On leading a (philosophical) discussion

I recently had occasion to reflect on the question of how to lead a good discussion. What happened, in fact, was that I needed to give someone advice on how to do this, and didn't know quite what to say. I've since sat down and thought about it, and here's what I've come up with.


Ideally, the members of a discussion would be able to take care of the conversation themselves. What would this look like?

1. People would speak clearly, concisely, and to the point.
2. People would listen to one another, respond to one another, and build on what others have said.
3. People would move the discussion in productive directions by raising the right questions at the right times, staying on topic, and keeping the conversation from scattering in different directions or going off track.

In most discussions, however, some or all participants can't be counted on to do all these things themselves. That’s okay. Your job as discussion-leader is to do some of this work for them, to supplement their contributions so that all the things that need to get done, get done. Depending on who the participants are, you'll have to do more or less of this work. When I've taught undergraduate classes, I've found that I have to do most of this work for my students. (This usually means speaking after almost every student contribution.) When I'm in reading groups with my peers, we all share this work. But no matter what the situation and the composition of the group, this work has to get done, otherwise the discussion won't go well.

When I lead discussions, I find myself doing three different kinds of work, corresponding to the three points listed above:

1. Reformulating
2. Relating
3. Redirecting

1. Reformulating
It often happens that participants will make contributions that are interesting but not sufficiently clear. In these cases, you need to help them to articulate their point more clearly. One way of doing this is to ask them to reformulate what they’ve said more clearly. If you have no idea what they’re talking about, you may just have to ask them to say it again in a different way. If you have some idea what they’re talking about, you may be able to ask them a more pointed question that will help them to clarify their point. If you think you understand their point, but suspect that other participants may not have sufficiently grasped what it is or why it’s important, then you can reformulate the point yourself. I find myself doing this a lot when I lead student discussions, e.g. “I hear two really good points in what George has said…” or “So if I understand you correctly, Michael, what you’re saying is…”

2. Relating
In the best discussions, participants will make an effort to respond to other people’s remarks, and say explicitly who they’re responding to and how (disagreeing, asking a question about, expanding on, etc.). In many discussions, however, the participants will not do this themselves, and so you have to do it for them by pointing out how the thing they’ve just said is related to what was said before. For example, it often happens in student discussions that someone will say something that contradicts someone else's earlier remark, but without noting this explicitly. It’s important to point out that the two claims are incompatible, since other participants may not necessarily have noticed this. You can then open the disagreement to further discussion, if you think it’s important, or redirect the discussion elsewhere.

3. Redirecting
At any given point in a discussion, there are many different directions in which it could go, and only some of these will support the overall goals of the discussion. Ideally, everyone in the discussion will have these goals in mind, and make their individual contributions with an eye to the big picture. In student discussions, however, this is usually not the case, and so it’s your job to keep the discussion on track. This usually involves setting the stage at the beginning of the discussion so that everyone starts off on the same page. As the conversation goes on, you may need to pose questions or suggest topics of discussion to the group. You may also need to interrupt the movement of the conversation if it’s getting stuck or moving in an unproductive direction, and bring discussion back to the things it’s supposed to be about. And you may need to correct people who are going about the conversation in the wrong way – talking too much, not listening to their colleagues, not being polite and respectful, etc.


In my experience, a good discussion is one in which many people think better together than any of them could on their own. But this means that even in situations where you are responsible for leading the discussion, you can't decide in advance how the conversation is going to go. Of course, if you’ve led a discussion on the same topic with students before, you may have some idea of the sort of things they’re going to say in response to certain questions. And there’s nothing wrong with having a plan for the sort of discussion you want to have, the topics you want to cover or the questions you want to pose. But you also have to be open to the possibility that things will go in a different direction than you planned. It can be difficult to strike a balance between achieving the goals you’ve set for the discussion and allowing it to develop spontaneously and organically. But the best discussions I’ve led are the ones where my students surprised me, and I managed to be flexible enough to keep the discussion productive even as it went in a direction I hadn’t expected.

The Turing test and the Chinese Room

John mentioned the Turing test in comments on my last post, so I thought I'd say a few words about it. The Turing test was Alan Turing's attempt to define objective criteria for answering the question, "Can machines think?". (See Turing's 1950 paper, "Computing Machinery and Intelligence".) Essentially, the criterion Turing proposed was that a machine is intelligent if it can persuade an external observer that it's intelligent.

In this post, I want to summarize one of the most influential critiques of the Turing test, and explain what I think is right about it. The critique is from John Searle's 1980 paper, "Minds, Brains, and Programs", and it's known as the "Chinese Room" argument.

1. THE CHINESE ROOM
Searle proposes the following thought-experiment: imagine you've been placed in a room with a large pile of papers printed with characters in a language you don't understand—call it Chinese. Through a slot in the wall, someone occasionally inserts some more pieces of Chinese writing. You've been provided with a detailed set of rules (in English) for correlating one set of papers with the other, based only on the shape of the Chinese symbols. No prior knowledge of Chinese is required to follow these rules: you just look up the symbols on the papers that come through the slot, choose the characters that the rule-book calls for from your stock-pile, and push these papers out of the room through the slot.

Unbeknownst to you, the papers being inserted into the room are questions written by native Chinese speakers, and the papers you're pushing out of the room are answers to these questions. The set of rules you're following is so sophisticated that to those outside, the room (or whatever's inside it) appears to be carrying on a perfectly fluent conversation in Chinese. You are equally unaware of the fact that those who designed the room and wrote the rules that you're following consider the papers that come in through the slot “input,” the papers you push through the slot “output,” and the rules you're following a “program.”

This “Chinese Room” is a computer, albeit a strange one: instead of magnetic memory and a CPU made of silicone transistors, it's built out of stacks of paper and a human being. Nevertheless, the room functions in the same way that a digital computer does: it manipulates and responds to symbolic input according to purely syntactic rules.

2. INTROSPECTIVE ILLUSIONS?
The strange computer in Searle's thought-experiment is passing the Turing test with flying colors: it appears to Chinese-speaking observers to be fluent in Chinese, and to understand the questions they are putting to it. The question is, is this appearance of understanding sufficient to show actual understanding?

Searle argues that it is not, on the grounds that the human being inside the room doesn't understand a word of the conversation she is participating in. As Searle puts it, "whatever purely formal principles you put into the computer, they will not be sufficient for understanding, since a human will be able to follow the formal principles without understanding anything."

This argument has been met with a number of objections. Defenders of the Turing test have generally argued that Searle hopelessly muddies the issues by inserting a human homunculus into the workings of his Chinese-speaking computer. The Chinese Room argument seems to rely on vague, introspective intuitions about what and how we understand, intuitions that may or may not be empirically accurate. The whole point of the Turing test is to avoid such subjective definitions of understanding. According to its defenders, the only objectively valid criterion is the results the system produces; if a computer’s performance of a given task is indistinguishable from that of a human being, then the computer understands the task just as well as the human does, regardless of what it "feels like" for either.

3. THE PROBLEM OF MEANING
The answer to this critique, and the true strength of the Chinese Room argument, lie in a further point that Searle makes about the meaning of the computer’s inputs and outputs: “the formal symbol manipulations by themselves… are quite meaningless; they aren't even symbol manipulations, since the symbols don't symbolize anything. In the linguistic jargon, they have only a syntax but no semantics.”

The computer only appears to be thinking, to know and understand things about the world, because its inputs and outputs are symbolic, and thus appear to have a meaningful content. But symbols have no content in themselves, for in themselves they are not even symbols, but only things—ink on a page, or colored pixels on a screen. They are meaningful only for beings who can interpret them as symbols, and find a meaning in them. Searle’s crucial point about the computer is that it is not such a being. The Chinese Room’s inputs and outputs appear to its human observers to be meaningful Chinese sentences, but they have no such meaning for the computer itself.

The “correctness” of the computer’s outputs, its apparent fluency in Chinese, lies entirely in the interpretation given to these outputs by its human interlocutors. The Chinese Room itself is utterly incapable of distinguishing between correct and incorrect outputs, since for it these outputs are nothing but physical effects of physical inputs, the end of a complex chain reaction. In our attempt to give an objective definition of understanding, we have ended up attributing to the computer properties that are only in the eye of the observer.

This can be seen even more clearly if we imagine that, instead of “conversing” with human interlocutors, the Chinese Room exchanges inputs and outputs with another, identical Chinese Room. There should be no temptation, in this scenario, to say that Chinese is being spoken or understood. There is here only a mechanical exchange of inputs and outputs, one computer triggering an automated response in the other, in a closed feedback loop. This is not a conversation.

Defenders of the Turing test might insist, of course, that to a (human, Chinese-speaking) observer it is indistinguishable from a real conversation. But this would again be to import into the situation an outside observer for whom the signs being exchanged are meaningful. The Chinese Rooms are completely incapable of generating meaning on their own. As Searle puts it, you cannot get semantics from syntax.

4. GENERAL CONCLUSIONS
We see here a general problem with attempts to give an “objective” account of understanding or subjectivity. Turing-types are right to criticize introspective accounts, which would reduce the meaning of my situation to the meaning it has for me. However, we are no better off if we exchange the introspective standpoint for a purely external one. We will then arrive only at a description of what the situation means to the observer, when the whole problem was to describe (objectively) what it means to the system being observed.

If we take the observer’s perspective for granted then we only postpone the problem we set out to solve, for the observer is also a thinking being, and her perspective must also be accounted for. The claim that computers are thinking can only be sustained by appealing illicitly to the perspective of an observer who is not a computer, whose thought is more than an algorithm.

The Mechanization of the Mind

I read a good book over the holidays: The Mechanization of the Mind, by the French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy. (Coming out in paperback at the end of May, if you're wondering what to get me for my birthday. ;-)

It's a history of Cybernetics, the early 20th century intellectual movement that gave rise to contemporary cognitive science (as well as various other fields like information theory, artificial intelligence, and analytic philosophy of mind). Thus it offers a kind of recent pre-history of today's prevalent assumptions about the nature of the mind and the brain.

The most interesting thing I got out of the book was the fact that the computational theory of mind did not, as I had always assumed, arise as a consequence of the invention of the digital computer. That is, it's not the case that we first invented computers, and then started using them as a metaphor or model for the way our own minds work. As it turns out, the modern digital computer and the computational view of mind share a common origin in mathematical logic.

Here's how it all went down, according to Dupuy.

1. Frege et al. invent modern mathematical logic, which attempts to give a purely syntactic (i.e. symbolic, algorithmic, formal, "mechanical") account of logical inference.

2. The power of this new logic, along with the view that logic prescribes the "laws of thought", lead to the claim that thinking just is this sort of formal symbol-manipulation. Logicism is born.

2. Alan Turing, in his paper "On Computable Numbers, With an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem", tries to give a purely syntactic definition of logical inference by describing an imaginary machine that could write and erase symbols on an infinitely long tape, and "remember" the symbols it has recently scanned in a finite "memory". This machine scans up and down the tape, modifying it in response to the symbols it finds.

While the formal inference rules of symbolic logic had been described as "mechanical" before, in the sense of proceeding without understanding or insight, this was the first time anyone had proposed the idea that these formal inferences could be carried out by an actual machine.

In fact, Turing's machine could only be imaginary, since its tape was infinitely long. But it's not hard to see how a similar machine could be constructed with a finite "tape" - and indeed, it wasn't long before John Von Neumann proposed such a machine. And so the computer as we know it was born: a machine whose instructions are stored in its own memory, and so can be modified by the machine's own activity; a machine in which hardware and software can be distinguished.

4. Since Logicism had already identified thinking with the symbol-manipulation of formal logic, two conclusions seemed inevitable:
a) Machines are capable of thought;
b) The human brain is itself -- or at least, can be adequately modelled by -- a Turing/Von Neumann machine, a computer with a very complex program.

Thus, the computational theory of mind was not the consequence, but rather the antecedent of the invention of the modern computer. The idea that thought consisted in the purely formal manipulation of symbols gave rise more or less simultaneously to the idea that a machine might be able to think, and that the human brain must be such a machine.

Sick of the brain

Can I tell you how sick I am of the Brain? The 90s were the decade of the Brain and it's all been very exciting... But how do we get past the brain and back to personhood? I know at least N believes I worship the god of Science at an electronic shrine (! :) and while I do take quite an interest in cognitive science, I getting more and more wary of mentioning it in my classes. At the same time, I find it to be of increasing political import to raise for discussion.

For example, today, I read my students latest paper proposals... Soooo many of them are convinced that the mind is the brain, is a person. What do I do?!? Seriously... I mean, for my own sanity! If I read one more paper that cites a biology text book to refute Aquinas or Descartes, I'm going to scream! I encourage them to draw examples from popular culture or media... As a result, several of my students cite this persnickety article that is supposed to disabuse me of the view that one should study philosophy before 1985.

I just feel like I am totally failing if they leave my class thinking that... So far, we've only read Aristotle, Aquinas, and Descartes. I just can't convince them that describing personhood involves describing anything but the action of a collection of machine-like parts.

As if my students weren't enough, my therapist recently recommended
Louann Brizendine The Female Brain. (My therapist and I are now "breaking-up") The book was trashed by Nature as "psychoneural indocrination," and there would be no need to harp on it if it weren't still selling and popular. But it is... and I think it deserves a good thrashing from a phenomenological level too.

Brizendine essentializes both gender and brains. She basically claims that there are two types of brains and, equivalently, two types of people. One, the female brain, was "marinated" in estrogen (her words) early on and thus capable of all kinds of interpersonal connections that that the un-marinated male is not. Male brains lead to semi-autistic behavior and definitely to infidelity. If you, perchance, do not identify with her phenomenological account of female experience, then you are just less female and more male (or perhaps just less human, I'm not sure). (Lesbians, apparently, were just improperly marinated.) She mentions some vaguely feminist concerns in the introduction and conclusion, but declares that she had to put aside political scruples in the service of scientific truth. The critiques she imagines seem limited to those possibley posed by second-wave feminists; she makes no mention of third wave feminism, gender studies or queer studies.

Not only does Brizedine essentailize genders but she essentializes brains. Sure, these brains show up in bodies, but just as isolated organs popped inside a ready-made shell that in itself contributes little to identity, knowledge, or experience.

What do we do with this sort of material? Again, on the one hand, if this is bad work on so many account, perhaps it doesn't deserve refutation or further discussion and publicity. On the other hand, if my students' papers are any indication, then this book is just a timely reflection of the dominant culture... and in a way, not to spend time refuting it is politically lazy.

My students are very concerned about animals and the environment. I feel I should be able to exploit this... at least as a distraction from The Brain.

Economist on Darwinism : Celebration or Slander?

Now, I realize that the Economist is a conservative paper but this article on Darwinism shocked and horrified me. Conservative it may be, but it's still journalism; whence the lack of research??

The author begins by dismissing ALL of philosophy, sociology and theology: none of these disciplines has succeeded in the view of the Economist in sufficiently applying Darwinism to political policy. Apparently even the most thoughtful people in all of these disciplines believe "that human anatomy evolved, but human behaviour is culturally determined. " (What thoughful philosopher, analytic to continental would make such a blanket statement?) With that quick remark, the authors lose even the few thoughtful allies -- e.g. Dennett or Pinker -- in evolutionary psychology and philosophy that they might have, and simply revert to hearsay and poor reading of Darwin. (Even if I profoundly disagree with Pinker, I at least respect his work) Apparently, the Economist does not consider that in intervening 150 years, thinkers in these various disciplines might have had very good reason for a cautious application of the Descent of Man to policy changes.

The Economist writes "What is extraordinary, though, is how rarely an evolutionary analysis is part of the process of policymaking. To draw an analogy, it is like trying to fix a car without properly understanding how it works: not impossible, but as likely as not to result in a breakdown or a crash." Perhaps what this analogy show is quite apropos but in relation to the authors themselves: without researching or understanding many developments in philosophy in the last 150 years, he should not attempt to "fix" the situation with pseudo-Darwinian theory.

The authors suggest wild theories on the nature of sexual selection -- on how women choose mates based on status -- when in fact, as Helena Cronin puts it, " the modern conception of sexual selection is not about discriminating animals but about discriminating genes" (cited in Slotten's The Heretic in Darwin's Court 297).

And consider their fantastic choice of the phrase "distribution of women" to describve contemporary monogamous relations ships.

Perhaps most galling is the author's revelation that the reason women after childbirth and marriage make less than men is NOT due to discrimination, as popular liberal mythology would have it, but that "Once they have found the best available mate, the calculation changes: a woman no longer needs to show off. " That's right, Economist: the only reason a woman might pursue a career is to show off to her potential (only male!) mates. (All debates on gender and sexuality are apparently irrelevant to this brand of so-called Darwinism)

The Economist seems to have missed one of the pretty basic distinctions we need to make: between description and prescription. I can describe the situation of people tending toward discrimination, rape or murder, but I do not prescribe it in policy. Darwin himself was a profoundly cautious thinker and writer, however constrained by the prejudices of his era, taking decades before publishing definitive claims. I'm sure he would never make the mistakes now that the Economist makes in his name.

two kinds of memory - amensia and H.M.

I thought this obituary on the legendary H.M. was pretty interesting in that way that things in the NY Times are Interesting. They mention "two kinds of memory" that people have, one associated with conscious name recall located in the hippocampus (which I guess is what H.M. lost) and another that allows subconscious, habitual memory that is dispersed through the brain. Sounds a bit like memory and retention to me ... Tell me why that couldn't be the case.

How does newness help us change?

Kascha, in your previous post (or two posts ago now, I guess), you were discussing the possibility of something novel happening to us. I think that is a very interesting problem, and really forms the heart of Levinas' philosophical project (which grows out of his reading of Husserl; for an interesting, and I think quite compelling, example of this argument, see John E. Drabinski's Sensibility and Singularity). For Levinas, of course, everything comes down to an encounter with the Other, an encounter that comes, not from myself, but from the Other. But he extends this also into the realm of perception, and our bestowal of sense on the world in general: this can occur only because something in the world bestows sense to us. The biggest such factor is the Other person, who gives us our very sense of ourself (for Levinas, this occurs in responsibility, which is always mine, and hence makes me me). But he seems to also say that it comes from the world, via Husserl's notion of primal impression, or of sensibility and materiality more generally. These are not solely the work of a constituting subject, but are also the result of a constituting world. This is because the horizons which guide our constitution of sense are not just the internal horizons (i.e., of retention, expectation, etc.), but also the external horizons of the world. And in this world we encounter many things, including other people.

This means that, in addition to fulfilling our expectational horizons (or perhaps prior to doing so), every moment of perception is also an encounter with the radically new. In fact, what is retained is not equivalent with what we encounter in the primal impression, but is essentially less than that; something has fallen away and is missing, namely the encounter with the genuine alterity of the world impressing itself upon me. In retention (though I think the point is made better in memory), I might keep everything about the encounter--except the uniqueness of that which is encountered.

This seems to speak to the problem of novelty and newness, but I'm not sure how helpful it is in our discussion of changing habits. It would seem to be necessary, if we are to change our habits, that we encounter something radically new, that is to say, different from our old habits. But if we are always encountering the new (even in the familiar, it seems), then what makes some instances of newness affect changes in us and not others? Levinas' project seems to be about the conditions of the subject, but how does his explanation of those conditions help us change our habits, that is to say, help us become, if you will, more ethical (or at least have a new recipe for cookies)? Is there anything helpful here?

Tradition and perception

A thought on perception from Merleau-Ponty:
"My first perception, along with the horizons which surrounded it, is an ever-present event, an unforgettable tradition; even as a thinking subject, I still am that first perception, the continuation of that same life inaugurated by it." (PP 407)

I think this is interesting because
1. it's confusing !
2. the tradition is "unforgettable." are all traditions? living traditions?
3. the perception is tradition ... perception seems like a personal act, but it's actually participation in a collective, worldy meaning. So it's "traditional" rather that "private."

Novelty, accidents and intention

By suggesting that we don't entirely plan new actions, I don't mean that they're completely arbitrary. Of course not; I definitely agree with Neal that future actions arise out of the past. The question is, though, how much agency do we have in changing habits, and when does that agency come in? We all agree -- I think -- with the general phenomenological stance on time: the present distends into past and future, and that habit stretches across all this. But, what we're worried about is how habit varies: i.e. in our gender example, how we perform differently. (I very much like, by the way, Neal's emphasis on encountering pain/insufficient relations with members of certain genders as a motive to acting differently)

Let me stick with the evolution example (keep in mind I'm just testing it out!): evolutionary developments -- new skin colors, new spots -- are random mutations but they happen for being with a past and with motivations. The body does not "produce" variations in response to a situation; variations just happen and either succeed or fail. That said, variations can only vary current conditions that depend on personal and collective past.

The reason I like this analogy is because it takes some of the conscious intention out of doing something new. Sometimes, we don't plan our new action; I try cooking something, dump in too much wine or salt, and find I have a new dish that I like. Of course, I start out with my particular recipe, my particular cupboard of ingredients and my motivation to cook a meal in the first place ... and then I affirm the changes I like based on my preferences, past and future. (Sometimes I throw out the batch of cookies with too much salt) Unlike in real evolution -- although weird things happen with epigenesis -- my predilations might sometimes guide my 'accidental' actions (I lean a little heavy on the salt because I unconsciously crave salt) but don't necessarily (someone just bumps my arm when I'm using the salt shaker)

So when you say "But what about the possibility of my experiencing something new that comes from elsewhere", I think that self-revelation must include this other-revelation. I can't always decide what my new behavior ought to be, until 1. something in the world calls me to act and 2. I see what I do. So... I say I can't "always" decide because I'm leaving open the possibility that there are situations in which we act with more intention. But I'm more interested in the situations in which we have 'less' intention. In childhood, for example, I think we often discover novelty quite accidently... but of course that discovery is conditioned by our motive to act in the first place and our past and future actions.

When you say "we can't change what we think and do until we realize that what we think and do aren't just the 'way things are', but they can be different"... I agree, but I think that sometimes we don't know things can be different until we find difference/newness accidentally. Change/novelty entered, not arbitrarily, but not through my premeditated, active consciousness.

Remembering and forgetting, Part III: Tradition

In my last post, I wrote about the way we carry the things we learn forward in our individual lives. In this post, I want to talk about how we can pass these discoveries on to other people.

My habits, powers, and abilities live in my body, and they will die with me unless I somehow transmit them to other people. We do this by teaching and parenting, educating others into the powers we’ve developed and the world as we see it.

I discussed in my previous post how the very nature of developed powers makes them difficult to pass on, because they tend to be invisible to those who possess them. An important part of teaching is going through the difficult work of reflecting on our own abilities and gaining some degree of explicit understanding of how we do what we do. However, even with such an explicit understanding, the task of transmission remains an intrinsically difficult one.

A teacher cannot simply pass on her hard-won insights directly to the student, the way I could give to you an object I had spent a long time creating. Rather, the student must go through something like the same process of development that the teacher went through. To teach someone is to initiate them into a new domain of sense. However, precisely because this domain is new to the student, her first steps into it will necessarily be blind. She is not yet privy to the logic of this realm—its intelligibility is not yet accessible to her. Thus, the teacher’s instructions must initially appear as arbitrary rules to be learned by rote. We saw this already, in the case of the child being initiated into her community’s way of life. As students, we have to “fake it ‘till we make it”: we must begin by imitating our teachers without understanding what we’re doing, or why we’re doing it.

This initial stage of learning is necessary and unavoidable. However, it carries with it an intrinsic risk. As students, we may remain at the level of external imitation, never grasping the inner intelligibility of our teacher’s actions. To an uneducated observer, our practice may be indistinguishable from that of our teacher. However, a crucial loss of meaning has occurred. What was an intelligent practice has become a ritual, whose actions are no longer self-justifying, no longer genuine responses to the demands of our situation.

There was once a very high-ranking Japanese martial artist who taught in Boston. This teacher wore his hair long, and often had to move it out of his eyes with a toss of his head as he practiced. The story goes that if you watch his senior students, many of them now high-ranking teachers in their own right, you can see them tossing their heads in the characteristic manner of their teacher, even though they have no hair to clear from their eyes. What was an intelligent response for the teacher has become an empty ritual in his students.

The students in this story may seem a little foolish. But in fact, we are all like them. Probably the majority of our habits are not our own, for we begin the project of imitation when we are children, long before we could be reflectively aware that this is what we’re doing. Our lives are full of empty rituals inherited from our families and communities, gestures we are barely aware of making, and whose intelligibility has been lost.

I’ve argued that in habits, the power to build on earlier developments carries with it the risk that once-meaningful responses may descend into mere repetition, responding to a past that is no longer present. We've now seen that tradition has a similar structure. Tradition, the power to pass on our insights and abilities to others, allows us to build on the accomplishments of those who have come before us, and this offers an enormous extension of our own potentials. However, with this power again comes the risk that the accomplishments of the past will be passed down as mere rituals, empty imitations of once-meaningful activities.

Some thoughts on the new

Kascha, is productive imagination really reducible to accidental evolution? The issue here, as Noah points out, is the possibility of something new. What I think Husserl's work suggests, and what I tried to point out earlier, about this possibility is that the new always grows out of the past. Hence, our new is, perhaps, not as new as we'd like it to be; on the other hand, it also gives us precisely the means to effect change. We have to reach people where they're at (hit 'em in their horizons, so to speak), which of course isn't news to anyone, especially not to rhetoricians, who have been doing this type of thing for centuries. But maybe this isn't 'just' rhetoric: maybe there is something essentially true--and something essential about truth--in it.

But what would it mean that the new always grows out of the past? It doesn't mean, I don't think, that we can't have anything new. It just means that what strikes us as new--precisely in order to strike us--must be relatable to our past. This is true in the first case of things that we try to start: in order for me to want to change my habits, some experience must strike me that accords with those habits (and other past experiences), in a particular way; either I have an experience that I can't make sense of, and I change my habits to try to make sense of them (e.g., I encounter a woman doing something I had previously thought only men could do; this leads me to change how I understand women and their potentialities), or I experience my habits negatively (i.e., with some kind of pain, usually spiritual/mental/emotional), and this makes me want to change my habits (e.g., I find my present understanding of men painfully restrictive in some way, say, because it doesn't let me have true meaningful friendships; in response, I try to change how I understand men and their potentialities). The first of these is the 'trailblazer' model of cultural change, and is what makes us venerate the Jackie Robinsons and Barack Obamas of the world. The second is the empathy route, and is what cross-cultural exchanges are supposed to foster (i.e., I make friends with people who are different, then their pain at societal injustices become my friend's pain, and hence my pain, rather than just 'their' pain). These two are connected, of course, but I think slightly different.

But what about the possibility of my experiencing something new that comes from elsewhere, that is, something not of my own production? Must we distinguish here between self-revelation and other-revelation, between self-affection and hetero-affection (to use Michel Henry's terms)? And doesn't my characterization of the new as coming out of the past prevent the possibility of something totally new, wholly other, coming to me?

This was precisely Levinas' worry with Husserl. It is why Levinas insists on the newness and alterity of the instant, and prefers to think of time as the 'instant' (of newness, of incoming sensation from 'outside' me) rather than as ec-stasis (the stretching of the present into past and future). I think, though, that what Levinas ultimately ends up doing (and Derrida too for that matter) is a question of changing how we understand the subject in order to make room for the advent of something other. However, this change is still undergone on the basis of a certain prevalence for the present subject, and the present growing out of the past. Without this, we would have no horizons, and hence no ability to experience the incoming (as other or as anything else). The totally other is so other as to not even appear to me. This is why Levinas' account of time as futural is based on an immemorial past, a past that was never a present for me (and hence comes from the other), but that is still part of my past (as horizon of my present). This is where I 'first' encounter the other, and makes the other constitutive of me.

I guess, then, my answer to Kascha about how we change is by recognizing that what I have (and understand and am) is always an experience that I have received by interacting with my world (that is, with myself and what is other than me). This is a fancy, ontological and phenomenological way of saying that we can't change what we think and do until we realize that what we think and do aren't just the 'way things are', but they can be different. We can't learn until we learn that what we think we know might be wrong. Hence, the first step in not repeating cultural gender stereotypes is in recognizing, not just that there are gender stereotypes, but recognizing all the things that I think which are actually affected by those stereotypes, things as small (but as important) as how tough I think my 3-year old nephew should be vis-a-vis my 3-year old niece.

This point seems so banal, but it's the best I can do right now. But thanks for letting me think through some of my dissertation stuff. It's been helpful to me. Hopefully for you as well.

Remembering and forgetting, Part II: Habit

In my last post, I claimed that a child's initiation into her community requires that she internalize the community's rules and customs, in such a way that they become obvious, taken for granted, and therefore invisible. And the name I gave to this kind of internalization was "habit".

I'm going to return to the issue of cultural transmission, but first, in this post, I want to say more about the structure of habit. (These thoughts owe a lot to John Russon's Human Experience.)

Consider what is involved in learning a new skill or becoming comfortable in a new environment. For example, think about what it's like to learn to drive a car. At first, I have to concentrate on every individual movement, from pressing on the pedals to turning the wheel to checking my mirrors. This makes it difficult to do all these things at once, let alone do them while planning a route, looking for a parking spot, or singing along to the radio. With practice, though, these basic movements become automatic, and this frees me up to focus my attention on other things. The acquisition of these basic habits also endows me with powers of perception that I didn't have before: I can feel the road though the car's tires and see around me through its mirrors; I can feel the intentions of other drivers, and see whether spaces are wide enough for my car.

What I want to call attention to here is the way that skillful conduct must become largely automatic in order to be effective. When I'm driving, I'm for the most part unaware of exactly what I'm doing—and this is precisely what make successful driving possible. Not only am I unaware of my actions in the moment, but in many cases I simply don't know, and couldn't explain, how I do the things I do. Thus habit is a kind of productive forgetting, in which deliberate actions and small discoveries become sedimented or absorbed, through repetition and familiarity, into my body and my world.

This way of carrying forward past accomplishments as forgotten is what gives habituation its power and utility. It's intrinsic to the structure of human learning and development. However, it carries with it certain dangers.

First, the fact that our own habits are invisible to us makes them very hard to change. To be habituated is to find that the world simply calls for certain actions, and that my body has already begun to respond to this call, before any conscious decision on my part. This would be no problem if our habits never needed to change, but as we constantly enter new and more sophisticated situations, we find that the habits that got us here are no longer adequate, and are even in conflict with the new habits we need to develop. The conversation style that worked well with my parents doesn't work when I start school, but I am not free to simply change my way of talking—and even worse, I am probably not even aware that I have a "style" of talking, since for me this is simply the obvious and necessary response to the demands of conversation.

Second, when we want to pass on our skills and discoveries to other people, the fact that we do not know how we do the things we do is a serious obstacle. I know how to write a philosophy paper, but I have yet to figure out how to explain to someone else just how this is done. I learned to do it over time, through a series of steps, corrections, errors and discoveries. But these discoveries have, of necessity, been forgotten, since it was only as forgotten that they could serve as the basis for further learning.

This issue of teaching and transmission will be the subject of my next post.

Do distinctions = dualism?

Neal wrote "while also calling into question some assumptions of the nature-nurture distinction, but that's a topic for another day"

Ah... well, today is a new day. That's exactly what I'd like to talk about.

First let me point to a famous example: the Molyneux problem. When a blind person gets her sight restored, can she see immediately or must she acquire sight? This seems to be "just" a problem of perception... but the problem is bigger than just blindness (just as the Phenomenology Perception is not "just" about perception). It asks how much we are preconditioned by nature to experience and how much we must acquire in experience. Even sight, it turns out, must be ‘acquired’ … we don’t “naturally” see like normal adults. (here’s a recent study)

From the perspective of embodied phenomenology (a phrase I'm practicing using instead of just "as Merleau-Ponty would say”), we can't have a nature/culture division ... or any of the related divisions: subject/object, a priori / a posteriori, or for-itself/in-itself. All of these can happen in reflection, but not in original experience. If we assume there’s a unity to experience, a naturalness to it, we can’t go look outside of experience for some “culture”; that would be kind of like the kid saying “What’s bigger than the universe?”

I think embodied phenomenology (Husserl's passive synthesis description and Merleau-Ponty's own similar description) works well at certain levels of intentionality... but I worry whether it really helps us as higher levels of intentionality like those you describe in the situation of gender. At a perceptual level, we are sensitive (another term to avoid the passive/active distinction) to colors; they call out to us and we act with them in a certain way prereflectively. But is this a phenomenology of all action? It seems not. Merleau-Ponty says for example "I cannot say that I see blue ... in the sense in which ... I decide to devote my life to mathematics." In the case of colors, I am sensitive, whereas personal acts create a situation and I am a mathematician because I decided to be.

Neal suggests that we act similarly in relation to people of different genders; prereflectivley tending toward certain actions with women. But at what level of intentionality do we get to start deciding? That is, when are we in control? When can we exercise the freedom needed for ethical choice? Neal writes “Each judgment is also an experience, that then becomes part of our horizons of past experiences and expectation.” But how and when can we intervene? I want to think that an embodied phenomenology can describe experience all the way down and all the way up… but, if at some point, we have to start positing a special consciousness with distance from all this prereflective “tending-towards” behavior, then we are still preserving distinctions of dualism.

That is… how can I grow up as a young girl watching others, men and women, behave in certain ways, acquire tendencies of behavior myself and then decide to do something different? Noah suggests that “the child learns to fit into her community by internalizing its customs as habits.” But when does she learn not to fit in? To perform differently, as Butler would like.

And to complicate things further, getting rid of these distinctions also seems sort of tautological and inauthentic to experience. Don’t we also affirm in experience that nature and culture are different?

To close, let me just toss this out: I think, when and if we do make decisions, it has something to do with our capacity for productive imagination, for creativity and genesis in general. I’d say that would have to work something like mutation in evolution: along with repeating standard habits, we also have the capacity to (often accidentally) vary them… and choice (and ethics) comes in when we affirm one of those variations as better than our usual habits. So… perhaps we don’t plan ahead to do something new and better; we just do it accidentally and then have the capacity to judge it as better. But gosh ... this sounds like a pretty weak version ethics!

Remembering and forgetting, Part I

A while ago Kascha and I had a conversation about children and culture. I was complaining about the tendency to treat children as cultural innocents, taking their behavior as evidence of innate or "natural" human characteristics. E.g. "My two-year-old son likes to play with trucks not dolls, therefore gender is natural." It seems to me, on the contrary, that children are avid students of culture, starting from the day they're born.

Each of us is born into a world we didn't make, a world that initially makes little sense to us. The first, most pressing project of our lives is to figure this world out, and to find out where we fit in it. This is a double imperative: to figure out how to get what we want and need from the world, how to mould the world to our desires; but also to mould ourselves, to understand who we need to be to fit into the world as it stands, and to become that person.

The rules and customs we encounter as children cannot but appear as arbitrary, unintelligible and empty rituals. (Why am I allowed to pee here and not there? Why did you laugh before, but get mad when I did the same thing just now?) The task of the child, which she applies herself to with great effort, is to figure out these rules so she can behave appropriately, earning her parents' approval and securing a place for herself as a valued member of the family.

However, the child's initiation into her community's way of doing things doesn't take the form of an explicit or critical understanding of these rules, an account of why they are rational and necessary. Rather, the child learns to fit into her community by internalizing its customs as habits. Thus, the product of the child's education in culture is not a scholar who could write a thesis on the world she grew up in, but rather a person to whom her own culture is quite invisible.

To be continued...

Frosh Week

Some interesting posts about freshmen and liberal arts education, on Dr. J's blog, which references posts here and here.

The upshot of these posts seems to be that most freshmen are not ready (or looking) for a life-changing, mind-opening experience in their classes, and the small number who are, are the ones who will go on to be grad students and professors like us. Thus the cult of liberal arts perpetuates itself, while remaining completely out of touch with the needs and priorities of most college students, and the population at large.

This isn't the first time I've heard this critique, but I do find it worrisome. It speaks to a question that I never entirely answered in a satisfactory way during my two years of teaching Philosophy of the Person: What exactly was I supposed to be accomplishing in this class?

Here's what BC has to say about why they require undergrads to take philosophy classes:

Philosophy has had a permanent place in Jesuit higher education and should be an important part of the Boston College core. By introducing students to the great philosophical questions, philosophy supplies an integrated vision of physical, human and spiritual reality; it weighs propositions fundamental to personal dignity and social responsibility; and it examines moral issues that affect personal and social decency.*

Basically, studying philosophy is supposed to make you a better person. And indeed, this is the hope I cherish, both for myself and for my students. But how exactly is it supposed to do this?

The standard introductory survey course seems ill-suited to this goal. But as a teacher, it's the only model I had to work from. It worked for me as a student — but I was one of those unusual students who continued to study philosophy at the graduate level.

What does philosophy have to offer to the average student? And how do we go about delivering these goods in the classroom?

For Ms. Fox: Some thoughts on natality

In the story of the Buddha, as I've heard it told, the young prince was shielded by his parents from all knowledge of human suffering, including aging and death. What I find interesting about this story is the fact that death, as an event, is not something we are born knowing about. We have to learn that we will die. But it seems to me that mortality, as a condition of human existence (as opposed to death as a future event) is something we experience daily. Thus no one could shield us from the knowledge of mortality, of our own finitude.

What are these signs of finitude that no one could miss? Well, for one, there's the fact that we can't do everything, that choosing one path excludes all others. I can only do one thing at the cost of not doing other things, and this cost is often a painful one. Closely related to this is the experience of the irrevocability of our actions and decisions. I can remember the pain of realizing, as a child, that I had done something I could not take back.

These are experiences of temporality, of the way human beings exist in time. Even if I did not know that I would one day cease to exist, I would still experience my time as limited. We are pressed on toward the future, whether we wish it or not; opportunities not taken will vanish forever, and the choices we make now will have consequences that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives.

Now, I think this contrast between death (as event) and mortality (as human condition) applies also to birth and natality. My birth, as an event, is something I cannot have direct knowledge of. If shielded from this knowledge by my parents, as the Buddha's parents shielded him from the knowledge of death, I might never know that I had been born. (And indeed, many parents tell their children fanciful stories about the circumstances surrounding birth.) However, it seems to me that natality, like mortality, is a human condition that no one can remain ignorant of, since it characterizes all of our experience.

What are the basic signs or experiences of natality? One is the knowledge that I did not make myself, that I am not responsible for my own existence. We find ourselves living in the world, with no recollection of how we got here. We pre-date ourselves in a strange way, for we are aware of having existed prior to our present awareness of that existence. Another experience of natality is that of our dependence on others and on the world around us, our lack of self-sufficiency. The experience of hunger is an experience of natality -- every day the world continues to bring me into being, to ensure my continued existence. A third experience of natality is my experience of the world as pre-existing and independent of me. Every person is born into a world not of their own making, a stranger, as Arendt says. To be a child is to be a student of this world, needing urgently to learn its ways and adjust oneself to its demands. Thus the experience of natality is one of having arrived late on the scene, and so of being determined by circumstances of which one is not the origin.

Have I characterized natality and mortality correctly? Are there other signs or experiences of these conditions that I've missed? How is natality related to time, and how are mortality and natality related?

Challenge!

I challenge you to a blog post!

Three (or four) subjects: are language and culture inseparable, how is your vision of your own future different or similar (opitmistic or pessimistic) in relation to your vision of the future of the world? and do you think there should be an official language(s) for the U.S. (particularly considering the law)

These were all questions posed in my Alliance Francais class... the things people said were truly amazing. They're all pretty intelligent people (though not all so quick with the francais!), mostly retired. One woman is an 82 year old former stockbroker for Smith and Barney. Another is a cardiologist who just decided to write a novel set in France between the wars. Another is a retired elementary English teacher who is half Crow-indian and grew up on a reservation. Our teacher is an American with a Phd in French lit on contemporary french theater and semiotics (he practically wriggled when I said I studied continental philosophy). I adore them all... j'ai decidé à continue la semaine prochaine juste pour les écouter ;) People *love* being asked these sorts of things. And it's amazing the sort of things people will say (how frank, how intimate) when asked in a foreign language! There's a scene in T. Mann's Magic Mountain where two Germans explain why they speak to each other in French "because it's like speaking in a dream."

(N.B. Option four is ignore the Alliance Francais questions et poser un autre)

Diaspora

I'm starting this blog as a place to put my thoughts. This is partly a response to the fact that I'm finished my coursework, and will soon be leaving the immediate geographical vicinity of my department. I'm hoping that having a place to write will keep me writing, and thinking.

I've asked two friends who are in the same position, Kascha and Neal, to share this blog with me, as a way of staying in conversation with one another over the distance that newly separates us. I hope that other friends will join this conversation too, by commenting on these posts.