RE: Friam Digest, Vol 19, Issue 17
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RE: Friam Digest, Vol 19, Issue 17
 
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Dear Kate,
I am sorry; this is going to be a biggie! Thanks for your comments. Such a far flung audience. We seem to be having a serious ">>>>>> <<<<<<<" problem on FRIAM, so I have pulled out the piece I wanted to respond to and reproduced it below. "Maybe what Nick has suggested is true: that what we mean by aliveness and should actually capture in defining life is that alive things feel and have intentions, etc. But of course there's no empirical criteria to distinguish feeling (conscious) things from inanimate things. That seems to be a can of worms without a cover." Actually, I am on the completely opposite side of the argument to that you suppose me to be. I am a behaviorist by training. Behaviorists come in two flavors. A psychological behaviorists believes that "there is no empirical criterion to distinguish feeling (conscious) things from inanimate things." In other words, a behaviorists implicitly buys into the metaphysics of the "Cartesian theatre"... you know, the little room with the single plush seat where you sit watching your consciousness stream by at your own private showing. But behaviorists refuse to do science about the ineffable. (As one psychological behaviorist mentor of mine put it, "You can't study what you can't EFF!" But that's a cat that cant be put back into the bag. As human beings, we talk about the ineffable all the time, so we need a position that explicates what talk of the ineffable actually IS. According to philosophical behaviorism, talk of the ineffable is in fact talk about behavior OR it is no talk at all, the playing of language games totally unconnected to any reality whatsoever. So, contra the psychological behaviorists, to say that one is talking of something that is beyond observation is to say nothing at all. (CAnt you just hear Wittgenstein raging in the background, here?!!!) So, our job as scientists is to discover to what actual behavior, talk of the ineffable actually adverts. When you say, "I want a cup of coffee," what is the game of which that saying is a part and what comes of your saying it. When one lover says to another, "I love you", the proper response of the the other is not to ask, "Does this statement speak truthfully of some ineffable state within my lover to which he and s/he only is privy, but does this statement speak truthfully of a higher order pattern in the behavior that I can rely on. Also, of what higher order pattern in my lover's behavior is the saying of "I love you" a part? As I talk here, you can actually hear me sliding over into a position that anticipates philosophical behaviorism by a few years, the New Realism. Below is a description of the new realism from a piece of writing that our group is currently working on. (The little blue things are part of our collaborative editing process and should be ignored.) More of an explication can be found in the link I posted with my original comment. Or you can go to my permanently in construction and obsessively wordy web site, home.eathlink.net/~nickthompson/ and mess about. In short, when I say that Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital, I mean that intentionality is a higher order property of BEHAVIOR, and if we can identify that property, we can say whether something is alive or not. And I certainly don't believe that the creature itself is the only one who knows whether it is alive or not. Here is the quote. The New Realists were a small group of William James graduate students who formed a short-lived philosophical movement at Harvard in the 1910s. Although not well known to contemporary psychologists, the new Realists had a powerful impact on American psychology through the work of two of their disciples, JJ Gibson, the founder of direct perception theory, and E. C. Tolman the founder of cognitive behaviorism (Heft, ). The New Realism has enjoyed something of a revival in the last decade, having been featured in Hefts history of ecological psychology, in Thompson and collaborators work on natural design (e.g. Thompson, 2000; Thompson & Derr, 2000, and sources cited therein), and Tonneaus work on consciousness (Tonneau, 2002[Nick1] [Nick2] The New Realists understood consciousness as the cross section of objects in the world to which the organism responds. The most acessible explicaton by a New Realist of the cross section idea occurs in E. B. Holts Concept of Consciousness (1914). To Holt, a cross section of an object is a set of features of an object that are designated by a system external to that object. For instance, a cut across a log is a cross section because, while the cut may reveal something about the internal structure of the log, it is made without regard to the structure of the log. In explicating a psychological cross-section, Holt uses the following metaphor: [A] navigator, exploring his course at night with the help of a searchlight, illuminates a considerable expanse of wave and cloud, occasionally the bow and forward mast of his ship, and the hither side of other ships and of buoys, lighthouses, and other objects that lie above the horizon. Now the sum total of all surfaces thus illuminated in the course, say, of an entire night is a cross section of the region in question that has rather interesting characteristics. It is defined, of course, by the contours and surface composition of the region, including such changes as are taking place in . the surface of the waves and by the searchlight and its movements, and by the progress of the ship. [This] cross-section is neither ship nor searchlight, nor any part of them, but it is a portion of the region though which the ship is passing. [It] is clearly extended in space, and extended in time as well, since it extends through some watches of the night. . This cross-section, furthermore, is in no sense inside the searchlight, nor are the objects that make up the cross-section in any wise dependent on the searchlight for their substance or their being[S3] . [Nick4] This definitions [Nick5] ontology is radical. It places consciousness outside the conscious actor. For instance, it moves your conscious from being a property of you to being a property of your surroundings. The definition turns on its head the functionalist notion that your consciousness is ontologically within you but epistemologically available to you only through examination of your behavior. In the New Realist account, the contents of your consciousness are epistemologically linked to you but are ontologically outside of you. Thus, to a New Realist, an emotional feeling is a fact about the world, rather than a fact about the organism that has the feeling. Nicholas S. Thompson Professor of Psychology and Ethology Clark University [hidden email] http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/ [hidden email] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20050112/c7d11f7a/attachment.htm |
RE: Friam Digest, Vol 19, Issue 17
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OH, and I forgot to say, although I think it is evident... that the new realism does away with "privileged access", the doctrine that only I can see "into" my own consciousness. Since my consciousness is a property of my relation to my environment, if you stand in my environment, you can see it to.
Enough, thompson! Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Professor of Psychology and Ethology Clark University [hidden email] http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/ [hidden email] ----- Original Message ----- From: Nicholas Thompson To: [hidden email] Cc: Rose Sokol; [hidden email]; Jaan Valsiner; nickthompson Sent: 1/12/2005 11:01:58 AM Subject: RE: Friam Digest, Vol 19, Issue 17 Dear Kate, I am sorry; this is going to be a biggie! Thanks for your comments. Such a far flung audience. We seem to be having a serious ">>>>>> <<<<<<<" problem on FRIAM, so I have pulled out the piece I wanted to respond to and reproduced it below. "Maybe what Nick has suggested is true: that what we mean by aliveness and should actually capture in defining life is that alive things feel and have intentions, etc. But of course there's no empirical criteria to distinguish feeling (conscious) things from inanimate things. That seems to be a can of worms without a cover." Actually, I am on the completely opposite side of the argument to that you suppose me to be. I am a behaviorist by training. Behaviorists come in two flavors. A psychological behaviorists believes that "there is no empirical criterion to distinguish feeling (conscious) things from inanimate things." In other words, a behaviorists implicitly buys into the metaphysics of the "Cartesian theatre"... you know, the little room with the single plush seat where you sit watching your consciousness stream by at your own private showing. But behaviorists refuse to do science about the ineffable. (As one psychological behaviorist mentor of mine put it, "You can't study what you can't EFF!" But that's a cat that cant be put back into the bag. As human beings, we talk about the ineffable all the time, so we need a position that explicates what talk of the ineffable actually IS. According to philosophical behaviorism, talk of the ineffable is in fact talk about behavior OR it is no talk at all, the playing of language games totally unconnected to any reality whatsoever. So, contra the psychological behaviorists, to say that one is talking of something that is beyond observation is to say nothing at all. (CAnt you just hear Wittgenstein raging in the background, here?!!!) So, our job as scientists is to discover to what actual behavior, talk of the ineffable actually adverts. When you say, "I want a cup of coffee," what is the game of which that saying is a part and what comes of your saying it. When one lover says to another, "I love you", the proper response of the the other is not to ask, "Does this statement speak truthfully of some ineffable state within my lover to which he and s/he only is privy, but does this statement speak truthfully of a higher order pattern in the behavior that I can rely on. Also, of what higher order pattern in my lover's behavior is the saying of "I love you" a part? As I talk here, you can actually hear me sliding over into a position that anticipates philosophical behaviorism by a few years, the New Realism. Below is a description of the new realism from a piece of writing that our group is currently working on. (The little blue things are part of our collaborative editing process and should be ignored.) More of an explication can be found in the link I posted with my original comment. Or you can go to my permanently in construction and obsessively wordy web site, home.eathlink.net/~nickthompson/ and mess about. In short, when I say that Intentionality is the Mark of the Vital, I mean that intentionality is a higher order property of BEHAVIOR, and if we can identify that property, we can say whether something is alive or not. And I certainly don't believe that the creature itself is the only one who knows whether it is alive or not. Here is the quote. The New Realists were a small group of William James graduate students who formed a short-lived philosophical movement at Harvard in the 1910s. Although not well known to contemporary psychologists, the new Realists had a powerful impact on American psychology through the work of two of their disciples, JJ Gibson, the founder of direct perception theory, and E. C. Tolman the founder of cognitive behaviorism (Heft, ). The New Realism has enjoyed something of a revival in the last decade, having been featured in Hefts history of ecological psychology, in Thompson and collaborators work on natural design (e.g. Thompson, 2000; Thompson & Derr, 2000, and sources cited therein), and Tonneaus work on consciousness (Tonneau, 2002[Nick1] [Nick2] The New Realists understood consciousness as the cross section of objects in the world to which the organism responds. The most acessible explicaton by a New Realist of the cross section idea occurs in E. B. Holts Concept of Consciousness (1914). To Holt, a cross section of an object is a set of features of an object that are designated by a system external to that object. For instance, a cut across a log is a cross section because, while the cut may reveal something about the internal structure of the log, it is made without regard to the structure of the log. In explicating a psychological cross-section, Holt uses the following metaphor: [A] navigator, exploring his course at night with the help of a searchlight, illuminates a considerable expanse of wave and cloud, occasionally the bow and forward mast of his ship, and the hither side of other ships and of buoys, lighthouses, and other objects that lie above the horizon. Now the sum total of all surfaces thus illuminated in the course, say, of an entire night is a cross section of the region in question that has rather interesting characteristics. It is defined, of course, by the contours and surface composition of the region, including such changes as are taking place in . the surface of the waves and by the searchlight and its movements, and by the progress of the ship. [This] cross-section is neither ship nor searchlight, nor any part of them, but it is a portion of the region though which the ship is passing. [It] is clearly extended in space, and extended in time as well, since it extends through some watches of the night. . This cross-section, furthermore, is in no sense inside the searchlight, nor are the objects that make up the cross-section in any wise dependent on the searchlight for their substance or their being[S3] . [Nick4] This definitions [Nick5] ontology is radical. It places consciousness outside the conscious actor. For instance, it moves your conscious from being a property of you to being a property of your surroundings. The definition turns on its head the functionalist notion that your consciousness is ontologically within you but epistemologically available to you only through examination of your behavior. In the New Realist account, the contents of your consciousness are epistemologically linked to you but are ontologically outside of you. Thus, to a New Realist, an emotional feeling is a fact about the world, rather than a fact about the organism that has the feeling. Nicholas S. Thompson Professor of Psychology and Ethology Clark University [hidden email] http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/ [hidden email] -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: /pipermail/friam_redfish.com/attachments/20050112/f8829008/attachment-0001.htm |
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