[From Richard Kennaway (2004.06.29.1848 BST)]
[From Bill Powers (2004.06.29.0934 MDT)]
I maintain that there is nothing provably special about social reality; you
and I can know it no better than you and I can know physical reality. I
don't know why you want to establish that social reality is somehow
superior to other forms of reality, but when your efforts to do this lead
you into logical errors and into overlooking the obvious, I hope I can be
forgiven for thinking I should look for reasons other than your
dispassionate love of truth (if not for saying it). You obviously place a
very high value not only on the existence of social norms but on
establishing as a fact their origin in self-perpetuating social phenomena
rather than in individuals. I don't know why this matters so much to you --
it certainly matters a lot less to me. But it's not true just because you
want it to be true (or have a lifelong conviction that it is true).I would like to hear from Richard Kennaway on this subject.
Happy to oblige, though I'm not sure why me. I see Rick Marken is
looking for some mathematics from me, which I don't have right now,
but here are some observations on the problem of perceiving other
people's minds.
I was rather startled when Bruce Nevin posted a few days ago about
being able to perceive other people's states of mind more surely than
other things. We can perceive other people only through the same
physical senses we use to perceive everything else.
Other people's minds are more inaccessible than other things, not
less. It takes a quite gross defect of the sense organs or the
nervous system for someone to be unable to form a perception of a
chair; in contrast, autistic people can have great difficulty forming
perceptions of other people's states of mind, yet some are able to
function in society without anyone around them realising they are
anything more than a bit odd (which also speaks somewhat to those
other people's competence at the task).
He wrote:
If this is inference, then it is inference with a great deal of
support that is not present when, say, a physicist infers the
presence of a certain kind of particle.
But is it *better* support? One can make certain observations on
control systems -- e.g. the Test -- which do not apply to things
other than control systems, but they are not necessarily any more
reliable than any other sort of observation, such as measuring the
weight of a rock. I'd put more trust in the latter than in my guess
about what someone means when they say, for example, "Would you like
to see a movie with me?"
And earlier:
That it [the perception of another's perceptions] is as remarkably
accurate as it is, especially in certain domains, pre-eminently in
the domain of language, is because we control to assist one another
in making it so.
I don't find it remarkably accurate at all. On the contrary, it is
often highly inaccurate. How often do you crash your car (bicycle,
legs, etc. as the case may be)? Almost never, I expect. How often
does a conversation crash? Look at any contentious forum (including
this one, on occasion). Look at the entire history of literature:
almost every plot is driven by ignorance and error in people's
perceptions of other people's minds.
Back to another earlier message from Bruce Nevin: (I'm cherry-picking
what I think is the relevant history of the conversation. The surge
of activity in the last few days, and my being offline most of the
weekend, mean I have by no means read everything.)
However,
when the observed organism is known (or assumed) to be constructed like the
observer, as a fellow human being is, then for the observer who has
identified a CV (eliminating every alternative that she can imagine), an
equivalence can be known: the observer knows that both the observer and the
observed person are controlling the "same perception".
That's a dangerous assumption, albeit one that is proverbial in more
than one culture (one speaks of "putting oneself in the other
person's shoes", or "walking a mile in their moccasins"). It will
give only a very limited understanding of other people, if one
assumes that they are all just like oneself. They aren't. And if
that understanding is assumed to be even more certain than one's
knowledge of whether one's car is pointed in the right direction,
then only disaster can result in one's dealings with other people.
This is not just a theoretical doubt, but a serious political issue.
See the literature around survivors of the mental health system, and
the joke, which they would find a grim one, that psychology is the
delusion of insight into other people's mental processes.
Finally, here is an anecdote that may be of some relevance, or at
least which may provide some amusement. An Oxbridge don was being
interviewed by the BBC.
Don: "Until I was well into my adulthood, I believed that the word
'invective' was a synonym for 'urine'."
Interviewer: "Why ever would you have believed that?"
Don: "As a boy, I was an avid reader of the Tarzan romances of Edgar
Rice Burroughs, and in those books, whenever a lion walked through a
clearing, the monkeys would leap into the trees and 'pour streams of
invective on the lion's head."
Interviewer (after a pause): "But surely, sir, you now know the
meaning of the word?"
Don: "Yes, but I do wonder under what other misapprehensions I may
continue to labour."
-- Richard Kennaway
