“People thought ‘Blood and the Tracks’ was about me but I don’t write confessional songs” Bob Dylan

In my previous blog-post I briefly discussed Robert M Young’s advice that interrogating the fringes of my memories, distressing experiences, and my dreams may be a better way of understanding Klein’s views on unconscious Phantasies than simply reading her texts. Young put it as follows:

“I offer these reports, somewhat shyly, as a way of inviting you to make similar searches of your memories to glimpse the tips of the icebergs of your own phantasies and psychotic anxieties. They are my version of what Klein calls ‘a cave of dangerous monsters’. My general point is that if you ask the question, ‘What is a psychotic anxiety when it’s at home and not in the pages of an implausible and nearly unfathomable text by Melanie Klein?’, you’ll be less sceptical if you interrogate the fringes of your own memories and distressing experiences and, of course your dreams” (Phantasy and Psychotic Anxieties’ Robert M Young p.71)

In this blog-post I will outline some of my own experiences and anxieties order to see if this can bring me closer to understanding Klein’s texts.

While doing my PhD I also worked full time in a hospital for people with intellectual disabilities, and for a while was also working as a tutor for first year and second year college students. This stressful work load led to me suffering from what eventually got diagnosed as a generalised anxiety disorder. Looking back the anxiety has been a part of me since childhood but it simply became exacerbated later in life through the excessive work load. So before discussing the later anxieties I will try to briefly discuss some general anxieties I had throughout the years.

Firstly I will describe a childhood event which wasn’t particularly frightening and as far as I can remember didn’t lead to any particular anxieties but it was the first time I remember my picture of reality being shattered. As a child I woke up and went down stairs to see my parents however when I walked into the kitchen I was greeted by silence there was nobody there and the room was in darkness. I remember the shock I felt. Up until then I had assumed that when I went to bed life went on around me as normal. It was at that moment I realised that other people had a bed time too and that at night the day time family world no longer went on as I had imagined.

It is hard to date the early memory but I must have been extremely young if I didn’t realise that other people slept. This is possibly my earliest memory. It leads me to later anxieties about sleeping I used to have when I was a child. Lying in bed at night I used to worry about the fact when I would sleep I would in effect not cease to exist. I would lie there in blackness only to be aroused if I had a nightmare or a dream. It used to puzzle me and worry me that I would disappear for the night and have no control till awaking. Despite these fears I was still a good sleeper.

I remember in my late teens reading Jung for the first time and discovering his view that dreams had significance and could be interpreted. His work and some research on Lucid Dreaming made me fascinated with the dreaming process I looked forward to sleeping and dreaming as even nightmares had potential significance. The process of sleeping no longer involved the disappearance of the self but a vehicle of discovery. I no longer accept most of Jung’s claims but he is probably the reason I ended up studying philosophy.

A particular anxiety provoking dream I had was again in my very early twenties. Where I went into a barn to see my mother, and a black blob appeared and slowly started moving around and everything it touched was engulfed in the blackness. Eventually the blackness engulfed everybody, my mother and even me. I woke up feeling dreadful the dream at the time seemed to represent a kind of dread of death which inevitably engulfs and destroys all life.

A later dream I recall was again in my mid-twenties. The dream was of a thousands of planes flying over me and crosses I at first I thought I should marvel at the aesthetic beauty of it all then I realised they were going to kill us all. At the time I again put the dream down to anxiety about death and a belief that being immersed in art and science is only a distraction until the inevitable end comes.

All of these dreams and anxieties were very brief moments in another wise happy life. They show some real anxieties on behalf of a particular child and young adult occurring at various times throughout his life. I now want to move from general anxieties about death, nothingness etc to more particular anxieties which occurred in my twenties.

I associate a lot of these anxieties with being in college. I remember walking out of a class on Richard Rorty and thinking about the fact that (1) My current beliefs are caused because of the current state of my brain. (2) I only believe that my current beliefs are caused because of my current brain states because of the current state of my brain. (3) Therefore I am not justified in arguing that my current beliefs are caused by my current brain states. (4) If I am not justified in believing what I believe how can I justify my belief that my beliefs are caused by my brain states. And so on in an infinite circle. This little problem; is a pretty simple problem, actually it isn’t really a problem at all. However the thought kept repeating in my mind in a loop and I could see no way of solving it and began to feel extremely anxious and my mind raced. Why my mind was put in a spin by such a trivial thought I cannot say. But possible reasons were mountains of coffee drank that day, and being over worked and over tired. However the anxious state of mind stays in my mind because it seemed to occur in response to a trivial thought.

This leads me on to real irrational fears. I went through weeks worrying about nuclear holocaust. This worry was an irrational fear. There was no reason to think that any nuclear attack would happen. I had thoughts about terrorist attacks on nuclear targets in Britain and the slow dying of radiation poisoning that would result for me and people in Ireland as a result of any such attack. My fears were not really based on any knowledge of nuclear power or of the likelihood of an attack. They seemed almost internally driven and went away after a couple of weeks as my mind focused on other things.

The first physical symptom of my anxiety was tightness in my chest which I worried may be a heart condition. I worried about this for days and felt more and more certain something was wrong with my heart. I eventually booked an appointment with a doctor did a variety of different tests including an EEG and determined that my symptoms were down to stress. They disappeared not long after the test.

But a full on anxiety problem developed not long after that which resulted from feeling tingling in my arms which immediately put me in mind of disorders like Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis and Motor Neuron Disease. The onset of symptoms was around April 2007 so it began over eight years ago when I had just turned 30. This led to a long period of severe anxiety and worry which lasted for a long time. Neurological disorders are difficult to diagnose and hence one cannot simply have one’s mind put to ease by attending a GP. My GP argued that my symptoms were not an indication of any neurological disorder. I started to feel severe pains in my muscles and some twitching in my muscles. I began recording every incident of a pain, a twinge or a muscle twitch. I went back to my GP who did a series of motor tests, and blood tests which he said convinced him that there was nothing wrong with me. I however insisted on further tests and I had a CAT scan done, and a MRI scan done both of which came back clear. I knew that in the early stages of MMD and Parkinson’s (less so in MS) people can have normal scans and still have the disorders. So I attended two separate neurologists who after a few motor tests and reading my symptoms which I recorded in great detail they argued that as far as they were concerned there was nothing wrong with me in terms of neurological worries though both they and my GP believed that my worries were psychological in nature.

So after a year of nightmarish anxieties and obsessional checking symptoms, not sleeping well, worrying about death, and disability I decided to go into therapy and to follow my doctors advice and begin a course of the anxiety controlling medicine Lexaphro. After a while in therapy and being on Lexaphro my symptoms began to fade and I got back to a normal life. Looking back I don’t think my concerns were entirely irrational; neurological difficulties often take months if not years to diagnose, they are often misdiagnosed as stress, or some form of psychosomatic order by GP’s. So I wasn’t entirely wrong not to trust their diagnosis I did after feel terrible at the time. Nonetheless on the other side of the coin I was aware about baseless worries about nuclear bombs and heart problems so I had ample reason not to trust my judgement as a diagnostician of my own disorder and to instead trust the trained professionals. Whatever the case it has been over 8 years since my symptoms started and they have disappeared pretty quickly since I underwent analysis and went on medications.

Now after writing this brief history of my experiences with anxiety and my dreams In my next blog I will now try and relate it to Young’s advice that thinking about our own dreams and anxieties can help us understand Klein’s beliefs about unconscious phantasies. The first thing to note is that all of my anxieties and dreams were conscious hence my ability to articulate them. So one wonders what my dreams and anxieties really prove about Klein’s views on unconscious Phantasies? I think to really measure or discuss this in any detail it is important to segregate the different aspects of my anxieties which I have chosen to talk about. I will divide these into three different sections (1) Early childhood worries around night time and falling asleep. (2) Worries and dreams about death. (3) The anxiety disorder and treatment. In each case I will interpret and try to understand my experiences in light of Klein’s notion of unconscious Phantasy. In my next blog-post I will consider multiple interpretations of my symptoms from Freudian, Jungian, Lacanian and Kleinian perspectives to show how my own experiences while interesting don’t really demonstrate the truth or falsity of any psychoanalytic theory.

As an undergraduate in a philosophy of science class the scientific status of psychoanalysis was discussed on a number of occasions. In particular we discussed Popper’s claim that psychoanalysis was pseudo scientific because it was in principle unfalisifiable. My teacher Brian Garvey correctly noted that for all of Popper’s attacks on psychoanalysis Popper never actually cites actual psychoanalytic texts, nor does he closely analyse Freud’s arguments, and engage with the clinical material in the form of case studies psychoanalysts published. Popper contents himself with anecdotal reports from conversations he had with people like Adler to motivate his criticisms of psychoanalysis.

In a series of blog posts I have evaluated the evidence for various different psychoanalytic claims and have shown that modern psychoanalysis is a properly scientific discipline. I have discussed meta-analysis that show that psychoanalysis has greater clinical success than its other therapeutic rivals. I have also shown that attempts to integrate neuroscience and developmental psychology have helped the discipline improve and develop as we learn more about the world. Nonetheless there are other aspects of psychoanalytic theory that I don’t think stand up to critical scrutiny. In previous blog-posts I have criticised the scientific status of Lacanian Psychoanalysis. In this post I will turn my critical gaze towards the claims of Melanie Klein. My focus will be on her interpretation of the behaviour of children. I will argue that her claims are too unconstrained by the data of experience. Her posits while consistent with the child’s behaviour are entirely lacking in plausibility or empirical support and so should be rejected in favour of simpler interpretations of the child’s behaviour.

In the past when I have criticised the theoretical positions of either Lacan, Klein or their followers I have been chastised on the grounds that the empirical evidence suggests that psychotherapy whether Kleinian or Lacanian is equally effective as treatment. People have misinterpreted my claims as indicating that I think that a therapist who learns a lot of neuroscience will automatically be a better therapist. To be clear from the outset I do not believe any such thing. One of the most aspects of the psychoanalytic encounter is the relationship between the analyst and the analysand. When an analyst is dealing with an analysand they are dealing with them as a person. A massive part of the job involves listening to others in an emphatic manner. The analyst in training has to undergo hours of personal analysis, he has to train in analysing other people, and these skills are shaped and honed over years of practice through talking and listening to people in practice for hours on end day in and day out. These skills, like any other skill e.g. playing football or painting cannot be reduced to propositional knowledge. So for this reason I should emphasise that criticisms of people like Klein etc are not criticisms of their competency as an analyst but theoretical criticisms of their meta-psychological theories.

One of the replies often given to the claim that one is focusing on meta-psychology is: ‘why bother tinkering with well established psychoanalytic theories if it makes little practical difference to clinical practice?’ My hope is that psychoanalysis can develop and improve by integrating itself with sciences like neuroscience, and developmental psychology which study overlapping areas of research. Again though it is important to emphasise that with psychoanalysis things are driven by therapeutic driven practice, and not just theory and observations. Thus Mark Solms correctly notes:

“Although we claim that neuroscience has a lot to offer psychoanalysis methodologically, we do not believe that neuroscientific experiments must be the final court of appeal for theoretical work in psychoanalysis, as some critics of Neuropsychoanalysis think we do” (From the Couch to the Lab p. 51)

I am not defending Neuropsychoanalysis in this blog-post but I share Solms sentiment; if I argue that some claim of Klein’s is not supported by findings in developmental psychology, or neuroscience this is not intended as a refutation of the clinical theory (which stands or falls on pragmatic success). Rather I am suggesting that if empirical evidence and logical analysis points to evidential shortfalls in a particular theory, analysts need to ask themselves whether these areas that are not supported by any empirical data outside of the analytic setting; are necessary to their clinical practice, and if they are not then the beliefs need to be rescinded. On the other hand if some theoretical construct in psychoanalysis is considered vital despite having no evidence for it scientifically and plenty of evidence against it, then we need to analyse what the evidence for it is within clinical practice and how other psychoanalytic approaches manage equally successfully without this theoretical construct. Overall the aim is to construct as accurate a model of the mind as possible and this will involve rescinding beliefs in controversial theoretical postulates that are neither necessary for clinical practice nor supported by empirical data.

When dealing with Klein I will be concerned with her views on the mental life of infants. I will first discuss the methodology with which she uses to understand the mental life of children. Klein used children’s play and her interpretation of their play as a way of understanding the mental life of children. For Klein play in children was similar to free association in adults, she also believed that children like adults could develop transference neurosis (Bronstein ‘Technique and Interpretation in Klein’ p.37). She provided her children with toys such as ‘pencils, wooden men and women, carriages, dogs, as well as a wash basin with running water, spoons vessels etc (ibid p.37). She then proceeded to interpret the children’s play with the toys as evidence for the unconscious phantasies of children[1]. It was in the context of her observations of child play that she came up with her hypothesis of child unconscious Phantasy.

Nonetheless while Klein practice seems a reasonable way about drawing inferences about the mental life of the infant. Her claims about what children’s unconscious phantasies are which she derived from her clinical practice seem frankly ludicrous, and one finds oneself in stunned disbelief when reading them. Here are some quotes from her book ‘The Psychology of Children’ which show the type of phantasies she attributed to children:

“Here is another game which shows clearly that to Erna’s unconscious the head had the meaning of the penis: a toy man wanted to get into a car and stuck his head into the window, where upon the car said to him ‘better come right inside!’ The car stood for the mother inviting her father to have coitus with her.” ( Klein ‘The Psychology of Children p. 36)

“Erna used very often to play at being mother. I was to be the child, and one of my greatest faults was thumb-sucking. The first thing which I was supposed to put into my mouth was an engine. She had already much admired its gilded lamps saying, ‘They are so lovely, all red and burning’, and at once put them in her mouth and sucked them. They stood to her for her mother’s breast and her father’s penis.” (ibid p. 37)

“The beautifully cut-patterns, for instance representing a table cloth, stood for her parent’ genitals, or the body of her mother restored from the destruction which in Phantasy she had previously inflicted on them” (ibid p.38)

“Once instead of the father, a magician came along. He knocked one child on the anus and then on the head with a stick, and as he did so a yellowish fluid poured out of the magic wand. On another occasion the child – a quite little one this time- was given a powder to take which was ‘red and white mixed together. This treatment made the little child clean, and it was suddenly able to talk and became as clever as its mother. The magician stood for the penis and knocking with the stick meant coitus. The fluid and the powder represented urine, faeces, semen and blood, all of which according to Erna’s Phantasies her mother put in herself during copulation through her mouth, anus and genitals.” (ibid p. 38)

“Erna’s analysis too, demonstrated that theatres and performances of all kinds symbolised coitus between the parents.” (ibid p. 39)

Now it is easy to pick quotes out of context to make anyone look a bit nutty but I can assure the reader that Klein used this type of analysis throughout her writings without giving too much away interms of why she was interpreting children this way. In her defence she was writing for analysts who shared theoretical assumptions with her so her arguments would have been condensed because of her intended audience. Possibly the best expositor of Klein’s views was Susan Isaacs her paper ‘On the Nature and Function of Unconscious Phantasy’ is still considered to be the best summary of the nature of Phantasy. Isaacs argues that there are three main methodological rules of thumb that are important when analysing a child. (1) Attention to detail (2) Observation of context (3) Study of Genetic continuity.

She correctly notes that understanding of speech proceeds the use of speech (with really intelligent children understanding of speech can proceed language use by up to a year.) She argues that children from 8 weeks onwards are distressed by strange faces and reassured by familiar faces. She notes that the surprise that children show to change in stimuli indicate that preverbal infants form judgements, have expectations etc. However despite her confidence a cursory consideration of alternative behavioural explanations shows that her claims are wildly over confident She cites Hazlitt (1933) to show that children understand logical relations (identity, generalisation), long before he can express them in words. She asks the question are phantasies active in children from the time their impulses arrive or are they only retrospectively apparent after the child develops the linguistic ability to put them into words. She says that the phantasies are active along with the impulses with which they arrive. Her emphasis on developmental continuity as opposed to jumps cognitive capacities makes her think that we are justified in applying the same analytic interpretative stance towards young children as we are to adults. But of course this assumption means that if one is not impressed by the evidence for psychoanalytic interpretation of adults then one will not be impressed by psychoanalytic interpretation of children. Over all I would argue that because of her controversial assumptions Isaacs does not provide much empirical support for Klein.

   PERSONAL ANXIETIES AS A WAY OF UNDERSTANDING KLEIN

In my readings of Melanie Klein and the phantasies she attributes to young children I find myself thinking that she was a deeply disturbed person projecting her own sick ideas on to the infant. I have yet to come across any evidence that I feel supports her conjectures, from an evolutionary perspective there seems to be no reason why a child would have such sick phantasies about their care takers, neither is there any neurological or developmental data that supports her claims. When I bring up this point people usually point that the evidence comes from the clinical encounter. That listening to patients lends support to psychoanalytic conjectures about the experiences of the clinical infant as described by Klein. This puts me at an impasse; firstly psychoanalysts of equal experience interms of analysing their patients do not all agree on the nature of the early experiences of the ‘clinical infant’ so years of clinical experience doesn’t guarantee that one will end up believing Klein’s theoretical posits. Secondly I am not psychoanalyst myself. So I do not have the years of clinical practice that psychoanalysts have so I am not in a position to judge the validity of the Kleinian views on infant phantasies. But if we accept the view that only psychoanalysts are fit to judge the evidence for psychoanalytic theories then the theory becomes in effect irrefutable by outsiders and insiders probably won’t be too motivated to refute their own theory. If we imagine a similar situation holding with religion or Reki healing where outsiders are given no epistemic authority to criticise it then we are in a sad situation where even the most ridiculous theories will be irrefutable by public criterion. Since psychoanalysts unlike ReIki Healers and Religious nuts claim to be an empirical discipline I presume no respectable psychoanalyst would argue that the evidence or against the discipline can only be tackled by practitioners. So I think the argument that a person cannot criticise psychoanalysis because he doesn’t have clinical experience breaks down in two ways. (1) Theorists with equal amounts of clinical practices often hold wildly different theories about early experiences of the infant and (2) If we accept the fact that psychoanalysis is a closed epistemic community that cannot be judged from the outside why not do the same thing with religions or new age medicine?

So I think that while a psychoanalyst can indeed claim special skills because of years of experience in clinical practice this fact cannot be used as a refutation of critics without this experience. The burden of proof lies with the psychoanalyst to communicate his findings to critics in as clear a manner as possible. There are however some ways that critics can meet psychoanalysts halfway; Freud emphasised that the most important aspect of an analysts training was clinical experience by which he meant analysing people and undergoing analysis oneself. Now obviously if one is not a practicing analyst one cannot gain clinical experience as an analyst (the best substitute is reading case studies of actual clinical practice), however one can undergo analysis. This process will give one an understanding of analysis from within and an experience of the analytic process and its effects on one. Having undergone psychoanalysis for an anxiety disorder I can attest to both the usefulness of the experience and how one learns about the process in a way that simply reading books will not mimic (Obviously my limited experiences of being an analysand do not in any way compare with the years of clinical practice psychoanalysts have). However despite my experiences in analysis and my readings of clinical studies I still find Klein’s analysis wildly far-fetched. It is for this reason that I think the studies Robert M Young’s contribution to the ‘Lacan-Klein dialogues’ was potential gateway to understanding Klein. He offered the following advice:

“I offer these reports, somewhat shyly, as a way of inviting you to make similar searches of your memories to glimpse the tips of the icebergs of your own phantasies and psychotic anxieties. They are my version of what Klein calls ‘a cave of dangerous monsters’. My general point is that if you ask the question, ‘What is a psychotic anxiety when it’s at home and not in the pages of an implausible and nearly unfathomable text by Melanie Klein?’, you’ll be less sceptical if you interrogate the fringes of your own memories and distressing experiences and, of course your dreams” (Phantasy and Psychotic Anxieties’ Robert M Young p.71)

Upon reading these lines I was reminded of why I went into analysis in the first place. I entered into analysis because of a severe anxiety problem. A problem which I underwent psychoanalysis to overcome (I cut the analysis short for financial reasons) and I am medicated to control the anxiety by Lexaphro. Since undergoing the analysis and thinking about my anxiety I have realised that it was an ongoing problem which goes back a long time in my personal history. So Young as offered me an inside track to test Klein’s theories from a personal experience of analysis. Obviously any claims I make based on my own anxieties have virtually no generality but since they may help me understand Klein in my next blog post I intend to analyse my personal anxiety problems to see if they can be made sense of in a Kleinian fashion. This will involve detailed phenomenological descriptions of my anxieties and an attempt to relate them to Kleinian psychology.

[1] A similar technique is used to analyse non-verbal people with Intellectual disabilities; see for example the work of Melanie Sinason in her ‘Mental Handicap and The Human Condition’.

“Developmental psychology can inquire about the infant only as the infant is observed. To relate observed behaviour to subjective experience one must make inferential leaps. Clearly, the inferences will be more accurate if the data base from which one is leaping is extensive and well established. The study of intrapsychic experience must be informed by direct observation, as the source of most new information about infants continues to be naturalistic and experimental observations…In contrast to the infant as observed by developmental psychology a different “infant” has been reconstructed by psychoanalytic theories in the course of clinical practice (primarily with adults). This infant is the joint creation of two people, the adult who grew up to become a psychiatric patient and the therapist, who has a theory about infant experience. This recreated infant made up of memories, present re-enactments in the transference, and theoretically guided by interpretations. I call this creation the clinical infant, to be distinguished from the observed infant, whose behaviour is examined at the very time of its occurrence.” ( The Intersubjective World of the Infant p. 15)

Stern’s division of the two infants is extremely interesting and theoretically valuable. The developmental infant is well studied and understood with more and more sophisticated experimental techniques, better cross cultural studies, better recording equipment and availability of neuroscientific tools we learn more and more about the typical developmental milestones of children each day. The clinical infant is a different beast. It is as Stern notes the creation of two people the analysand and the analyst. When a person enters therapy and starts telling their story they are narrating how things seem to them in the present moment. As the therapy proceeds and the analysand sometimes reflects on his childhood a larger picture of who the analysand is and how he became the person he is will emerge.

But of course the analysis isn’t centred entirely on constructing a narrative about the analysand. The analysand will a lot of the time have come to analysis because of some particular issue; neurosis, depression, anxiety etc. Sometimes talk will circle around certain topics week after week, the analysand will have one view about what is bothering him, and the analyst may have another. The analysand may have concerns about what the analyst is thinking, he may gear his talk towards what he thinks the analyst wants to hear etc. Nonetheless it is true, that over time in therapy, that in some cases; cases that could go on for years, a picture of the self does emerge.

This self doesn’t just emerge from the analysand telling his story and the analyst faithfully recording it. The analyst will offer interpretations of behaviour that the analysand talks about. He will interpret slips of the tongue, dreams, the tone of voice that the analysand talks about different people in, he will note logical discrepancies in the way analysand treats different people for equivalent behaviour etc. Sometimes the analysand will agree with the analyst and sometimes not, but with the analyst in the position of the person who knows; the master interpreter of the unconscious etc his views will have more weight for the analyst than most people’s views do. Eventually a picture of the psychoanalytic infant and adult will be constructed and a narrative of how the infant became the adult that arrived in analysis will be constructed.

Now whatever the therapeutic efficacy of this technique, one wonders to what degree it is an accurate biography of the analysand. These are not mere academic questions when Freud (circa the 1890’s) was told by his analysand’s of their early childhood experience of sexual abuse; he took them at their word. He believed that the children were recounting factual material. And he used this “factual” material as evidence for his seduction theory of hysteria. Later he abandoned the seduction theory arguing that so many people were claiming to have been seduced that it was very improbable to have actually happened. This is when he moved towards his theory of childhood sexuality and argued that the reports adults were giving in therapy were reports of unconscious childhood phantasies of seduction. A big problem with the childhood sexuality explanation is that there is a danger that Freud could be told about a real case of sexual abuse, and ignore it because of his theory.

Another major problem is the problem of suggestibility. There have been cases documented where analysts have convinced patients that x or y occurred when there is virtually no evidence that this is the case. The analyst who convinces the patient of this occurring and the patient’s relation with their family is never the same. A tragic version of this story occurred with a patient Carol Myers who through therapy was convinced she had been ritually abused by her family who were allegedly members of a satanic cult. Myers ended up committing suicide and subsequent research indicates that some of the claims Myers made to her analyst Dr Fisher turned out to be wildly false. And there are suspicions that Myers was lead into believing falsehood through suggestions of her therapist. There is ample evidence that false memories can be implanted in a person, for example, the psychologist Elizabeth Loftus managed to implant false memories into her patients see her (1997) Paper ‘Creating False Memories’. Whatever the truth of the Myers case is it does give pause for thought. If analysts are capable of inadvertently placing false memories into their patients this raises serious difficulties with any notion of a psychoanalytic infant being anything other than a made up fiction (albeit a fiction that has some theoretical utility).

Some psychoanalysts have bitten the bullet and claimed that “reality” plays no real role in the psychoanalytic process. In her book ‘Becoming a Subject’ Marcia Cavell gathered together some quotations which reveal this attitude towards reality by some therapists:

“Reality”, as we use the term, refers to something subjective, something felt or sensed, rather than to an external realm of being existing independently of the human subject’ (Atwood 1992: 26-27)

The idea of analytic ‘objectivity’ is an intellectual remnant of the one-person psychology paradigm. … Might reducing the object of analysis to the “interaction” between the patient and analyst not mislead us, if it predisposes us to imagine that there is an objective reality “out there” between analyst and patient, that one can be “objective” about. (Fogel et al. 1996: 885)

The psychoanalytic task is not trying to discover something that was already there, in the patients mind, but trying to devise a view of [his] life present and past, that works, i.e. that helps him feel better’ (Renik: 1998: 492)

(The above quotes taken from Marcia Cavell ‘Becoming a Subject 2006 p.72)

This cavalier attitude towards reality may seem harmless, and it could be used to solve the problem raised by Stern of how do we merge the developmental infant with the clinical infant? With this loose attitude towards reality one could simply argue the clinical infant is a theoretical construct which is useful in therapy but it has no reality outside of it. This approach would be fine except analysand’s leave therapy believing in what has been uncovered about his childhood in the therapy. This will have consequences for the child’s relationship with family members and friends afterwards, so it is only ethical that analysts at least try using every tool at their disposal to render accurate accounts of childhood experiences. This is what people like Solms, Stern and Cavell are trying to do as they try to ground psychoanalytic theories in facts of neuroscience, and developmental psychology. It might be worth discussing what they have discovered and see how it relates to Sterns problem of merging the clinical and the developmental child.

Some Neuroscientific and Developmental Facts About Memory:

In his ‘The Interpersonal World of the Infant’ Stern presents some interesting evidence which he thinks demonstrates that we are capable of forming reliable memories from early on in life:

“Is the infant capable of remembering the three different kinds of experience that make up the other main core self-variants-agency, coherence, and affect…It is now clear that there are recall memory “systems” that are not language based and that operate very early (see Olson and Strauss 1984) Motor Memory is one of them. The point is that cued recall for motor experiences can be experimentally demonstrated, as well as inferred from natural behaviour, and that these motor memories assure self-continuity in time. The thus constitute another set of self-invariants, part of the “motor self”…It is well established that infants by five to seven months have extraordinary long-term recognition memory for visual perceptions…for some events, recognition memory appears to operated across the birth gap…Clearly, the infant has the memorial capacities to register, recognize, and recall affective experience so that continuity of the affective self is assured. (Stern: ‘The Interpersonal World of The Infant pp 90-94)

Now while the data that Stern as brought together is impressive sceptics will probably note that it flies in the face of the empirical fact that people typically don’t remember the early years of their childhood. I think that this objection if voiced relies on a crude understanding of the nature of memory. When Stern talks about affective memories, motor memories, and perceptual memories he is not talking about memory as it is ordinarily used (the closest neurological analogue to what we typically mean by memory is Episodic Memory). We typically wouldn’t attribute episodic memory to young children below the age of 12months. But there is plenty of evidence for other types of memory at play as the child learns about his world. It is worth looking at some of this evidence for different types of memory and how they relate to the findings of psychoanalysis.

In his ‘The Brain and The Inner World’ Solms and Turnbull note that there are two areas of storage in the brain for memories:

1. Long Term Storage: Both recent and remote memory are parts of long term memory (LTM)
2. Short Term Storage: Refers to information that is in your consciousness right now (derived from events that occurred a few seconds ago) is your short term memory STM. (Sometimes called working memory)

Solms argues that it is quiet likely that the cells that survive the great pruning are deeply consolidated and serve as templates to later experiences.            If Solms is correct about this, and a lot of evidence indicates that he is, then may indicate that early experiences do influence our later lives and that our brains and bodies maybe good at storing these experiences accurately. He goes on to correctly argue, that the distinction between conscious and unconscious memory is very well established in neuroscience (implicit and explicit memories are synonymous with unconscious and conscious memory).

Explicit memory (remembering the day you got your dog, what you were doing etc),

Implicit memory: Not conscious, first person or verbal. It also includes memories of skills, habits and experiences we acquire through experience. This type of implicit memory is called procedural and involves ‘knowing how’ as opposed to knowing that.

PROCEDURAL MEMORY: Is a kind of bodily memory; e.g. knowledge of how to walk, how to cycle a bike, of how to type etc. Procedural memory and abstract memory can be dissociated it is common for patients to lose abilities but to retain the abstract knowledge about the skill they have lost. Procedural memory functions implicitly (unconsciously). Solms notes that as soon as procedural memory becomes explicit it becomes something different either episodic memory or semantic memory. Typically procedural memories are associated with both semantic and episodic memory. This fact is important for thinking about the clinical self. While procedural memory may accurately capture some childhood fact the act of turning it into episodic or semantic memory actively transforms its nature. So to some degree psychoanalytic reconstruction involves a falsification.

Another type of implicit memory is associative memory which Cavell argues is the way in which memories are organised along pathways that are associative and idiosyncratic (Cavell p. 13). She argues that all memory, thought and perception may move along associative networks (she cites Bracknel and Westen both of whom are psychoanalysts not psychologists).

Episodic Memory: Which concerns the specific context of an experienced event including time and place of the event.

Semantic Memory: Is acquired during an event but is stored separately from the memory of the event itself. Cavell notes that semantic memory is a network of associations and concepts that underlies our basic knowledge of the world (word meanings, facts, categories, propositions etc.) Solms and Turnbull et al note that studies of amnesia shows that episodic memories can be destroyed and semantic memories can remain intact (Solms and Turnbull p. 170). It is stored in the form of third person information. Semantic memory is divided into various subcomponents that can be damaged in isolation.

Emotional Memory:

“With a few other writers, LeDoux distinguishes emotional processes from feeling. His view is that ‘a subjective emotional experience, like the feeling of being afraid, results when we become consciously aware that an emotion system of the brain, like a defence system, is active’ The emotional meaning of a stimulus can begin to be appraised by the brain before it has made its way into conscious perception; that is, the brain may evaluate something as threatening – ‘bad’ before the person herself knows exactly what the stimulus is and what is threatening about it” (Cavell p.16)

LeDoux notes that emotional memory has two routes to affect our behaviour; there is the direct route that causes instant behaviour say, for example, a dog was burned by fire in the past and therefore he automatically flinches when around fire. There is also the emotional memory that is processed by the hippocampus provides the amygdala with information around the content of the emotional experience, allowing data from multiple memory systems to be unified into what may become, for a creature who can tell one, a coherent story (ibid p.17). Pre-verbal children register affective experiences before they can use symbols, and this pre-verbal, affectively coloured experiences continue to exert an influence throughout life, (ibid p17). However it is worth noting that while LeDoux acknowledges some similarity with his discoveries and Freud’s there are clear differences. LeDoux argues that there is no evidence that emotional memories are repressed rather they are unconscious in their nature because of the architecture of the brain On the other hand Anderson et al. (2004) show that we can willingly suppress an unwanted memory and that the longer it is suppressed the more thorough the job is (Cavell p. 20).

Overall the neuroscientific data, indicates that emotional, and motor memory are formed very early prior to learning language do serve as a structural template for future life; however a lot more work on the topic needs to be done. Nonetheless Solms and Turnbull claim in “The Brain and The Inner World” that the most vulnerable memories are the most recent ones while the most our earliest are the hardest to destroy because of the process of consolidation may indicate that there is something to the clinical infant that is worth researching into further.

The problem is that these unconscious memories are not unconscious in the sense of beingrepressed they are unconscious because of the structure of the brain. When we translate them into episodic memory we can never be one hundred percent sure of how accurate translation of the memories is. And there is always a risk of the therapist inadvertently implanting false memories into us.

A lot of people come to therapy because their ways of thinking and being have become mal-adaptive. Therapy helps them to rationally reconstruct how their behaviour became mal-adaptive and how they can become happier and healthier people. But we cannot say for certain that the narrative self constructed in therapy reflects reality accurately. We do know that this practice has practical utility John Thor Cornelius https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IQBx5TONHac has brought together the biggest meta analyses that have been done and shown psychoanalysis performs as good as Cognitive Behavioural Therapy in the short term, and better in the long term. So the clinical infant is justified pragmatically even it its epistemic status is somewhat sketchy. To improve the epistemic situation we need further studies into implanted memories and the neuroscience of memory and these facts need to be integrated into neuroscience.

Whatever the fate of the ‘clinical infant’ interms of its epistemic status, an important sense of who we are, is our narrative selves. Our narrative self, is the self we construct in interaction with our social group as soon as we become language users. From the moment people are born they are immersed in a readymade drama. Their name is prepared for them, their room is prepared for them, and they have a place within a family unit who already have a collective narrative (with some individual differences) created by the family about its nature and its relation to the wider word. From about 12months when the child starts triangulate on shared objects of experience with his parents and mouth words the child begins to make his faltering steps into the socio-linguistic world of his family. If the child has brothers, and sisters they will have their own phantasies of who the child is and what his relation is to the rest of the family. Likewise the parents will have similar phantasies about the child and its relation to the socio-linguistic world. A lot of the time the child will have behaviours labelled as good or bad; they will be told that they are good or bad boys by parents, sisters and peers and here will begin a process of judging and describing oneself interms of a relation to the competencies and normative judgements of others.

When people grasp a language with concepts which they share with others and can combine using rules to create a potentially infinite amount of utterances they have the capacity to think about themselves in whatever way they want. But they live in a particular society and their self conception will be constantly in interaction with the norms and idiosyncratic beliefs of the significant others lives that the person lives in. Thus say the person thinks they are generous, or a good singer, an excellent athlete their views on their selves will be judged by public criterion. If, for example, a person who thinks they are an excellent athlete finishes last in every competition they enter their self conception will be wildly at odds with public criterion. If the person has normal abilities to learn from others, and facts in the world his self conception will modify. So the narrative self is sometimes forced into line with public criterion. Though people don’t always test their beliefs about themselves, they don’t always utter them publically, and when they do sometimes people are too polite to correct them. Thus a person who considers himself funny, may elicit polite laughter from his peers, (who really don’t find him funny), he may not see their rolling eyes etc. So a big part of his narrative self is that of being funny. The narrative self is a constantly unfolding self sometimes, shaped by public criterion, and sometimes oblivious to it.

When a person enters into therapy say after a marriage break up they will tell a story about the marriage break up. This will involve descriptions of the spouse’s role in the break up, of his own role and the role of other involved parties. The therapist has no way of verifying the reality of the narrative self, except within the narrow confines of the therapy. Yet the narrative self is a vital part of pretty much all therapies. If we give up ‘the clinical infant’ are we forced to give up the ‘narrative self’? And is this giving up too much e.g. pretty much all therapies? I would argue that we cannot give up the ‘the clinical infant’ but must try to improve our ability to construct one by learning more about neuroscience, and through listening to analysands in as open and honest a manner as possible.

“Developmental psychology can inquire about the infant only as the infant is observed. To relate observed behaviour to subjective experience one must make inferential leaps. Clearly, the inferences will be more accurate if the data base from which one is leaping is extensive and well established. The study of intrapsychic experience must be informed by direct observation, as the source of most new information about infants continues to be naturalistic and experimental observations…In contrast to the infant as observed by developmental psychology a different “infant” gas been reconstructed by psychoanalytic theories in the course of clinical practice (primarily with adults). This infant is the joint creation of two people, the adult who grew up to become a psychiatric patient and the therapist, who has a theory about infant experience. This recreated infant made up of memories, present re-enactments in the transference, and theoretically guided by interpretations. I call this creation the clinical infant, to be distinguished from the observed infant, whose behaviour is examined at the very time of its occurrence.” ( The Intersubjective World of the Infant p. 15)

Daniel N Stern’s excellent ‘The Interpersonal World of the Infant’ was published thirty years ago. In his book he aimed to update psychoanalysis in light of recent findings in developmental psychology. Freud’s psychoanalytic model had proven to have excellent therapeutic success, but there were aspects of his psychological theories which didn’t make sense in light of developmental psychology. Furthermore there were off shoots from Freudian psychoanalysis, developed by people like Adler, Jung, Klein and Lacan which were equally successful in terms of pragmatic success of theories. A key problem was that despite being equally pragmatically successful in terms of therapy, the theories held contradictory views on the nature of man and on the nature of the unconscious. Since all of the contradictory theories cannot be true at the same time, then we need some way of distinguishing them, so grounding them in empirical findings would seem a great way of doing this[1].

Stern assumes that a sense of self exists long prior to the emergence of language. By sense of self he means non-reflexive awareness. He includes things like, agency, physical cohesion, sense of continuity, sense of affectivity, sense of self which can achieve intersubjecitivity (by 2000 Stern believed that the sense of self and other came together from the start), the sense of creating organisation, the sense of creating meaning (ibid p.7) He notes that from birth babies experience themselves as self’s differentiated from others, there is never an autistic stage of development. From 2-6 months children consolidate this sense of self, there is no symbiotic phase. He argues that infants are excellent reality testers. Some of his observations are clearly highly critical of a lot of psychoanalysts views:

“Further, many of the phenomena thought by psychoanalytic theory to play a crucial role in early development, such as delusions of merger or fusion, splitting, and defensive or paranoid fantasies, are not applicable to the infancy period- that is, before the age of roughly eighteen to twenty-four months- but are conceivable only after the capacity for symbolization as evidenced by language emerging, when infancy ends.” (ibid p.11)

Needless to say Stern’s research wasn’t met by universal praise. Some theorists dismissed the relevance of research from outside of psychoanalytic circles (neuropsychoanalysts today are similarly irrationally criticised). While others had more measured criticisms, for example noting the lack of cross cultural data used by Stern, and some developmental psychologists critiqued the fact that the psychoanalytic interpretations went well beyond the facts.

In his 2000 new introduction to the ‘The Intersubjective World of The Infant’ Stern addressed some of the critics of his book and updated his ideas in light of empirical advances that occurred in the 15 years since he wrote the book. In this blog post I intend to draw some parallels between the neuropsychoanalytic research programme which was just beginning at the time Stern wrote his new introduction. I will also discuss some recent evidence from developmental psychology and neuroscience which has emerged in the 15 years since Stern wrote his new introduction.

In his new introduction Stern reminds us that a central finding of his research is that as we go through developmental stages, earlier stages don’t just disappear they remain with us throughout our lives:

“No emerging domain disappears; each remains active and interacts dynamically with all the others. In fact, each domain facilitates the emergence of the ones that follow. In this way, all ways-of-being-with-others remain with us throughout the life span, whereas according to the stage model, all mental organisation can be accessed only by means of a process like regression.” (Stern ‘The Intersubjective World of the Infant XII of 2000 Introduction)

He argued that he switched to the Layered model because the Freudian model of the psychosexual stages of development which postulated discrete stages of development was a disaster at predicting later psychopathology. He also felt that Piaget’s model while good at explaining how the child goes learns how to deal with the inanimate world, things such as number, weight , volume etc was inadequate to deal with a child’s emotional world. Here I think Stern has a point. A big part of my own work over the last few years has been explaining, as Quine put it, how the child goes from stimulus to science. One of the primary weakness of my work is that I have focused almost exclusively on the cognitive aspect of this area. However, neuroscientific data indicates that any supposed naturalised epistemology that ignores the role of the emotional world will be missing out on a large piece of the picture. Computers may be able to calculate without emotion, likewise fictional characters like Spock may reason independent of emotion. However humans interaction with and thoughts about the world are deeply dependent on emotional experiences which influence our cognitive performance. Antonio Damasio’s 1996 Somatic Marker Hypothesis is a good indication of the importance of emotion in human practical reasoning. Mark Solms nicely summed up the importance of Damasio’s results in his ‘The Brain and The Inner World’. By now everybody knows the story of Phineas Gage who in 1840 had an accident which resulted in a rod being shot through his cheek bone up through the frontal lobe of his brain. Gage recovered from the accident, and remained more or less the same in terms of IQ after the accident. However there were noticeable changes to Gage’s personality after the accident, prior to the accident Gage was a responsible savvy member of his community, however after the accident things changed. A physician of the time Harlow described the changes Harlow underwent:

“… The equilibrium or balance, so to speak, between his intellectual faculties and animal propensities, seems to have been destroyed. He is fitful, irreverent, indulging at times in the grossest profanity (which has previously not been his custom), manifesting but little deference for his fellows, impatient of restraint of advice when it conflicts with his desires, at times pertinaciously obstinate, yet capricious and vacillating, devising many plans of future operation, which are no sooner arranged than they are abandoned. … In this regard his mind was radically changed, so decidedly that his friends and acquaintances said that he was “no longer Gage” (Harlow, 1868 p. 327)[2]

Solms notes that cases like Gage’s have puzzled neuropsychologists for years. How could people who measured more or less as normal on intelligence tests behave in ways that are so radically irrational. Damasio’s somatic marker hypothesis showed that what was going wrong with people like Gage was that damage to the frontal lobe meant an impaired ability of the brain to interpret messages from the emotional centres of the brain. As Solms put:

“It appears that poor judgement- and decision making abilities of these patients follow from an inability to use the emotion-learning systems, which provide information about the likely outcome of future decisions. ( ‘The Brain and The Inner World p. 177)

Here Solms is correctly interpreting Damasio’s result in showing the vital importance in practical reasoning. I think any account of Naturalised Epistemology needs to integrate findings like Damasio’s and show to what extent our emotions relate to our practical as well as theoretical reasoning. Stern as a psychoanalyst is keenly aware of the role that emotion plays in our daily life, so it is understandable that he would have found Piaget’s narrow focus on abstract cognitive knowledge a bit restrictive. Sterns look at developmental data confirmed that the (normally developing) child from the beginning experiences the physical world and the world of emotional attachment to others. From the start we are immersed in a world that we care about and has meaning for us, at no stage are we disinterested Cartesian Observers.

As a consequence of this interpretative process we begin distinguishing ourselves from, other agents, and objects in the world. Stern notes:

“…This book maintains that Self/Other differentiation is in place and process almost from the beginning” (ibid p. XIII)

This claim of Stern’s, which he backs up with mountains of empirical data, flies in the face of Freud’s claims (and many other psychoanalysts like Klein) about an autistic phase of human development. In her excellent book ‘Becoming a Subject’ Marcia Cavell used both Donald Davidson’s transcendental arguments on the necessity of a self-other and a shared object of experience in order to learn a language and her view is largely consistent with Sterns empirical arguments. Stern’s empirical data backs up Davidson’s claim about the self and other being constituted equally primordially from the beginning. As I said above for similar conclusions argued from a phenomenological point of view see Stolorow’s ‘World, Affectivity, and Trauma’.

Stern goes on to argue as follows:

“One consequence of the books application of a narrative perspective to the nonverbal has been the discovery of a language useful to many psychotherapists that rely on the nonverbal. I am thinking particularly of dance, music, body, and movement therapy, as well as existential therapies.” (ibid p. XV)

I think that this aspect of Stern’s work is important to look at. His developmental work has led him in the direction of embodied cognition and he cites approvingly the work of Evan Thompson, Varela etc. For a discussion of embodied cognition see my blog-post’s https://www.academia.edu/9676291/Deacon_and_Incomplete_Nature as well as https://www.academia.edu/9675447/Dennett_on_Deacon_and_Thompson_A_double_standard .Stern’s focus on embodied cognition is congenial to both the existential psychoanalysis of Stolorow etc who were heavily influenced by Heidegger and the Work of Cavell et al who were influenced by Davidson.

“Researchers working within the new perspective of an embodied mind, where the traditional sharp separation between body and mind is no longer maintained, have provided insights into the nature of a primary consciousness that is usable in infancy (e.g., Clark, 1997, Damasio, 1999; Varela, Thompson, and Rosch, 1993) primary consciousness, is not self reflexive, it is not verbalised, and it lasts only during the present moment”

Stern’s work on embodied cognition helps make sense of a real embodied person developing in a shared world with other embodied subjects. His view is a welcome change from the quasi-solipsism favoured by some psycho-therapists. Stern’s leaning on the work of neuroscientist Damasio also helps to create a links with Neuropsychoanalysis. Neuropsychoanalysis is a bridge subject which aims to help develop a mutually helpful exchange of ideas between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Some of Stern’s work is largely consistent with modern Neuropsychoanalysis. This offers a further bridge between developmental psychology, psychoanalysis, and neuroscience and can help turn psychoanalysis back into the scientific endeavour that Freud always recommended.

Stern notes that all mental acts are accompanied by input from the body. Damasio calls these inputs “background feelings” and Stern calls them “vitality affects” (ibid p. XVII). In Solms and Turnbull’s ‘The Brain and the Inner World’, they also make use of Damasio (1999), distinction between core consciousness which is background awareness of bodily feelings and states, and extended consciousness of the sensory world we experience. Solms notes that we know from brain damage that while our extended consciousness can be destroyed and our core consciousness spared the converse is not true. If a person’s core consciousness is destroyed through damage to the extended reticular and thalamic activating system, all consciousness is destroyed. Damasio’s discoveries show that animals with similar brain physiology to our own will have core consciousness like us.

Stern builds on Damasio’s work arguing that when our background awareness is connected to an intentional object in the external world we achieve primary consciousness which is a state of awareness he thinks other animals lack entirely. It is worth noting that the picture of the embodied nature of consciousness Stern sketches has been supported independently by contemporary researches into consciousness. In her 2013 book ‘Touching a Nerve’ neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland summed up recent research into consciousness. I have discussed her work in detail in another blog-post https://www.academia.edu/9688784/The_Churchlands_Consciousness_and_Naturalised_Epistemology I recommend people read the post in full to grasp her position on consciousness. Here I will merely outline the aspects of her work that is relevant to the work of Stern.

In her (2013) Touching a Nerve Patricia Churchland outlined what she saw as the current consciousness studies at the present time. She agrees with Dennett that there is no single location in the brain where consciousness occurs, and argues that there are particular structures in the brain (along with looping links connecting those structures) which are necessary for the maintenance of consciousness. She maintains that it is important to distinguish between two things:

1. The structures that support being conscious of ANYTHING AT ALL.
2. The structures that support being conscious of THIS AND THAT ( the contents of consciousness)

Now as we saw above Stern and Solms who are both following the work of neuroscientist Damasio make the same distinction. However they describe consciousness of anything at all as the monitoring of our bodies which Stern calls the background music of being alive. In this connection Churchland discusses the work of Nicholas Schiff a neurologist who studies disorders of consciousness. His research led him to the central thalamus and its ingoing and outgoing pathways as giving us the capacity to respond to the world. She argues that there are looping neurons from these upper layers of the cortex projecting right back to the ribbon in the central thalamus (Touching a Nerve p. 235). The looping back allows for maintaining an especially potent but transient connection for a chunk of time.

She also argues that some regions of the thalamus that connect to, for example, the visual area do so in a domain specific manner. So the retina is connected to the LGN in the thalamus, however the LGN projects only to the visual cortex area V1 not to everywhere, not even to everywhere in the visual cortex (ibid p.235). This is typical of other sensory modalities. She calls this a system by system development of a specific signal. She notes that things are different in the central thalamus, the pattern of the central thalamus suggests a different set of functions: be awake and alert or down regulate and doze. She makes the point that the distinction of functions in the thalamus corresponds with the distinction between being aware of something in particular and being aware of anything.

She goes on to say that there are other aspects of the central thalamus which separates it from other cortico-thalamic systems such as the style of neuronal activity. The central thalamus has unique connectivity and unique behaviour. Think of this interms of the awake/sleep cycle. During awake and dreaming states the neurons fire in bursts an unusually high rate (800-1000 times per second). This bursting pattern is not displayed during dreamless sleep. So this strongly indicates that the central thalamus plays a big role in making people conscious.

The ribbon of neurons that is the central thalamus is controlled by the brain cell and regulates the cortical neurons to ready themselves for consciousness. In a nutshell BRAINSTEM+ CENTRAL THALAMUS + CORTEX is the support structure for consciousness.

She goes on to describe what happens when the Central Thalamus is damaged:

1. If a lesion occurs on one side of the Central Thalamus people tend not to be conscious of the affected side. If both sides are affected then the person is in a coma.

Again this is consistent with Stern and Solms claim that damage to core consciousness destroys consciousness, but we can have our extended consciousness destroyed and still be conscious in an animalistic way.

To be aware of something, say a dog barking one needs to have the brainstem, central thalamus and upper layer of cortex in its on state. Central Thalamic Neurons must be firing in bursts that ride the lower frequency brain wave of 40hertz. In addition the specific areas of the thalamus (for sound and sight, respectively) must be talking to the proprietary areas of the cortex.

Overall one can see that Churchland’s description of the current state of play on consciousness studies is largely consistent with the views that Stern and Solms were working with 15 years earlier.

Stern builds the bridge from self to other through discussing the literature on mirror neurons. He cites Braten (1998) whose work indicates that mirror neurons take effect from the start and are part of the reason we can distinguish between self-other and shared objects of experience. Based on evidence from mirror neurons Stern makes the following claim:

“In light of the new evidence on other-centered-participation shown by infants in their many forms of imitation, as well as the new findings on mirror neurons and adaptive oscillators, I am now convinced that early forms of intersubjectivity exist almost from the beginning of life” (Stern ‘The Interpersonal World of the Infant p. XXII)

Based on Stern’s developmental data (and neurological data) he not only argues that intersubjectivity is there from the start but that there are four main ways of being intersubjectively there with others. (1) Self Regulating Other: Which is involves regulation of things like security, attachment, arousal, activation, pleasure, etc (2) Primary intersubjectivity (which begins around 9 months) where we are linked to the other via other centric participation. (3) Self in the presence of the other: Stern describes this as the type of thinking that occurs when the self is in the presence of another though not interacting with them. (4) The sense of self with others as part of a family triad. Stern argues that by three months the child begins to form expectations and representations of the self as part of a triadic constellation (ibid p. XXIII).

Stern’s four different senses of the self with others are very important. However it is equally important to emphasise the importance of our sense of relatedness to each other against background of a shared world of experience. Psychoanalyst’s Stolorow and Cavell have correctly emphasised that our embodied interaction with a shared world of experience is a necessary condition of any thought. Stern doesn’t deny any of this, as can be seen from above he argues that our sense of a shared world of experience is equiprimordial with our sense of others. Nonetheless I think that it is important to emphasise the point by considering some recent developmental that supports Stern on this point. The epistemological triangle can only be complete when the objective world is added. This is a point that is so obvious (a shared world of experience is ever present) that we sometimes play down this truism. On this issue I think it is important to discuss the relation some psychological data on children’s relation to the world before continuing on discussing the dyadic relationship that exists between people.

Jean Piaget’s experimental research led him to believe that young children at the age of five months do not have an adequate knowledge of objects and that they have to pass through a variety of developmental stages before they will acquire the full concept of an object. Piaget noted that children playing with a ball will not search for it if it runs out of their field of vision. He drew the conclusion that they do not have knowledge of object permanence at this age. As early as the seventies, psychologists such as Bower were questioning Piaget’s view by claiming that these babies do not search for the missing objects because of a problem of coordinating their movement. And since the seventies, it has been common-place to try to test children’s concept of an object by using experiments that do not require coordinated sequences of actions. Bower’s studies have made surprising discoveries: (Here I am citing from Baillargeon, R., Spelke, E, and Wasserman’s paper ‘‘Object permanence in infants’’):

Bower’s studies have yielded four findings that seem to have provided evidence for object permanence in infants well below 9 months. First, 7 week old Infants were found to discriminate between disappearances that signalled the continued existence of an object (e.g. Gradual Occlusion), and disappearances that did not (e.g. gradual dissolution or sudden implosion). Second, 2 month old infants were found to anticipate the reappearance of an object that stopped behind the screen, ‘looking to that half of the movement path the object would have reached had it not stopped’ Third, five month old infants were found to show disruptions in their tracking when an object was altered while passing behind the screen: they tended to look back at the screen, as though in search of the original object. Finally, 5-month-old-infants were found to reach for an object that had been hidden by darkening the room. (1985, 195)

However, Bower’s experiments are not conclusive evidence that children are born with concepts of object permanence. Piaget himself claimed in a personal correspondence with Bower that he could interpret some of these experiments in a way which was consistent with his own theory (ibid., 97). Because of the inconclusiveness of the debate between Bower and Piaget,[3] Baillargeon et al. set up more rigorous tests to show that humans are born with concepts of object permanence. Quine, like Piaget, also argued that Bower’s experiments did not necessarily show that a 4-month-old child has a concept of an object:

True, an infant is observed to expect a steadily moving object to reappear after it passes behind a screen; but all this happens within the specious present, and reflects rather the expectation of continuity of a present feature than the reification of an intermittently absent object. (1969, 24)

Here Quine is interpreting Bower’s famous experiment to mean not that the young child has a concept of an object, but as indicating that the young child expects continuity in his experiences. Baillargeon et al.’s experiment aimed to test this view of Quine and Piaget’s.

They began by testing whether children have what they called The Solidity Principle, which was the principle that a solid object cannot pass through another solid object. An experiment was set up where an object was presented to the child and then occluded. Then another object was rolled towards the occluded object. If the child exhibited surprise that the object moved through the space which seemed to be occupied by first the object, then this would exhibit two things: first, that the child had grasped the Solidity Principle; second, that the child understood object permanence, because he knew the objects still existed when occluded. Baillargeon et al performed this experiment on four month old children. An unargued assumption of the experiment was that the child was exhibiting surprise when he stared at the event longer than when it did not violate the solidity principle and the object permanence principle. When completed the experiment showed that four-month-old infants do seem to reason according to the principle of solidity, and the principle of object permanence.

Quine explained Bower’s experimental results by saying that the child expected the object to return out the other side of the screen because of an expectation of continuity. The child saw the object-shaped thing move towards and behind a screen. So he expected this object-shaped thing to continue moving in the same direction as it started from; hence, the surprise when it did not move out the other side of the screen. For Quine this in no way indicates that our child has a sophisticated concept of an object. However, expectation of continuity does not explain what is going on in Baillargeon et al.’s experiment. The child is exhibiting two beliefs: first, the belief that object-shaped things do not disappear when occluded; second, that object-shaped things are solid, and hence cannot be moved through. Hence the surprise the child exhibits when the object appears on the other side of the screen as though it had passed through the original object. Obviously, expectation of continuity does not explain what is going on in Baillargeon et al’s experiment. So to account for both Bower and Baillargeon’s experimental results, Quine needs to postulate at a minimum that 4 month old children expect object-shaped things not to disappear when occluded, to move in undeviating paths unless stopped by another object-shaped blob, and to have solidity. Research by Baillargeon et al. which I have just outlined indicates that four-month-old children seem to have implicit knowledge of the following five principles about objects:

(1) The principle of solidity.

(2) The principle that objects are three-dimensional.

(3) Objects tend to move on undeviating paths.

(4) Objects move continuously through space and time.

(5) Objects only move when contacted by another object. (Children make exceptions to this principle when they are viewing intentional objects)

This work of Baillargeon et al. indicates that children from a very young age have an intricate knowledge of objects. Stern was aware of some of this work (though a lot of it was discovered after he wrote his book), and he felt important as it is it needs to be looked at alongside data on children’s implicit knowledge of others. Happily there has been a stunning amount of research in this area aswell, people like Simon Baron-Cohen[4] work indicates that prior to learning language, normal children view other people as intentional agents with beliefs, desires etc. Furthermore, there is evidence that such children who lack this theory of mind suffer severe language learning difficulties.[5] The evidence for a pre-linguistic theory of mind has been summed up succinctly by the psychologist Paul Bloom:

What understanding do prelinguistic children have about the minds of others? Consider first sensitivity to what other people are attending to. By around nine months, a baby will naturally follow its mother’s line of regard (Butterworth, 1991), and will also follow her pointing gestures (Murphy and Messer 1977), at about the same age, babies can monitor their parents’ emotional reactions to potentially dangerous situations and react accordingly. For instance when seeing a spider, a baby will be less likely to approach it, if its mother seems fearful than if she seems happy (Zarbatany and Lamb 1985) and when babies are uncertain or hesitant, they check what their mother is looking at and how she is reacting (Bretherton, 1992)… (2000, 67)

Bloom then wonders whether the gaze following is really an indication that the child has an implicit theory of mind, as Baron-Cohen believes it does, or whether the gaze is just an automatic orientating device that has nothing to do with intentional attribution. And he cites an experiment which seems to indicate that Baron-Cohen was indeed correct:

One way to address this question is to ask what sort of stimuli elicit gaze following in babies. A study with 12-month-olds by Johnson, Slaughter, and Carey (in press) reports an intriguing finding. When exposed to a robot who acts contingently with them through beeping and light flashing, but that has no face, babies will nonetheless follow its gaze (the orientation of the front, reactive part of the robot) treating it as if it were a person. But they do not do so if a faceless robot fails to interact with them in a meaningful way. This suggests that gaze following is applied to entities that give some sign of having intentional states, regardless of their appearance, and supports the view that gaze following is related, at least for twelve-month-olds to intentional attribution.(ibid, 62).

In my next blog post I will discuss in more detail how current developmental data, and neuroscientific discoveries support Sterns views on the nature of the self against the view supported by people by Klein. To do this I will describe the developmental data presented by Stern in light of more recent research, and compare this with the extravagant speculations of Klein. By closely analysing Klein’s texts I will show that her claims while perhaps supported by the pragmatic success of her and her disciples is not supported by any empirical data. I will demonstrate that based on current empirical data the more moderate position argued for by Stern is the one that warrants further research. I will also further develop parallels with Neuropsychoanalysis and Sterns position.

[1] I am not here claiming that this was Stern’s motive in writing the ‘Interpersonal World of The Infant’ merely that I think it is a happy consequence of this type of interdisciplinary empirical research.

[2] Quote taken from Solms and Turnbull 2000 ‘The Brain and The Inner World p. 3)

[3] Piaget is not only a strong proponent of the view that the empirical evidence for innate concepts is weak; he also refuses to grant any significance to Chomskies’ poverty of stimulus argument. So Piaget is, in effect, one of the strongest opponents of both the logical and empirical argument for innate concepts. Chomsky and Piaget had a public debate in the 1970 and this debate is recorded in the Book: Piattelli-Palmarini, M EDS Language and Learning:The debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky.

[4] See Simon Baron Cohen:Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind.

[5] See for example Cohen’s book Mindblindness, and Kuhl, P. ‘‘Is speech learning gated by the social brain?’’ Developmental Science 10 pp 110-120

“What all of this does occasion, if grasped, is change in prevalent attitudes towards meaning, ideas and propositions” (Quine: Reply to Chomsky)

Dreams have perplexed people as long as people have existed. They have been viewed as messages from the Gods, as visitations to other worlds, or mere babble conjured up by the semi-conscious brain. In 1900 Freud wrote his famous (or infamous) book ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’, where he argued that Dreams carried hidden desires which could be deciphered once one knew the language that Dreams were constructed in. In this short blog-post I want to discuss dreams and whether they do indeed express unconscious desires, wishes etc. Before beginning my analysis I will first outline two recent dreams I had. I will not be trying to interpret my dreams. Rather I will use them as illustrations my own direct experiences on the topic. I believe it is important for philosophers to go to their own direct experiences as much as possible, in order to ground our beliefs in our experienced reality as much as possible. Not that I think one person’s idiosyncratic experiences should somehow constrain science. Rather I think it is just important to use our own experiences as a template to see how much and to what degree our experiences coincide with what science is telling us. Furthermore when thinking about the mind I think it is important to avoid making the Typical Mind Fallacy of assuming that all minds are identical to our own. One way to avoid making this mistake is to directly describe one’s experiences and compare them with others to see to what degree ones experiences represent those of all people. Obviously it takes brain scans and behavioural tests to verify if people actually think differently, verbal reports are merely a starting point. So I will begin my blog-post by writing down two of my most recent dreams and I encourage people reading this blog-post to do the same themselves:

Dream 1: Occurred 2 nights ago:

“ One of the first things I remembered about my dream was that some girl had gone missing down a very deep cavern. People had searched but could not find her. Two friends of mine tried to find the missing girl but they had to return as one of them was afraid of some wolves who were in the cavern and when you got deep into the cavern it was flooded and you needed to be able to swim down there. I was worried because the girl (sometimes in the dream it switched between being a girl missing, and many people being missing) had gone deeper and further into the cavern than should have been possible. Eventually myself and a friend of mine went into the cavern to look for the girl, as we descended into it we eventually came across water and had to start swimming. The water was overwhelming. It was extremely difficult to swim in and I had the constant worry about being bitten by sharks. I wanted to turn back but my friend found this confusing and wanted to continue. Eventually someone (rescued/captured us), I don’t really what happened then…the next thing I remember was that my friend and I were back in a lab. Suddenly a machine in our lab contacted us, we had a model T Rex that was given to us by the person who saved us in the cavern last time. I through the T Rex model at the machine and the person talking through the machine destroyed the T Rex model. I shouted at my friend it is from a deeper layer than the creature who rescued us and is more powerful. We ran out of the lab and I felt that the theory of evolution had been disproven twice by something personal… the next thing I remember was I was back at big empty house that in the dream was my home. I went out to get some beers I met a friend of mine who had rescued the girl from the cavern she seemed in a terrible state. I went and picked up some beers and when I returned to my house it was vandalised”

Dream 2 which occurred last night:

“ I was looking for someone and a girl told me that they were in a room, but when I looked in the room I could see nobody. The girl laughed at me, and told me I could see them from another angle. So I walked around and looked in the back door. I could see people in the room though at a skewed angle. They laughed and told me that they weren’t really them but were representations from elsewhere…From here things get sketchy I remember turning from the room and meeting someone who had something wrong with his foot, somebody told me he was a copy of another person, that subjectively the person would think he was the real him but there would be another more real version of him somewhere. Then I saw a lot of replica’s of other people walking with their originals. I sat down to dinner. I looked at my foot it had something on it, I realised I was a replica. I talked with others about being a replica. A guy informed me that human replicas were not entirely controllable by aliens, but that lower order replicas of animals or plants were almost entirely controlled by aliens. We all went for a drive, I was sitting in the back of the car, when the driver started driving I fell out part of my leg was caught under the door of the car. I and other passengers shouted at the driver to stop but he only drove faster. This went on for ages. Eventually the car stopped…The next thing I knew I was walking towards a hotel and I recognised an acquaintance he asked me if I had got some product for him which I had promised. I informed him that I had not gotten it but would do so by tomorrow. We then bitched about the idiotic recklessness of the driver… the next thing I remember I was back at the dinner table here my memory of the dream breaks down. I vaguely remember that we and others at the table were changing form, things were getting frightening so we ran from the table. We ended up running over a bridge. But the bridge was surrounded by Ivy like a tissue of webs. The Ivy connected to my foot. We realised I had been captured by the vegetation. My friends went on. I lay ready to be transformed by the vegetation and I heard a beautiful song playing in the background singing the lyrics ‘Everything is Colours’.”

Freud’s theory of dreaming stated that the primary purpose of dreams was wish fulfilment. He noted that humans have a biological need to sleep but that worries and needs have a habit of waking people up from a deep sleep. Thus in order to keep us asleep the psyche constructed dreams which helped us fulfil our wishes/desires. Now there was obviously a problem with Freud’s theory from the outset if dreams were wish-fulfilments why do we have bad dreams and nightmares etc. Freud’s answer to this question involved arguing that the manifest appearance of dreams masked the real meaning of the dreams. On his theory our wishes and desires are often unconscious, and if we they entered consciousness they would be so disturbing we would wake up. So our desires are fulfilled in dreams in disguised forms.

Freud (like Skinner and most psychologists) wanted to ground his theory on evolutionary facts. He looked at man as an animal created by the forces of natural selection whose animal nature was repressed by societal norms. Those of us brought up according to cultural norms were indoctrinated with a form of ethics of the particular society we are born into. But our societal ethics does not always help us satisfy our unconscious animal urges for power, sex etc. According to Freud we satisfy instinctive urges that society judges unacceptable through Phantasy. By studying the things like Parapraxes (slips of the tongue) and dreams he claimed to have discovered that humans have unconscious urges.

Freud claimed by analysing the nature of dreams he discovered that they worked according to different laws of logic[1]. His analysis of dreams revealed that it worked according to the following logic (1) Exemption from Mutual Contradiction, (2) Timelessness, and (3) Replacement of External by Psychical Reality, (3) the absence of negation. From my own introspective examination of my dreams I will admit, that speaking only for my experiences, my dreams sometimes take the form that Freud claims is universal of dreams[2]. In my above dream we were looking for one person (a girl), and at the same time we were looking for a group of people. To me in the dream it didn’t seem at all strange to be looking for one person and a group in fact, it seemed that they were identical. So my dream involved identification of a group with an individual, it involved an acceptance of contradictions. I assumed that One = Many; if many equals 4 (or any number other than 1), then saying that 1 = 4 this will lead to wild contradictions in any mathematical system[3]. I have had many dreams where I talked to a person who represented an entire class of people, and have had no difficulty accepting contradictory states e.g. thinking a person was both dead and alive at the same time. So for the very little it is worth my introspective experiences has features that correspond to the logic Freud discusses. According to Freud when you understand the logic of the dream work you can unmask the latent content of a person’s dreams. The real meaning that lies under the manifest image that is the dream content we experience. I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to analyse my dreams J

In a therapeutic situation Freud used the concept of free association, which was predicated on the concept of psychic determinism. So if a person has a particular image in their dreams Freud asks them to talk about what they associate with the image. The connections people make with the image will from Freud’s perspectives reveal the persons emotional connections with the image. Where the person’s free associations break down this reveals the persons possible unconscious feelings on the particular dream image. Freud began his studies by working on Hysteria (what we would call a psycho-somatic disorder). With his studies in Hysteria Freud believed that he discovered that people were unconsciously using physical disorders as a way of coping with unconscious disorders.

Freud was used his techniques on himself. His early interest in dreams was inspired by an event in his life. When his friend and fellow Doctor argued that Freud’s psychoanalytic treatments were not working on his patient Irma Freud had a dream which showed Otto in a foolish light, Freud interpreted this as unconscious resentment on Otto.

Freud’s theory of dreams had a dual existence in academic psychology with the rise of behaviourism it was largely treated with distain. But in the psychiatry and the humanities it was adopted by most people as a work of genius. However, while it enjoyed hegemony in psychiatry for for 75 years, from 1975 onwards the work of Hobson seemed to have refuted Freudian theories of Dreams[4].

Solms and Turnbull correctly noted that the work of Hobson seemed to have refuted Freud:

“… They were able to claim that since generation of REM is an automatic, pre-programmed process its unconscious mental correlate is as “motivationally neutral as the brainstem mechanism that generates your heartbeat. This much seemed certain…Some 25 years after it was first proposed, it is still completely dominates the field of REM sleep research. By 1975, then some of the great mysteries surrounding sleep and dreaming appeared to have been resolved. ..Hobson and McCarley 1977 seemed to have destroyed Freud’s theory of dreams with their activation synthesis model” ibid pp. 187-189)

On Hobson and McCarley’s model dreams were activated by the mechanisms in the Pons of the brain stem. And since the Pons was in no way connected to higher brain processes Hobson and McCarley were quick to point out that it had nothing to do with complex thoughts or desires. So they noted that brains were not caused by the type of complex desires that Freud postulated. The synthesis aspect of the model notes that the forebrain that is activated by the Pons tries to make sense of the random images, thoughts etc that the Pons has activated. But the whole process is random and ultimately on this model dreams do not have the properties that Freud attributed to them. In their ‘The Brain and the Inner World’ Solms and Turnbull noted that at a 1976 meeting of the American Psychiatric Association a very pro-psychoanalytic crowd massively agreed that Freud’s ‘The Interpretation of Dreams’ had been refuted by recent neuroscience. Now scientific disputes are not solved by a vote; but it is instructive that in 1976, the vast majority of psychoanalytic orientated psychiatrists believed by Hobson had refuted Freud.

Solms though argued that recent evidence shows that Hobson’s theories are not as sound as originally believed. Firstly Solms noted that Hobson (and the vast majority of dream researchers) assumed that dreams only occurred during REM activity (which is caused by the Pons), but actually up to 20 percent of dreams occur in non REM states. Solms noted as follows:

“In a 1997 study, 6 patients who had sustained damage to the REM-generating regions of the Pons were asked whether or not they were still dreaming, and their answers were a clear “yes”. In contrast, more than 40 others patients with damage to specific parts of the forebrain, nowhere near the critical REM-generating structures, did experience a cessation of dreaming following their brain damage-but in those patients the REM state was preserved” (ibid p. 193)

The obvious conclusion to draw as Solms did was that contra Hobson dreams are causally dependent on REM states. Solms research indicates that from a neurological perspective dreams can be caused by a variety of different states they can even be generated by the forebrain. Solms notes that Dreaming can be triggered by arousal from any place within the brain, including emotion, memory etc.

As I said above Freud argued that dreams were wish fulfilments which helped us sleep. But there was little way of helping testing his claims circa 1900. However recent research on brain damaged people who report that they no longer sleep indicates that they sleep worse than typical patients (see Solms 1995). This is to some degree a confirmation of Freud’s views, though needless to say much more research needs to be done on the topic.

As things stand from my limited knowledge on the subject the debate between people like Hobson and Solms is still wide open on the issue of the nature of dreams (though the evidence is swinging towards Solms sympathetic reading of Freud). That said I think to some degree the debate is much ado about nothing. I think that if Solms is tilting at wind mills by looking for the intrinsic meaning of dreams. Solms despite his competence as a neuroscientist believes that there exists real intentionality of the unconscious mind. He had presented no evidence to support this view.

I think that rather than think Freudian dream interpretation stands or falls on the debate between Hobson and Solms we should adopt a more pragmatic approach. Dreams are typically ambiguous, in some sense they are like Rorschach symbols. We can treat an analysands reactions to them as indicating what they are worried about, interested in. We can do this by letting them talk, and interpreting their talk. This is what talking therapy was originally about after all.

[1] For a more explicit working out of the supposed laws of the unconscious see Matte Blanco ‘The Unconscious as Infinite Sets’ where he works out mathematically the logic of the Freudian Unconscious.

[2] Obviously my own experiences should not be taken as having any real validity other than as data as to how things seem to one subject.

[3] Obviously as Matte Blanco noted we map many onto 1 in infinite sets but going into this would involve too much of a detour. The short story is for Blanco the unconscious is structured very similar to the infinite discovered by Cantor.

[4] Here I am following the work of ‘The Brain and The Inner World’ by Solms and Turnbull (2002)

LANGUAGE AND PHYSICS A DISCUSSION OF SOME ISSUES

“Many physicists have gone so long not understanding quantum physics that they think it is a mistake to even try”

               “The world doesn’t speak only we do” Richard Rorty

Facebook can be a great medium to think through various different scientific and philosophical issues. A while ago on Facebook a friend of mind Fabiola Soreng posted an interesting quote by Heisenberg:

“It is not surprising that our language should be incapable of describing the processes occurring within the atoms, for, as has been remarked, it was invented to describe the experiences of daily life, and these consist only of processes involving exceedingly large numbers of atoms. Furthermore, it is very difficult to modify our language so that it will be able to describe these atomic processes, for words can only describe things of which we can form mental pictures, and this ability, too, is a result of daily experience. Fortunately, mathematics is not subject to this limitation, and it has been possible to invent a mathematical scheme — the quantum theory — which seems entirely adequate for the treatment of atomic processes; for visualisation, however, we must content ourselves with two incomplete analogies — the wave picture and the corpuscular picture.”

I had read this claim by Heisenberg many years ago in his book ‘Physics and Philosophy’. Over the years I have heard it repeated many times by various different physicists. Below is a nice discussion of the perils of trying to talk about physics when not being clear about language http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P0TNJrTlbBQ&fb_action_ids=10152932376023008&fb_action_types=og.shares&fb_source=other_multiline&action_object_map=%5B528345130628302%5D&action_type_map=%5B%22og.shares%22%5D&action_ref_map=%5B%5D

When reading the post on Fabiola’s page I believed that these physicists including Heisenberg had inherited a logical positivist view on the nature of language, for example a Carnap/Ayer type view on language. I wondered if physicists today knew that few if any theorists would accept the simple picture theory of language that Ayer, following the early Wittgenstein, argued for. When I voiced these concerns Fabiola correctly informed me that a lot of physicists like Heisenberg were very critical of Logical Positivists and my historical understanding of the issue was deficient. That said I was still unclear as to what justification physicists had for their claim that language was incapable of describing the world of Quantum Mechanics etc. If they simply meant that in their experience language was a bad tool then there would be little issue. But if they on the other hand argued that language was structurally deficient then things would be different and they would need to provide some justification for their claims about the nature of language. So needless to say I was delighted to see that she tagged her friend physicist David Samuel Silverstein into our discussion. However before moving on to Silverstein I will first give a brief outline of Heisenberg’s reasons for thinking that language is inadequate to describe reality.

Heisenberg discusses language in his ‘Physics and Philosophy’ in the chapter ‘Language and Reality’. He argues that language is by its nature vague and that even if we try to define the terms of language we will have to rely on some basic concepts which are themselves vague. He claims that language is vague because of its evolutionary history. He gives various examples of what he sees as the primary difficulty with language, e.g. colour blind people who use the word red and green without having any idea of what the actual extension of these terms. He begins with a discussion of colour and appeals to the work of Socrates who in Plato’s dialogues showed the slippery nature of concepts that we think we have a handle of e.g. Justice, Equality, The Good, etc. He credits Aristotle with giving us tight definitions of concepts and says that Aristotle gave us our scientific language.

He then notes that Aristotle’s emphasis on logical analysis and syllogisms etc, while important doesn’t capture the actual vague pattern of ordinary language discourse. He then talks about how we develop a scientific language (through technical definitions) which is different from natural language. He argues that this technical language, prior to the theory of Relativity and Quantum Theory, could be employed consistently and without difficulty. With the mathematical and experimental discoveries of relativity and quantum theory things changed. He argued that since our language formed in a Newtonian world it would be of little use in describing non-Newtonian concepts.

He seems to think that with regard to language it gradually moulds itself around new theoretical developments. He notes that (scientific) language is now in line with Einstein’s notion of ‘simultaneity’. But he argues that there are unsurpassable difficulties when it comes to describing some aspects of physics in natural language:

“In the theory of general relativity the language by which we describe the general laws actually now follows the scientific language of the mathematics, and the descriptions of the experiments themselves we can use the ordinary concepts since Euclidean Geometry is valid with sufficient accuracy in small dimensions…The most difficult problem, however, concerning the use of language arises in quantum theory. Here we have at first no simple guide for correlating the mathematical symbols with concepts of ordinary language; and the only thing we know from the start is the fact that our common concepts cannot be applied to the structure of atoms…But the problems of language here are really serious. We wish to speak in some way about the structure of the atoms and not only about the ‘facts’- the latter being for instance the black spots on a photographic plate or the water droplets in a cloud chamber. But we cannot speak about the atoms in ordinary language.” (ibid pp 78-79)

So above Heisenberg is arguing that Relativity theory is to some degree expressible in natural language but things are much more difficult with quantum theory. He goes on to note that there have been two alternative approaches to trying to describe quantum weirdness in ordinary language. The first approach is to speak vaguely (and poetically about) about the discoveries of quantum mechanics.

“In answer to the first question one may say that the concept of complementarily introduced by Bohr into the interpretation of quantum theory has encouraged the physicists to use an ambiguous rather than an unambiguous language, to use the classical concepts in a somewhat vague manner in conformity with the principle of uncertainty, to apply alternatively different classical concepts which would lead to contradictions if used simultaneously. In this way one speaks about electronic orbits, about matter waves and charge density, about energy and momentum, etc., always conscious that these concepts only have a limited range of applicability. When this vague and unsystematic language leads into difficulties, the physicist has to withdraw into the mathematical scheme and its unambiguous correlation with the experimental facts…In fact I believe the language actually used by physicists when they speak about atomic events produces in their minds similar notions as the concept ‘potentia’. The language has already adjusted itself, at least to some extent, to this true situation. But it is not a precise language in which one could use the normal logical patterns; it is a language that produces pictures in our minds, but together with the notions that pictures have only a vague connection with reality, that they represent only a tendency towards reality.” (ibid p. 80)

Here we see the curious approach repeated by Heisenberg that he used above when speaking about relativity theory. He begins by saying that language cannot capture the discoveries of relativity and a few paragraphs later speaks about language adjusting itself to the new facts of reality. Likewise he begins by saying that language cannot capture the facts about quantum reality, but he then moves on to say that language is adjusting itself to the new quantum reality, except in certain areas where we need some mathematical formalism to capture reality.

The other approach to describing quantum reality using language is designing a more precise technical language. Heisenberg describes this as follows:

“Weizsacker (Birkhoff and Neumann) have tried to create precise logical languages which can cope with the quantum world…The general logical pattern, the details of which cannot be described here, corresponds precisely to the logical formalism of quantum theory. It forms the basis of a precise language that can be used to describe the structure of the atom. But the application of such a language raises a number of different problems only two of which we can discuss here. The relation between the two different levels of language, and the consequences for the underlying ontology.” (ibid p. 81)

Heisenberg is correct to note that there are some technical difficulties with Weizacker’s formal language. Furthermore one wonders what advantage there is to be gained in developing a formal language to express the discoveries of quantum physics when we can understand them well enough in mathematics. Nonetheless I see no reason in principle why a more advanced version of Weizacker’s project cannot be developed. Hence I see no reason why we cannot express the discoveries of quantum mechanics in terms linguistic terms. From what I can see Heisenberg really showed little more than that language is not always a good tool for capturing physics not that it is structurally deficient.

When I discussed the issue of language and math with Silverstein he made some points which were different than Heisenberg’s. Silverstein made some interesting points and it is worth delving into our discussion to see where the brief dialectic led us. I began with the following question:

Firstly I should say I am not an expert in physics so I freely admit I could be badly wrong on this issue. That said I think it is worth discussing because I don’t understand the structural features of language that physicists are pre-supposing when they speak of the nature of language. You begin with the following claim:

“To a very large degree our verbal language is something that is limited due to the fact we as humans are hardwired and evolved within the macroscopic world where the laws of Newtonian mechanics apply. Because of this, the quantum world is something that is a complete breakdown of our intuition. When we even begin to attempt to intuitively describe what happens within quantum mechanics we find ourselves in the dark when we either use our current language or further modify it to something that makes little to no sense to us.”

You claim that because of the conditions of our linguistic evolution (a place where Newtonian Mechanics apply) our language fails us because of a misalliance between our folk intuitions about reality, and the strange facts about the quantum world. I think here when you talk about folk intuitions about reality, you are not speaking about language, but about our intuitive theories of the world. Humans do seem to be hardwired with folk psychological expectations about the behavior and mental states of other agents in the world, and the behavior of objects in the world. These are the domains of study of folk-psychology and folk-physics. When ethno scientists study folk physics and folk psychology they are not interested in the world per-se but in the cognitive processes of a particular species and their expectations (probably unconscious) of how the world works.

Now what is interesting here is that empirical studies into the folk physics of children, indicates that they have an implicit theory about how the world should work prior to acquiring any language. These studies are typically done by tracking the expectations of children; children are habituated to a particular stimulus and when something surprising happens (from the child’s perspective); the child will stare at the stimulus longer. Using this technique psychologists have found that children have detailed expectations of the way the world should work months before they even begin to acquire a language. Spelke (1990) describes some of this data:

“Bower’s studies have yielded four findings that seem to have provided evidence for object permanence in infants well below 9 months. First, 7 week old Infants were found to discriminate between disappearances that signalled the continued existence of an object (e.g. Gradual Occlusion), and disappearances that did not (e.g. gradual dissolution or sudden implosion). Second, 2 month old infants were found to anticipate the reappearance of an object that stopped behind the screen, ‘looking to that half of the movement path the object would have reached had it not stopped’ Third, five month old infants were found to show disruptions in their tracking when an object was altered while passing behind the screen: they tended to look back at the screen, as though in search of the original object. Finally, 5-month-old-infants were found to reach for an object that had been hidden by darkening the room. (1985, 195)”

Now there was admittedly some debate in the literature on the significance of Bower’s results; Piaget and Quine both in their different ways, argued that Bower over interpreted the data. But since then Spelke, Baillargeon, Markman, Carey, Bloom and many others have replicated these studies and responded to both Piaget and Quine’s objections. For a more detailed explication of these topics see my: https://www.academia.edu/5679793/The_Indeterminacy_of_Translation_and_Innate_Concepts . The important point here is that children typically begin developing their language from about 12 months as they learn their first words, and start triangulating on shared objects of experience with others, and this is months after they have developed their folk physics. So difficulties in describing the quantum world may as you suggest stem from a discontinuity between our folk physics and the actual structure of reality. But I don’t see how this can be traced to a problem in the structure of language as opposed to a problem with people expecting the world to fit their a priori intuitions.

Silverstein replied to my point as follows:

“ First off I would like to point out that this isn’t specifically with respect to our linguistic evolution, but to the very hard-wiring of our brain itself. However because of that, of course language is still going to play a role regardless, yet if we focus particularly on language alone that really is something that I feel will really mask the issue as a whole. Once again this does reflect on language yet to get at the very roots of language I feel one first needs to look and focus on understanding and comprehension. So to elaborate further one needs to look at and see how the world works first even before comprehension. Now that is some very interesting information you shared with me with regards to the psychological studies done with children. Yet this is something which really does show how we are hardwired to the Newtonian world, and because of that it is something that is extremely intuitive to us even at a very young age. Once again I feel what we have to do is look more at the root or as Fabiola said, a common denominator, and that really has to do with our understanding of the physical world.”

I am not entirely sure I fully understand the reply of Silverstein. On one level we seem to be in agreement that the conditions under which humans evolved resulted in hardwired intuitions which make understanding quantum mechanics difficult from an intuitive point of view. I would add that a slight amendment; studies in folk physics intuitions show that children seem to intuitively accept a kind of Cartesian contact mechanics. It is for this reason that people, including Newton, found some aspects of Newtonian physics puzzling. That said it seems that Silverstein and I are in agreement that our intuitive folk physics can be an impediment to understanding the real world.

What I am slightly confused about is his claim that we need to look at and understand the world ‘before our comprehension’. To some degree this seems like arguing that our eyes to some degree effect how we see the world, so to see things in a theory neutral way we should rip out our eyes and see the world as it is. When Silverstein argues that we need to understand the world ‘before our comprehension’ what he seems to mean is that we should carefully observe and mathematically describe the world as it is before theorising about it. I think, and pretty much all brain science and developmental psychology would back me up on this, pure theory neutral description is impossible we are always using an implicit theory to interpret data. Now things may not seem like that from the point of view of the theorist doing the observing but it is none the less a fact (see Wittgenstein 1953, Quine 1960 for more details). From the point of view of a working physicist these implicit assumptions may be so close to home that they are not even aware of them. The working assumptions typically do no harm so a physicist who thinks he is engaging in theory neutral observation and typically will not run him into trouble. Nonetheless it is important that we give as accurate description of what is going on as is possible if we as external observers are to understand the nature of the scientific enterprise.

Back to the issue of language I do agree with Silverstein that it has its deficiencies. Natural language can be vague there is no doubt about this. But people like Quine (1960) have worked on modifying our natural language to at least minimise this vagueness where necessary. There is a huge literature of Vagueness (Timothy Williamson has done great work on this) in natural language that can help in discovering where exactly natural language breaks down and examining this literature can probably help in the process of making language more precise in order to express the weird world of Quantum mechanics.

People like Ladyman and Ross in their ‘Everything Must Go’ attack the philosophical need to tame the world as revealed by contemporary physics. They note that attempts to make quantum mechanics more intuitive, by the lights of our folk intuitions, simply ends up falsifying the data. For this reason they argue we should treat the mathematical structure of the various theories as real and ignore the other aspects of the theory as mere window dressing. To some degree I think they have a point. Nonetheless I think understanding precisely how our folk intuitions differ from what science tells us about the world can greatly increase our understanding. So, for example, with a greater appreciation of what our intuitions are about how the physical world works, we can understand why we find some scientific theory radically unintuitive. This works in simple areas like probability, we have a good working understanding of how people intuitively think about probability, we can also explain why people’s intuitive probability goes wrong in certain areas. This helps us explain to children why certain facts seem intuitive to them and shows them the unreliable nature of their intuitions on some topics (some philosophers haven’t taken this simple fact on board: Thomas Nagel take a bow).

Similar situations arise in the study of consciousness where people use intuition pumps to get others to think that certain aspects of consciousness will never be amenable to a scientific analysis. But none of this is the fault of language as far as I can see, but is the fault of taking our intuitions more seriously than we should on a variety of different topics. Silverstein replied to my above comments as follows:

“As for differentiating our folk intuitions verses what science actually tells us; well that is something that we have been doing within the scientific community for centuries and it is still something we are differentiating today. Consciousness is something that is extremely mysterious due to the fact that we have such an ill understanding of what it is, however that is something that really isn’t something which we need to focus on language first, but once again need to look more at the big picture which is being able to understand it first. When it comes to talking about language I really don’t think that it is so important to specify on a particular nature of language they are using.”

Again here I think there are large areas of agreement with Silverstein and I. We are in agreement that science has been differentiating our folk intuitions from what sciences tells us for centuries. The evidence I gave about our deficient folk intuitions was scientific evidence. I am not presenting some alternative to science as the best tool for understanding reality, there is no alternative that I know of. On the issue of Consciousness I think he misunderstands me to some degree. I don’t think we need to focus on language first in order to understand consciousness. Rather what I was pointing towards was the fact that people have intuitions which make them think of consciousness in a certain way. These ways of thinking sometimes lead to pessimism about a science of consciousness. People like Dennett use language (analogies, metaphors, intuition pumps) to get people to think differently about consciousness. This is not a replacement of the experimental approach rather a helping hand in getting people be less guided by their a priori intuitions about the way we should or should not approach consciousness.

On the issue of language I do worry about the way physicists think about it. When physicists talk about language they typically (but by no means always) don’t specify what their theory of the nature of language is, rather they seem to rely on their own intuitive view on its nature. Relying on one’s own intuition is bad practice for physicists thinking about linguistics as much as it for linguists thinking about physics.

I think that it is necessary if language is being discussed for the person to give some indication of what they mean by the word ‘Language’. There are debates within linguistics about the degree to which language is an innate domain specific entity genetically programmed or whether is developed culturally and learned by each individual using domain general innate architecture. I think it is important to take a stance on these issues as if you are going to talk about language being limited in ways x or y you need to justify this with empirical data about the nature of language. There is a big debate on the extent to which natural language consists of universals that are wired into the subject and if a theorist is arguing that language is hardwired to do x or y then they owe us an account of what they think are the universals in natural language and some commentary on the anthropological and linguistic data offered by people like Everett, Sampson, Pullum, Evans, Behme, Cowie, Clark etc who argue that these supposed universals don’t actually exist.

Upon reading my reply to Silverstein my friend Fabiola responded by posting a meme from Feynman: in which Feynman argued that making language too precise as some philosophers do can actually be counterproductive and bad for science. Below is my reply to her:

Fabiola I am not sure I agree with you on Feynman. It seems to me that physicists say diverse things about language and don’t really justify them with empirical evidence. One physicist Pete Morrison claims that the problem is that language is too vague and cannot be used to make the precise predictions in the way that mathematics can. In the Feynman quote he complains that philosophers use language in too precise a manner. Heisenberg claims that language is deficient because we need to form mental images when using language whereas mathematics is more abstract. Einstein on the other hand argued that language was a bad tool for thinking and he preferred to think in mental imagery (so is he making the opposite claim to Heisenberg?)

So different physicists seem (from a cursory glance) to have vague and not always consistent views on what is so deficient about language as a tool for explaining the world. If they are making claims about the structure of language they need to deal with the structures revealed by linguistics. On the other hand if they are merely saying that language is a tool that is not very useful for them then we can just ignore the issue. I don’t think Feynman really addresses any real issue above it would be helpful if he cited particular philosophers who are guilty of this behaviour. Then I could see if he understands them correctly, if he did I may agree with his characterisation. Furthermore as Heisenberg showed above it is not just philosophers who try to improve language to make it a more precise tool to explain reality. Weizsacker, Birkhoff, and Neumann, have all tried to develop formal language for this purpose as well. I wonder what Feynman would make of their work?

I am not arguing that physicists need a theory of meaning to do their science. It is one of the most flourishing scientific fields there is, and needs no help from ignorant outsiders like me. I am more concerned with their views on language and whether I can make sense of them. In my view Linguistics is a flourishing science, if physicists want to talk about language they need to understand the science of language. Otherwise they can just choose to ignore the issue, (a perfectly sensible approach) but empirical claims about the nature of language require empirical evidence. I mean if a theorist decides to speak about quantum mechanics then presumably they need to know something about quantum mechanics and maths. Why does a physicist get to make vague claims about the nature of language while systematically ignoring the science of language? Just because a scientist has expertise in physics doesn’t make them an expert on language. It seems to me that some physicists make a mish-mash of claims; e.g., language is too vague to do x, we shouldn’t try to make language too precise because it leads to paralysis, we need to form a mental picture to use words. These claims are never justified with any evidence. I agree that if you want to understand cosmology physics is the only place to look (although philosophers like Maudlin and Ladyman, Ross, Albert etc have written interesting stuff). My concern is to understand whether there are structural features of language that make it unsuitable to understanding the world. And if there are why it cannot be modified to fill this void?. It is clearly the case that physicists find mathematics the best tool for explaining and understanding the world. But this tells us nothing about the semantic power of language or its limits. Silverstein commented on my reply to Fabiola as follows:

“To be frank it seems like it should be something that is self explanatory with regards to what language we are using. Yes I am one of those people that relay far more on my own intuitive view. This is my honest opinion when it comes to language and it is not only something that I feel is true but I would say that about at least 99% of the physics community of the past and present agree with. I cannot give any fancy linguistic argument since it is not my field, however I did express my opinion earlier and I hope this further illuminated it.”

More than anything he said, in our discussion, I am in strong disagreement with Silverstein’s above claim about language. If a theorist wants to make claims about the structure of language they need to provide empirical evidence to support these claims. The fact that 99 percent of physicists agree with him on this fact is not relevant at all. Furthermore this 99 percent of physicists seem to be in disagreement about what it is about language that makes it so deficient; is it too vague, is it too precise? Heisenberg seems to think that the problem with language is that we need to connect our words to mental images in order to give them content. This claim is simply false; some people are extremely poor mental imagers and don’t use mental imagery in using their words at all (see Kosslyn et al 2006, and Galton 1880). I have discussed mental imagery and how assumptions that all people have the same degree of mental imagery leads to theoretical mistakes in my blog post: https://www.academia.edu/5959711/Dennett_and_the_Typical_Mind_Fallacy . I think that physicists can claim that they don’t find language a useful tool and that is fine as far as it goes. But when they argue that language cannot express x or y they need to provide real empirical evidence to support their claim and neither Fabiola or David Silverstein have provided this evidence.

On the issue of mathematics Silverstein’s claims are interesting but again I think they need to be qualified. He argued:

Now mathematics is something which is not so limited because with mathematics we are writing down natures laws which is something that automatically comes to us, and no matter how it comes out, it is something that we write down and describe not with verbal language but the language of the cosmos. Hence we are not limited to inventing ways of describing things, when we are discovering the endless and different amount of ways the laws of nature comes to us. This is regardless if it is something that at first makes sense to us or not and no matter how paradoxical it may seem, the only thing we are looking for is truth, no matter how it may show its face to us.”

Firstly I think the metaphor of the language of the cosmos needs to be expanded on a bit. The universe doesn’t speak any language, it is us (and perhaps other creatures) that uses language or math to describe the universe, but does it really make sense to say that the universe speaks? I think it would be more expedient to say that so far mathematics has proven the most efficacious tool we have for describing the universe.

When he speaks of mathematics being used to understand the universe he argues that because of the fact that the universe speaks mathematics we don’t have to invent symbols to describe it. You just describe the universe in its own language; the language of mathematics. Assuming that he doesn’t think that the universe is a conscious agent who has a language, there are two ways I could parse his claims (1) As meaning that the universe at its most fundamental level is nothing more than a series of mathematical entities and their relation to each other. (2) That mathematics is the most useful tool we have for understanding the universe?

Silverstein replied to this question as follows:

“When I talk about the language of the cosmos and language of nature, you even stated that it does appear to be a metaphor. Indeed this is a metaphor and it doesn’t literally mean that the universe is literally speaking. I would like to add that I don’t see mathematics as a mere tool but I actually see mathematics as a discovery and artifact that we are uncovering. This is something that I truly do feel that makes it different than language which is something that really does appear to be something that is invented and is not something universal. To be very direct I’m going to put language and mathematics in two different categories and I don’t see the universe as a self aware conscious agent. To a very large degree, I will say that at the most fundamental level. Earlier I was not emphasizing language being hardwired into us; I was talking about the hard-wiring of our minds as a whole which gives us a physical understanding which then LEADS to language.”

Silverstein’s reply in so far as I understand it is an expression of some kind of Platonism. Language is a tool developed over our evolutionary history but mathematics is something that exists independent of our contingent biology and is a universal feature of the universe. I partly agree with him here but I think he ignores the degree to which our mathematical abilities are innately structured because of our evolutionary history. To develop the point a bit we can assume mathematical Platonism but still think that us as contingent biological entities may be incapable of grasping all of these truths and our innate mathematical sense may only partially correspond with the mind independent world. Silverstein who believes that maths puts us in direct contact with reality may not agree with my pessimism on this point.

When Silverstein speaks of the fact that “We discover the way the laws of nature come to us no matter whether they make sense to us, we accept it no matter how paradoxical it may seem, because we are after truth; no matter how it may show its face to us.” Here I think he definitely needs to expand on what he is claiming. Sure you can and should modify your theory on the basis of unexpected experimental results. But an experimental result doesn’t come with a label ‘I must be interpreted this way’. When an anomalous experimental result occurs and it cannot be made sense of in light of previous theories. Different theorists ALL of whom presumably want to discover the truth no matter what its face may disagree on how to account for this new experimental result. Different mathematical formalisms may be tried which at least agree with the current experimental result and can account for it in light of a modified previous theory and a variety of different experiments will be proposed to test the various new formalisms and theories. I think the way he describes things air brushes the fact that we are sometimes at a loss with how to cope with anomalous experimental data. Theorists disagree, and hopefully as we do more and more tests we can get an interpretation which is more in line with the facts. But such results are rarely the result of simply accepting some revealed truths but rather as a result of interpretation, theorizing, and testing these theories as rigorously as possible.

Silverstein replied as follows:

“With regards to how nature shows itself, I am saying that regardless if we comprehend it or not, it is something that we write down regardless. As I stated before there are things that observation plays a key role in the picture and regardless if what we are observing cannot be understand and if there are no words to describe it in the dictionary we write down the mathematics regardless, and when it comes to labeling yes it does indeed come with a label, we simply just need to decipher what it is telling us. Yes different mathematical formalism often is tried, but very often we are discovering a brand new axiom of mathematics, something physical which is which is describing our results.”

Here again he seems to be emphasising the importance of pure observation and not letting our theories force us to ignore inconvenient or seemingly bizarre data. I think it is worth reflecting on the degree to which our minds enter into our interpretative process when we are collecting data. Chomsky has written about the fact that we are creatures created by natural selection not angels so we shouldn’t be so sure we are always directly in touch with reality at all times. I have written on this topic and though I am very critical of it, it is worth thinking through his logic in thinking about whether our brain engages a science forming faculty which to some degree influences how we interpret the world https://www.academia.edu/9689377/Chomsky_and_The_Science_Forming_Faculty . There is a long standing debate between people like Kuhn and those like Weinberg and Sokal on the degree to which observation is theory laden. I don’t think Kuhn is necessarily correct on this issue but I do think that Silverstein is beginning with the assumption that Kuhn is wrong and hasn’t provided much evidence to support this a-priori intuition of his.

When Silverstein talked about the evolution of language he noted that it developed in our Newtonian Environment. But he spoke about mathematics as something we discover and read off Nature’s language. To some degree I agree with him on this, I think Frege and Husserl both conclusively showed that mathematics cannot be entirely reduced to psychology. That said some of our implicit mathematical abilities are shared with other animals, Dogs, Crows, non-human Primates Etc. There is good evidence that we have an innate number sense which we use to acquire our more complex mathematical abilities. See for example:

https://youtu.be/KBzQu1G1cuU

Above Susan Carey discusses the evidence for an innate number sense. In a different direction Ian Hacking and George Lakoff have discussed the role of embodiment in the type of mathematical structures we develop:

https://youtu.be/PbKUsAR_8DY

https://youtu.be/WuUnMCq-ARQ

Above is a talk by Hacking on mathematics development and Lakoff on embodied cognition. None of this in my opinion shows that mathematics can be reduced to cognitive/embodied processes in my opinion. But it does show that if we are going to discuss the nature of mathematics and language we need to pay attention to cognitive science to justify our positions. We do know that in the brain there are different areas which specialise in language and math. We know through brain damage that the areas are dissociated from each other. A person after a stroke can have much of their mathematical abilities spared, while losing the ability to speak and understand language (and vice-versa). But I don’t think this really demonstrates much about the structure of maths and the structure of language and how they can be developed, modified, and inter translated.

Silverstein responded to the above points as follows:

“Yet with mathematics what we are doing is that we are doing something that is rather different. Even before we can understand what it is we are writing, we are writing down our observations; something which we very often are forced to come up with entire new names because of what that very observation is telling us. While with the mathematics it is indeed something that is already there; and indeed being a physical phenomenon, it was something that already existed before our prior knowledge. To be direct, we don’t invent words such as gauge invariance, Lorentz Transformations, Chern-Simon forms and topological explicit and spontaneous symmetry breaking prior to the mathematics and that is used to describe our daily lives. This is something that comes to us first from the mathematics and then we are forced to invent new words for them.”

I think here I should note that Silverstein is presenting a particular philosophy of mathematics called realism. In their ‘The Grand Design’ Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow espoused a kind of model dependent realism, while people like Penrose prefer a form of Platonism. Different physicists hold different philosophies of science. So a physicist who says that this is the philosophical views held by physicists needs to at least debate with the competing scientists who hold different philosophies of science whether pragmatist, Platonist etc.

An important point to note when speaking of natural language (and the degree to which it can express mathematical truths) is that natural language is typically explained interms of mathematics by linguists. Linguists typically explicate syntax in terms of a kind of quasi set theory; semantics in some quarters is explicated in terms of ‘Tarski’s theory of truth’. There are mathematical studies of the statistical features of words being used and correlated with the probability of a child hearing things like nouns, verbs etc in their linguistic environment. Some theorists like Katz actually think of language as an abstract object like math. I think if physicists want to make large scale claims about the semantic powers of math (or lack thereof). They need to provide empirical evidence to support their claims.

I found the discussion with Fabiola and David Silverstein very interesting and informative. But I am not sure that I fully understand their positions. So I decided to post it in blog-post form to see if others had any views on the differences between natural language and mathematics and could perhaps help us to further clarify the issues. As a non-expert on these issues I hope to gain further insight by engaging with thinkers who have thought about this issue deeper than I have.

“There is no such thing as philosophy free science; there is only science whose philosophical baggage is taken on board without examination” (Daniel Dennett 1995)

In his ‘Freudian Unconscious and Cognitive Neuroscience’ Vesa Talvitie contrasted two different conceptions of the unconscious. He called them the dry unconscious which he traced to Aristotle via Leibniz and is studied today in cognitive neuroscience, and the wet unconscious which he traced to Plato via Schopenhauer and Freud and Jung. Talvitie correctly noted that the unconscious been massively studied and explicated by philosophers over the last 2000 years. Yet despite the fact that philosophy has clearly had a significant influence on psychoanalysis, Freud was dismissive of philosophy and some current analysts think that philosophy is actually harmful for psychoanalysts to study. Donald Meltzer has explicitly argued that the study of philosophy is bad for practicing psychoanalysts. But as Daniel Dennett admirably put it, there is no such thing as philosophy free science, just science which uncritically takes on board philosophical baggage without examining it. Over the last 50 years or so, some psychoanalysts have argued that despite the brilliant clinical insights of Freud, his theory of the mind was infected with harmful Cartesian assumptions about the nature of the mind. Psychoanalysts like Stolorow and Cavell have used the arguments of Heidegger, and the later Wittgenstein and Davidson to repair the conceptual foundations of psychoanalysis. While on the other side of things psychoanalysts like Matte Blanco have used the mathematical logic of philosophers like Russell and Frege, and the early Wittgenstein (and mathematicians like Cantor) to try and make psychoanalysis more rigorous.

Matte Blanco was influenced by Bertrand Russell’s views on Logic, in particular Russell and Whitehead’s ‘Principia Mathematica’, and applied them to psychoanalytic observations. He attempted to explicate the workings of unconscious logic using the set theory. His main insight was that the logic of the unconscious as described by Freud has similar properties to the infinite that Cantor discovered. Thus in unconscious fantasies parts are often considered equal to wholes, and when we explicate infinity similar things happen, with an infinite series you can map the prime numbers on to the natural numbers, and despite one series being a part of the other they both add up to an infinite series. Blanco explicates the unconscious in terms of the principle of symmetry and the principle of generalisation and shows how these features can make sense of otherwise inexplicable behaviour. I won’t go into this in too much detail here other than to say he thinks that he explicates the unconscious interms of symmetrical logic and consciousness interms of asymmetrical logic.

Blanco’s theory of emotion is derived from a direct phenomenological analysis of our experience of emotion. He starts with an assumption which influences the rest of his analysis of emotion throughout his text. Firstly he treats propositional attitudes as something that is caused by brain but as something that is not identical to any particular brain-state. He maintains that he is not supporting any kind of mind/body dualism. Rather he is just noting that our propositional attitudes are not obviously identical with our brain states. Now Blanco is correct that his view doesn’t commit him to substance dualism, but it does seem to commit him to form of property dualism. Though strictly speaking he doesn’t argue that the propositional attitudes won’t reduce to brain states he merely states that it isn’t obvious that they will, but that future brain science may refute his conjecture. He was writing ‘The Unconscious as Infinite Sets’ in 1975 around the same time that Fodor was writing ‘The Language of Thought’ and Dennett was writing ‘Then Intentional Stance’, and eliminative materialism had yet to surface. So Blanco could be forgiven for not having this worked out in any detail.

Somewhat surprisingly, while he argues that propositional attitudes emerged from the brain but may not be identical with the brain, he argues that sensation-feeling is obviously a bodily state. Nowadays, with Chalmers hard problem of consciousness, the relation between raw feels and the brain/body is dubbed the hard problem of philosophy which some theorists think we will never solve. Blanco notes:

“It will be seen that, if one starts from the phenomenological point of view, the subject unfolds with the help of logical notions which are at the heart of psychoanalytic conceptions. The ensemble is, therefore, phenomenological-psychoanalytical-logical…But where emotion differs from it is in the fact that it not only leans, so to speak, on bodily events (if we wish to be more Unitarian, we would say: it is not only an integral part of a psycho-physical event), but in its very nature must be viewed as a psycho-physical phenomenon. An example may illustrate what I mean. If I am afraid, my heart may beat faster than usual and I may become pale. Faster pulse and paleness are not the physical substratum of the emotion of fear in the same way as some brain metabolism may be the substratum of thinking. They are more than that: they are integral aspects of the phenomenon called fear. Similarly, tense muscles may be considered integral aspects of the emotion that is called expectation…We feel them to be such directly and refer to the physical aspects of them as an integral part of the emotion, whereas this is not the case with thinking…To give an example: we are now more fully aware of the influence of emotion on thinking. We know that people see the world according to the emotions we experience; if they are under the influence of paranoid fears they will tend to see people as persecutors; if they have repressed sexual wishes they will find sexuality where others would not discover it; and so on” (ibid p. 217-219)

Blanco makes a good point that bodily sensations are very closely connected to bodily processes but the exact feeling of pain or happiness does seem to be obviously identical with any physical process in the body. Here I am not accepting any intractable hard problem there are various ways of attacking the hard problem e.g. Galen Strawson’s approach or Dan Dennett’s approach. My point is merely that contrary to what Blanco claims the emotions don’t seem to be any more identical to bodily/brain states than the propositional attitudes are from an intuitive point of view. Now as we know, intuitions are not a great guide to ontology so the relative obviousness or non-obviousness of the supposed identity is not that important from a pure naturalist perspective. But since Blanco’s emotional theory is derived from a close phenomenological analysis of our experience of emotion if his analysis of emotions doesn’t correspond with other people’s experience of emotions then he faces a problem that needs to be addressed.

Blanco’s analysis of emotion deserves credit he anticipates the work of Damasio in breaking from tradition and not separating emotion from thinking. To some degree he thinks sensation-emotion is primary but he argues that all thinking is intertwined with emotion and that intense emotion is driven by propositional thought. His work was heavily influenced by the philosophical work of Bertrand Russell’s ‘Analysis of Mind’ and William James’s papers on Consciousness. Blanco’s phenomenological analysis of emotion lead him to a position so similar to Sartre’s theory of emotion that Blanco actually devoted an appendix of his ‘The Unconscious as Infinite Sets’ to discussing how both theorists arrived at such similar views as each other independently. Clearly Blanco was influenced by philosophers such as James and Russell, and he used similar techniques as Sartre, to arrive at his theory of emotions. A lot of philosophers like Wittgenstein, and Popper have been dismissive of psychoanalysis. While Freud and a variety of different psychoanalysts have been dismissive of philosophy, nonetheless the two subjects seem to have offered key insights to each other. This can be seen further if we analyse the work of Marcia Cavell.

Marcia Cavell was influenced by the work of Donald Davidson in particular his emphasis on triangulation, and paradoxes of irrationality. Her emphasis on procedural knowledge, implicit memory and knowing-how (as opposed to knowing-that), being prior to explicit knowledge is consistent with the views of Heidegger and Stolorow. She says for example:

“Children do not learn that oranges exist, that beds exist. They learn to peal oranges, to lie in beds. Attention to the ways language is actually used in daily life will free us from the temptation to hypostatize language and meanings, as Plato did in positing a realm of abstract, immutable Forms. There are not meanings, but people meaning things by what they do” (Cavell: Becoming a Subject p 64)

By drawing on the work social scientists like Margret Mead and philosophers like Grice and the later Wittgenstein Cavell notes that ‘selves’ emerge through social interaction with peers about a shared world of experience. She hammers home the point by discussing the work of Donald Davidson. Davidson in a series of papers argued that a necessary condition of thought was a self, other and a shared object of experience.

“To believe that p is to hold that p is true. Of course you can know that it might be false, can be doubtful of its truth, and so on; the point is that the concepts of belief and truth, evidence and reason, are necessarily linked…So if you have a belief of the propositional sort…you must have a grasp of how you THINK things are, and how they truly are, between right and wrong, correct and incorrect, true and false, since belief is by definition, a state of mind about the world; it is the sort of thing that can be true or false (even though one may never know in a particular case which it is), and for which one adduces evidence and reason. (ibid p. 67)

For Davidson (and the later Wittgenstein) we can only discover the difference between something being true and something being false if we have a self, another and a shared object of experience which we can make claims about truly or falsely. Robert Stolorow speaks of post-Cartesian philosophy and uses Heidegger as a philosopher who more than most has helped us escape from the myth of the isolated mind. As we can see though Cavell using the work of Donald Davidson and Wittgenstein manages to avoid a lapse in to Cartesianism. Both guys end up with the same result but using different strategy. But there are differences Stolorow’s emphasis on procedural knowledge, is largely consistent with Cavell. But Stolorow’s focus on anxiety, and death, etc is far removed from Cavell’s concerns. Likewise when Cavell discusses the nature of irrationality she borrows from and improves on Davidson’s logical arguments (by considering developmental evidence), she is arguing in a manner alien to the likes of Stolorow. Nonetheless I think there are a lot of similarities to the psychoanalytic work of Stolorow and Cavell which can be traced to their philosophical influences Davidson, The later Wittgenstein and The early Heidegger. Blanco as we have already seen was heavily influenced by philosophers like Russell and James. So clearly philosophy has played a key role in influencing Freud’s development of the unconscious and psychoanalysts influenced by philosophers are busy trying to make psychoanalysis more rigorous using mathematical methods invented by philosophers, and to free psychoanalysis from hidden Cartesian assumptions through detailed phenomenological analysis. So philosophy and psychoanalysis while sometimes critical of each other can be mutually enriching fields.

A former teacher of mine Ross Skelton is a logician, a psychoanalyst and a philosopher. He has written papers on Blanco and has forty years of clinical practice behind him. When discussing the influence of philosophy on psychoanalysis with me noted that while people like Blanco, Stolorow and Cavell have done some interesting theoretical work their theories have had little impact on clinical practice. So one could argue that despite what I am claiming philosophy has had little practical influence on psychoanalysis.[1] It could be further claimed that like the way engineers can rely on Newtonian physics and ignore the niceties of Relativity Theory when dealing with terrestrial objects psychoanalysts can ignore the philosophical debates about Cartesian theories embodied cognition etc. This approach is fine as far as it goes as long as the analogy is followed through. Engineers don’t deny that relativity theory is true they merely abstract away from it for some purposes in order to simplify calculations. If psychoanalysts are doing similar things then there is no problem. But it should be noted that in certain circumstances the effects of relativity cannot be ignored. Likewise I would argue that the mathematical modelling done by Blanco and the emphasis of embodiment and phenomenology cannot be ignored in all circumstances and psychoanalysts would be well advised to use as many tools at their disposal as possible.

At the start of this blog-post I noted that Vesa Talvitie made a distinction between the dry unconscious of cognitive science and the wet instinctive unconscious studied by psychoanalysis. In my next blog I will discuss the relation between the cognitive unconscious and the psychoanalytic unconscious. I will try to bring the two unconsciousness together with the work of Deacon, and the idea of Selfish Neurons, showing that if we start from Deacon’s position of creatures fighting off the second law of thermodynamics the cognitive unconscious will be seen to be less dry and mechanical. I will show that there is less of a schism between psychoanalysis and cognitive science than some people think. Dennett notes the distinctions between theorists of a different mind set:

“There are no entirely apt labels for the opposing sides of this gulf, since the ongoing controversy turns every battle cry into a derogatory term for the other side. Reductionism, fie! Holism, fie! “Enlightenment” versus “Romanticism” is pretty close, as the reader can judge by considering what the following team players have in common; on the Enlightenment side: Darwin, Turing, Minsky, Dawkins, both Crick and Edelman (in spite of their antagonisms), Tibor Ga´nti, E. O. Wilson, Steven Weinberg, Paul and Patricia Churchland, and both Raymond Kurzweil and me (in spite of our antagonisms). On the Romantic side are arrayed Romanes and Baldwin, Kropotkin, Stephen Jay Gould, Humberto Maturana, Francisco Varela, Stuart Kauffman, Roger Penrose, Ilya Prigogine, Rupert Sheldrake, and the philosophers John Haugeland, Evan Thompson, Alicia Juarrero, John Searle, and—off the map, now— Jerry Fodor and Thomas Nagel. Many have been inoculated against the other side by the excesses of some of the participants. Can anybody knit up “the Cartesian wound that severed mind from body at the birth of modern science” (p. 544)? Deacon, defending the Romantic side, makes some real progress largely because he understands and appreciates both sides so well. He is a good evolutionist and cognitive scientist with insightful interpretations of the strengths and triumphs of evolutionary and computational thinking, and he is trenchant in his criticisms of Romantic lapses into mystery.” (Dennett ‘Aching Voids and Making Voids’)

I will try to bridge some of these divides between psychoanalysis and cognitive science which are mirrored in the Dennett quote above. Not by treating all approaches as equal but by adopting the approach of a vulture and adopting what is useful in each theory and discarding what is not.

[1] Skelton does allow that Lacan’s use of Hegel has had an actual practical influence on clinical practice. But I won’t discuss Lacan’s work here as I have done so in other blog-posts see my ‘Lacan and Cognitive Science’

“Existential psychologist Rollo May (1986) warned, whenever you perceive a person merely as a particular diagnostic disorder, neurological deficit, biochemical imbalance, cognitive schema, set of behavioral patterns, genetic predisposition, collection of complexes, or “as a composite of drives and deterministic forces, you have defined for study everything except the one to whom these experiences happen, everything except the existing person him [or her] self” (p. 25). Existential psychotherapy strives to empower and place the person–and his or her existential choices–back at the center of the therapeutic process. To cite Sartre on this subject: “We are our choices” (Stephen Diamond: ‘What is existential psychotherapy’)

In my last blog discussed the relationship between Existential Psychoanalysis and Behavioural Science. In this blog I want to further consider Existential Psychoanalysis and the merits of adopting this approach to mental health issues. There are many thinkers working in the field and rather than analyse a particular theorists views on the topic I will instead consider the subject from a broader perspective and consider what the merits and disadvantages are of adopting this approach.

Existentialism is an approach to philosophy which can be traced back somewhat idiosyncratically to thinkers like St. Augustine, St Aquinas, or Pascal. The historical birth of the movement is typically traced to the work of Kierkegaard (1813-1855). Later philosophers who were sometimes spoken of as existentialists were Heidegger, Sartre, Jaspers, Marcel, amongst many others. Philosophers like Jean Paul Sartre also expressed their existentialist ideas through works of fiction like his famous ‘Le Nausea’, while other artists like Camus, and Kafka wrote what they considered existentialist novels like ‘The Outsider’, and ‘The Trial’.

Some existential philosophers like Kierkegaard, Marcel, and Jaspers, were Christian while others like Nietzsche, Sartre and Camus were atheists. But all of them rejected the systematic way that philosophers before them had try to explain the world (and in particular man) in terms of an all-encompassing overarching theory of the world. Existential philosophy focused on man’s thrownness into the world, their freedom to act, and the inevitability of death. A further primary concern of theirs was the inauthentic ways that man had to evade his own inevitable death through being busy in the world as a way of avoiding our existential predicament.

When discussing existentialism on its own it all sounds a bit wishy-washy and one would be forgiven for thinking that while existentialist positions may make interesting literary fiction, and appeal hip young teenagers, it is hardly a serious philosophical or scientific position to hold. However a close reading of central philosophical texts in Existentialism shows that the position cannot be as easily dismissed as one might think at a first glance. Martin Heidegger’s classical work ‘Being and Time’ contains a detailed phenomenological analysis of the world of experience as it reveals itself to us in our daily activities. His analysis of thrownness, anxiety, freedom and our relationship to death is painstakingly drawn from a detailed phenomenological analysis.

Nonetheless when one considers the work of Freud it seems to be entirely alien to the work of existentialists. Freud started out as a neuroscientist and when he created psychoanalysis he noted that he used his psychoanalytic concepts as placeholders to be replaced when neuroscience became more advanced. His analysis of things like parapraxes, and his use of free association all relied on his assumption of psychic determinism. His metapsychology was constructed using the model of the unconscious and conscious mind on the model of hydraulic pressure. All of this is a million miles away from the existentialist emphasis on freedom to choose and existential anxiety[1].

Furthermore Freud’s emphasis on our sexual and aggressive nature which we are biologically born with; his emphasis on society which forces us to curtail our biologically driven nature to some degree and repress it, is very different than the story existentialists tell. Likewise when Freud focuses on our childhood, our relationship to our parents, our attachment to peers etc determining our adult behaviour he is again telling a story which is at odds with anything we see in existentialist philosophy. So to some degree the name existentialist psychoanalyst seems like an oxymoron.

But there is more to the story than this obviously. Over and above Freud’s metapsychology, his views on neuroscience and his determinism was Freud the clinician dealing with human suffering. Freud dealt with childhood experiences as described by his patients; he dealt with his patient’s current preoccupations, anxieties, and worries. He noted that his patients were busy avoiding problems which they were barely or sometimes totally unaware of. Existentialists were likewise concerned people’s relation to their worlds, their pasts, present and future.

From a clinical point of view psychoanalysts used Freudian theoretical apparatus to explain what was going on in their patient’s life and to help their patients gain a greater understanding and hence control of their behaviour and thoughts. Psychoanalysts would use theoretical terms like Ego, Superego, ID etc, or if they were influenced by Klein they would use theoretical terms like Paranoid Schizoid position, Depressive position etc. But despite the fact that psychoanalysts were using these theoretical abstractions to interpret the behaviour of their patients the psychoanalytic encounter was operating at interpersonal level. Patients were talking to their analysts about real world problems such as sexual problems, anxiety about death, devastating inner turmoil, loss of meaning, etc. Despite the fact that Freud emphasised the nature of psychoanalysis as a placeholder for future neuroscience the psychoanalytic encounter typically took place at the personal level as opposed to the sub-personal level. It is because of the clinical emphasis of a person talking to another about emotional problems and crises that existentialism became a natural bed fellow to psychoanalysis.

Some of the early theorists who were interested in merging psychoanalysis and existential phenomenology felt that psychoanalytic concepts actually stood in the way of analysts reaching their patients at a personal level. In his (1960) book ‘The Divided Self’ R. D Laing criticised psychiatrists for interpreting patients almost entirely at the sub-personal level. To illustrate this point he discusses the case of Kraepelin who when talking to a schizophrenic patient treats the verbal replies of the patient as signs of the patients organic disease. Laing though manages to give a quite plausible explanation of the meaning of the patient’s words by interpreting the patient at the personal level. He argues that if we really want to understand patients and the suffering they are experiencing we need to do so at the personal level of explanation.

Outside of phenomenological circles the relation between personal and sub-level explanations has been a core concern of philosophy of mind. In fact the same year that Laing published his ‘The Divided Self’ Willard Van Ormond Quine published his classic book ‘Word and Object’. ‘Word and Object’ as a text had little to do with the concerns of psychotherapy or phenomenology. In fact Quine’s concerns would have seemed very alien to anyone interested in phenomenology. He was interested in naturalising philosophy, of purging mentalist discourse from our theories of how people go from stimulus to science. His central problem was in naturalising epistemology and in naturalising metaphysics. For Quine epistemology is simply a branch of empirical psychology while the best metaphysics we can hope for is a translation of our best physics into the syntax of first order logic.

Now at face value this project is as far from the spirit of existential phenomenology as it is possible to be. You certainly won’t find analysis of Anxiety, Authenticity, or brooding on the inevitability of death in the entire corpus of Quine’s writings. Quine began his career as a logical positivist, and while he critiqued central aspects of logical positivism, his criticisms lead him towards an even more austere form of naturalism than even the science friendly logical positivists would have supported. From the start of his career Quine was obsessed with removing anything psychological from his ontology. So given that Quine’s project seems so far from existential phenomenology a critic could be forgiven for wondering what the relevance of Quine is to this discussion.

The relevance is that while Quine started out with an aim of ontological minimalism and of reducing our ontology to its simplest components by ridding us of unnecessary posits like, meanings, ideas, and propositions, he ended up supporting some claims which are congenial to the view of existential phenomenology. Firstly Quine emphasises our embeddedness in our social and physical world of experience, there is no way according to Quine we can step outside our conceptual scheme we must repair and develop it within our lived world of experience:

“Neurath has likened science to a boat which, if we are to rebuild it, we must stay afloat in it. The philosopher and the scientist are in the same boat. If we improve our understanding of ordinary talk of physical things, it will not be by reducing that talk to a more familiar idiom; there is none. It will be by clarifying the connections, causal or otherwise, between ordinary talk of physical things and various further matters which in turn we grasp with ordinary talk of physical things.” (Quine: Word and Object p. 3)

Heidegger[2] never showed much concern with science but the above passage by Quine is very similar to claims made in ‘Being and Time’ about the relation between the ‘Ready-to-hand’ and the ‘Present-at-Hand’.

The kind of dealing which is closest to us is as we have shown, not a bare perceptual cognition, but rather that kind of concern which manipulates things and puts them to use; and this has its own kind of ‘knowledge’… Such entities are not thereby objects for knowing the ‘world’ theoretically; they are simply what gets used, what gets produced, and so forth…We shall call those entities which we encounter in concern “equipment”. In our dealings we come across equipment for writing sewing, working, transportation, measurement. (Being and Time pp. 95-97)

“Being-in-the-word, according to our Interpretation hitherto, amounts to a non-thematic circumspective absorption in references or assignments constitutive for the readiness-to-hand of a totality of equipment…The Presence-at-hand of entities is thrust to the fore by the possible breaks in that referential totality in which circumspection ‘operates’(ibid p. 107)

As we can see from the above quotes from ‘Being and Time’ Heidegger also viewed us as embedded creatures whose concern is with coping with reality. Heidegger, like Quine, emphasises that our scientific theories which he thinks of as thinks of interms of ‘presence-at-hand’ are arrived at as part of our embedded involved interactions with the ordinary world of lived experience.

Quine of course aimed to modify our ordinary language and make it more precise using the tools of first order logic. This approach is obviously at odds with anything that Heidegger would have recommended. But it is interesting that while pushing, his behavioural, naturalistic, logical approach to its limits Quine couldn’t altogether eliminate personal level explanations of human behaviour. Near the end of ‘Word and Object’ when discussing Brentano’s argument about the irreducibility of intentional idioms, Quine noted that there are two ways to react to this fact. (1) Brentano’s way of accepting the reality of intentional idioms. (2) Arguing that intentional idioms scientifically baseless. Quine chose option 2 but with an interesting qualification. He argued as follows:

“Not that I forswear daily use of intentional idiom, or maintain that they are practically dispensable…If we are liming the true and ultimate structure of reality, the canonical scheme for us is the austere scheme that knows no quotation but direct quotation and no propositional attitudes but the physical constitution and behaviour of organisms…But if our canonical notation is meant only to dissolve verbal perplexities or facilitate logical deductions, we are often well advised to tolerate the idioms of propositional attitudes.” (Word and Object p. 221)

Quine later (under the influence of Donald Davidson) even ended up supporting a form of Anomalous Monism which as he put it says that while there is no mental substances there are irreducibly mental ways of grouping physical states and events (Pursuit of Truth: p.73). He even emphasised that when trying to translate the utterances of an alien tribe we needed to rely on empathy:

“We all have an uncanny knack for empathizing another’s perceptual situation, however ignorant of the physiological or optical mechanism of his perception… Empathy guides the linguist still as he rises above observation sentences through his analytical hypotheses…” (Pursuit of Truth: p. 43)

So here we have Quine mad dog behaviourist admitting that we cannot entirely do away with intentional idioms that anomalous monism is true, and that empathy is essential for translation to occur etc.

So far we have seen that like Heidegger Quine emphasised the embedded nature of our dealings with the world. Like Laing he emphasised that for some purposes personal level explanations are more appropriate than sub-personal level explanations. But it is obviously a massive stretch to say that Quine would have supported any kind of existential psychoanalysis. Quine’s emphasis on our knowledge coming from our neural nets being stimulated is obviously radically at odds with any kind of existentialist analysis[3]. Likewise his hard core naturalism and emphasis on scientific metaphysics is not remotely congenial with existentialist theories.

The point of mentioning Quine is that he was writing at the same time as Laing, and despite starting from an entirely different stand point he ended up drawing some similar conclusions. Laing was writing at a particular time in the history of psychology. Behaviourism was still dominant in 1960; Skinner’s ‘Verbal Behaviour’ was just published a few years before hand. Behaviourists were pretty trenchant that the mind had no place in our scientific psychology. Behaviourists were press darlings and popular articles were filled with claims that the mind was a simply a relic from our primitive past. That thinking that people had minds was as absurd in thinking that the moon rotated around the earth because it wanted to. The cognitive revolution was only in its infancy and from theorists like Laing’s point of view there was a real danger of people having their subjectivity ignored because of behaviourist restrictions. However as the case of Quine indicates even behaviourists were being forced to admit that it is not as easy to do away with propositional attitude explanations as behaviourists originally believed. So Laing’s worry can be construed as a reaction to some overblown hype in the popular press by some behavioural scientists.

In philosophy of mind Quine’s double standard has been subjected to incredible scrutiny over the last 55 years by the world’s leading philosophers. Hyperrealists like Fodor, eliminativists like Churchland, eliminativists/slash pragmatists like Rorty, and stance-stance theorists like Dennett have all have a crack at the problem. I obviously don’t have time to deal with all of these approaches but it suffices to say that 55 years after Laing wrote ‘The Divided Self’ we are still no nearer to eliminating personal level explanations as we were when Laing was writing. People like Paul Churchland who is a defender of eliminative materialism will cheerfully admit that it is an ongoing research programme that will only be justified by future empirical research. So Laing’s worry about people being treated as bags of neurons, or mindless machines mouthing verbal behaviour were misguided.

Nonetheless Laing et al were not merely concerned with psychology crushing human subjectivity they was also concerned with the effects of psychiatry treating humans as a bunch of symptoms of a disease instead of a person concernfully engaged with the world. We saw this in Laing’s discussion of Kraepelin’s inadvertent dehumanising of his patient. Over the last 50 years we have developed further and further psycho-pharmaceutical treatments of mental disorders. Likewise with every new copy of the DSM we are treated to a new classification of some form of aberrant behaviour that can be treated by medication. We have medical doctors handing out drugs for various different behavioural problems despite the fact that the doctors have no training in psychotherapy or psychiatry. This state of affairs leads to more and more meds being prescribed in dubious circumstances.

I think that this state of affairs is worrying. Not because drug based therapies do not work but because not all problems are problems that need be addressed by medication. Some problems are lived problems which we face because of the human condition. It is a fact of the human condition that everything you know and love will decay and die at some time, and so will you. The human condition is a tissue of contingencies in which at any moment any of form of disaster can strike. Existential psychoanalysts are right to notice that this feature of reality can have serious psychological consequences for people. They are right to try do understand the whole person in their interactions with the world and others in it. Nonetheless, I think existential phenomenology would be well served by adopting a more loose pragmatic approach of using whatever tools we have at our disposal to help people in mental distress. There is no evidence that existential psychoanalysis is any better than CBT or traditional psychoanalysis in treating people with mental illness. Furthermore it should be emphasised that while the personal level of explanation is important, there are times where sub-personal explanations will only do. There are times where simple behavioural approaches and medical treatments will trump any kind of personal level of analysis. In my next blog I will consider the empirical evidence available on what type of treatments are more likely to work for what psychological predicaments.

[1][1] Neuropsychoanalysts consider themselves to be following on from Freud as a neuroscientist. They now seek to begin Freud’s original motivation turning psychoanalysis into a natural science grounded and justified by neuroscientific research. Mark Solms and Joseph Dodds are two key theorists in this field.

[2] When I speak of Heidegger I am referring to him at the period he wrote ‘Being and Time’ I will not engage with the later Heidegger at any stage in this blog-post.

[3] Though Davidson’s emphasis on distal as opposed to proximal stimulation and triangulation could be used as a way of modifying Quine’s theory and making it more consistent with the insights of Heidegger.

“If I take death into my life, acknowledge it face it squarely, I will free myself from the anxiety of death and the pettiness of life-and only then will I become free to become myself” (Heidegger)

Facebook and Twitter are two relatively new ways of people bonding in groups seeking out like minded individuals that one otherwise may not ever meet in daily life. The groups feature in Facebook is particularly useful. When I finished my PhD and was still eager to discuss philosophy and its relation to science so I set up a group to discuss these issues on Facebook called ‘Philosophy, Science and Utube’. The group now has over 8000 members and has a lot of very serious academics as in it. Around the same time as I set up ‘Philosophy, Science and Utube’ my friends Matt, Simon and Bill set up their group ‘Analytic Philosophy’ which has close to 10,000 members and again is filled with some very serious academics.  For pretty much any group out there one will find a Facebook discussion group chocked full of people waiting to discuss the relevant issues.

As a member of various groups on different theoretical disciplines I often come across, different tribal allegiances, different theoretical stances, different standards of evidence etc. In a psychoanalytic discussion group I was a member of world famous and much respected psychoanalyst George Atwood made a disparaging comment about Aaron T Beck the father of cognitive behavioural therapy. Atwood’s comment began with the claim that Aaron T Beck is the Devil, and in his comment sketched a very implausible psychoanalytic theory, for which he provided no evidence, as to why Beck created cognitive behavioural therapy. I criticised what I perceived as Atwood’s closed minded dismissal of an entire discipline, and argued harshly that it would make life very difficult for his patients if he took this closed minded approach with them. His friend Robert Stolorow who co-authored many books with Atwood went on the attack and argued that I should be banned from the group for a personal attack on Atwood (apparently personal attacks are only allowed if they are directed toward Beck). I replied that my criticism was directed towards his dogmatic attack on an entire discipline not towards Atwood himself, and Stolorow replied that my behaviour was typical of cognitive behavioural therapists[1] who do not have the emotional ability to recognise when they are insulting people. The obvious reply to this was that since his statement is of the form ‘All people who study x are deficient in capacity y’ he was engaging in a personal attack on every person on the planet who studies Cognitive Behavioural Therapy[2]. So again he had no problem with personal attacks as long as they were directed at people who study CBT.

I didn’t bother continuing with the argument with Atwood and Stolorow as it was too heated and there was no chance of either side learning from the other at this point. I have recently been thinking about the discipline of psychoanalysis and its relation to other sciences of the mind and it put me in mind of the argument with Atwood and Stolorow. Stolorow’s claim that people who specialise in behaviour analysis, and cognitive behavioural therapy are less emotionally attuned than psychoanalysts while insulting, isn’t necessarily false. A neurologist could correctly argue that people who study philosophy are on average worse than neurologists at distinguishing between tremors associated with Parkinson’s disease and tremors associated with MS. Stolorow could argue that his claim has the same logical status as the claim made by the neurologist. If we read Stolorow’s claim this way then we can look at it not as an insult to CBT or behavioural analysts but rather as an empirical claim which may or may not be true.

In fact one could flip the focus of Stolorow’s claim around and focus on a psychoanalyst’s competency to assess a person’s behavioural environment.  So, for example, consider a child with severe intellectual disability who engages in self injurious behaviour such as severe head banging. We have ample evidence to indicate that an Applied Behavioural Analyst through assessing the child’s environment, circumstances of occurrence, causal antecedents of the behaviour etc and implementing a differential reinforcement programme will be able to reduce the amount of self injurious behaviour the child engages in.[3] So here we could argue that we have a nice division of labour. The behavioural analyst deals with external behaviour and is probably not the best person to evaluate emotional stuff, and the psychoanalyst deals with emotional problems and is probably not the best observer of external behaviour. So there is no conflict of approaches just people dealing with different areas of life using different tools. If only life were that simple.

Psychoanalysts sometimes deal with behavioural problems with their clients. Valerie Sinason and Neville Symington have both worked with people with severe intellectual disabilities who have emotional and behavioural problems. Sinason even worked with intellectually disabled people who cannot speak (but who seem to understand language), by analysing their play with toys to try and to discover unconscious difficulties they have. By making explicit these difficulties to her clients she helped them to move on and decrease their destructive behaviour. Reports by care givers indicate that Sinason’s work did help improve her client’s behaviour though these anecdotal reports are much harder to assess than the objective measurements used by behavioural analysts.

My point is that there is simply not any clear division of labour between these disciplines. If a psychoanalyst and behavioural analysts (whether CBT or not) claims that the other discipline is deficient in various different areas then it is important to note who is correct. Behavioural Analysts treat people with anxiety disorders and so do psychoanalysts. While CBT and psychoanalysts both deal with essentially the same problems in using their different approaches.

We do know that the empirical evidence doesn’t really favour one approach over the other in terms of outcomes. Philosopher Charlotte Blease has recently noted[4] that 300 different studies have shown that there is only 1 percent difference in outcomes. Psychoanalysis seems to have slightly better long term outcomes than CBT but overall there seems to be very little difference between the approaches in terms of outcomes. There is little empirical research on the difference of outcomes between psychoanalysis and Clinical Behavioural Analysis.  Clinical Behaviour Analysis is a form of therapy which tries to remain closer to the functional approach of people like Skinner and more modern behavioural research in Relational Frame Theory; they tend to move away from more cognitive approaches like CBT. Clinical Behaviour Analysis such as ‘Community Reinforcement Approach and Family Training’, or ‘Behavioural Activation’, are relatively recent. There hasn’t been as much comparative research into its merits in comparison to CBT and Psychoanalysis yet. But the research so far is promising and indicates it can match up to either CBT or Psychoanalysis.

Given that there is no evidence that behavioural approaches and Psychoanalytic approaches are more successful than each other in therapeutic settings one might wonder why a more ecumenical approach isn’t adopted. We could argue that different approaches to psychotherapy will work on different people depending on their temperament. Is it just dogmatism of therapists who have a childish urge to assert “my discipline is the best” despite the evidence failing to find any significant differences of the success rate of the different approaches? I would argue that the answer to the previous question is NO.

People like Atwood and Stolorow are arguing from a philosophical perspective. When Stolorow notes that people who work from a behavioural perspective lack emotional insight he is arguing that they do not understand a key facet of the human condition. Stolorow in his blog has criticised CBT as being a form of commercialism. Neat short sessions can cure people’s psychological ailments at a nice price, in a very short time; maybe 8 sessions or so. This approach fits perfectly with a capitalist society where people’s primary role is as a worker, and if the worker has difficulties we need to get them back to work as quickly as possible, with as little fuss as possible. Things like mental anguish or grief are not aspects of life to be worked through but symptoms to be cured. In short on Stolorow’s picture mental health, like all other aspects of our existence, are reduced to commodities.

In an interview with the Centre for Psychoanalytic studies Stolorow recounted how he wrote a series of psychobiography’s with George Atwood on how the theories of Freud, Jung et al were shaped by the personalities of the theorists. To encompass this fact they looked to phenomenology as a way of grounding the theories in phenomenological experience.

When trying to ground his psychoanalytic practice in phenomenology Stolorow went to the work of Heidegger[5]. A key aspect of Heidegger’s theory that Stolorow was interested in was his account of authenticity. So for Heidegger humans suffer a primordial sense of guilt, it is not moral guilt but a condition of possibility of moral guilt, a sense of being accountable to oneself for oneself. Instead of holding oneself responsible for ones existence interms of some public norm (inauthenticity), one holds oneself responsible for himself. You have to be accountable to yourself first existentially before you can become morally accountable. The other aspect of authenticity is being aware of our being towards death and accepting our finitude. For Heidegger people normally try to escape from their finitude by engaging in idle talk. From a clinical perspective Stolorow notes that emotional trauma forces us into our finitude. Death is brought into the foreground by various emotional trauma it reminds us that we and everyone we know will die. When this happens our everyday defence mechanisms are meaningless.  When we are in the state of authentically being towards death we have less interest in being busy in the world. This can explain depressive states where people lose interest in sex and food etc.

He distinguishes his approach to psychoanalysis from other psychoanalysts as follows[6]: Theye don’t have a content theory, and do not prescribe any universal content of experience, because sometimes those theoretical contents end up becoming the content of analytic practice as opposed to the unique experiences of the analysand (e.g Archetype, Super ego, etc).The try to treat every individual as an individual who has own unique intersubjective history. One exception of this treating people as unique contingent individuals is on the traumatising effect of finitude itself on us. For Stolorow this traumatising effect of finitude is a universal fact of the human condition which cannot be escaped. Though Stolorow does differ from Heidegger in that he thinks that being towards loss is just as important as being towards death. Heidegger wouldn’t have agreed with him on this.

We can see from this brief summary of Stolorow’s work that any analysis that focuses on behavioural changes to help individuals cope with the world will be inadequate because it misses out on essential facts about the human condition. Our relationship to our choices, and to our finitude are key facets of who we are, and any therapy that ignores this fact while it may have some pragmatic success will not get at the truth of the person they are helping. Stolorow views things like behavioural analysis and CBT as crude consumer tools which sell short term happiness at the cost of long term authentic understanding being achieved by the patient.

A couple of points need to be noted here. Firstly Stolorow’s attempt to provide a phenomenological theory to ground psychoanalysis is problematic. If he is going to ground his psychoanalysis in terms of phenomenological description he is going to have to deal with competing phenomenological descriptions. Why, for example, accept Heidegger’s analysis in ‘Being and Time’ over Husserl’s (slightly different) in ‘The Crisis of the Human Sciences’? Secondly, it think it is important to note that to some degree Stolorow’s claim that  those from a behavioural background lack emotional empathy would probably apply to other psychoanalysts. Neuropsychoanalysts with their attempts to ground Freud’s theory in modern neuroscience are miles away from the Phenomenological Psychoanalysis Stolorow practices. One could argue that they are entirely new disciplines? To some degree Neuropsychoanalysis has more in common with CBT and Relational Frame Theory than with phenomenological analysis. It would be interesting to hear if Stolorow and Atwood think Neuropsychoanalysts are emotionally deficient as well.

Stolorow’s problem with behavioural approach is philosophical. Likewise some Behavioural approaches will criticise psychoanalysts for over populating their ontology with entities that are not warranted by the behavioural facts. Again this is a philosophical complaint. I am a pragmatist. Since both approaches seem to work equally well I think people should use them as necessary, and try to devise other approaches that may be better than what has gone before them. The Heidegger I prefer is the Heidegger of the first part of ‘Being and Time’ the thinker who emphasises pragmatism, embodied cognition, implicit awareness. This is the Heidegger that Rorty talks about a lot. I think that Heidegger can have something important to add to discussions of the human condition. But I think appealing to the more metaphysical aspects of his worse are more trouble than they are worth.

[1] I am not a Cognitive Behavioural Therapist he just assumed I was because of my defence of Beck.

[2] Henceforth Cognitive Behavioural Therapy will be referred to as CBT.

[3] I won’t be dealing with pharmaceutical treatments in this blog post.  But it should be kept in mind that a good psychoanalyst or cognitive behavioural therapists, or behavioural analyst will use pharmaceutical treatments in tandem with their programmes where necessary.

[4] Charlotte Blease 2015 ‘Unthinkable is Psychotherapy a licence to deceive’?

[5] Note Stolorow is no amateur using the work of a philosopher he doesn’t understand. As well as having a PhD in Clinical Psychology he also has a separate PhD in Philosophy where he researched on Heidegger and Trauma.

[6] He discusses this in his interview with the Centre For Modern Psychoanalytic Studies.

“What the results suggested was that the simple learning observed in Pavlovian conditioning paradigms arises from an information processing system sensitive to the contingencies between stimuli. If this implication is valid, then it changes our conception of the level of abstraction at which this basic learning process operates.” (Gallistel ‘Information Processing in Conditioning’ p. 1)

Gallistel (2002) discussed a 1968 experiment by Robert Rescorla which Gallistel argued contemporary theorists have not fully digested. According to Gallistel what the result showed was that the simple associative learning of Pavlovian conditioning comes from an information processing system that is sensitive to contingencies between stimuli. Pavlov famously managed to associate an Unconditioned Stimulus[1] to a Conditioned Stimulus and this has been one of the foundational pillars in behaviourism. Rescorla’s experiment was done in the following way. A pidgin experiences a key light up and a while later he gets food. In the case of the rat a tone comes on and soon after the rat is shocked. After a while the pidgin starts pecking when it hears its key lights up and the rat starts defecating when it hears the tone. According to Gallistel this showed that both the Rat and the Pigeon were anticipating that the US is coming. This learning was considered by followers of Pavlov to be a paradigm of associative learning.

In order to prove that this pairing was the result of association forming; an experiment was done where two stimuli were repeatedly presented together, and a control experiment was done where the stimulus were widely separated in time. So, if you could see the change in the experimental condition, but not in the control condition, then the experimenter would argue that the paring was an association.

However Rescorla (1967) found that temporal pairing and contingency could be disassociated from each other, prior to this people believed that they were the same thing. But Rescorla found that the controls used in previous experiments were not sufficient. Control conditions in which the CS and US are never paired do not eliminate CS-US contingency, they rather replace one contingency with another. Rescorla pointed out that if we want to determine whether it is temporal pairing or contingency that is leading to conditioning we need a truly random control.

In this condition the occurrence of the CS does not determine in anyway the time with which the US may occur; so the US must sometimes occur with the CS.  Rescorla (1968) ran his experiment as follows: He tested for conditioned fear in rats. In the first experiment hungry rats were trained to press a lever to obtain food. Once the rats were trained to press the lever regularly there were five sessions during which the lever was blocked (ibid p.3). In each of these sessions twelve tones came on at more or less random times. The rats also received short mildly painful shocks to their feet. Rescorla manipulated the distribution of the shocks relative to the tones. For one group the shocks were completely contingent on the tone and the shocks only occurred when the tone was on. In another group the rats got 12 shocks when the tone was on and the also got shocks at equal frequency when the tones were not on. This protocol did not alter then number or frequency of tone shock parings but it did destroy the contingency between tone and shock, and it did increase the number of shocks per session. To check the importance of this Rescorla had a third group who were shocked at random 12 times without regard to the tone.

Before testing the extent to which the rat had learned to fear the tone Rescorla eliminated their fear of the experimental chamber by eliminating tones and shocks for a couple of sessions. In the final sessions the rats conditioned fear of the tone was measured by seeing how the tone affected their willingness to continue pressing the lever. What they found was that although the Rats in the in the two conditions had the same tone shock pairings, the rats in the contingent condition learned to fear the tone, whereas the rats in the truly random condition did not, neither did the rats in the other condition. So it is contingency not temporal pairing that drives simple Pavlovian conditioning.

“In sum, the evidence that conditioning is driven by contingency unsettles us because it challenges what we have taken for granted about the level at which basic learning processes operate. Contingency, like number, arises at a more abstract level than the level of individual events. It can only be apprehended by a process that operates at the requisite level of abstraction–the level of information processing. A US is contingent on a CS to the extent that the CS provides information about the timing of the US.” (Ibid p.4)

Gallistel has done many other experiments which confirm Rescorla’s experimental findings. In various different blogs I have defended various different types of behaviourism. I have noted that behaviourism is not a blank slate theory, that reinforcement does play a role in our language acquisition, and that Applied Behavioural Analysis (in particular the Picture Exchange Communication System), can be very useful in helping children with Autism acquire language. I have also argued that despite the hype by Chomsky and Pinker behavioural accounts of language have not been refuted and more research should be done into them. These views of mine have typically been met with rhetoric and sometimes even personal attacks. Typically people don’t respond with reasons they respond with anger. Not all responses have been so irrational. Linguist David Pereplyotchik has argued that Gallistel’s paper above shows that any appeal to reinforcement alone will only give a partial account of language acquisition.

Firstly some terminology; Gallistel (2002, 2006, and 2012) presented evidence that classical conditioning relies on subjective computations of partial information. His evidence was largely directed against Pavlovian accounts of learning. Skinner however had a different conception of behaviourism his conception focused on Operant Conditioning as opposed to Pavlov’s focus on Classical Conditioning. Classical conditioning involves placing a neutral stimulus before a reflex, whereas Operant conditioning involves placing either punishment, negative reinforcement, or positive reinforcement after a behaviour. Classical conditioning focuses on taking an involuntary response (instinct) and pairing it with a neutral stimulus to form an association; Operant conditioning instead focuses on voluntary behaviour and a consequence following that behaviour. In Operant conditioning people are rewarded with incentives while in classical conditioning no such incentives are offered. In therapeutic setting typically operant conditioning is focused on more than classical conditioning. But it is not uncommon for both types of conditioning to be used by an applied behavioural analyst. In Tacting for example a child will come to associate a sound with a particular state of affairs in the world. This is a type of classical conditioning where the child’s instinctive imitative behaviour, (imitating sounds of his care givers) becomes associated with particular states of affairs. When the child says ‘mama’ primarily in the presence of ‘mama’ he has become conditioned to associate a piece of instinctive imitation with state of affairs and this is classical conditioning. But it is also combined with operant conditioning as the parents use various types of positive and negative reinforcement to help the increase the likelihood that the child will mouth the sound in the right circumstances. Now I have discussed at length in other blogs the extent to which reinforcement is necessary to explain things like language acquisition. I have note that is one amongst many of the tools necessary for a person to acquire language, it is far far from the complete story. Nonetheless I think that it is important to note that since operant and classical conditioning are combined in many different studies then Rescorla’s findings need to be taken account of in any scientific theory which makes use of reinforcement.

The results indicate that classical conditioning takes place at a much more abstract level than theorists previously believed. It is fair to say that no behaviourists currently believe that all of our behaviour can be explained in terms of classical conditioning. In fact Rescorla (1988) explicitly argues that classical conditioning is just a small part of psychology and should not be viewed as the total story; though it thinks that since it is relatively easy to gain experimental traction over it is ideal to be integrated with neuroscientific research.

Rescorla (1988) explicates some of the same experiments as Gallistel does, and details some other experiments which he thinks are relevant to showing people they misunderstand the details of Pavlovian conditioning. Rescorla emphasises that Pavlovian Conditioning no longer works in the simplistic reflex condition and their experimental results suggests that Pavlovian conditioning has a more complex richness in the relations it represents and the way the representations influence behaviour. He even goes as far as claiming that modern versions of classical conditioning involves representations which are closer to the British Empiricist tradition in philosophy than the reflex tradition favoured by reflex theorists. Rescorla’s view argues that conditioning involves the learning of relations and contiguity between US and CS is neither necessary nor sufficient to this process; the important aspect is the information available to the organism. Rescorla details experiments like the one above that Gallistel outlined above and further experiments like ‘The Blocking effect’ which he performed in 1968.  In the blocking effect two groups of animals receive a compound stimulus, but they differed in that for one the prior training of the light makes the tone redundant (ibid p.155). Rescorla notes that the results in the experiment are not driven by contiguity but by the informational relation on which they note. Experiments have been repeated by Rescorla, Gallistel et al over the last 50 or so years.

It is important to note that Rescorla explicates his view in terms of subjective amount of information available to the organism, not just the objective features of the environment. Furthermore Rescorla talks about the organism using this information to represent his environment. As I understand behaviourism this talk is not typical. It is difficult to answer this question, does claiming that classical conditioning (and hence indirectly operant conditioning) makes use of subjective information mean that one is no longer a behaviourist. People like Fodor don’t think so:

“The heart of the matter is that association is supposed to be a contiguity-sensitive relation. Thus Hume held that ideas became associated as a function of the temporal contiguity-sensitive relation. Thus Hume held that ideas became associated as a function of the temporal contiguity of their tokenings. (Other determinants of associative strength were said to be ‘frequency’ and on some accounts ‘similarity’). Likewise, according to Skinnerian theory, responses become conditioned to stimuli as a function of their temporal contiguity to reinforcers. Likewise, according to Skinnerian theory, responses become conditioned to stimuli as a function to their temporal contiguity to reinforcers. By contrast, Chomsky argued that the mind is sensitive to relations amongst mental or linguistic associations that may be arbitrarily far apart.” (Fodor ‘Language of Thought 2’ p. 103)

Now it could be argued that since on the evidence from Gallistel and Rescorla shows that in classical conditioning contiguity is neither necessary nor sufficient for association then their evidence is closer to Chomsky’s views than Skinners. And any view that is closer to Chomsky’s than Skinners’ cannot be considered behaviourist. I am not so sure though. The data that is used by Rescorla is behavioural data, that the data shows that Pavlov’s theory is too simplistic should be views as improvements on behavioural science not a refutation of it. Debates like these are common place in all sciences. Thus some people in Darwinian Theory argue that recent evidence in terms of laws of form, epigenetics, and evo-devo research show that the neo-Darwinian synthesis has been refuted and we need a superior theory to capture this new data. It is hard to know what importance should be attached to these debates. Whether we call it ‘Neo-Darwinism’ or something else is irrelevant as long it deals with the new evidence. Was Darwin refuted by the discovery of genetics and its explanation of heredity in terms of genes, or was his theory merely extended in light of new evidence. Similar questions arise with Rescorla’s discoveries; I prefer to think of them as improvements on behavioural science rather than refutations, just like I think the neo-Darwinian synthesis was an improvement of traditional evolutionary theory rather than a refutation. But the issues are complex and I cannot go in to them in any more detail here.

Interestingly that there are aspects of Rescorla’s talk that remind me of Fodor’s Representational Theory of the Mind, except Rescorla thinks that connectionist models can capture the facts revealed by Pavlovian conditioning, he cites the work of Rumelhart and McClelland (1986), in this connection. Noting that

“Connectionistic theories of this sort bear an obvious resemblance to theories of Pavlovian conditioning. Both view the organism as adjusting its representation to bring it into line with the world, striving to remove any discrepancies. Indeed, it is striking that often such complex models are built on elements that are tied closely to Pavlovian associations” For instance, one of the learning principles most frequently adopted within these models, the so called delta rule, is virtually identical to one popular theory of Pavlovian conditioning, the Rescorla-Wagner Model” (ibid p.158)

What is interesting here is that the same year that the above paper was wrote Fodor and Pylyshyn wrote their famous paper attacking the connectionist models of Rumelhart and McClelland. They argued that these connectionist models don’t work for modelling cognition and language because they cannot capture the compositionality of both our language and thought.

Fodor and Pylyshyn emphasise that connectionism is committed to representation and that we need to becareful to set out what our level of explanation is; is it the neural or the cognitive level. They note that since connectionists are dealing with representation they are giving explanations at the cognitive level. According to F and P classical theories unlike connectionist theories are committed to the existence of (1) a language of thought. Classic theories also accept an ABC of assumptions. (A)There is a distinction between structurally atomic and structurally molecular representations. (B) Structurally molecular representations have syntactic constituents that are themselves either structurally molecular or structurally atomic. (C) The semantic content of a molecular representation is a function of the semantic content of its syntactic parts, together with its constituent structure. And classical theories are also committed to (2) The structure sensitivity of our thought processes.

The major difference that Fodor and Pylyshyn see between connectionist architecture and classical architecture are that classical architecture recognises constituent structure and the semantics of a thought is determined by the semantics of its constituents, whereas connectionist models do not work in that way.  Fodor and Pylyshyn argue that there are 4 reasons that researchers don’t always recognise that connectionist architecture cannot handle constituent structure: (1) Failure to understand what arrays of symbols do in classical architecture and what they do in connectionist architecture. (2) Confusion of the question of whether the nodes in connectionist architecture have constituent structure with whether the nodes are neurologically distributed. (3) Failure to distinguish between a representation having semantic and syntactic constituents and a concept being encoded interms of micro features. (4) By wrongly assuming that since representations in connectionist networks have graph structure then they have constituent structure.

“To summarize: Classical and Connectionist theories disagree about the nature of mental representation; for the former, but not for the latter, mental representations characteristically exhibit a combinatorial constituent structure and a combinatorial semantics. Classical and Connectionist theories also disagree about the nature of mental processes; for the former, but not for the latter, mental processes are characteristically sensitive to the combinatorial structure of the representations on which they operate” (ibid p. 21)

Part 3 their argument centres on explicating why connectionist architectures cannot handle the productivity, systematicity, compositionality, and inferential coherence of thoughts.

• Productivity of Thought: We can combine finite atoms of thought (concepts) in productive ways to produce a potentially infinite amount of expressions. This capacity is beyond all connectionist architecture. (Some connectionist models get around this fact by denying that our thoughts are potentially infinite) Note Elman has created connectionist recursive models.
• Systematicity of cognitive representation: Even if you deny that cognitive capacities are productive you cannot deny that they are systematic. You won’t find a person who can think the thought that ‘John loves the girl’ but who cannot think the thought ‘The girl loves John.’ The reason that the thoughts are connected is that there must be structural connections between the thought ‘John loves the girl’ and ‘The girl loves John’ the structural connection is that the two sentences are made of the same parts. Based on this they argue that mental representations have constituent structure and that we therefore have a language of thought and these mental representations cannot be captured by connectionist models.
• Compositionality: They connect this with systematicity; and note that the way that sentences are systematic is not arbitrary from a semantic point of view. A lexical item must make approximately the same semantic contribution to each sentence which it occurs in (not sure this works for metaphor, idioms, etc).

“So, here’s the argument so far: you need to assume some degree of compositionality of English sentences to account for the fact that systematically related sentences are always semantically related; and to account for certain regular parallelisms between the syntactical structure of sentences and their entailments. So, beyond any serious doubt, the sentences of English must be compositional to some serious extent. But the principle of compositionality governs the semantic relations between words and the expressions of which they are constituents. So compositionality implies that (some) expressions have constituents. So compositionality argues for (specifically, presupposes) syntactic/semantic structure in sentences.” (ibid p. 30)

They argue that some connectionists actually try to deny compositionality to get out of this argument. Connectionists seem to take idioms ‘Kick the Bucket’ as their model for natural language.

• Systematicity of Inference: The syntax of mental representations, mediates with their semantic properties and their causal role in mental processes. Classical architecture can handle this fact but connectionist models cannot.

Summary of the Argument:

What’s deeply wrong with connectionist architecture is this: Because it acknowledges neither syntactic nor semantic structure in mental representations, it perforce treats them not as a generated set but as a list. But lists, qua lists, have no structure; any collection of items is a possible list. And, correspondingly, on Connectionist principles, any collection of (causally connected) representational states is a possible mind. So, as far as Connectionist architecture is concerned, there is nothing to prevent minds that are arbitrarily unsystematic. But that result is preposterous. Cognitive capacities come in structurally related clusters; their systematicity is pervasive. All the evidence suggests that punctate minds can’t happen. This argument seemed conclusive against the Connectionism of Hebb, Osgood and Hull twenty or thirty years ago. So far as we can tell, nothing of any importance has happened to change the situation in the meantime.” (ibid p. 34)

David Chalmers in his 1990 paper ‘Fodor and Pylyshyn the Simplest Refutation’ argued that F and P underestimate the differences between localist and distributed representation. Chalmers notes that distributed representations can be used to support structure sensitive operations in a very different manner than the classical approach.  Chalmers notes that the refutation of F and P can be stated in one sentence: If  F and P’s argument is correct, as it is presented, then it implies that no connectionist network can support a compositional semantics; not even a connectionist implementation of a Turing Machine, or of a Language of Thought.

It is unclear that Chalmers’ reply to F and P really works. Philosopher Simon Mc Waters has argued persuasively that the model that Chalmers uses to show that connectionist models can capture systematicity and compositionality is not sufficient to refute F and P. He argues that Chalmers model relies on a prior structuring of the symbols used in the model so the connectionist model doesn’t really show that operate on the symbols in a direct and holistic manner as Chalmers claimed. Debates are ongoing on this issue and despite the open ended nature of the debate the connectionist models have flourished in the 27 years since F and P wrote their critique. I am not sure if a model has been developed that can deal with all of F and P’s criticisms but I plan to return to the issue in my next blog.

It is unclear Fodor and Pylyshyn 1988 would affect Rescorla’s views on Pavlovian conditioning because he thinks that Pavlovian conditioning plays only a small role in cognition, and doesn’t tell us what his views are things like operant conditioning are and what he thinks the nature of computational procedures which make learning of all kinds possible. Furthermore as Paul Churchland has argued in ‘Plato’s Camera’ (2012) Rumelhart and McClelland (1986) is ancient history and more modern connectionist models can deal with the difficulties posed by Pylyshyn and Fodor (I don’t know whether Churchland is correct on this point I am currently researching the issue. I am not sure where Rescorla would stand on these facts; presumably he thinks it is his job to do the experiments and other theorist’s job to construct mathematical and artificial models which can accommodate the various different experimental data as they come in. Personally my hunch is that Bayesian Modelling will be more successful than connectionist ones to help us accommodate the findings of Rescorla et al. Overall though I don’t think that Rescorla’s studies refute reinforcement theory they merely show that the story is richer than previously believed.

[1] Henceforth Unconditioned Stimulus are referred to has US and Conditioned Stimulus are referred to as CS.