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Thursday, June 17, 2010
Rant: Theory of Mind, NOT!
Theory of mind (aka TOM) is all the rage in (some quarters of) cognitive science and evolutionary psychology. It’s driving me batsh¡t crazy. And its use by literary critics makes me super-mega batsh¡t crazy.
Why?
Well, first, in case you don’t know what TOM is, it refers to the capacity humans have for attending to and wondering about what’s on someone else’s mind. It’s a capacity that’s possibly unique to humans, though perhaps not, and it begins appearing at around four-plus years of age. My problem is not with the research itself or the notion that some-such capacity comes “online” at that point in development. What bothers me is the term and its implications.
It bothers Melvin Konner too. Here’s a passage from an opinion piece* he published in Nature a few years ago:
Meanwhile, social-cognition theorists have come up with a phrase inferential enough to make one almost long for the black-boxers: theory of mind. Freud sought one, Skinner assiduously didn’t, and most people don’t bother to ask themselves whether they have or need one. Yet there is serious debate as to whether chimpanzees or four-year-olds have a theory of mind. Closely inspected, the phrase seems to mean something like perspective-taking or, when mutual, intersubjectivity. True, a four-year-old can see and act on another person’s perspective whereas most three-year-olds can’t.
This is fascinating stuff and something we need to understand. But a term such as ‘theory of mind’ simply stands in the way. It makes for catchy article titles but conveys no meaning. Is the maturing orbitofrontal cortex newly able to calm an impulsive and self-centred limbic circuit? Is there a down-regulation of some neurotransmitter receptor, allowing a younger form of social mirror-imaging to grow into identification and parallel perspectives? As long as we are playing with pretty word-coins that substitute for brain functions, we will never know.
This TOM-talk is rather like Richard Dawkins talking about “selfish” genes. He knows perfectly well that genes aren’t the kind of agents that can be motivated by selfish considerations, but it’s a useful way of talking. And, in a pinch, he’s quite capable of explaining what’s going on without recourse to the personification; that is to say, Dawkins and others can give technical accounts that do not require genes to have mental states.
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Tuesday, May 18, 2010
Ah, the Good Old Days
I heard you proclaim that my philosophy’s lame.
Well I’ll have you know this ain’t no show,
I got this proposition that’ll slam your intuition.
It ain’t no joke, when I wind up this stroke,
I’ll whirl and twirl, and heave and weave
With this dance metaphysic, I’ll clobber your Zizek.
Nina Paley is the creator of Mimi & Eunice and is unleashing them on the world under a copyleft license.
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Wednesday, May 05, 2010
The Positive at the ARCADE
Andrew Goldstone has initiated an interesting discussion of positivism and the critique of “positivism” at the ARCADE:
In particular, I want to avoid the assumption that literature as such has spent the twentieth century locked in a “two cultures"-style struggle with the domain of science and what is often loosely called “Enlightenment rationality.” If Guillory is right, that is a misrecognized version of quite different struggles. Yet I also have no time for extorted reconciliations of the profoundly differentiated spheres of literary and scientifically rational practice. What more nuanced accounts can we devise?
And later on:
This concern leads me to a question I really can’t answer yet: what literary and humanistic genealogies of non-anti-rationalism are there? What meaningful historical and social alignments have there been, in the twentieth-century, between literary and humanistic work on the one hand and logical-positivist-style scientific rationality on the other?
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Tuesday, April 13, 2010
Visual Culture and Evolution Online Symposium
Runs from April 5 to April 14, 2010. Description from main page:
“Join a group of more than 30 international experts - including artists, scientists, historians, ethicists, curators, sociologists, and writers - as they discuss the intersections between the visual arts and evolution. This past year, in celebration of the 200th anniversary of Darwin’s birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of his book, On the Origin of Species, a number of conferences were held around the world focusing on the impact of the concept of evolution. This symposium will be a platform to discuss both the ideas generated from those activities and the present impact of evolutionary thought on visual culture.”
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Monday, April 12, 2010
Literary Studies, Hermeneutic Insiders and Naturalist Outsiders
I began my second post at The Valve by looking at Jonathan Culler’s 1975 Structuralist Poetics. However much Culler was influenced by structuralism and semiotics, he also read his Chomsky – I’m thinking of linguistics, of course, not the politics (though he may have read that as well). We all read Chomsky in the 60s and early 70s, some of us more, some less, but we were all aware of the linguistics. Thus Culler’s first chapter is entitled “The Linguistic Foundation.” It ends with the assertion: “Linguistics is not hermeneutic. It does not discover what a sequence means or produce a new interpretation of it but tries to determine the nature of the system underlying the event” (p. 31). I think that Culler is correct in that. I also believe that the attempt to go beyond, or to sidestep, hermeneutics has flat-out failed, though much has been said about various systems underlying literary events. It never really got off the ground.
That, however, is the project I’ve been pursuing in one way or another for, well, since before I read Culler. I think such a project is necessary, and I remain optimistic about its possibility. The key is to focus on form, not meaning. Don’t ignore meaning, but bracket it. Form’s the key to a literary study that’s not hermeneutic.
But I’m not going to argue that here. I just want to get that idea before you as context for a passage from an old paper of mine. This passage is at the end of an article which I packaged as a “structuralist” reading (and it was, in a way) of “Kubla Khan.” (Note that the guy who wrote that piece hadn’t read my recent piece asserting that worrying about whether or not literary study is scientific is a waste of time.) Here’s the final two paragraphs of the article:
These questions are different from those generally asked by literary critics. They are not interpretive questions. The analytic method illustrated above does not yield a statement of the form: hence the meaning of text X is proposition Y. Rather it yields a description of the path in semantic space that generates the object text. There is nothing new in the idea that structuralist analysis is nonhermeneutic. But there is an aspect of this shift from hermeneutics that hasn’t received sufficient theoretical attention.
The hermeneutic critic is, ultimately, asking: What is the meaning of life? What is man’s place in the scheme of things? What does this text tell us of that scheme? These are not properly scientific questions and we should not expect a science of man to answer them. But that science must answer closely related questions: What is the nature of the human mind such that it continually inquires into its own nature, into its place in the world? What is the nature of a poem such that it stills, for the moment, such questioning? A science that fails to address such questions may indeed be a science, but it will not be profoundly of man.
The polarity, perhaps, is drawn too sharply, and too simply. But I think it nonetheless a useful and valid distinction.
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Tuesday, March 23, 2010
Cognitivism for the Critic, in Four & a Parable
This is about computational thinking. It’s a style of thought, a way of looking at the world. Alas, the most familiar example of computation, arithmetic, is not a very good way to get a feel for the style, not as you need it to investigate literature. This post is a brief guide to THAT style.
It has long been obvious to me that the cognitive sciences are what happened when the computation and the computer hit the behavioral sciences as a source of models and metaphors. And that is what is missing from almost all of the work I’ve seen in cognitive approaches to literature. In this post I list and annotate four modest books that can help restore the sense of computation, and the constructive, that’s otherwise absent. I list them in order of suggested reading, starting with a comic book about comic books. After that we have a bonus section, a parable about computation based on passages from Simon about a drunken ant walking on the beach.
(1) Scott McCloud (1993). Understanding Comics. New York: HarperPerennial.
In some odd, but wonderful, ways this may be the best single introduction to the cognitive study of literature. It’s not an academic book; there’s no scholarly apparatus. But it yields a superb sense of what it is like to think about story-telling from a cognitive point of view. It takes the form of a comic book, words and images in panels cover every page - McCloud is a cartoonist. The pictorial form is what makes it so effective. So, McCloud has the reader thinking about visual objects and how they’re constructed and how those constructions are organized into stories. It conveys a sense of design, engineering, and construction which is very important and which is missing in much of the current literary cognition literature. It gives the reader a whiff of mechanism without the pain involved in understanding the computational models of the cognitive sciences.
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Monday, March 22, 2010
10 Influential Books
Urged on by a reader, Tyler Cowen seems to have started a books meme: What 10 books have influenced you the most? This sort of thing is something of a crapshoot, yadda yadda, but why not? I’ve limited my list to non-fiction.
My Teacher
David Hays, Cognitive Structures. Hays was my teacher, and most of what I learned from him I learned directly from him. His aim in this book was to integrate the analog and servomechanical model of William Powers (see below) with the propositional and digital style of his own earlier work in computational linguistics. It is embodied cognition before the term was coined and gained currency. I believe this is the most profound such attempt to date (Hays wrote the book in the Spring of 1976), but, of course, I am biased. It is also, alas, rather obscure in points, no bias.
Some Others
Claude Lévi-Strauss, The Raw and the Cooked. I’ve read a good deal of Lévi-Strauss, and this wasn’t the first. But it has had the most lasting effect on my thinking, which I’ve already discussed. Lévi-Strauss sees that there is a rigorous, but hidden, logic to a body of South American myths. He evokes this hidden logic by careful comparisons between myths, while discussing them in their larger socio-cultural context.
John Bowlby, Attachment. I read this in typescript under the tutelage of the late Mary Ainsworth. Bowlby set out to reconstruct psychoanalytic object relations theory using systems models (TOTE from Miller, Gallanter, and Pribram, Plans and the Structure of Behavior) and evidence from ethology, especially of primates. This became my model of biologically-based psychology.
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Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Style Matters
Intellectual style, that is.
When, some 35 years ago, I turned toward the cognitive sciences and away from structuralism & post-structuralism, deconstruction, and the rest, the turn was driven as much by intellectual style as by epistemological conviction. No, I didn’t have much affection for the predicate calculus, which I learned in a course in symbolic logic (it fulfilled my math requirement), but I did like the intellectual style I found in linguistics books, the sense of rigor and explicit order. I also liked the diagrams. A lot.
There were large sections in my dissertation—Cognitive Science and Literary Theory—where the major burden of the argument was in the diagrams. I’d work out the diagrams first and then write prose commentary on them. That modus operandi pleases me a great deal. In the preface to Beethoven’s Anvil, which had some diagrams, but not many, I refer to my thinking in that book as speculative engineering. I like that term: speculative engineering.
There are other intellectual styles, obviously. Some very different from my diagrammatic and speculative engineering style.
Take New Historicism for instance. I’ve not read much in that vein, but I’ve read some, and some of that I’ve found quite interesting and delightful. If New Historicism is, as I’ve been told, the closest thing literary studies currently has to a dominant methodological practice, I can’t help but thinking that is as much about intellectual style as about epistemological conviction.
It is, or can be, a very writerly style. One gathers a pile of stories, vignettes, and passages from various writers, literary and not, and arranges them more according to rhythm, surprise, and repose than for logical progression and finality — though such matters come into play as well. It is a style that can be a bit like literature itself, at least prose fiction, though one can sneak in some lyrical passages here and there, and maybe even a bit of insistent rhythm.
* * * * *
I’ve got two suspicions about style matters:
1.) In anyone’s intellectual ecology, style preferences are deeper and have more inertia than explicit epistemological beliefs.
2.) Some of the pigheadedness that often crops up in discussions about humanities vs. science is grounded in stylistic preference that gets rationalized as epistemological belief.
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Saturday, March 13, 2010
Disciplinary Tension? Or, Holbo Meet Hillis
We need to make every effort to defend, in changed circumstances, the tradition that makes the humanities in the university the place especially charged with the combination of Bildung and Wissenschaft, ethical education and pure knowledge.
Curiosity about a pendant one Joshua Landy hung on a 2009 post by John Holbo led me, first to Landy’s comment (about Moretti on Sherlock Holmes) and then back to Holbo’s post. And that reminded me that I had intended to bounce a post off of Holbo’s. So here it is.
John is discussing a panel discussion he’d attended once upon a time not all that long ago. He remarks:
I was struck, in particular, by one panel discussion I attended at which it was more or less agreed by various participants that scholarship and pedagogy of literary history are, at present, mutually ill-suited. . . . On the one hand, you need a set of texts that will provide you with sufficient evidence to pronounce intelligently—justifiably—on such subjects as ‘the nineteenth century American novel’. On the other hand, you need a set of texts to fill out a 12-week syllabus for an undergraduate course of that title. There isn’t any one set of texts that can do both jobs.
Of course it isn’t so surprising that the most sophisticated scholarship goes beyond what can be crammed into an undergraduate semester. But there is more to the point, it seems to me. There seems to be a tendency for good undergraduate pedagogy to recapitulate bad (as opposed to merely incomplete or preliminary) historiography. The teacher finds him or herself proceeding as if ‘the nineteenth century novel’ (pick your suitably broad subject) is the sort of thing that is at all likely to show up through the lens of, say, eight novels to be read. Reading a small number of novels and writing a few interpretive essays can be a fine and enriching way to spend a few months. But it’s not the same kind of enriching activity as studying the novel historically, with scholarly rigor. In a sense no one really thinks otherwise. So tension between pedagogy and historiography is not just tension between for-students simplification and for-scholars sophistication. It is tension between certain notions of value and certain standards of validity.
Let me offer a brief interpretive gloss on this tension between value and validity, which may only have emerged into view recently but has been latent for a somewhat longer time.
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Monday, December 07, 2009
Into Lévi-Strauss and Out Through “Kubla Khan”
Previous posts in the series:
The King’s Wayward Eye: For Claude Lévi-Strauss
Lévi-Strauss 2: Subject and Object
Lévi-Strauss 3: What’s the Subject?
My recent posts about Claude Lévi-Strauss are about his ideas on myth, but they are also about the influence of those ideas on me. They are stories in my intellectual autobiography. I would like to continue with that autobiography and say more about how, for better or worse, I moved through Lévi-Strauss to cognitive science.
That could not have happened unless I had become interested in the cognitive sciences even as I was investigating Lévi-Strauss. For Lévi-Strauss & Co. was not all that caught my undergraduate interest when I was at Johns Hopkins in the 60s. I studied psycholinguistics under James Deese and thereby discovered Noam Chomsky’s transformational generative grammar (& how it wiped behaviorism off the map). I learned about Jean Piaget under Mary Ainsworth, who also introduced me to John Bowlby and to primate ethology. Other thinkers were important as well, including Nietzsche, Merleau-Ponty, the early Wittgenstein, and, in a way, Philippe Ariès, though that influence is not so germane to this particular story.
What brought it all together, or, in a way, forced me to tear it apart, was a poem, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (text available here). I became interested in “Kubla Khan” during my senior year at Johns Hopkins in a course taught by the late Earl Wasserman. As you know, Coleridge had declared “Kubla Khan” incomplete: It came to him in an opium-induced reverie (opium was the aspirin of the time); he was interrupted by a man from Porlock; the reverie was dissipated and, with it, most of the poem vanished. The text was oh! so incomplete. I sensed that the two sections of the poem—the first, about Kubla and his pleasure-dome, the second, about a poet and his vision of the damsel with a dulcimer—had the same structure. I also believed that “Kubla Khan” became complete by asserting its own incompleteness: “Could I revive within me . . .” But he couldn’t, and so this incomplete poem asserted its own fragmentary nature, from within itself, thereby recursively attaining closure. It was a trick of the times.
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Saturday, December 05, 2009
The Sublime Funk of Cornel West
For what it’s worth, here’s a bit of controversy (at Crooked Timber) over Cornel West’s latest, an autobiography: Brother West: Living and Loving Out Loud. Here’s a Facebook page for the book; and here’s an excerpt from it along with an interview with Matt Lauer. Here’s a paragraph from the excerpt:
But what does it mean to be a bluesman in the life of the mind? Like my fellow musicians, I’ve got to forge a unique style and voice that expresses my own quest for truth and love. That means following the quest wherever it leads and bearing whatever cost is required. I must break through isolated academic frameworks while, at the same time, I must build on the best of academic knowledge. I must fuel the fire of my soul so my intellectual blues can set others on fire. And most importantly, I must be a free spirit. I must unapologetically reveal my broken life as a thing of beauty.
And here’s another paragraph, on his quest for love, taken from this review (Scott McLemee at IHE):
The basic problem with my love relationships with women is that my standards are so high—and they apply equally to both of us. I seek full-blast mutual intensity, fully fledged mutual acceptance, full-blown mutual flourishing, and fully felt peace and joy with each other. This requires a level of physical attraction, personal adoration, and moral admiration that is hard to find. And it shares a depth of trust and openness for a genuine soul-sharing with a mutual respect for a calling to each other and to others. Does such a woman exist for me? Only God knows and I eagerly await this divine unfolding. Like Heathcliff and Catherine’s relationship in Emily Bronte’s remarkable novel Wuthering Heights or Franz Schubert’s tempestuous piano Sonata No. 21 in B flat (D.960) I will not let life or death stand in the way of this sublime and funky love that I crave!
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Friday, November 27, 2009
Lévi-Strauss 3: What’s the Subject?
When I wrote my first post on Lévi-Strauss I had no intention of writing a second. Rob’s response, however, led me to take a stroll through Derrida and Donato and in turn led me to take another shot at explicating Lévi-Strauss’s analytic method in The Raw and the Cooked. At about the time I was posting that second piece I’d also decided to develop that first post into a formal article and, in the process of doing that—I’m still working on it—I continued to read some older pieces, mostly about Lévi-Strauss and the subject, more in the Donato pieces, but also some de Man, which I’d not read back in the day, and Joseph Riddel. “So that’s what was afoot,” thought I to myself, though not exactly in those terms, “that’s what folks were all psyched about. Hmmm.” I’d pretty much forgotten that material, though I’d obviously read it with some care as the texts were underlined and had marginal comments. And then I got out Tristes Tropiques and reviewed some of the underlined passages, again, on the subject.
This is not my first copy of Tristes Tropiques, it is not the one I read in Dick Macksey’s course on the autobiographical novel at Johns Hopkins. That was an abridged translation, which I discarded when I purchased the 1973 translation of the whole book. So these underlings and marginalia were not those of a provincial newly arrived at the Big University. These markings were made by a sophisticated young intellectual who had both a philosophy BA and a humanities MA from Hopkins and who was then pursuing a PhD in English at SUNY Buffalo. I’d gotten my MA for writing a long and quite sophisticated thesis on “Kubla Khan.” Lévi-Strauss was my central methodological touchstone, but there was Jakobson and, I suppose, Piaget as well. And Merleau-Ponty. And the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. Others, including Nietzsche, but also a bit of Chomsky.
I came out of that thesis convinced that cognitive science was the way forward. And that’s what I pursued at Buffalo. The story of how I managed to study cognitive science while enrolled in the English Department, well, that’s the story of an institutional style — and I do mean that, institutional — that may well have been unique in American letters, a style of adventure and generosity that is now gone. But that’s a story for another day.
Let’s return to Lévi-Strauss, and to the subject. I can’t imagine how puzzled I must have been to read about and hear talk of “the subject.” When I read Lévi-Strauss’ eclipse of the subject in Tristes Tropiques the exposition must have been strange, but without weight. That is, without the weight of the philosophical tradition Lévi-Strauss, himself trained as a philosopher, was critiquing. Sure, I knew of that tradition, and I’d even read about it in the later pages of Bertrand Russell’s A History of Western Philosophy. But I’d not read Kant or Hegel, nor the phenomenologists. Thus, I suppose, Lévi-Strauss’s rejection of the self is where I began, one of the places. All the rest is backfill.
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Thursday, November 19, 2009
Lévi-Strauss 2: Subject and Object
In response to my previous post on Lévi-Strauss, rob reminded me of Derrida’s essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences,” revised from his presentation at the 1966 structuralism symposium held at Johns Hopkins. And not only that. In evoking Kant and capital “R” Reason, rob also reminded me that both Lévi-Strauss and Derrida had been operating within a philosophical tradition that stretches back to Kant though Heidegger and Hegel and various others. While I certainly read in that tradition as an undergraduate, and marked those books in blue, red, and green felt-tip pen, I abandoned it with Derrida, or perhaps with Lévi-Strauss himself – the exact formulation doesn’t matter.
I want to revisit that abandonment. Perhaps, even, re-enact it. In a small way.
Let us consider some passages from Derrida’s essay, which I present not to critique them, but simply to display them. For example (p. 256 in Macksey and Donato, The Languages of Criticism and the Sciences of Man, 1970): “In effect, what appears most fascinating in this critical search for a new status of the discourse is the stated abandonment of all reference to a center, to a subject, to a privileged reference, to an origin, or to an absolute arché.” On the next page (257): “There is no unity or absolute source of the myth. . . . Everything begins with the structure, the configuration, the relationship. The discourse on this acentric structure, the myth, that is, cannot itself have an absolute subject or an absolute center.” From the subsequent discussion, in response to Jean Hypolite: “. . . this center can be either thought as it was classically, like a creator or being or a fixed and natural place; or also as a deficiency, let’s say; or something which makes possible “free play” . . . and which receives—and this is what we call history¬—a series of determinations, of signifiers, which have no signifieds [signifiés] finally, which cannot become signifiers except as they begin from this deficiency.”
That is to say, talk and thought of the center, the subject, and the sign are intimately bound together. Eugenio Donato, in his contribution to the symposium (“The Two Languages of Criticism”), notes (p. 94): “It is the possibility of maintaining the discontinuity between the order of the signifier and the order of the signified that permits Lévi-Strauss to avoid dealing with the problem of the individual subject and makes for the extreme rigor of his work.” Note that phrase, “extreme rigor.”
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Friday, November 13, 2009
The King’s Wayward Eye: For Claude Lévi-Strauss
Farewell to freedom in the Adriatic and to days of wild abandon.
– Hayao Miyazaki via Porco Rosso
The news of his death has, by now, no doubt spread to every region of cyberspace where his ideas have seen use and remembrance. I am speaking, of course, about Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009), tamer of wild flowers, pollinator of myth, and diviner of opposites. I learned of his ideas in the days when Structuralism was something in its own right rather than being a doormat at the threshold of Poststructuralism, Deconstruction, and Postmodernism. I thought his ideas about myth were quite profound, but not fully-formed.
This note is an attempt to indicate what I saw in his study of myth despite the fact that I cannot give a concise account of what he did nor can I recommend such an account. You have to read the man himself. First I say a little about his ideas, then I suggest their implications for literary study by giving an example from early modern English literature, a comparison of Robert Green’s Pandosto with Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. I then suggest extensions of that analysis both into Shakespeare and into the novel (Wuthering heights). (There’s small collection of Lévi-Strauss links at the very end.)
The Structural Study of Myth
I first learned of Lévi-Strauss during my undergraduate years at Johns Hopkins in the late 1960s. I believe it was in one of Dick Macksey’s courses, The Idea of the Theater. I forget whether Macksey assigned “The Structural Study of Myth” or merely suggested it. No matter. I read it, didn’t understand it, and was hooked: “The true constituent units of myth are not the isolated relations but bundles of such relations, and it is only as bundles that these relations can be put to use and combined so as to produce meaning.” First Oedipus; then the Zuni emergence myth, compared with those in other Pueblo tribes, finally a Plains myth to round things off. “In all cases, it was found that the theory was sound; light was thrown, not only on North American mythology, but also on a previously unnoticed kind of logical operation, or own known so far only in a wholly different context.” Yippie kayo git along little dogies!
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Tuesday, November 10, 2009
How Heideggerian Are You?
You know what? It wouldn’t kill me to post at the Valve every year or so. I could, just for example, take time out of my busy schedule ... (it really is busy, my schedule.)
But I do find that Crooked Timber keeps me busy, and I’m bizarrely averse to cross-posting. (I don’t know why.) So let me link to a post at Crooked Timber, on typography, philosophy and the Nazi question. And let me just ask the humanists among you (that’s most of you, I expect): just how Heideggerian are you? How much of the stuff that matters to you can be traced back, significantly, to Heidegger? If you don’t know a damn thing about Heidegger, how seriously confused are you, sitting in a graduate seminar?
I realize it’s a trick question, because it’s vague. But answer as best you can. How much Heidegger have you actually read - for a class, say. Or assigned, for a class? I’m curious what the kids are being made to read these days.
But it’s not a trick question in this way: I’m not going to call you a Nazi. Life’s too short.
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