[From Bruce Nevin (2004.06.29 23:09 EDT]
Richard Kennaway (2004.06.29.1848 BST)--
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.
Certainly. But other things do not assist us in determining which of a
discrete set of possible perceptions they are controlling. The effect of
conventionalization is to partition the continua of observed behavior into
discrete possibilities.
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,
This is true of autistic people. It is also true of children under the age
of about 4 years. This tells us that there is some level or kind of
cognitive ability involved that not everyone has developed.
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).
This is true of people with Asberger's syndrome. Don't confuse them. There
is a gradation. A colleague of mine with Asberger's syndrome must infer
affect, rather than perceiving it more directly, and so has trouble with
empathy, but is able to perceive and control social conventions reasonably
well. Problems with empathy and affect interfere with control of social
relations in obvious ways as does whatever underlies the obsessive,
repetitive behavior (who would want to play with that weird kid). For
Asbergers, language development is fairly normal, however, and that is my
particular interest. Aspergers kids typically are assessed as being
unusually intelligent, and high verbal ability is part of this. There's a
kind of irony, then, in saying that my friend perceives and controls social
conventions "reasonably" well, since he has to use his intellectual acuity
to infer what others perceive directly.
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?"
I am not talking about meanings. I am talking about the conventional
difference between e.g. see, be, pee, etc. and all the other limited sets
of choices at each point of contrast in that utterance. Regardless of what
they meant by the words, it is very clear what words they said.
Not all conventions are as clear or as mutually agreed as that. There may
be certain conventional expectations associated with seeing a movie with
someone in certain contexts, but it's not cut and dried, and a lot of the
negotiating in creating relationships is negotiating about reliable
expectations. Some folks then get bored with how predictable the other is
and want to move on. The person they're leaving, however, is not so
predictable to everyone in their community. I'd rather leave such
wishy-wobbly things out of the picture and focus on what is conventional
within a larger public.
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.
These are issues of meaning again. In all of these cases, the conflict is
not about what words were said or written, it is about what was intended by
saying them. The words are social realities; the perceptions that people
try to control by means of words are their private perceptions.
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".
This was part of an exercise in determining where the CV is located -- in
the environment, or in the brain of the observer who has identified it by
performing the test. No, wait, it's in the brain of the person that is
being observed. No, wait, it's in both their brains. But the CV in the
brain of the observer is not the same as the CV in the brain of the
observed person. Even though the point of the Test is to demonstrate that
the observer has identified the CV. At last account, the CV became a pretty
wispy theoretical flimsy kind of thing on which to build a model. It is the
same (and therefore reliably identified) only IF IF IF the observed person
is constructed as the observer is constructed. I refer you to Bill's post
on the subject.
I can only agree with your (and Bill's) doubt that we are all constructed
identically. By what I have been describing, we do not have to be, because
we construct conventional social realities alike. They provide a kind of
scaffolding by which we may arrange and negotiate coordination of our more
nebulous non-public perceptions with one another.
I loved the story about Tarzan and the monkeys' invective. A case in point.
There was no doubt what word he was reading. There was a difficulty with
the meaning that he inferred for that word from its context -- something
that monkeys poured down on Tarzan's head.
Whether that clears up my meaning for you or not, there can be no doubt
what words and sentences and paragraphs I have typed, can there.
/Bruce Nevin
/Bruce Nevin
···
At 07:21 PM 6/29/2004 +0100, Richard Kennaway wrote: