Frank Ramsey was a philosopher and economist who accomplished more in his 27 years than most people do in a lifetime, including the first English translation of the Tractatus logico-philosophicus.
His work is too technical for me to understand, with the exception of a speech he gave, appropriately, about how every subject is too technical for most people to understand. That speech was delivered to the Cambridge Apostles, an elite discussion group whose members have included Henry Sidgwick, Alfred Whitehead, John Maynard Keynes, and Amartya Sen. The speech can found in the epilogue to Ramsey's Foundations of Mathematics. Hopefully the link to Google Books works!
You should read the whole thing. Don't worry if the first paragraph makes no sense to you, but worry a great deal if the last paragraph doesn't either.
Ramsey thinks that only experts can fruitfully discuss "science, philosophy, history and politics", but he thinks that "psychology and aesthetics", are not possible subjects of discussion either. According to Ramsey, for one thing, aesthetics reduces to psychology and when we discuss psychology, we're simply "comparing notes on our experiences", and that discussing aesthetics, (e.g. discussing a novel) is really just expressing how we feel about the work.
Is it worthwhile to "compare notes on our experiences"? This question is more important than it sounds, so keep it in mind. Ramsey is skeptical about comparing such notes, because his experiences with psychoanalysis convinced him that we just don't understand ourselves. Today, psychoanalysis is more the province of film critics than psychologists, but contemporary psychology suggests an even more radical image because of
(1) Evidence that we are "dumbfounded" when asked for justification of some moral judgments: When researchers asked subjects why it's wrong to, for instance, clean their toilet with a national flag, people didn't respond with reasoning or principles, but rather bald assertions ("Because it's wrong!") or just silence.
(2) Evidence from Michael Gazzaniga's celebrated results with split-brain patients: People with intractable epilepsy are sometimes treated by having their corpus callosum surgically severed, separating the left and right sides of their neocortex. These patients, under controlled circumstances, act as if they have two minds, largely unaware of the other. Importantly, when research subjects are confronted about their behavior, they'll rationalize it, rather than admit that they don't know why they are behaving so strangely.
(3) Evidence from Korsakoff's syndome, and its associated behavior. People with certain kinds of brain damage suffer from anterograde amnesia, like the guy in Memento, except they don't know that they're amnesic. That might sound paradoxical. After all, how could you not know that you don't remember something? People with Korsakoff's syndrome solve this paradox by simply making things up!
(4) Evidence that we are radically wrong about what will make us happy. For instance, lottery winners are no happier than the average person, and amputees are no less happy than the average person. In the language of psychology, we aren't very good at "affective forecasting".
Together this evidence suggests a picture of human experience that I'd like to call the Ignorance-and-Confabulation thesis. To wit, proponents of this thesis believe that we are ignorant about our own mental life, and that we confabulate when asked to account for our thoughts, judgments and experiences. We are just like the pathological cases, except we're better at rationalizing, and better at confabulating. Again, I'd like to emphasize that the modern incarnation of the Ignorance-and-Confabulation thesis echoes psychoanalysis in many of its implications; even if you reject psychoanalysis, Ramsey's concerns still resonate.
The Ignorance-and-Confabulation thesis, of course, implies that "comparing notes on our experience" is a waste of time. We just bullshit ourselves, and then let people know about our bullshit, so they can imagine we said some other bullshit. To be specific, our views about morality, aesthetics, and the trajectory and meaning of our lives is just a bunch of bullshit.
It strikes me as a pretty depressing view. Ramsey's view is slightly different, but mostly in affect. He thinks we can share our feelings, and that it's good to be happy, and that philosophy, as an activity, can cure us of our unhappiness. I read the end of his essay as an exuberant attempt to make explicit what Wittgenstein tried to show, but your results may vary.
If the modern Ignorance-and-Confabulation view is correct, it's unlikely we can even share our feelings, which casts a pall over Ramsey's exuberance anyway.
Ignorance-and-Confabulation is an appealing picture for those who seek an austere, properly scientific worldview, and it's an even more appealing picture for those who've rejected religion, and are looking for more things to reject.*
But I think it's a picture we should resist.
I don't think we should resist it because it's depressing. If anything, proponents probably find it more compelling because it's depressing.
If I wanted to take a cheap shot, I'd point out that scientific knowledge relies on the kind of informal, non-scientific thinking that Ignorance-and-Confabulation rejects. But you could bite the bullet and say that informal, non-scientific thinking is only useful insofar as it historically undergirded the rise of science. That would be a shaky argument, but it wouldn't dispel the Ignorance-and-Confabulation picture when the evidence feels so suggestive.
But that evidence isn't definitive.
(1) The apparent dumbfounding in the face of moral confusion should certainly make us skeptical about whether we should trust moral judgments that are purely motivated by disgust. But these experiments only succeed in strange cases. In regular cases, people are perfectly capable of reasoning and applying principles in their moral judgments. Those judgments might be preceded by activation of regions of the brain responsible for feeling, rather than thinking, but would anyone think that it's impossible after serious, conscious deliberation to overrule or change their feelings?
(2) and (3) are certainly interesting, and I think they tell us something about what it is to be a normally functioning person—not because we are reflected in these pathological cases, but because we are not. That tells us that our ability to accurately describe our own behavior depends on certain kinds of mental functioning and anatomy.
(4) is an interesting example, because it is non-technical enough that it's become common knowledge among educated people, to the point where it's a a caveat in most advice. I think this shows that there isn't a perfect delineation between scientific and non-scientific knowledge. (4) is an example of how scientific knowledge can be superior to non-scientific knowledge, but it's also an example of how scientific knowledge can inform informal discussions.
So I don't think Ignorance-and-Confabulation provides an accurate picture of human experience, and obviously, I don't think psychoanalysis does either.
And I think that's a very good thing, because I think some kinds of knowledge are best nurtured by experiencing life, falling in love, working, reading Shakespeare, cultivating friendships, and eating well—all while exchanging notes with the people around you.
*If you think I'm creating a straw man, check out the philosopher Alex Rosenberg. More pertinently, I feel this view is worth addressing because I myself feel its pull.
I'm really not sure why you find all these findings from psychology so depressing or somehow undermining other important aspects of our lives. The way I see it, these findings bear most directly upon how we understand our own mental lives, and afford us opportunities to improve upon that understanding. Ultimately, these findings can inspire the same humanistic optimism that you advocate at the end of your post. So, here's my take on why all this stuff you've listed isn't so bad:
ReplyDeleteI tend to see the data on human beings' pervasive confabulation as showing that we lack non-interpretive access to our own beliefs, decisions, judgments, etc. A lot of the action in our mental lives happens beneath the level of consciousness, although conscious processes play a really important role in which beliefs we hold, which decisions we make, etc. When we introspect, we are not privy to most of what's going on in our own minds, so we use what access we do have to form a coherent interpretation of what we're thinking about. It just so happens that the folk psychological concepts we apply in those interpretations aren't always perfectly suited for the job, so we see characteristic mistakes from time to time. I don't really see it as bullshitting - it's just that we have imperfect access to the inner workings of the most complicated computer that's ever existed. Fortunately, there are lots of smart people doing psychology who can help us learn a bit more about ourselves. We can then use that knowledge to be more careful in circumstances in which we know that our judgments are subject to characteristic breakdown. What's so worrisome about that?
I agree with you that we shouldn't worry too much about the moral dumbfounding effect. One thing we can learn from such studies is that we should subject our gut reactions to closer scrutiny. The split-brain and Korsakov's examples are nice illustrations of the fact that we do our best to interpret ourselves with the information we have available to us; in these particular cases, brain damage has limited the amount of information that these people have to make these interpretations. The lesson? Introspection is an imperfect guide to self-knowledge. Good to know, right?
The happiness stuff can be interpreted the same way: with the knowledge that our best guesses about what will make us happy aren't all that good, we can turn to more reliable sources of information in order to make better decisions.
The lesson is the same throughout: psychology can help us overcome the inherent limitations that come from being mediocre self-interpreters, and this can ultimately help us achieve other important goals.