Judging Others: When It's Bad, It's Worse Than You Think (by Guest Blogger Hagop Sarkissian)

When we meet others we form impressions of them, and they tend to stick. This automatic tendency motivates numerous social practices, such as grooming before a date or rehearsing before a presentation. It can be unfair, of course, to evaluate persons based on their behavior on any one particular occasion, as the behavior may not be representative. Nonetheless, first impressions are easy to form and difficult to overcome.

What's more, there is a well documented asymmetry between the impact of bad first impressions versus good ones. Consider the following: We are quicker to both form and recall bad impressions, and are also more likely to do so. We also tend to be more confident about bad impressions, take less time to arrive at them, and require less information to be convinced of them -- that is, relative to good impressions. Finally, once a bad impression is formed, we seal it away from revision or interference.

'So what?' you might think. Even granting such broad tendencies, it remains an open question whether or not any particular impression is accurate. Moreover, you might think yourself a 'good judge of character', that your initial impressions are routinely confirmed by subsequent data: the initially cold and distant colleague turns out to be just as cold and distant in the end, and those we warm up to tend not to disappoint.

Well, there's room for doubt here. At least two psychological phenomena that might play a role in producing false evidence for our impressions. The first, commonly known as the confirmation bias, is our general tendency to seek or interpret evidence in ways that confirm our previously held hypotheses. Bad first impressions render us more susceptible to noticing future behavior that is bad; behavior that is good is, by contrast, overlooked or discounted. The second is often called behavioral confirmation or self-fulfilling prophecies, and occurs when we treat others in ways reflective of our preexisting beliefs about them, thereby causing them to act in ways that conform to our preexisting beliefs. For example, we might think someone rude, and then treat her accordingly. She picks up on this, feels resentful, and reciprocates in kind, thus confirming our initial hypothesis. What's more, we are often ignorant of our own causal role in this process. In other words, owing to these biases, our initial impressions might be inapt in spite of the fact that they turn out be true!

All this brings me to the virtue of civility. In most philosophical discussions of civility, it is described as the practice of concealing one's negative appraisals so as not to hurt others' feelings, to show outward respect in spite of the fact that others are disagreeable. Here's a nice quote from Cheshire Calhoun:

In social life, there are unending opportunities to find other people boring, disagreeable, repulsive, stupid, sleazy, inept, bigoted, lousy at selecting gifts, bad cooks, infuriatingly slow drivers, disappointing dates, bad philosophers, and so on. The civil person typically conceals these unflattering appraisals, since conveying them may easily suggest that one does not take others' feelings or the fact that they may have different standards to be worth taking into consideration or tolerating. (260)

I agree that there are unending opportunities to make such judgments. I just wonder whether being civil about them goes far enough, and whether we shouldn't instead foster a habit of calling such judgments into question. It seems as though we have good reason to, given the biases above, but then again there may be bad consequences for not being vigilant in our judgments of others.

Traveling to China

Next Friday, my family and I will fly to China for a couple weeks. If everything goes as planned, we'll come back with an adoptive daughter! We've been on the waiting list to adopt since 2005, and the waiting times have grown longer and longer. Originally we thought we'd travel in summer 2006. We've been waiting on tenterhooks ever since, and yesterday we finally got definitive permission to travel.

So we have a week to get ready for a two-week trip to China and for a new baby in the family. With that, and the term still in full swing, I'm afraid the blog will have to languish a bit. I hope to be able to post a couple things from China, but I'm not sure I'll have the opportunity: Last summer a reader told me The Splintered Mind is blocked there.

Is Philosophical Moral Reflection Behaviorally Inert?

Regular readers of this blog will know that I'm interested in the moral behavior of ethics professors -- and why, in particular, it doesn't appear to be any better than that of non-ethicists of similar social background. One possibility is that philosophical moral reflection is behaviorally inert. In conversation, I've found that philosophers are often quick to endorse that idea.

Maybe I haven't done a very good job of articulating what I find unattractive in that view. Let me phrase my concern as a dilemma: Is philosophical reflection about ethics different in this respect from everyday moral deliberation about what to do?

If no, then the view being espoused is dark indeed: Moral deliberation, in general, is behaviorally inert. When we think morally about what we are obliged to do, the resulting judgments must either simply justify what we were going to do anyway, or if they don't match our prior inclinations they must be cast aside as we go ahead and act contrary to them. Of course such things sometimes happen -- maybe even the majority of the time -- but to think that such a result is inevitable undermines the very basis of reflection. We think we reflect morally so that we can figure out what's right and do it (or at least seriously consider doing it); but in fact that project is just a sham. If our aim is to do what's right, there's no point in reflecting about things, no point in trying to figure out what's right. Many of us build our lives as teachers around the falsity of that view.

If yes -- that is, if the philosopher who wants to deny the efficacy of philosophical moral reflection thinks the problem is with philosophical moral reflection specifically, not everyday moral reflection -- then some doubtful claims about philosophical ethics follow. While some parts of philosophical ethics are indeed far removed from everyday decision-making (e.g., abstruse metaethical discussions, puzzle cases about runaway trolleys), other parts are much more closely connected to everyday decision-making. Ethicists debate how much we should feel obliged to give to famine relief or other charities, whether we should eat meat, under what conditions it is permissible to lie, the nature and importance of courage. Even those ethicists who don't publish articles on such topics typically discuss them in undergraduate courses. It would be strange if everyday moral reflection about vegetarianism or charitable donation was causally efficacious but philosophical moral reflection about those same matters was not. It's hard, even, to see what the difference between the two is, other than that the latter may be more formal and detailed.

Maybe some of you can help me out: What's so attractive in the view that philosophical moral reflection is behaviorally inert? Why are so many philosophers seemingly attracted to this view, when confronted with my questions about the morality of ethicists?

Selfless?

Friday and Saturday, the UCR Philosophy Department hosted its annual conference. Eminent scholars traveled from afar to address the conference theme: the self.

Various accounts of "the self" were bruited and attacked; fine discriminations were made; historical texts were deferentially cited. Is the self where consciousness comes together? Is it our subjective location in space and time? Is it created by our personal narratives? Or could it be, as Kierkegaard says:

The self is a relation which relates itself to its own self, or it is that in the relation [which accounts for it] that the relation relates itself to its own self; the self is not the relation but [consists in the fact] that the relation relates itself to its own self.

Through it all, I felt unmoored. What is a self really? I'm not sure how we are to go about answering such a question.

I believe it's a great mistake to plunge into metaphysics with intuitions about what it sounds right or wrong to say as one's only guide. First, one needs a sense of why we care. What is the purpose of the account? Do we want to know who to punish after a crime? Do we want to know why we should save for retirement? Do we want to know how an animal knows not to eat its own limbs?

With no practical or empirical grounding, it's all just puffs of fog.

Squaring the Circle, in Malcolm's Dreams

Few works of philosophy are more perverse than Norman Malcolm's (1959) Dreaming, in which he argues that dreams do not occur when one is asleep and contain no feelings, imagery, sensations, or the like. Malcolm's view, rather, is this: When we wake, we're inclined to confabulate stories of a certain sort. Telling such a story is what we call "relating a dream", but there is no sense in which the dream exists independently of or prior to the story we tell about it, and no sense in which such a story can be evaluated as an accurate or inaccurate description of occurrences during sleep.

Malcolm knew about the then-recent REM research that most people think creates serious problems for his view. He cites and dismisses, on what seem to me flimsy grounds, Dement's research suggesting that reported dream duration on waking matches duration of REM sleep and his very suggestive finding that horizontal movements of the eyes during REM sleep correlate with dream reports of horizontally-salient events (such as a tennis match) and vertical movements of the eyes correlate with reports of vertically-salient events (such as climbing a series of ladders, looking up and down them).

So I don't recommend trusting Malcolm on dreams. But here is an interesting remark of his:

In a dream I can do the impossible in every sense of the word. I can climb Everest without oxygen and I can square the circle (p. 57).

So here's my question: What does it mean to say one can "square the circle" in dreams?

Surely Malcolm doesn't mean that the dreamer can actually coherently conceive of a square circle. That, I take it, is straightforwardly impossible. Somewhat differently, can one violate the laws of math and logic in fiction? Can I coherently tell a story in which 2 + 2 equals 5 (like I can coherently tell a story in which pigs fly)? I'm not particularly well read in the metaphysics of fiction, but my impression is that few philosophers of fiction would grant that -- though if we do grant it, we might be able to use it (with some additional assumptions) to give sense to the idea of squaring a circle in a dream.

More likely, Malcolm is expressing the idea that we can reach incredibly stupid judgments in our dreams, even baldly contradictory judgments. I have also long thought this (see section v. of this essay).

If we accept this view, it gives more juice to the dream skeptic than she is usually accorded. For if this right now might be a dream, then mightn't also my thinking be so baldly contradictory that I can't even trust my simplest-seeming judgments? The dream possibility calls, then, not only sense experience but also reasoning into doubt. If we allow ourselves the assumption that a faculty frequently unreliable is not to be trusted, there would be no hope that I can rely on my reason to establish the hypothesis that I actually am awake, or indeed anything else.

More on Admissions

[This post has been removed due to objections by some members of the UCR philosophy department.]

Admissions (and Sleep)

I'm working hard today on graduate admissions and preparing for seminar. No time for my usual Friday post! But maybe I can take this occasion to remind prospective graduate students about my advice for what to do once you hear back.

(And by the way, I've been wondering if sleeping more makes you a better philosopher. I used to think, in grad school, that getting lots of sleep gave me a fresh, creative energy -- but now I'm not so sure it didn't just make me more contented and sanguine instead.)

Now if you don't think the parenthetical paragraph is related to the first paragraph, you've never had a stack of 100 graduate applications, each containing a 20-page essay, to evaluate.

When Will Ethicists Behave Better and When Worse?

Suppose we accept that philosophical moral reflection is bivalent -- that sometimes it leads us toward morality and sometimes away from it. It would be nice to have a theory about when it will do one and when the other.

Here's a first thought. Suppose philosophical moral reflection simply introduces an element of randomness into one's ethical principles. Suppose that to a first approximation it's just a random walk away from pre-reflective standards. When conventional, thoughtless, ordinary behavior is morally good (returning one's library books, not pursuing elaborate schemes to evade taxes, waiting one's turn in line), whatever introduces randomness into that behavior is likely to lead away from the good; and thus we might predict that people who do a lot of philosophical moral reflection, such as ethics professors, will actually behave worse in such matters.

In other cases, ordinary, conventional, thoughtless behavior might have serious moral shortcomings, such as in the vast overuse of resources by Americans, not donating much to charity, regularly eating meat. In these cases, deviation from the norm might be more likely to be deviation toward the good than away from it. So in these cases, we might predict that people prone to philosophical moral reflection will on average behave better than others.

Risky predictions from a simple theory! -- a theory too simple to be true, I'm sure. Can we test it? I've already done the books study and it fits. I've looked a little at charity, but my data are pretty limited and ambiguous. What else can we test? Hm, ethicists cutting in line -- that might be do-able....

The Bivalence of Moral Reflection

As I continue to reflect on the moral behavior of ethics professors and others prone to moral reflection, I find myself increasingly attracted to the idea that moral reflection is bivalent. Ethicists behave no better than others, on average, not because they don't engage in real moral reflection, and not because moral reflection is inert, but rather because moral reflection has the power both to lead one toward and to lead one away from moral behavior.

I have long thought this about religion. Religion is not a behaviorally inert superstructure we weave over what we would do anyway, but rather a powerful cause of behavior -- both good behavior (such as charity) and immoral behavior (such as religious wars, close-mindedness, denigration of others). In the end, the good and the bad seem to me roughly to balance out across people (as the empirical evidence also suggests), though for any particular individual religion may work mainly toward good or evil. (I doubt many people have good self-knowledge about which way it works for them, though!)

Moral reflection (in either a religious or a secular framework) can work toward good by increasing one's attunement to the moral dimensions of one's actions; by undermining cheap rationalizations; by helping one see better what morality (or at least one's own value system) requires; and (as Nussbaum and Hume and Mencius have stressed) through imaginatively extending one's sympathy and understanding. However, moral reflection is also a tool of rationalization -- and the more skilled one is at moral argumentation, the more readily one can find rationalizations for what one wants to do.

Suppose you unintentionally walk out of a library with a book, forgetting to check it out. You're not caught. Months later, you vaguely consider whether you should return the book, or whether you should just keep hanging on to it. Any philosopher worth her salt could construct a bevy of rationalizations. Conventional thinking seems to demand returning the book. (In fact, I've found that ethics books are more likely to be missing from academic libraries than other books.) Conventionally, one should not engage in sexual relationships with one's students, or outside one's marriage. A danger of independent moral thinking is that it invites self-serving rationalizations for setting aside convention in one's own case. (I'm reading a biography of Einstein, who complacently justifies his extramarital affairs, painful to his wives, with a theory of the natural non-monogamy of men.) Of course, not reflecting morally has its moral dangers, too! Whether reflection or its absence is more apt to lead us astray is an unsettled empirical question. My sense, both from personal experience and from empirical research, is that it's roughly a tie.

Suppose we grant all this. The question then becomes: Under what conditions, or with what supports, does moral reflection promote rather than impede moral behavior?

On "Steep" Learning Curves (Or: Hackling at Tilted Petards)

Okay, time to tilt against the windmills -- actually just one small, stupid windmill. But it's a windmill that particularly raises my hackles because it brings together my distaste for ignorant distortions of stock phrases with my interest in the history of psychology.

(You can bet that I double-checked the OED, after saying this, to confirm my use of "tilting" at windmills and raising "hackles". I don't want to be hoisted by my own petard. [Yep, double-checked that too.] Shouldn't we know what we are saying? -- what tilting and hackles and petards are?)

Here's a picture of a typical learning curve (from Stroop 1935):

(This curve charts the increasing speed with which subjects can name the colors of words on a list of color words printed in colors different from those named by the word [e.g., saying "blue" when seeing the word "red" printed in blue ink]. But the particular nature of the task is irrelevant to my point.)

Now consider this: If the curve were steeper, would that mean subjects were learning more quickly -- i.e., that the task was easier to learn -- or would it mean that the subjects were learning less quickly and the task was harder?

Next time you hear someone talk about a "steep learning curve" to mean the opposite of its proper meaning, tell her you're going to hackle her tilted petard!

Does the Sun Look One Foot Wide?

Aristotle says that the sun looks one foot wide (De Anima 428b, On Dreams 458b). Writers in later antiquity repeat this claim without challenging it (e.g. Cleomedes II.1), though they are troubled to explain how it can look one foot wide given how far away it must be -- hundreds of meters at least! Their assumption seems to be that there is some illusion or trick of optics at work.

Does the sun look one foot wide?

Do stars look tiny? Do people look no bigger than ants when you stare down at them from twenty stories up?

People say these sorts of things, but how literally should we take them? Maybe the people below look normal-sized, but only very far away -- far away enough that there's something unusual about how they look that tempts us to say they look tiny, though really that's not quite the right way to describe how they look.

Or consider skyscrapers in the distance: Do they look small, or do they look huge? I find myself doubtful of both those ways of putting it. Alva Noe might say they look huge in looking small (but not tiny?) given how far away they look. But I'm not sure I understand that. One problem: Don't they look small because they look like they're less far away than they actually are? (In which case, they don't look so far away at all and consequently they don't look huge in virtue of looking very far away.)

If we say simply that the skyscrapers look like large things far away, then I wonder two things: (a.) Why are we tempted to say they look small? (This temptation manifests itself cross-culturally, e.g., in the ancient Chinese philosopher Xunzi); and (b.) What do we do about outright illusions?

Look at Poggendorff's illusion:

You know the line is straight, but it still looks crooked. Right? Likewise, could it be that although I know the skyscrapers are large they still look small? Surely it's too purist to say things never look other than how you know them to be.

There are outright illusions with distance -- things looking smaller, in an illusory way, than they actually are. (This is part of why we often badly misjudge the speed of large, far away things.) Such illusions should have a different effect on the visual experience of size than does the non-illusory visual experience of "smallness" with great distance, if the advocate of the view that skyscrapers look like large things far away is right. But I'm I can't seem to find in myself the required difference in visual experience.

Should I then simply get on board with saying that distant objects look small? Among other things, I worry that the geometry of that view will lead us ultimately to say that things far away look simply flat (or concave) -- with the unpleasant consequence that a far-away road receding to the horizon looks like it goes straight up. That couldn't be right, could it?

(And don't get me started on painters.)

The Phenomenology of a Memory Whiz

UC Riverside philosophy grad student Alan Moore pointed out these YouTube videos to me, of a fellow (Daniel Tammet) who recites pi from memory to more than 20,000 places without error. The videos also show him doing multiplication in his head into the hundreds of millions.

Part One
Part Two
Part Three
Part Four
Part Five

Oddly, the eminent neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran, whom Tammet travels to San Diego to visit, does fairly little with him. (His student gets more air time.) Ramachandran could just have been too busy, but I'd have thought he'd have more to say. Hmmm....

The videos are fun and suggestive, but I'm also struck at how creduluous the researchers (Ramachandran less than others, maybe) seem to be about Tammet's phenomenological reports of how he does such incredible calculations -- by fitting together imaginary shapes in his head. Is it even topologically possible to model multiplication in this way? That's not obvious. And the direction of causation is open to question -- do the images lead to the answers or do the answers lead to images?

All that said, this is the kind of radically different capacity that gives some credibility to claims of radically different phenomenology, unlike most of the time when people claim radically different phenomenology (no imagery vs. tons of it, for example) with no behavioral differences to show for it....

H.H. Price on the Apparent Size of Very Nearby Objects

Today I was struck anew by a passage in H.H. Price's classic book Perception (1932). After endorsing the idea that outside the "zone of perfect stereoscopic vision" (about six inches to a few feet, in his estimation), things look smaller the farther away they are (maybe I'll discuss that issue next week!), Price goes on to say:

And if we come inside the zone of perfect stereoscopic vision [i.e., closer than about six inches] (a region too little explored by philosophers) we find that there is indeed a correlation between depth and sensible size, but it is the other way about; the smaller the depth, the smaller the size. Thus if I bring a match-box up to the end of my nose, the top surface is manifested by a trapeziform expanse having its longer side at a greater depth than its shorter one: the box has rather the appearance of a wedge, whose 'thin end' is directed towards me.

A surprising claim, and not one I recall reading elsewhere! I'd be interested to hear if the readers of this blog share Price's sense of this.

Suppose we call "visual arc subtended" the amount of the visual field some object occupies, defined geometrically by how much surface area the object would occupy if projected onto a sphere centered at the eye. As an object approaches the bridge of my nose, the visual arc subtended increases dramatically as it moves from about twelve to six inches; but in the last two inches or so, there's not much increase.

I don't think that can be Price's point, though: First, there's a simple geometrical explanation for the fact about visual arc. Within the last two inches, bringing the object closer to my nose does not actually bring it much closer to either eye. If I instead bring the object close to the pupil of my dominant eye, there is no slowdown in the increase in visual arc subtended. And second, Price emphatically does not think that apparent size changes when objects move around within the zone of perfect stereoscopic vision -- such as from twelve to six inches -- though the visual arc subtended obviously does increase. So what Price is after here is not, I think, a matter of visual arc.

Is there some other sense, then, in which the nearer end of the matchbox almost touching my nose looks smaller than the farther end? I can almost feel the pull of that....

The Richness of Experience and the Collapse of Consciousness Studies

Many people have looked foolish by claiming a scientific question insoluble that was not so. Yet I wonder if the following question will prove ultimately intractible: Is conscious experience rich or thin?

To say that consciousness is rich is to say that our phenomenology or stream of experience contains many things at once, in different modalities -- that as I sit here typing for example, I consciously experience not just what I'm attending to most focally, but also much else in a peripheral way: the sound of traffic in the background and of click of the keys on the keyboard, the feeling of my fingers typing and of my feet in my shoes and of my back against the seat, a whole broad visual field fuzzy outside the focal region, and possibly also feelings, images, inner speech, and the like. To say that consciousness is thin is to say that most of what we don't attend to we don't experience. The feeling of my feet in my shoes and the sound of traffic in the backgroud are not actually experienced by me, not even in a peripheral way, when I'm not thinking about such matters.

Philosophers' and ordinary folks' intuitions on this question appear to be divided; and I also got mixed results when I gave people random beepers set at long intervals and asked them to go about their ordinary day, noticing when the beep went off whether they had (for example) tactile experience in their left foot in the last undisturbed moment before the beep.

The refrigerator light illusion frustrates any attempt to address this question through concurrent introspection: Thinking about whether you have conscious experience of your feet in your shoes will normally create that experience whether it was there before the question occurred to you or not.

So it seems that the question must be studied retrospectively (as I attempted with the help of the beeper). But any retrospective study will raise the issue of memory error. Change blindness studies, for example, suggest that we retain very little memory of what we're not attending to, even over the tiniest intervals. Experience could be massively rich but all that detail might be instantly forgotten. (Why, after all, would we retain it?) Some people may still recall a general impression of richness; but evidently others do not. Who's to say which of them is right? Furthermore, someone might mistakenly report sensory details as experienced that were not experienced, but only called to mind as a result of the beep, details brought into awareness as a result of the person's focus a moment later, though not experienced at the targeted time -- a kind of retrospective refrigerator light error. I worry that such introspective difficulties are intractable.

So could we do without introspective report? Could we just look at the brain, for example? No, not that either. We have no good theory right now of what makes a brain state conscious; and we never will have a good theory until we know, broadly speaking, which brain states are the conscious ones; and we will never know, not even broadly speaking, which brain states are the conscious ones until we figure out whether that hum of traffic processed ever so lightly in the auditory cortex is consciously experienced.

So is the question simply intractible? If so, that could lead to the collapse of consciousness studies. The question is so central and important to our understanding of consciousness that it's not clear how much progress we can make on any general account of consciousness without resolving it.

"Toys R Us". Are They Us?

Four-year-olds can communicate somewhat complex ideas, but their minds are still alien; their language hasn't quite settled down into adult patterns; and they're flying by the seat of their pants socially. I'd love to see a site devoted simply to the interesting things they say!

Those interesting things are so easy to forget. Our memories tend to reshape and adultify in retelling; we can't hang on to the weirdness. I wish Pauline and I had done a better job capturing Davy's interesting remarks as a four-year-old; but we do have a few (what we think of as) gems. I hope readers will contribute their own in the comments if they have any!

In a restaurant: "It smells like a rainbow of things to eat" (4 yrs, 0 months).

"Mommy, you're evil, so I taked away your shoe" (4 yrs, 0 months).

Davy's great grandmother died. We took him to see the body. He wanted to touch it to see "if she's still squishy but doesn't move" (4-0).

"I wasn't being bossy. I was being right" (4-1).

At bathtime: "I hate to hide from you, but it's just a special occasion" (4-1).

"Is it today or tonight?" (4-2).

Of a new toy truck: "It springed my heart with love, I like it so much" (4-2).

Arguing about who has the better mommy:
Mary Travis: My mommy can help anyone!
Davy: My mommy can help anyone!
Mary Travis: My mommy can talk to anyone!
Davy: My mommy can talk to anyone!
Evidently this is what mommies do: help and talk (4-4).

Daddy: Are you fine?
Davy: I'm so fine I could burst a porcupine! (4-4)

Davy: Jesus didn't have a crib.
Daddy: What? Oh, right. "No crib for a bed."
Davy: I don't have a crib.
Daddy: So you're Jesus.
Davy: Yes. No! (4-4)

"Maybe they call it 'Christmas' because you MISS it and... and... and it's Chris" (4-5).

"My race car is fun-fastic!" (4-5).

To Mommy: "I said 'Wonka Nerds' because my brain took a peek at it before I did. My brain is very smart because it looks at things before I do and it discovers things before I do and that's why I'm smarter than you" (4-6).

Davy punches Mommy.
Mommy: Don't do that. That hurt!
Davy: Did it sting?
Mommy: I'm not saying.
Davy: Did it sting?
Mommy: I'm not telling you so you can enjoy it.
Davy: I enjoy punching people.
Mommy: Well I hope no one punches you and enjoys it.
Davy: I like to be punched. I didn't like it when I was a baby but I absent-mindedly got used to it (4-6).

Davy sneezes. Mommy usually says "bless you", but she's on the phone and ignores it. Davy says, "bless myself" (4-7).

Davy: I don't need a diaper. I just insulated myself for sleep.
Mommy: Insulated yourself?
Davy pulls up his shirt to reveal wads of toilet paper stuffed into his pants (4-7).

"All my ideas live here [points to tummy]. Then they come up to my brain and I think them" (4-8).

Davy: Maybe this is a dream.
Daddy: This, right now?
Davy: Well, maybe. If this hurts. [He pulls on Daddy's earlobes.] (4-11)

Davy: Mom, what's smaller than the smallest thing in the whole world?
Mommy: What? No, there can't be anything smaller than the smallest thing in the whole world.
Davy: No, I don't know what it is, but it's the smallest thing in the whole galaxy! (4-11)

Well, I can't quite resist going a bit into the fives:

"You know why I win [marbles] all the time? Because my blood cells have little actions spirits ready to win" (5-0).

Daddy: Nothing goes faster than light.
Davy: No, something does.
Daddy: What?
Davy: Something that doesn't exist (5-0).

Daddy: If I spin a 3 [in Chutes and Ladders] I win!
Davy: You're not going to spin a 3!
Daddy: How do you know? Precognition? Psychic powers?
Davy: Extra strong brain! (5-0)

"You can't grab afterimages. When you grab them you just get air. Nothing made me think of that. It just popped into my brain" (5-0).

Seeing our brand-new minivan for the first time: "Hubcaps shiny as the sun! Tires as sticky as a sticky-frog!" (5-2).

Looking at the toy store sign: "'Toys R Us'. Are they us?" (5-2).

Consciousness While Reading -- Is It Visual? Imagistic? Auditory?

Some people say they speak silently to themselves when they read; others say they don't do that, but do entertain visual imagery. Others claim to do neither but rather only to see the page and take it in. Melanie, whom Russ Hurlburt and I interviewed at length in our recent book about conscious experience, reports no visual experience of the written page at all; rather, she experiences only the images, thoughts, and emotions that the text creates in her. (No visual experience of the page whatsoever? Wow, that's hard for me to imagine!)

Maybe people are very different in how they experience reading. If so, I know of no systematic studies. (Of course there are plenty of studies of differences in reading skill, in the use of the eyes on the page, on the sorts of errors people make, etc., but that's quite different.) If there is such variation, it could potentially be very useful to reading teachers (and poets?) to take advantage of it.

Or maybe people differ mainly in their reports about how they read, while their experiences are all very broadly speaking the same. (We do have, I think, false general impressions about our stream of experience quite often.) So it would be neat, before going too far out on a limb here, to get some external corroboration for the reports.

It's easy to think up cute experiments:

* People who speak silently to themselves while reading would tend, I'd think, to have strong impressions about how to pronounce unusual names they find in the text (it's GOLL-um, dammit, not GOAL-um!); people who are more strictly imagers may not. Experimenters could pronounce a name in an unusual way and measure (a) likelihood of being corrected by the subject, (b) skin conductance (a measure of stress), or (c) attentional blink (poor performance on an immediately subsequent task).

* People who say they hear the text aloud sometimes claim to hear it mostly in their own voice; others claim to hear the author's (imagined) voice or the characters' voices. The latter sort of reader, but not the former, may show additional facility or impairment when an external voice or sound is presented that matches or mismatches the characteristics of the author's or characters' voices.

* People who visually experience the page may have better memory for visual details of the text than people who do not.

Etc.

If the results of such measures align neatly with people's self-reports, great! There may really be a phenomenon here worth studying.

So many experiments, so little time!

Bertrand Russell on the Philosopher's Temperament

The curmudgeonly essays Bertrand Russell wrote late in life generally get little attention from philosophers -- strikingly little, really, given that he was such a famous philosopher. For example, in the (admittedly limited) ISI Web of Knowledge citation database, I see only nine citations since 2000 of Russell's book Unpopular Essays, and none in mainstream philosophy journals.

I, however, am enjoying the essays, at least in my present also somewhat curmudgeonly mood -- though they do sometimes display the intellectual laziness common to grand old men who know they won't have to fight their way through unsympathetic referees to find print. (Hm, come to think of it, blogs are a little like that, too!)

One passage that particularly struck me, given my growing interest in the psychology of philosophy, was this:

Philosophy has been defined as "an unusually obstinate attempt to think clearly"; I should define it rather an "an unusually ingenious attempt to think fallaciously". The philosopher's temperament is rare, because it has to combine two somewhat conflicting characteristics: on the one hand a strong desire to believe some general proposition about the universe or human life; on the other hand, inability to believe contentedly except on what appear to be intellectual grounds. The more profound the philosopher, the more intricate and subtle must his fallacies be in order to produce in him the desired state of intellectual acquiescence. That is why philosophy is obscure.

Russell illustrates this point very plausibly with the Descartes of the later Meditations, where Descartes attempts to reason his way out of his skeptical quandary by proving the existence of God. Russell also offers Berkeley, Kant, and Hegel as examples, though Russell's treatment of the latter two especially will strike any sympathetic historian of philosophy as irritatingly simplistic. Being myself generally an unsympathetic historian of philosophy, though, I wonder if Russell hasn't simply cut through the bullshit and seen the core. Here he is on Hegel:

Hegel's system satisfied the instincts of philosophers more fully than any of its predecessors. It was so obscure that no amateurs could hope to understand it. It was optimistic, since history is a progress in the unfolding of the Absolute Idea. It showed that the philosopher, sitting in his study considering abstract ideas, can know more about the real world than the statesman or the historian or the man of science.

Given that our attraction to or revulsion from philosophical ideas tends to far precede our understanding of the subtle arguments pro and con (as I discussed a bit here), I suspect Russell is correct that such psychological considerations are a major factor driving both individual philosophers and the discipline as a whole, despite our flattering self-image.

This also makes me wonder whether Russell's late-in-life History of Western Philosophy has more to it than historians generally give it credit for.

The Rule of Three

In connection with Vincent Hendricks's recent advice on increasing one's visibility in academic philosophy and the subsequent discussion at Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants, I thought I'd post some of my recent thoughts on academic memory -- what I'll call the "rule of three".

Here's the rule of three: If you devote cognitive attention to an academic matter only once, you will retain no functional memory of it. If you devote attention to that matter twice, you will recognize it vaguely when you encounter it again, but you won't freely recall it. If you devote attention three times, you will be able to freely recall one thing about it.

This works, I think, in the classroom: If a student reads a philosopher, then hears a lecture about that philosopher, then finally studies that philosopher again for the final exam, she will be able for some time afterward to remember some core thing about that philosopher. If she does only two of the above, she will recognize the philosopher vaguely when the name is presented. If she does only one of those things, nothing useful will be retained.

It also works (more to the present point) in the context of getting to know a fellow philosopher. Based on my own experience: If I have no previous acquaintance with a philosopher (through her work or otherwise) and I have a conversation with her at a conference from which nothing further comes, I will not recognize her the next time I see her. If I do this twice, I will have a vague recollection next time I see her. Three times, though, and I'll remember who she is and probably one key fact about her. I suspect many other academics' memories work the same way. Sometimes, a person gets a two-fer or a three-fer in my cognitive space: If the conversation was striking enough that I return to it later in my mind in some extended way, then that's two instances of attention; if we then follow it up with an exchange of interesting emails (for example), that's three instances.

This principle also applies to presentations and publications. If something I hear or read only once is striking enough, or close enough to my current perplexities, that I think about it for some period of time on at least three separate occasions, I will retain the main idea of it (or what seems to me the most important or useful idea given my interests) for a while. However, most work -- especially conference presentations -- regardless of how assiduously I take notes at the time, doesn't command enough of my interest that I return to it seriously later, and consequently a single presentation of the ideas won't stick. It takes some repetition. If I hear it in a presentation, then we chat about it afterward, then I see the published essay, it will stick with me even if I wasn't much enamored of it. The nature and order of these events doesn't matter much: It might be three journal articles (oh, that's the guy who keeps saying the HOT theory of consciousness has flaw X), or three conversations, or two criticisms of the work by other philosophers followed months later by an oral presentation by the author himself, or whatever.

Now of course this rule isn't hard and fast, and what exactly qualifies as an episode of "cognitive attention" is pretty fuzzy (I mean more than seeing the name cited and less than reading an entire book by the person) -- but the implications for improving one's academic visibility (if that's one's aim) should be clear: Go to the same conferences, publish on the same topics, expose yourself to the same people, multiple times -- don't spread yourself thin. And since you shouldn't expect people to retain more than a single core fact about you unless they're exposed to you more than three times, try to have a consistent theme or idea or topic in your work, especially earlier in your career. Something of intermediate specificity is probably best ("consciousness" is too broad, "problems with Schnerdfoot's reply to Huberdike" is too narrow).

Of course maximizing academic visibility may not be your only aim! I often spread myself too thin, from a career-maximizing perspective, from sheer enthusiasm on too many topics.

Call for Papers: Special Journal Issue on Experimental Philosophy

"Psychology and Experimental Philosophy" E. Machery, T. Lombrozo & J. Knobe (eds.)

European Review of Philosophy, 9 (2009)

Submission deadline: 1 September 2008

Details here.

Color and Dream Experience in Philosophy, 1940-1959

As regular visitors to this blog may recall, I've occasionally discussed a historical trend in reports of the coloration of dreaming -- a tendency for Americans (that is, residents of the U.S.) to report overwhelmingly black-and-white dreaming in the 1940s and 1950s, and a tendency for pre-20th century philosophers and psychologists and 21st century Americans to report predominantly or exclusively color dreaming. With Changbing Huang and Yifeng Zhou, I found the same trend in subgroups in mainland China, where rates of reporting of black-and-white dreaming varied with the prevalence of black-and-white media in one's community. My hypothesis is not that the actual content of the dreams changed between these periods. (For example, rates of color-term use in dream diaries are amazingly consistent.) Rather, I hold that it was only the reporting that changed -- more specifically, that at least some people mistakenly assimilated the properties of film media to their dream experience.

Recently I've been wondering if I'd see the same trend among philosophers. Would philosophers of the 1940s and 1950s say that dreams were mainly black and white? This issue is especially interesting in the context of dream skepticism, the view (from the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi and from Descartes's first two Meditations and from many other sources) that we cannot, or cannot reliably, discriminate between dream experience and waking sensory experience. If waking visual sensory experience is pervasively colored and while dreams rarely contain colored objects, both of which many Americans in the 1940s and 1950s would have granted, it should be easy to tell the one from the other, right? So dream skepticism should be less compelling.

So far, however, in looking through the literature from that period, that's not what I've found. On the contrary, the issue doesn't even seem to arise in the literature on dreams and dream skepticism (though I still need to check more sources to say this definitively). Some philosophers even casually mention color as an element of dreams, without special remark or acknowledgement of the issue. Elizabeth H. Wolgast, for example, when reaching for an example of a dream in the context of a discussion of dream experience and waking sensory experience, imagines someone saying, "In my dream, I saw great blue grasshoppers" (Philosophical Review, 1958, p. 231). She does not remark in particular on the issue of coloration.

I'm not sure how much to draw from this. Even in the black-and-whitest days of black-and-white dream reporting, people tended to acknowledge the possibility, at least, of fully colored dreaming. And maybe that possibility is enough for philosophers to do their thing, and to justify dream skepticism to whatever extent it is justified?

Rationalizing Emotions and The Moral Behavior of Kantians

I've recently been enjoying Joshua Greene's "The Secret Joke of Kant's Soul" (penultimate manuscript available here). Greene's research suggests that the moral judgments of Kantian deontologists (who focus on such things as rights, duties, and "respect for persons") tend largely to be rationalizations of evolutionarily-selected emotional responses, while the moral judgments of utilitarians and consequentialists (who focus on such things as maximizing the good of everyone) tend to be more rationally driven (or at least less driven by emotional "alarm systems"). The sorts of cases on which Kantians and consequentialists tend to disagree are cases where maximizing the good violates what we might perceive as someone's rights. Should you push someone in front of a runaway trolley, thereby killing him, if that's the only way to save five other innocent people? Should you smother your baby to death if that's the only way to prevent yourself, your baby, and several other people from being found and killed by Nazis? The Kantian impulse (with caveats and complications, of course) is to say no in such cases, the consequentialist to say yes.

Now if (a.) Greene is right about Kantianism as principally a post-hoc rationalization of evolutionarily selected emotions -- and needless to say it's very controversial! -- and if (b.) the apparently widespread view is correct that Kantians behave less well than consequentialists, and finally if (c.) emotional reactions tend to be more self-serving than do consequentialist principles, then, well, maybe (a) and (c) together explain (b).

Let me stress that I myself have no beef against Kantian deontology or Kantian deontologists and that conditions (a) and (b) are highly speculative. Finally, the only small bit of direct empirical evidence I have on the moral behavior of Kantians versus deontologists (the rate at which ethics books are missing from academic libraries) suggests that patrons are no more likely, and maybe even a bit less likely, to misappropriate Kantian than utilitarian texts.

Updated Photo

Here's my principle: If your photo on the web is more than ten years old, you're either lazy or vain. (Well, Genius may be an exception!) Fancying myself neither and flirting with the ten-year mark, I've finally been forced to update.

Ah well. At least I'm already married!

Peripheral Vision: Mapping Color onto Shape

It's well established in vision science that perception of shape and color declines precipitously outside the central one or two degrees of visual arc (about the size of your thumbnail held at arm's length). Most people find it surprising, actually, how poor their peripheral vision is, and how narrow the region of clarity (despite the number of hours each of us has logged expertly seeing outward things). Dennett's playing card experiment is a nice way to test yourself: Take a playing card from a normal deck, without looking at it. Hold it at arm's length to one side, just beyond the field of view. Keeping your eyes fixed on a single point ahead of you, slowly rotate the card toward the center, noting when you can discern its color, its suit, and its value. It won't be until almost dead center that you'll be able to tell if it's a Jack or a King.

But if shape and color perception are bad individually in the periphery, Peter Neri and Dennis M. Levi (2006) suggest that things are even worse when you combine them.

Suppose you are presented a red square and a blue circle. Regions of your brain specializing in color will register a red thing and a blue thing. Other regions specializing in shape will register a square and a circle. If everything works right, you'll also know that it's the square that's red and the circle that's blue -- but that is a bit of extra work, an additional thing that must go right. In some situations, people will get the colors and shapes right, but they won't know which color went with which shape (Triesman and Schmidt 1982).

Neri and Levi's experiments suggest that this sort of "feature binding" goes especially badly in the periphery. Even at resolutions where their subjects could make out color and shape individually, they could not accurately put those colors and shapes together.

Now I have some picky complaints about the methodology of their experiment -- having to do with Gestalt principles for shape detection and possible single-feature computing shortcuts (if you go to their article, note the "7"-like figure in the left hand image in Fig. 1C which could not occur in a non-target image; HT: Ryan Robart) -- but there's also the phenomenological question. Peripheral vision seems blurry, and the color of unknown objects can be surprisingly indistinct or inaccurate, but does it additionally seem on introspection that the colors out there get mapped onto the wrong objects, or that the colors and shapes don't coherently fit together?

Billock and Tsou (2003) describe the phenomenology of binding failure thus:

In other cases, all sense of object and surface can be lost and the target is perceived as a ‘jumble of lines’ or ‘extremely confusing and hard to describe’. Moreover, the contrast of equiluminant images can seem unstable – Gregory describes such images as ‘jazzy’. In 1927, Liebmann reported that there is a ‘critical zone [where] everything flows…glimmers…most everything is soft, jelly-like, colloidal. Often…parts which belong together in the normal figure now have nothing to do with one another. [It is] a world without firm things, without solidity.’

Is that how peripheral vision seems? I've been walking around today trying to notice, and it just doesn't strike me that way. Indistinct, yes. But binding failure is different.

Furthermore, I've finally found a use for all those silly business cards they gave me when I was promoted to Associate Professor. On the backs, I've written letters and shapes right next to each other in arbitrary colors. I made about 80 cards, each holding two of eight shapes in two of four possible colors. Rotating them in from the periphery, I don't find myself making many binding errors. As soon as the cards are clear enough to distinguish shape and color, I know which shape goes with which color.

Book Review

Readers of this blog might be interested to see this review, in Salon, of my recent book with Russ Hurlburt, Describing Inner Experience? Proponent Meets Skeptic.

I'd love to say something clever about the review, but I've never been much good at clever. (Maybe that's part of what helps keep me "straight-faced"?)

Inner Speech, Imageless Thought, and Bilinguality

In our book Describing Inner Experience?, Russ Hurlburt suggests that people often overestimate the amount of inner speech (silent speaking to oneself) in their stream of experience. People, he says, simply presuppose that that is how thinking must occur. What the basis of this presupposition might be, Hurlburt doesn't explain, but I suspect our opinions about our minds are often shaped by analogies to media and technology (e.g., computers [or in the old days, clockwork] for minds in general, movies for dreams, pictures for vision). Maybe we can think of language as a medium or technology particularly apt for analogizing to thought.

In conversation Hurlburt has also suggested that one basis for the impression many people have that they frequently or constantly talk silently to themselves is that when we stop to think about what our current stream of experience is, that self-reflective activity tends itself to produce inner speech in many people. Why exactly this should be so I'm not sure. But if it is so, someone might gain the false impression that inner speech is constant because she notices inner speech whenever she stops to think about what her experience is. (This would be a version of the "refrigerator light error".)

Hurlburt goes into considerable detail in our book (in Ch. 11) defending the idea that much conscious thinking takes place neither in speech, nor in images, nor in any other symbolic format. He calls this "unsymbolized thinking" and describes the resistance many people have to this idea. (It is in fact a matter of controversy right now among philosophers such as Charles Siewert, William Robinson, and David Pitt.)

I was then surprised a couple weeks ago, when chatting with a brother in law about his stream of experience, when he casually said -- as though it were the most obvious thing -- that he just had a thought that was quite conscious but neither spoken nor in any imagistic form. When I asked him how he knew that he thought was imageless in this way, he said that it had a specific content but nothing visual, more like words, but actually lacking words, since it was neither in English nor in Hindi.

I was then struck by the following idea: Might bilingual people -- really bilingual people who shift easily and regularly between two languages -- more easily recognize unsymbolized or imageless thought than monolingual people? A monolingual English speaker might experience a thought content and then falsely assume that the thought must have taken place in English. A bilingual person, forced to think about what language the thought transpired in, might in some cases find no basis for choice and so more readily recognize the non-lingustic nature of that thought.

Your thoughts are welcome -- but please translate them into some linguistic format (preferably English) first!

How I Know I'm Not Dreaming (I Think)

I'm not dreaming. Neither are you.

Oddly, the second sentence seems to be self-confirming in a way the first isn't -- if it refers to an actual "you", that is, if anyone other than me actually reads the sentence, then the sentence must necessarily be true (barring paranormal dreamer-to-dreamer communication). But of course this doesn't imply that I have any special knowledge of your waking state. It's merely a trick of language....

How do I know I'm awake? Responders to the previous post, and others I've questioned, tend to offer the following grounds for knowing:

(1.) Sensory experience is more vivid or detailed in waking than in dreaming. The pinch test may be a version of this. Some claim not to feel their feet on the floor or to be pained staring at the sun. Others say the wide panoply of current visual experience would be impossible in sleep. (Jonathan Ichikawa has recently been arguing that it's not even sensory-like experience we have in dreaming but rather only imagery.)

(2.) Sensory experience is more stable and organized in waking than in dreaming. Some people, for example, say that the words on a page (or on a computer screen!) won't stay still during dreaming, or that a clock's time will be strange or blank or keep changing.

(3.) I cannot do some actions that I can ordinarily do when I try to do them while dreaming -- for example, I can't fly.

Now, I'm inclined to dismiss (3). Maybe, if I can fly, I can rightly conclude that I am dreaming, but the reverse doesn't seem to follow. I suspect that it's perfectly normal to have dreams in which one cannot fly, etc., even if one wants to (unless, perhaps, one realizes one is dreaming and so takes command of the dream, as in lucid dreaming).

(1) and (2) are more tempting. In fact, when I started planning this post I thought I might go for a version of (1). But here's my problem: I go to a quiet place and close my eyes. I still feel quite confident I'm awake. But my visual experience is not very distinct or organized -- certainly not so distinct and organized that I couldn't imagine my brain producing just such experience during sleep without the aid of external input. My auditory experience is pretty vague and thin too. I feel my feet on the floor, of course. But could it really come down to such a slender thread? Is that really my only basis for knowing I'm awake? What if I found a way to deprive myself of vivid or organized tactile sensation too (e.g., by floating in water)? Would I then have no basis for knowing whether I'm asleep or awake?

So maybe we should consider:

(4.) There's some direct and intrinsic knowledge we all have when we're awake that we're awake -- knowledge that's somehow immediate, not on the basis of anything sensory or quasi-sensory.

I point out that accepting some version of (4) -- or (1) or (2) -- does not imply that I can always know that I'm dreaming when I am dreaming. In dreams, we are often confused and leap to weird conclusions. This fact no more undermines my coherent, unconfused present knowledge of my wakefulness than the fact that a deluded, confused person might mistakenly think he's a philosophy professor undermines my non-deluded, non-confused knowledge that I'm a philosophy professor. Our opinions are differently grounded.

Now I wonder where in the philosophical or psychological literature we can find someone who develops an idea like (4). No one comes to immediately to mind, but surely there's someone....

How Do You Know You're Not Dreaming?

Things are quiet. People are on break -- visiting family, like me -- or they're sweating it out at the Eastern APA.

But maybe some of you visitors will do me a favor and answer this: How do you know you're not dreaming? Presumably you do know, right? Genuine radical skeptics are few. What I'm asking is how you know -- on what basis or by what means.

I have my own opinions about this which I'll post later, but first I'm curious to hear from some of you....

Ho Ho Ho!

was the Christmas greeting my mother -- a statistics professor -- sent me.

To which, of course, the only possible reply was H_a H_a H_a.

(If you don't get the joke, this might help.)

Introspective Infallibility, Causation, and Containment

In his second Meditation, Descartes gives the impression that he thinks self-knowledge of current conscious experience is indubitably certain, immune to error, infallible. (Whether he consistently espouses this view throughout his corpus is another question.) Ever since, infallibilism about introspection has been a mainstream position in philosophy of mind -- sometimes dominant, sometimes (as now) out of favor but nonetheless with prominent proponents.

If we suppose that introspection is a causal process between two distinct events, it's hard to see how infallibilism could be plausible. What sort of event can't be brought about in strange ways? If we suppose, for example, that introspective judgment is a brain process, couldn't -- at least in principle, by dint of genius neuroscience, but probably much more easily than that -- that brain process be brought about non-standardly?

One way out of this is to deny that the introspective judgment and the introspected conscious experience are indeed distinct events ("distinct existences" in Shoemaker's sense). For example one might "contain" the other, as is sometimes suggested (e.g., Shoemaker, Burge). Consider as an analogy: "This sentence contains the word 'pixie'". The sentence is infallibly true wherever it appears because the conditions of its existence are a subset of the conditions of its truth. Could introspection work the same way?

Well, one fella's modus ponens is another's modus tollens: If containment implies infallibility, the case against infallibility is, I think, so compelling that we ought to deny containment. But let's consider containment independently of that. Does the judgment, "I'm visually experiencing redness" (for example) contain a visual experience of redness? Does it itself, somehow, contain the phenomenology of red -- not merely assert the existence of red phenomenology but actually include that phenomenology?

Let's suppose -- I don't quite buy this, but it's probably close enough for the purposes of this argument -- that the components of judgments are concepts. Concepts may be reshuffled and combined to make new judgments, right? Now the judgment "I'm visually experiencing something caused by Martians" cannot literally contain something caused by Martians because nothing is caused by Martians. And the judgment "Looking at Mars can cause people to visually experience redness" cannot contain an actual experience of redness because it can be uttered by a blind woman. But now we can recombine elements of the two to get "I'm visually experiencing redness". It's odd to suppose that this recombined product must contain actual red phenomenology if it's composed only of elements none of which contain that phenomenology and that can occur independently of it.

Or: The judgment "I visually experienced redness" does not contain red phenomenology (since I might now be experiencing no redness). Similarly for the judgment "I will visually experience redness". Is the present-tense version of this judgment so radically different in structure from the past and future tenses that it must contain redness -- a totally different kind of thing from what the others contain -- while the others don't?

The most plausible case for something like containment might be the following (bastardized and simplified from Chalmers 2003): "I have *this* phenomenology" -- where *this* is an act of "inner ostention", cognitively pointing toward one's own phenomenology. Such a case might be a case of self-fulfulling containment, but it is no more substantive or necessarily introspective than "I'm located here".

Links to Advice on Philosophy Grad School Applications

from the Leiter Reports, here. I also ran a series of posts about applying a couple months ago.

I'd wish all applicants good luck, but I wonder if there would be some sort of paradox in doing so!

Artists Don't Know Better Than the Rest of Us How Things Look

It's almost a ritual, in discussions of the phenomenology of vision, to praise "artists" -- meaning those in the visual arts -- for having an appreciation of visual phenomenology that most of the rest of us lack. However I believe that the truth is the reverse.

Thomas Reid is typical:

I cannot therefore entertain the hope of being intelligible to those readers who have not, by pains and practice, acquired the habit of distinguishing the appearance of objects to the eye, from the judgment which we form by sight of their colour, distance, magnitude, and figure. The only profession in life wherein it is necessary to make this distinction, is that of painting. The painter hath occasion for an abstraction, with regard to visible objects, somewhat similar to that which we here require: and this indeed is the most difficult part of his art. For it is evident, that if he could fix in his imagination the visible appearance of objects, without confounding it with the things signified by that appearance, it would be as easy for him to paint from life, and to give every figure its proper shading and relief, and its perspective proportions, as it is to paint from a copy (An Inquiry into the Human Mind, 1764/1997, p. 82-83).

Now this much I'll grant Reid and others who share his view: Traditional, representational painters have the difficult skill of rendering on a two-dimensional canvas an arrangement of paint such that it produces for the eye an arrangement of light importantly similar to what would be produced by the actual three-dimensional scene they are rendering; and it takes much practice to see outward things in terms of how they can be presented on a canvas, for example foreshortened and rendered in the right two-dimensional shapes. But that skill is not the skill of appreciating real visual appearances.

For one thing, the view makes no geometric sense. Three dimensional scenes cannot be rendered in two-dimensions without geometric distortion in size and/or angle -- distortion that becomes more evident the greater the visual angle encompassed. This is why there is always something a little wrong with panoramic photographs. This geometrical difficulty could be avoided if artists drew on concave semispheres instead of flat rectangles. But they don't; and they'd have to relearn the rules of perspective to do so.

Even setting that issue aside: We should not infer from the fact that to create a sense of realism in the viewer an artist must color shadows in such-and-such a way that we really visually experience shadows as colored in that way. We should not infer from the fact that light, and water, and distance, and motion, can be rendered a certain way on canvas to the fact that our visual experience light and water and distance and motion matches such renditions (e.g., motion as either a series of freeze-frames or as blur). The painter learns the skill of seeing the world in a certain way for the purpose of a certain technique, not the skill of apprehending our visual experience as it is in itself.

Since most visual artists don't seem to appreciate this fact, their reports about their visual experience are likely to be less accurate than the reports of non-artists -- distorted by the false assumption that the world as seen for painting is the world as seen for life.

What Do You Think About When Watching The Nutcracker?

Saturday afternoon was, I think (believe it or not), my first time watching The Nutcracker. My wife, son, and I were bumped from our back-of-the-room seats and compensated with VIP seats, third row center. Early into the performance, I started thinking about the amazing opulence celebrated, maybe even taken for granted, in the ballet; and then about the opulence of symphonies and ballets in general and critics of luxury like Marx and Peter Singer and Mozi. Then I thought about the fact that I was thinking such things, while my wife was simply enjoying the ballet. [Update Jan 15, 2014: I doubt that my wife was "simply enjoying the ballet" (per the discussion in comments below); and I no longer even think I know what it would take for such a statement to be true.] I thought about why boys want to be soldiers, and about changing views of corporal punishment, the strangeness of wanting pearls, the sexuality of the costumes, whether too many pirouettes will damage the brain.

And then I wondered this: What if we gave everyone in the audience "beepers" that went off randomly a couple times during the show, asking people to report on their experiences, thoughts, feelings, sensations, whatever, just before the beep? (You know I've been getting into beepers!) Surely someone has done this sort of thing?

Russ Hurlburt and I have randomly beeped people during our talks. So far, among about 10 beeped experiences we've discussed with audience members, not a single person has reported being focused primarily on the content of the talk.

Prediction: People will, if asked after the fact, report much higher rates of absorption in movies, lectures, performances, etc., than one would see if one did a random sampling study. That wouldn't be a bad thing, necessarily. In a way, it's compatible with a much richer, personal, life-involving experience of the performance....

Consciousness and Rationality Without Language?

A comment on Wednesday's post reminded me of a delightful old case study by Andre Roch Lecours and Yves Joanette (1980) which seems to be largely unknown in the literature.

"Brother John" was a French monk who suffered severe, almost complete, aphasia (that is, incapacity with language) of both outer speech and, by his report, inner speech as well during epileptic episodes. Yet during these episodes he remained quite capable of rational thought and behavior. Here is Lecours and Joanette's description of one extended episode of severe global aphasia in Brother John:

While he was traveling by train from Italy to Switzerland, Brother John once found himself at the height of a paroxysmal dysphasia soon upon reaching the small town of his destination. He had never been in this town before but he probably had considered in his mind, before the spell began (or became severe), the fact he was to disembark at the next stop of the train. At all events, he recognized the fact he had arrived when the time came. He consequently gathered his suitcases and got off the train and out of the railway station, the latter after properly presenting his transportation titles to an attending agent. He then looked for and identified a hotel, mostly or entirely on non-linguistic clues since alexia was still severe, entered and recognized the registration desk, showed the attendant his medic-alert bracelet only to be dismayed and dismissed by a gesture meaning "no-room" and a facial mimic that perhaps meant "I-do-not-want-trouble-in-my-establishment." Brother John repeated the operation in search of a second hotel, found one and its registration desk, showed his bracelet again, and, relieved at recognizing through nods and gestures that there were both room and sympathy this time, he gave the receptionist (a "fat lady") his passport, indicating the page where she was to find the information necessary for completing his entry file. He then reacted affirmatively to her "do-you-want-to-rest-in-bed-now" mimical question. He was led to his room and given his key; he probably tipped as expected and went to bed. He did not rest long, however: feeling miserable ["It helps to sleep but sometimes I cannot because I am too nervous and jittery" (free translation)], then hungry, he went down to the hotel's lobby and found the restaurant by himself. He sat at the table and, when presented with the menu, he pointed at a line he could not read but expected to be out of the hors-d'oeuvres and desserts sections. He hoped he had chosen something he liked and felt sorry when the waiter came back with a dish of fish, that is, something he particularly dislikes. He nonetheless ate a bit ("potatoes and other vegetables"), drank a bottle of "mineral water," then went back by himself to his room, properly used his key to unlock his bedroom door, lay down, and slept his aphasia away. He woke up hours later, okay speechwise but feeling "foolish" and apologetic. He went to see the fat lady and explained in detail; apparently, she was compassionate (p. 13-14).

If Lecours and Joanette's understanding of Brother John is correct, there was no, or almost no, inner or outer speech production or recognition through the entire episode. Brother John was presumbably not "thinking in words" -- or if he was, "thinking in words" must mean something very different from what I'd have thought it to mean.

Of course we shouldn't put much weight on a single anecdote transmitted second-hand....

Perceptual Experience and Attention

I'm drafting an entry for Sage Press's forthcoming Encyclopedia of Perception. Since Sage seems to want a fairly relaxed, conversational style and the draft isn't much longer than a blog post, I thought I'd make it today's post.

Perceptual Experience and Attention

Do you have constant tactile experience of the shirt on your back? Constant auditory experience of the background rumble of traffic? Constant visual experience of the tip of your nose? Or, when you aren’t paying attention to such things, do they drop out of consciousness entirely, so that they form no part of your stream of experience – not even vaguely, peripherally, amorphously – no part of your phenomenology, no part of what it’s like to be you?

There is, of course, perceptual processing without attention. A gentle tug on the shirt or an unexpected movement in the visual periphery will generally call your attention, even if you are fully absorbed in other things. To call attention such events must register, first, pre-attentively. While your attention centers on one or a few things, you monitor many others inattentively, ready to redirect attention when an inattentional processes detects a large or important change. The interesting question is not whether there is perception without attention, but whether experience accompanies our inattentional perceptual processing or whether that processing is entirely nonconscious. We might think of consciousness as like a soup. Is it a rich soup, replete with experience across broad regions of several modalities simultaneously? Or is it a thin soup, limited to one or a few regions or objects or modalities at a time?

Ordinary people’s intuitions diverge considerably here. So also do the views of philosophers and psychologists. On intuitive or introspective grounds, William James and John Searle (among others) endorse the rich view, Julian Jaynes and David Armstrong the thin view. One widely discussed case is the absent-minded driver: You’ve driven to work a thousand times. Today you drive habitually, utterly absorbed in other thoughts. You arrive and seem suddenly to wake up: Ah, I’m here already! Now, did you actually visually experience the road – at all? very much? – on your way to work?

One might think the question easily settled. Simply introspect now. How much is going on in your consciousness? Unfortunately, the “refrigerator light phenomenon” frustrates any such straightforward test: The fact that you hear (or auditorially experience) the hum of traffic when you’re thinking about whether you hear the hum of traffic provides no evidence on the question of whether you hear the hum of traffic when you’re not considering the matter. Just as the act of checking the refrigerator light turns it on, so also might the act of checking for tactile experience of one’s shirt or visual experience of one’s nose produce those very experiences.

Often we fail to parse, respond to, or remember what might seem to be salient stimuli – a stream of speech we’ve decided to ignore, a woman in a gorilla suit walking through a fast-paced ballgame, substantial changes in a flickering picture, a geometric figure briefly presented in an unattended part of a visual display. Daniel Dennett and Arien Mack, among others, have interpreted such phenomena as evidence for the thin view. However, the conclusion does not follow. We may not parse unattended stimuli much or remember them well, but they may still be experienced in an inchoate or immemorable way, or the general gist may be remembered if not the details.

Ned Block has emphasized that it seems introspectively that we visually experience more of a visual display than we focally attend to. On the face of it, this fact (if it is a fact) seems to suggest that perceptual experience outruns attention. But might it, instead, be a matter of diffuse attention spreading more broadly than focal attention, perhaps along a gradient? Even if you visually experience this whole page while focally attending only to a few words at a time, it doesn’t follow that you also visually experience the wall in the far periphery when you’re not thinking about it, or the pressure of the shoes on your feet.

The issue of whether perceptual experience is, in general, rich or thin may also be addressed by gathering introspective or immediately retrospective reports about randomly sampled moments of experience. Eric Schwitzgebel, giving people beepers to wear during ordinary activities and asking them to reflect on the last undisturbed moment before each beep, found a majority of participants to report visual experience in 100% of sampled moments, tactile experience and peripheral visual experience somewhat less. However, as Schwitzgebel admits, it’s unclear how much credence to give such reports.

The rich and thin views draw radically different pictures of our experience. If the rich view is right, consciousness contains much more than adherents of the thin view suppose. Although there is room here for merely terminological confusion, it appears that there is also room for major substantive disagreement. Strange that this question, concerning an absolutely fundamental and pervasive aspect of human experience, is so poorly studied!

Suggested further readings:

Armstrong, D.M. (1981), The nature of mind. Ithaca, NY: Cornell.

Block, N. (forthcoming), Consciousness, accessibility, and the mesh between psychology and neuroscience. Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

Dennett, D.C. (1991), Consciousness explained. Boston: Little, Brown & Co.

James, W. (1980/1981), The principles of psychology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard.

Jaynes, J. (1976), The origin of consciousness in the breakdown of the bicameral mind. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Mack, A., & Rock, I. (1998), Inattentional blindness. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Reddy, L., Reddy, L., & Koch, C. (2006), Face identification in the near-absence of focal attention. Vision Research, 46, 2336-2343.

Rensink, R.A. (2000), When good observers go bad: Change blindness, inattentional blindness, and visual experience. Psyche, 6 (9).

Schwitzgebel, E. (2007), Do you have constant tactile experience of your feet in your shoes? Or is experience limited to what’s in attention? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14 (3), 5-35.

Searle, J.R. (1992), The rediscovery of the mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT.

Simons, D.J. (2000), Attentional capture and inattentional blindness. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 4, 147-155.

Note to blog visitors: One aspect of the question I've omitted is the old debate in introspective psychology about whether experiences of objects to which one is attending differ in some qualitative attribute like "clearness" or "attensity" from experiences of unattended objects. But this hasn't exactly been a hot topic in the last 100 years; and the more basic question of whether there even is experience outside of attention needs to be settled first.

Political Scientists' Voting: Predictions and Methods

A week and a half ago, I posted a brief, frustrated reflection on my failure to find any good research on the rates at which political scientists vote in public elections. After several more search attempts, I've given up. As far as I can see, no one has explored this issue since a few studies in the 1960s and 1970s -- studies so problematic as to be utterly useless.

I've informally asked a number of people to guess what Josh Rust and I will find when we analyze the data. Everyone except the political scientists said that they suspect we'll find that political scientists vote more often than other professors. The political scientists, however, were cagey. A couple mentioned a minority view in political science that voting is for suckers: Your vote never makes a difference, so voting is a waste of time. Yet one of these same professors said that he himself has voted in every single election, down to the tiniest little runoff, since the turn of the century.

So here's my prediction: Political scientists will have a more broadly spread distribution than other professors -- there will be more at the extreme of voting in almost every election but there will also be many who vote rarely or never. On average, though, I predict, the political scientists will vote more. Compared to the average non-political-science professor, the average political scientist will be more informed about elections, more invested in and interested in the outcomes, and more likely to have publicly embraced the view that one should vote.

Well, we'll see! Here's what Josh and I plan to do:

From university websites, we'll gather names of philosophers, political scientists, and a sample of professors in other fields. We'll then look for these names on voting records that have been provided to us by several states, calculating a rate of votes per year for each individual since that individual's first recorded vote in the state.

There are two main weaknesses in this method, and I especially welcome readers' reflections or suggestions about these. First, since we don't have street addresses for the professors in question, we will not be able to disambiguate between voters with identical names. If there are four John Millers who live within commuting distance of So-and-So College, we won't know which one is the professor, so we will have to discard the data. And second, if no voting record matches the professor's name, we will not know whether that professor is registered under a different name, registered in a different locale, a non-citizen, a felon, or simply a non-voter. So we'll have to exclude those professors too.

Because of these difficulties, we won't be able to reach conclusions about absolute rates of voting participation among political scientists, just comparative rates -- more or less than professors in other departments. But will these difficulties undermine our ability even to draw that conclusion? Although I don't see any reason to think there will be large differences in the rates at which professors in different departments are registered under different names or in different locales, there is reason to suspect that different departments may have different rates of common names and of non-citizens. But hopefully we can keep those confounds under control: We'll have an exact count of the common-name professors in the different departments, so we can attempt analyses that account for that; and hopefully we can estimate the rates of non-citizenship in departments by accessing c.v.'s or biographies of our non-voting professors where possible and by looking at general data on the citizenship of professors.

What do you think?

Should Philosophy Be Read Slowly?

Non-academics often think that skill in reading is measured by reading speed -- the faster the better. That is partly true, up to a point (up to about 7th grade, I suspect). I'm reminded of Woody Allen's joke about what he got from speed-reading War and Peace: "It's about Russia."

Philosophers, in contrast, sometimes seem to fetishize slow reading. "Deep" philosophy, it might seem -- or deep thinking about philosophy as one reads -- requires a glacial pace. Students sometimes excitedly report, "We spent the whole three-hour seminar reading a single page of Wittgenstein!"

I don't deny that glacial reading can, in the right mood, be exciting. And surely if you breeze through Wittgenstein or Heidegger at two minutes a page, you're missing something. But here's the compromise: If you cut your reading pace in half to get more out of what you read, you'll only be able to read half as much -- and that's another way of missing something.

The key to great philosophical reading, I think, is to vary your pace according to your projects and interests. In some ways, reading quickly is the harder skill. It's also the one less taught in philosophy seminars. How quickly can you assimilate the main ideas of 400 pages of articles on topic X? Can you detect and hone in on, slow down for, those crucial few paragraphs on which the issues really turn? Indeed, unless you can read quickly, you're likely not to have the broad understanding necessary to see where one should read slowly.

I used to begin graduate seminars with student presentations on the assigned reading. The dull blow-by-blow that typically resulted, dedicating an equal amount of energy to every page of the reading, is exactly the opposite of the skilled reader's adjustment of pace and focus. Now instead I ask students to come prepared with one or two well-developed questions or objections. This, I hope, encourages focus rather than plodding. I haven't yet dared to assign students 400 pages of a philosophy for a week, advising them to read it quickly and laser in on what seem to them to be key issues -- I think this might cause a riot! -- but the more I think about it, the more I'm tempted.

Reading philosophy quickly of course invites misunderstanding and oversimplification. But so does reading philosophy slowly, without a sufficient sense of context and alternative perspectives.

Echoes of Inner Speech

It seems to me that I sometimes have thoughts that linger after the inner speech that expresses them is done. I might say silently to myself, "Shoot, writing three posts a week is a lot of work!" and then that thought may briefly stay with me, in some sense that's hard to articulate, before I move on to new thoughts.

Can I say more about what that experience is like? Only through metaphor, it seems: It's like a resonance or an echo. But I don't think the inner speech literally resonates or echoes in the sense of, say, the last word or the last few words quietly buzzing or repeating themselves, slowly dying away.

I found it interesting, then, to contrast this sense I have of my inner speech with a report by Melanie, the subject Russ Hurlburt and I interviewed in our just-published book, Describing Inner Experience?, regarding a randomly-sampled (with a beeper) moment of her inner experience:

Russ: So you had said in inner speech, “they lasted for a nice long time,” just prior to the beep?

Melanie: Um hm, not at the beep but just prior to it.

Russ: But in some way the “nice long time” portion is still there. Is that right?

Melanie: Yeah, it was. The best I can liken it to is an echo.

...

Russ: Okay. And “echo.” I want to understand what you mean by “echo.” An echo gets softer and softer; did you mean to imply that? And echo sometimes is repeated and sometimes once but…

Melanie: No, it didn’t get softer and softer, it’s almost like [quizzically] it got blurrier and blurrier. Not in terms of visual blurry, but a sound blurry [again quizzically], where it just started overlapping itself until it just came to this jumble in which you can’t make any noise out. It sounds really weird but…

Russ: So are you saying that you said in inner speech something that was quite clear…

Melanie: Um hm.

Russ: … “It lasted for a nice long time,” and then there’s “nice long time,” “nice long time,” overlapped with “nice long time”…

Melanie: Yeah.

Russ: … then “nice long time” overlapped with “nice long time” overlapped with “nice long time”…

Melanie: And it keeps going.

Russ: … until there’s sort of several of these things going?

Melanie: Yeah (Sixth Sampling Day, p. 207-208).

In the book, I express skepticism about this report. I wonder if Melanie is being taken in by her own metaphor (as, I think, people are often taken in by metaphors in describing their experience, e.g., in calling dreams black and white or visual experience flat). Russ, however, accepts the report.

What do you think? Any other ideas about the phenomenology, if any, of lingering thoughts?

Synchronized Movement and the Self-Other Boundary

I've been reading The Happiness Hypothesis, by Jonathan Haidt -- one of those delightful books pitched to the non-specialist, yet accurate and meaty enough to be of interest to the specialist -- and I was struck by Haidt's description of historian William McNeill's work on synchronized movement among soliders and dancers:

Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that [military] drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual (McNeill 1997, p. 2).

Who'd have thought endless marching on the parade-grounds could be so fulfilling?

I am reminded of work by V.S. Ramachandran on the ease with which experimenters can distort the perceived boundaries of a subject's body. For example:

Another striking instance of a 'displaced' body part can be demonstrated by using a dummy rubber hand. The dummy hand is placed in front of a vertical partition on a table. The subject places his hand behind the partition so he cannot see it. The experimenter now uses his left hand to stroke the dummy hand while at the same time using his right hand to stroke the subject's real hand (hidden from view) in perfect synchrony. The subject soon begins to experience the sensations as arising from the dummy hand (Blotvinick and Cohen 1998) (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1998, p. 1623).

Also:

The subject sits in a chair blindfolded, with an accomplice sitting in front of him, facing the same direction. The experimenter then stands near the subject, and with his left hand takes hold of the subject's left index finger and uses it to repeatedly and randomly to [sic] tap and stroke the nose of the accomplice while at the same time, using his right hand, he taps and strokes the subject's nose in precisely the same manner, and in perfect synchrony. After a few seconds of this procedure, the subject develops the uncanny illusion that his nose has either been dislocated or has been stretched out several feet forwards, demonstrating the striking plasticity or malleability of our body image (p. 1622).

So here's my thought: Maybe synchronized movement distorts body boundaries in a similar way: One feels the ground strike one's feet, repeatedly and in perfect synchrony with seeing other people's feet striking the ground. One does not see one's own feet. If Ramachandran's model applies, repeatedly receiving such feedback might bring one to (at least start to) see those other people's feet as one's own -- explaining, in turn, the phenomenology McNeill reports. Perhaps then it is no accident that armies and sports teams and dancing lovers practice moving in synchrony, causing a blurring of the experienced boundary between self and other?