the others, says Davidson; rather, all three are dependent on each other.

First he addresses the negative situation, which essentially comes down to this: it’s possible that someone can, without realizing it, believe a falsehood or interpret a subjective experience incorrectly. Consequently, no amount of knowledge of the contents of one’s own mind insures the truth of a belief about the external world, [and] no amount of knowledge about the external world entails the truth about the workings of a mind. If there is a logical or epistemic barrier between the mind and nature, it not only prevents us from seeing out: it also blocks a view from outside in. Further, if our experience of other minds is derived only by inference from observing their behavior, we have no basis for asserting that others’ minds are anything like our own.

Belief is a condition of knowledge, says Davidson: if I say “the snow is white” I can also say “I believe that the snow is white,” even though the first statement refers to the world while the second refers to my state of mind. In order to believe something it’s not enough to discriminate between features of the world and to act accordingly. A sunflower that aims itself at the sun isn’t acting from a belief, nor if it aims at an artificial light has it made an error in judgment. Having a belief demands in addition appreciating the contrast between true belief and false… Someone who has a belief about the world — or anything else — must grasp the concept of objective truth, of what is the case independent of what he or she thinks. And where do we get this concept of truth that underlies our idea of true and false belief? Here Davidson follows the later Wittgenstein: The source of the concept of objective truth is interpersonal communication. Thought depends on communication.

In order to understand what someone says, I need to know both what she means and what she believes about this meaning. I therefore have to assume that the speaker is logically coherent and consistent — rational — and that she is responding to the same features of the world as I am. This is the unspoken compact binding the speaker’s utterances to her beliefs, and her beliefs to my beliefs. Why should this tacit and tentative interpersonal agreement, based not on fact but on something like charity, form the basis for objective truth?

Like the sunflower orienting toward sunlight, humans discriminate between features of the world. Language assigns names to the discriminatory criteria: light/darkness, snow/rain/hail, etc. If I try to understand someone who speaks a language that’s different from my own, I have to figure out whether her discriminatory criteria match my own. And I can’t do that merely by comparing languages; I can only do it by attending jointly with the other person to various stimuli in the world, and then seeing if her words for these stimuli match up with mine. The consistencies in discriminatory criteria for parsing the world need to match up with both my linguistic categories and the speaker’s.

For until the triangle is completed connecting two creatures, and each creature with common features of the world, there can be no answer to the question whether a creature, in discriminating between stimuli, is discriminating between stimuli at the sensory surfaces or somewhere further out, or further in. Without this sharing of reactions to common stimuli, thought and speech would have no particular content — that is, no content at all. It takes two points of view to give a location to the cause of a thought, and thus to define its content. We may think of it as a form of triangulation: each of two people is reacting differentially to sensory stimuli streaming in from a certain direction. Projecting the incoming lines outward, the common cause is at their intersection. If the two people now note each other’s reactions (in the case of language, verbal reactions), each can correlate these observed reactions with his or her stimuli from the world. A common cause has been determined. The triangle which gives content to thought and speech is complete. But it takes two to triangulate.

Until a base line has been established by communication with someone else, there is no point in saying one’s own thoughts or words have propositional content. If this is so, then it is clear that knowledge of another mind is essential to all thought and all knowledge. Knowledge of another mind is possible, however, only if one has knowledge of the world, for the triangulation which is essential to thought requires that those in communication recognize that they occupy positions in a shared world. So knowledge of other minds and knowledge of the world are mutually dependent; neither is possible without the other.

The stimuli that cause our verbal responses to the world are also what those verbal responses mean, as well as the content of our beliefs about the world. We might jointly triangulate on the same wrong beliefs; however, because we arrive at an interpersonal agreement regarding meaning and belief makes it very likely that we’re right about our basic perceptual beliefs and our general picture of the world. It’s difficult to isolate a particular belief as true or false, however, because knowledge of the world, of one’s own beliefs, and of others’ beliefs are irreducibly interdependent and holistic. We can identify invariants across all three points of the triangle, but we cannot regard any one point as determinate, independent of its relationship to the other points.

A community of minds is the basis of knowledge; it provides the measure of all things… The thoughts we form and entertain are located conceptually in the world we inhabit, and know we inhabit, with others. Even our thoughts about our own mental states occupy the same conceptual space and are located on the same public map… The objective and the intersubjective are thus essential to anything we call subjectivity, and constitute the context in which it takes form… If I did not know what others think, I would have no thoughts of my own and so would not know what I think.

Babies Socialize Their Parents

Tomasello tells us that infants can detect patterns in meaningless verbalization. Seven-month-olds exposed to three-syllable nonsense words of the pattern ABB (such as wididi, delili) show attentional preference to new ABB words over other kinds of syllabic combinations. This ability to detect abstract patterns in auditory stimuli is essential for learning patterns in real language. However, it is not sufficient: other primates can do it too. Humans and other primates can also detect abstract patterns in non-verbal stimuli as well. Humans are unique, however, in being able to link abstract verbal patterns with abstract properties of the world to which the verbal pattern refers in adult speech. So, for example, a human can distinguish the pattern “cold” in the verbal stream and link it to the property of coldness of things in the world.

When children first learn to speak they don’t have it down perfectly. Involved adults, usually parents, meet them halfway. For example, our daughter’s second word (after Da!) was green. It’s not clear, though, that an indifferent observer would have been able to tell what she was saying. She pronounced it gr, leaving off the -een bit altogether. But we could tell: she’d point at the grass, or a tree, or part of the rug, and declare gr. “That’s right, the grass is green,” we would say. So language acquisition develops through a mutual accommodation between child and caregiver. Still, it’s the adults’ language and categorization scheme that serves as the gold standard by which the child judges her own competency.

Lacan contends that adults go more than halfway — that in fact the adult’s imposition of language on the young child shapes practically everything about the way the child experiences the world, other people, and even herself. Maybe if we hadn’t shaped our daughter’s language development according to our adult cultural categories, she might have experienced green differently. Fink describes Lacan’s radical view of the invasiveness of adult language:

…one cannot even say that a child knows what it wants prior to the assimilation of a language: when a baby cries, the meaning of that act is provided by the parents or caretakers who attempt to name the pain the child seems to be expressing (e.g., “she must be hungry”). There is perhaps a sort of general discomfort, coldness, or pain, but its meaning is imposed, as it were, by the way in which it is interpreted by the child’s parents. If a parent responds to its baby’s crying with food, the discomfort, coldness, or pain will retroactively be determined as having “meant” hunger, as hunger pangs. One cannot say that the true meaning behind the baby’s crying was that it was cold, because meaning is an ulterior product: constantly responding to a baby’s cries with food may transform all its discomforts, cold, and pain into hunger. Meaning in this situation is thus determined not by the baby but by other people, and on the basis of the language that they speak.

As someone with purely decorative breasts, I can testify to the frustration of being unable to open up the buffet to a crying baby. I acknowledge that I lack the maternal ability to comfort, but I will say this: the baby bottle gave me a lot more options as a satisfier of infant desire. And there’s an undeniable sense of satifaction to be gained by successfully soothing the baby — you could say it’s rewarding, reinforcing. A baby’s crying creates a desire to soothe the baby. I had more of a sense of adapting myself to the baby’s desires than vice versa. If the baby is crying, try various options until you come up with something that will shut it up. A lot of parents put their crying babies in the car and drive them around: something about the movement and the vibration seems to put them right to sleep. Parents seem to arrive at this solution more by trial and error; only later do they come to find out that lots of other parents have independently arrived at the same solution.

Among ethologists, “ritualization” refers to gestures an individual generates solely with the intention of getting something done. A young child walks toward an adult with her arms outstretched above her head: what does it mean? “Pick me up,” of course. Or is this just how adults interpret the gesture, imposing adult symbolic meaning on the infant’s prelinguistic communication and thereby shaping her desire? Tomasello cites evidence to suggest that the “pick me up” gesture develops out of more direct attempts by the infant to get picked up: climbing up the adult’s body, grasping onto the adult’s arm or waist, and so on. These are the infant’s direct, non-symbolic, physical actions to get what she wants. The adult interprets these actions, picks up the baby, and the baby seems satisfied. Later the baby need only extend its arms and the adult understands what’s being asked. It’s more like the baby is training the parents rather than vice versa. If baby A were to approach baby B with this same arms-raised gesture, baby B probably wouldn’t get the message, even though baby B uses the very same ritualized gesture when it wants to be picked up. The ritualistic behavior works as symbolic communication only because the adult learns to interpret it that way.