[From: Bruce Nevin (Mon 920422 08:52:59)]
I do not claim that Sagan and Drayan have correctly described the
perceptions that chimpanzees are controlling. I agree that there is no
basis, either in their writing or in the reports of ethological
observations which they summarize, for determining whether they have
identified and described the relevant perceptions or not. (The "or not"
is of course important.)
I do claim, and I think that you would agree, that projection of this
kind is typical of what people do. One looks at what another person (or
chimpanzee, or other creature) is doing. One imagines what one would
have to do to accomplish those behavioral outputs. One imagines what it
would feel like to do those things. One imagines what other aspects of
one's perceptual universe would be like were one having those feelings,
and doing those that one would do to produce like behavioral outputs--
one imagines what perceptions one would be controlling. One does this
imagining with respect to the observed behavior of each of the players
in a social interaction such as those Sagan and Drayan describe. For
each, one imagines what it would take and how it would feel for one to
do the observed things in the context of what one has imagined for the
other players' actions. I think it is not controversial to say that
this sort of "projection" is everyday fare for humans.
However, instead of attempting to eliminate this process as an unwanted
interference with "objectivity," I would embrace it as being itself a
crucial datum about our perceptions and our control of them, and an
invaluable tool for insight into them; this precisely because we all do
it, and because we know (or are confident) that we all do it, and
because we have acted on this assumption all or most of our lives,
evidently in concert with others so doing.
In particular, I make the further claim that the association of
particular manners of behavior (comprising behavioral outputs),
emotional states, and social roles (participation in mutually recognized
social relations) is learned and indeed taught as part of how to be an
adult member of one's society.
This observation, whether made of chimpanzees or humans, puts more
imagination than observation into the picture. "Upright" is one thing;
"bolt upright" is another, implying an imagined way of getting into that
position. "Jaw set" is completely imaginary unless you can feel the efforts
(if any) involved in holding the jaw in that position. "Staring" is OK, but
"confidently?" "Into the MIDDLE distance?" Those observations tell us a lot
about the observer but nothing (verifiable) about the observed.
Exactly so.
What would tell us something about the observed alpha male is that these
various enactments of assymetrical social relation (as we imagine them
to be, as they would be if we were engaging in them with other humans)
are indeed asymmetrical. That only one male is in the "superior" role
in transactions with all others in the group, though others are
recognizably so in relation to some others; that if the alpha male is
deposed (as we imagine it), he is no does all these things in the
"superior" role wrt all others, but rather the one deposing does; that
young males learn the ways of enacting superior and inferior social
roles and practice them. What all this (and more) tells us by its
consistency and pervasiveness is that the alpha male and the other
members of the group are controlling some perceptions which may be like
those that humans control when they do analogous things. What those
perceptions are, their reference levels, their relations to other
perceptions, etc., all this is surely to be determined.
Those observations tell us a lot
about the observer but nothing (verifiable) about the observed.
So what do they tell us about the observer? That is of great interest
to us. The same processes of observing behavioral outputs and imagining
how one would experience a perceptual universe in which one produced
like outputs oneself is at the heart of much of communication, which is
about social relationships. One imagines (and remembers) the experience
of enacting both (or each) of the roles that one perceives being
enacted.
Bateson lays out the issues of (nonverbal) communication in many
discussions, for example, in "Problems in Cetacean and Other Mammalian
Communication" (reprinted in _Steps to and Ecology of Mind_ p. 364 ff.),
where the discussion of the wolf pack is particularly apt. I will not
type it, as it is accessible and as the effort will be ill timed if the
above suggestions are controversial after all.
Bruce
bn@bbn.com