Dear Chuck and Fil (and Terry, if you read down to the long, long end),

Many thanks for your posts, and for your examples. I think the dialogue 
is valuable, and I'll try to respond to your objections. I'm sorry this 
is so long. I really didn't intend to write a position paper, but these 
are quite complex issues, and I am not gifted at stating them 
concisely.

With respect to human conversation, my point was that what is said (and 
what can be claimed to be thought) in conversation is understandable by 
reference to the details of the conversation. What happens there 
happens in interaction, and it has quite a specific organisation, and 
is understandable and (more importantly) accountable through that 
organisation. It is an organisation that is sensitive to sequence, 
timing, gaps, intonation and other, again, publicly observable features 
of that interaction, and probably many more features than we are 
currently aware. Conversation analytic studies are quite illuminating 
in this regard. I brought this up simply to challenge the view which I 
attributed to Chuck, that what people say is 'tested out in the head of 
an individual' whose interpretation is 'thrust out, so to speak into 
social communication'. I just don't think what we say in conversation 
is better understood as the public revelation of fully-formed, 
previously existing, private 'thoughts in the head', and I find that 
studies of conversation support my skepticism.

In your responses to this, you both counter by suggesting that there is 
a lot going on during conversation on a neural level. I don't doubt 
this is true, but I question what such an observation is intended to 
achieve here. Chuck, you say that what we know in advance is not known 
in language, but in the 'salience' of neural networks (I am not sure 
what this means), and that we are not necessarily conscious of them 
(instant 'blending' and the like), and that much of conversation is 
*probably* played out in our heads before we speak. To this I have 
objections. What could it mean that conversation is played out in our 
heads in advance, but not in language? It is as if the 'words' we will 
soon speak are able to be read off of the neuronal activity, but this 
at a 'level' that we (ourselves) are not aware of. But then you say 
that this is particularly when 'one is trying to get a word in 
edgewise' or 'in order not to say something to no purpose'. This is one 
of the confusions that I am targeting. In one mode of discourse, you 
credit neuronal activity with responding to our circumstances, 
projecting what we will say in advance, containing ideas etc. (all 
without our awareness), following which you seamlessly shift to a more 
vernacular discourse, giving a person credit for 'trying to get a word 
in edgewise', or trying not to say something irrelevant. This is the 
very conceptual trouble; it confuses physical 'causes' with personal 
attributes (motivations, reasons). Neurons don't pose hypotheses, give 
reasons, play out conversations in advance, or fail to understand 
arguments. These are predicates that can only, preserving any of their 
ordinary sense, be ascribed to human beings. It tends to be a Cartesian 
(and anthropomorphic) move to ascribe human attributes, characteristics 
etc. to the patterning of neuronal firings, but this is a mistake. I am 
not suggesting that human beings can think without a brain, but neither 
can they walk, cough or type without one. This slide from describing 
neuronal activity to ascribing agency to actors is a critical and fatal 
(according to my view) move that is not senseful. Reasons and causes 
are very different beasts. (Consider the difference between the answers 
to this question: "Why did he murder his wife's lover?" 1. Because he 
was insanely jealous. 2. Because of a temporary chemical imbalance. 
These cannot be boiled down to the 'same' phenomena. They express very 
different things, in spite of the fact they each may serve us as 
sufficient explanations of human behaviour, but in different contexts).

With respect to my paragraph about the use of emotion words. Chuck, I 
don't see the contradiction you suspect. The point here is to attack 
the illusion that emotion words are referential of physical bodily 
states in any normative sense. If it can be true that when I say I hate 
the war I actually DO hate the war, but I don't 'feel' anything bodily, 
then it remains pointless to attempt to find the sole explanation of 
human emotion in terms of body states that we feel (Damasio's 
postulation of 'unconscious' emotions, and his claim that emotions are 
omni-present only confuses the issue, unduly stretching the meaning of 
'emotion'). On the flip side, if someone reports feeling love, but 
about nothing in particular, it makes no sense to say that person truly 
loves. Fil, I think your examples are well-chosen, and illustrate 
boundary cases where it might still be senseful (in such rare 
circumstances) to ascribe emotions to people without there necessarily 
being objects of emotion (a possibility I did not deny). However, these 
cases do not demonstrate that the place we need to look for real 
emotions is therefore in physical somatic states. Permit me another 
example. In the middle of the night, a five year old boy wakes up to 
see a stranger in his bedroom. He comes running to his parents crying. 
Is he experiencing grief or fear? The answer to this question can 
(logically) not be found in neuroscience or human physiology, precisely 
because this is not an empirical question, but a conceptual one. 
Suppose the advanced neurophysiologist ultimately concludes that the 
boy was experiencing grief, not fear! What possible sense could that 
make? The criteria for the determination of the question 'which 
emotion?' is public, not private, and we do this (correctly) on a daily 
basis with reference to the circumstances of the five year old, not his 
somatic states. Looking within the human body for such answers is 
looking in the wrong place.

Fil, you sum up by saying that perhaps emotions are partly 'driven by' 
psychological and social factors, and partly by neurophysiological 
ones. I appreciate the concession to social factors, but I have a 
problem with the idea. To me, it makes no sense to claim that I am 
angry *because* my heart is racing, my fists are clenched, or 
adrenaline is running through my body. I am angry because I have been 
insulted. Physiological changes may be physical manifestations of 
anger, but my anger is not 'driven by' them, but by my circumstances.

Chuck, in your other comments, I also have some troubles. You suggest 
that interpretation 'occurs in the brain/mind of an individual and not 
in a particular social situation'. I am aware that not everyone cares 
all that much for Wittgenstein. But the point of his kinds of arguments 
are to demonstrate that the language that we use to make sense of the 
world encourages certain misconceptions. One of these misconceptions is 
that nouns (c.f. paper, headache, indictment, consciousness) must 
operate as names for things. The 'interpretive flexibility of language' 
you acknowledge does not mean that different people assign different 
objects to the same word. On the contrary, the point is that similar 
grammatical constructions (Wittgenstein uses the similarity of 'I have 
a pin' to 'I have a pain') often work in radically different ways. 
Appreciating such differences does not, therefore, mean that I locate 
interpretation 'in the world' rather than 'in the head', as you 
suggest. Trying to find a 'place' in the physical world for 'where 
interpretation is' may be the very problem that needs dissolving, not 
solving. The same is true for several other kinds of words, many of 
which we associate with 'the mind'. What we need is to first inspect 
the sense they are able to make through their ordinary use, rather than 
presume they are as-yet undiscovered or misunderstood physical 
phenomena of a certain type (object, state, process, etc.). These are 
among the 'philosophical investigations'; the logical/grammatical 
analyses of the kind Wittgenstein exemplified.

My problem with theorists like Pinker and Damasio is that they do not 
begin with a subtle enough appreciation of 'what emotion is' before 
looking somewhere in the body to find it. Emotion is much more complex 
and varied and chameleon and public and observable than is appreciated. 
In their attempts to locate or explain emotion through studying human 
physiology, they may identify many new and important visceral 
phenomena, but the problem is this: that emotion is not simply a 
complex visceral phenomenon in the first instance. So why can't we call 
what ever it is that neurophysiology does describe 'emotion' (e.g. 
Terry has pointed us to Damasio's 'three-part model')? What is wrong 
with that? Nothing, provided the things we do not hope to explain are 
what we ordinarily understand by words such as love, fear, hate, guilt, 
euphoria, contentment etc. Ultimately, neurophysiology may offer us 
possibilities (or explanations of experiences) like 'Do you want to 
love? Then take a pill.', similar to the psychotropic drug experiences 
Fil used as an example. But who would really argue that we are still 
talking about the same thing? This 'love' is neither physically nor 
grammatically the same. It would be a different experience, it is a 
different concept, it has a different meaning. And if we change the 
meaning, we might as well change the word, too, as Wittgenstein 
remarked. Again, the answer is not in neuroscience, yet many 
neuroscientists make the mistake of seeing emotions as nothing more or 
less then physical phenomena. The thing they are trying to explain is 
not a thing (nor is it a 'process', nor a 'state').

Thus I contend it is a misunderstanding to imply (as Terry does) that 
if only Wittgenstein had available the empirical results of 
neuroscience when he mused about these issues, he would not have made 
the points he did. This presumes that these issues are empirical, when 
they are in fact conceptual. Imagine an empiricist emerging from his 
laboratory claiming that he had taken new and careful measurements, and 
had determined that a meter was not, in fact, one meter long. We 
already have agreements about legitimate and illegitimate uses of these 
words, in much the same way as we already have agreements with respect 
to what a meter is. These agreements, the 'grammar' of language (or the 
length of the meter), are both things that offer us the very 
possibility of making inquiries. There is no experiment we can devise 
to determine what the word 'emotion' really means, what it 'actually' 
'refers to', apart from taking stock of its ordinary uses in vernacular 
(not theoretical) social discourse.

Perhaps this has only punched more holes in the can of worms. Thanks 
again for your comments and your patience in reading this. I'd 
appreciate hearing your responses, whether or not we are coming any 
closer to agreement.
Kind regards,
Ben


On 17 Jan 2006, at 21:19, Filippo A. Salustri wrote:

>
> I pretty sure the neurobiologists would say "automatic" or 
> "unconscious"=20
> rather than "ad-hoc" or "improvisational".  fMRIs have demonstrated=20
> clearly the amount of unconscious processing the brain does in order 
> to=20
> let us speak conversationally, and it's *alot*.
>
>
> What about people suffering from depression or other mental=20
> disabilities.  They often are unable to express an object of the=20
> emotion.  It could be, in some cases, a repressed memory, say.  What=20
> about people who respond emotionally when given a psychotropic drug? 
> I=20
> would suggest that because of these examples where it is possible to=20
> have emotion without an object, that it is reasonable to think that=20
> there is some sort of separation between emotion and the things we 
> might=20
> emote about.
>
>
> I think neuropsychologists use 'emotion' in this restricted sense 
> and=20
> 'feeling' to describe the 'bigger' psychological experience.  It's 
> just=20
> a terminology thing.  They're not (necessarily) saying all emotions 
> are=20
> just neurophysiological; they're just partitioning the purely 
> physical=20
> aspects from the psychological aspects for the sake of study.  
> Whether=20
> such a partitioning is really useful, only time will tell.
>
>
> I think a better statement would be that 'emotion' (what the 
> neuroboys=20
> would call 'feeling', I think) is *partly* driven by 
> neurophysiological=20
> factors, and partly from psychological and social/perceptual factors.
>
> Cheers.
> Fil
> --=20
> Prof. Filippo A. Salustri, Ph.D., P.Eng.
> Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering
> Ryerson University                         Tel: 416/979-5000 x7749
> 350 Victoria St.                           Fax: 416/979-5265
> Toronto, ON                                email: [log in to unmask]
> M5B 2K3  Canada                            
> http://deseng.ryerson.ca/~fil/
>