Reason … must approach nature in order to be taught by it. It must not, however, do so in the character of a pupil who listens to everything the teacher chooses to say, but of an appointed judge who compels the witnesses to answer questions which he has himself formulated.
—Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason
The evolutionary approach has been extended to more cognitive predictions of the actions of others. Nicholas Humphrey noticed that the large brains of gorillas suggested minds more powerful than their simple environment called for. While wondering why they had such large brains, he was also thinking about his own personal life: “If I do this, what will she do? But suppose I did that, or if she did something else?” He thought that gorilla problems too might be mainly social. Perhaps they had evolved to interpret each other. Given the importance of society for humans, perhaps we too had evolved to be psychologists by nature?1
Humphrey used the metaphor of “social chess” to describe how relating to others requires prediction of their likely decisions, which include their responses to what we do, responses in turn influenced by their predictions of how we will react. Each move in the game “may call forth several alternative responses in the other player. This forward planning will take the form of a decision tree, having its root in the current situation and branches corresponding to the moves considered in looking ahead at different possibilities. It asks for a level of intelligence which is … unparalleled in any other sphere of living.”2
Just as in actual chess (though here without the brute force of chess-playing computers to fall back on), our limited calculating powers in social chess make it urgent to prune the tree’s proliferating branches. This need for pruning places an obvious evolutionary premium on human interpretation. Successful strategies, of both intuitive and reflective interpretation, need to be either programmed into us or else internalized so well that they become second nature.
Chess, being competitive, is not the only game that could be a model here. Some games, including versions of prisoners’ dilemma, need cooperation for best results. To predict what will achieve cooperation, we need to understand other players. Both the competition and the cooperation in human social life should have favored the evolution of interpretation.
The evolutionary usefulness of our senses does not show that they never deceive us. The evolutionary case about social chess or social cooperation does not show that we always understand people correctly. But we are bristling with these systems for interpreting people—systems honed through the course of human evolution—so it is reasonable to expect them to be roughly reliable.
At the psychological level, how do these systems work? How do we play social chess? And how do we know enough about people to cooperate effectively?
Psychologists have started to work out some of the skills the growing child must acquire from babyhood onward to be able to do this. To grasp another person’s goals and desires, the child has to interpret movements as goal-directed actions. To pick up on others’ perceptual states, the child has to notice the direction of their eyes and interpret it as seeing what is looked at. There is the further step of comparing the child’s own perceptual state with that of another person, which in turn draws on noticing several different things. “We are both looking at the same thing.” Then, “She sees that I have seen it.” Then, “She sees that I see that she sees …” and so on. The suggestion is that we bring these interpretative skills together to create a “theory of mind” based on obvious axioms (“Seeing leads to knowing,” or “People believe that things are where they last saw them,” and such), a theory that guides our interpretations of people’s mental states.3
There are debates about whether this approach makes our readings of each other too theoretical. A person with Asperger’s syndrome said to me, “I am the only one who needs a theory of mind. The rest of you do it intuitively.” An alternative approach suggests that instead of having a theory, we use “simulation”—we imagine the mental states we would have if we were in the other person’s position.4 Perhaps one approach better fits some cases, and the rival approach better fits others. If the interpretative rules of a “theory of mind” can be so internalized as to be unconscious, and if the “simulation” can be guided by unconscious rules, the contrast becomes less sharp. Either way, there is a striking array of skills the child needs for even quite ordinary interpretations of others’ minds.
Some more-complex interpretations draw on even more subtle skills. Consider the skeptically minded jury mentioned earlier, who hope to go beyond the first impression that “he just didn’t sound like a man telling the truth.” In evaluating the prosecution and the defense cases, they are going to have to assess the credibility of conflicting witnesses. People, as well as nature, must be interrogated not like a pupil but like a judge. As well as judging which case better fits with the facts about time, place and alibis and so on, they are going to have to assess what kind of person the accused man is. What motives and beliefs does the prosecution say he had? What is the rival defense account? Which is psychologically more plausible?
All this involves a degree of holism in the jury’s thinking. Doubts about the credibility of a witness may weaken belief in the accused person’s defense, but the prosecution story about his motives may seem implausible. The overall verdict has to somehow weigh these very different thoughts—and many others—against each other. The search for a plausible interpretation takes us far beyond guidelines such as “People believe that things are where they last saw them.”
Our thinking, whether about people or anything else, has a degree of holism. Our beliefs are interconnected in many different ways to make up a system. Evidence casting doubt on any particular belief may have reverberations on many others.
Suppose something I expect to happen does not happen. I expected that the medicine the doctor prescribed would cure my illness. But it did not. I need to change in some way the beliefs that generated this prediction. Perhaps the doctor is not as good as I thought and got the diagnosis wrong. But this is not my only possible response.
There are alternative revisions I can make, some leaving the doctor’s diagnosis unchallenged. The drug company may have supplied a poor-quality batch to the pharmacist. Or the prescription may have been made up wrongly. Or perhaps I have an unusual resistance to this medicine that works for most people.
If I do decide the diagnosis was wrong, I can give up more than my faith in this doctor. I can decide that doctors in general are no good and give up scientific medicine in favor of some alternative therapy. At the extreme I can give up belief, not just in medicine, but in scientific method in general as a way of finding out about the world. Some of these revisions are more plausible than others. But still, the falsification of a prediction leaves me a lot of free play about which revisions to make to my system of beliefs and about how extensive they should be.
One of the great twentieth-century exponents of holism, W. V. O. Quine, said the totality of our beliefs could be seen as “a man-made fabric which impinges on experience only at the edges,” or as “a field of force” in which “a conflict with experience at the periphery occasions readjustments in the interior of the field.”5 When evidence seems to go against a belief, we have a choice. We may change or modify that belief. Or we may stick with that belief and instead change other beliefs in our interconnected system.
Jerry Fodor has stressed how difficult this inescapable holism makes it to understand how our thought processes work: “The more global … a cognitive process is, the less anybody understands it.”6 Fodor’s pessimism may be right. Alternatively, even when radically different kinds of evidence are relevant, we might still be able to make progress in understanding how we assess the plausibility of rival interpretations of other people.
In the interpretation of people, as in the interpretation of anything else, the key issue is what makes one account more plausible than another. On any view, these judgments of plausibility are remarkably subtle and complex. The fact that we successfully play so much social chess shows that the skills of reflective interpretation possessed by the human brain are very powerful. Perhaps they are powerful enough to interpret even our own holistic processes of interpretation?
Many thinkers (recently, notably Charles Taylor) have stressed that humans are self-interpreting animals. Besides interpreting other people, we interpret our own actions, words, thoughts, and feelings: a running commentary on our inner and outer lives. When we are aware of it, self-consciousness may result: “I am showing I cannot be intimidated” or “I am making a fool of myself.” At the lowest level, a lot of the commentary is unconscious, although retrievable if needed. Because of our conversation I hardly notice I am driving. If asked, I can say I was signaling a left turn. If asked more, the left turn is needed to avoid the road works ahead. If asked even more, the hurry is about not missing the start of the play. And so on.
A lot of our self-interpretation is not so boring. “I left because I could not bear another minute of his excruciatingly self-regarding conversation.” “I refused because the voice of conscience said it would be a sin.” “Taking this job isn’t really a compromise. It is creative in a kind of way.” Such interpretations, being laden with values and attitudes, may provoke others to disagree. They are also more open to our own revision.
Reflection may lead us to change attitudes or the beliefs they depend on. Someone who gives up religious belief may substitute thoughts about irrational guilt for thoughts about sin. Or the emotional tone of the interpretation may be changed by experiencing love, war, or literature, by having children, by being in extreme poverty or being bereaved. Things once important may come to seem shallow. These platitudes are important. Our interpretations change because we change.
And we change because our interpretations do. What we are is shaped by how we interpret ourselves. In addition to the moment-by-moment commentary, self-interpretation is also at the level, not of tactics, but of strategy. The boundary is not sharp, and the difference is one of degree. Hurrying to be in time for the play is tactics; thinking about the kind of husband, wife, partner, or parent you hope to be, or your hopes and plans about your work life, are strategy.
John Rawls wrote of people having life plans. Few (none?) of us are as organized as that. But there are the big, vague, and sometimes conflicting pictures at the back of our minds. “I hope we will still love each other in old age if one of us becomes demented.” “I hope I am a good enough parent most of the time.” “I try to push aside all this ‘management’ that has infected universities, hoping to keep its deadening effects from harming my teaching and writing.” These vague thoughts express values we have now and hoped-for interpretations of ourselves in the future.
So I am not immune to the way I see myself. The self-interpreting part of us is not inert, but acts on other parts. The person we become is partly shaped by self-interpretation, the yeast that makes the bread rise.
We need both reflective and intuitive interpretation. Sometimes they feed into each other. Experiencing things from the inside makes reflective interpretation more intuitive.
Because other people like or dislike such different things, we may not have enough feel for what is going on inside them. But even a moment long ago of having shared what they like may give a glimpse. As a girl Virginia Woolf used to be taken fishing. She was excited by feeling the tug on the line and then hauling the fish into the boat. One day her father, without any rebuke, said he did not like to see a fish caught: Virginia was welcome to go the next time, but he would not go along. “Though my passion for the thrill and the tug had been perhaps the most acute that I then knew, his words slowly extinguished it … But from the memory of my own passion I am still able to construct an idea of the sporting passion. It is one of those invaluable seeds, from which, since it is impossible to have every experience fully, one can grow something that represents other people’s experiences. Often one has to make do with seeds; the germs of what might have been, had one’s life been different. I pigeonhole ‘fishing’ thus with other momentary glimpses; like those rapid glances, for example, that I cast into basements when I walk in London streets.”7
Sometimes we have more to go on than these momentary glimpses. Some experiences are more widely shared than the tug of a fish on the line. Part of the depth of Tolstoy’s novels comes from his writing about so many different kinds of people from the inside. In Anna Karenina, Koznyshev (Sergei Ivanovich) and Varenka have grown close to each other and everyone thinks they will get married. They go to the woods to collect mushrooms. They both think this will be the day when Koznyshev proposes to Varenka. He goes off to another part of the birch wood for a few moments’ final reflection. He makes his final decision to propose and comes back. They walk a few steps alone together:
After a silence it would have been easier for them to say what they wanted to say than after talking about mushrooms; but against her own will, as if inadvertently, Varenka said:
“So you did not find any? But then there are always fewer inside the wood.”
Sergei Ivanovich sighed and made no answer. He was vexed that she had begun talking about mushrooms. He wanted to bring her back to her first words about her childhood; but, as if against his will, after being silent for a while, he commented on her last words. “I’ve heard only that the white boletus grows mostly on the edge, though I’m unable to identify it.”
More time passed with both of them knowing this was the vital moment. Koznyshev
repeated to himself the words in which he wished to express his proposal; but instead of those words, by some unexpected consideration that occurred to him, he suddenly asked:
“And what is the difference between a white boletus and a birch boletus?”
Varenka’s lips trembled as she answered:
“There’s hardly any difference in the caps, but in the feet.”
And as soon as these words were spoken, both he and she understood that the matter was ended, and that what was to have been said would not be said.8
They did not marry. Of course there can be different interpretations of this passage. One is the “Freudian” approach: Was the verbal stumbling caused by an unconscious reluctance to marry? Did Koznyshev’s need for final reflection show less than wholehearted love? But still, if they had broken out of the conversational trap they fell into, they might have discovered how much they wanted each other.
We understand the grammar of a Rembrandt portrait because of our shared memories of how people look when proud or when deepened and saddened by age. We know about the stumbling of Koznyshev and Varenka, the failure to break through inhibition and polite conversation to a deeper level of contact. We understand because we have been there and know it from the inside.