ENCOUNTERING THINGS WITH OTHER PEOPLE
We have already considered how embodiment plays a fundamental role in perception. Things show up for us in daily life, not as they would to a disinterested spectator, but as things that we “have to do with” in some way. It follows that when we become skilled in some particular domain, we begin to see and feel things we otherwise wouldn’t see or feel. The world acquires new “affordances” that guide us in what amounts to a new ecological niche that we have begun to inhabit. This new ecological niche is a new space for action. The most basic point of Part I was that our cognitive capacities are those of a being who develops from infancy not as a pure observer of the world, but as one who acts in it.
In Part II we are focusing on another basic fact that contributes to our “situatedness”: The world that we act in is one that is inhabited by other people. As infants, we find ourselves thrown into the world midstream; it is already saturated with sediments of meaning that have been building up in the social world since long before we came along. It is not simply that other people are among the objects we perceive. Rather, others set up shop in our consciousness in ways that condition how we perceive and use everything. One way to begin approaching this idea is by revisiting the concept of affordances, and extending it from our physical environment to our cultural environment.
FROM AFFORDANCES TO EQUIPMENT
Consider a pair of slender sticks about eight inches long. When I see them on the table in an Asian restaurant, I reach for them in order to bring some noodles to my mouth. But in the context of a percussion class for toddlers, they would likely show up as toddler-sized drumsticks of the lightweight sort used for timbales. In these different contexts, the sticks are part of different “equipmental wholes,” to borrow a concept from Martin Heidegger. The idea is that equipment always refers to other equipment, and to a set of social practices that more or less coheres. Only within those social practices does the individual object show up as useful.1 Thus chopsticks are part of a practice of dining that includes, for example, the use of bowls rather than plates, and the preparation of sticky rice rather than, say, loose peas.2 Chasing peas around a plate with chopsticks, or trying to eat a porterhouse steak with them at a Western-style hotel restaurant in Beijing, one can’t help but exclaim, “What the hell? These things are useless.”
Chopsticks belong to a different equipmental whole than forks and knives. Their usefulness is not simply a function of fit between a person who acts and a single object taken in isolation; nor is this fit determined by a purpose that is simply the actor’s own. Rather, in using things like chopsticks, or fork and knife, we involve ourselves in norms: it is just understood that one does things a certain way. These norms are for the most part inarticulate; they are tacit in social practices and in the equipment we use. This is one way in which other people condition the way the world presents itself to us, even when we do not interact with them.
Take a moment to look at the walls in whatever room you are in. I am at a library, and the walls are a slightly yellowish beige. If asked their color, that is what I would say, and not give it another thought. If I look more closely and get analytical about it, I notice that in the particular lighting conditions in this room at a certain time of day—and today is a bright day in April rather than a hazy day in August—different parts of the wall are “really” (that is, empirically) different shades of beige, some darker and some lighter, some with a glare from the window, some illuminated by an overhead fluorescent lamp, some closer to the warmer-colored reading lamp, and others in shadow.
But this isn’t to clarify my original perception of the wall (as uniformly beige) so much as it is to substitute a new perception for the original one. This new perception is the one that empiricism likes to talk about. Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes that empiricism “is not concerned with what we see, but with what we ought to see, according to the retinal image.”3 But before getting analytical about my visual experience, I simply saw a beige wall. This suggests that whatever it was that was determining my perception in that original case, it wasn’t simply stimuli as understood by the empiricist.
To begin with, my previous experience enters into my current experience.4 I have experience with how the appearance of things varies in reflected light from various sources, one of which (the sun) moves in certain characteristic ways according to the season and the time of day, and is partially scattered and occluded by clouds of various descriptions. A baby hasn’t yet learned these things, and one suspects it perceives something more riotous than a wall that is simply beige. But as an experienced perceiver, I extract invariants from the flux of stimuli, to use Gibson’s formula, and it is the invariants that I perceive, unless I make an effort to do otherwise (as the artist must—she applies different colors to the canvas to represent that uniform wall).
Further, my experience of the world includes experience of other people—the world I inhabit is a shared world, and this is a very basic feature of it. If one takes this into account when considering the problem of “color constancy,” the limitations of empiricism’s view of perception become clear. I am not a baby or a blank slate. As an acculturated member of society, I happen to know how painters proceed when painting a wall. They don’t carefully draw geometric shapes with slightly different shades here and there; they show up with five-gallon buckets and knock it out. This is not something I consciously think about when I am sitting in a beige room, going about my business. But I have this stock of social knowledge, and it seems to condition my immediate perception of the wall as uniformly beige. The point of calling this perception “immediate” is to claim that it does not depend on a process of interpretation that is laid upon, or comes after, elementary perceptions.5
The uniformity of the wall’s color is a social fact, and what I perceive, in everyday life, seems to be such social facts, rather than the facts of optics. The facts of optics are not being challenged here, but their role in understanding human perception is limited. Though they always have some phenomenological significance, they are dispositive only in special cases, when we task ourselves with perceiving in a special way. To perceive the wall as variously colored, I have to suspend my normal socially informed mode of perception.
This is what an artist does. She must defamiliarize herself with her everyday perceptions, which depend on—are conditioned by—her past experiences, including the experience of inhabiting a world that is thoroughly conventional. She has to try to perceive as a baby does, or as the empiricist supposes we all do, but this is a subtle and extraordinary accomplishment. There is nothing infantile about good art, but it does show us the world as viewed by a consciousness that has, for a spell, liberated itself from conventionality.
The critical point against empiricism, then, is that we are social and biographical beings, not digital cameras or recorders. As I sit here writing, in a library, I hear a noise coming from somewhere above and behind me. Though I could do so, it would be a specialized sort of exercise, alien to everyday life, for me to describe it in purely naturalistic terms—as, say, a frequency distribution of compression waves arriving at my ear. If you ask me what I hear, I’ll say “the ventilation system.” I live in a society in which there are such systems in buildings, and this fact enters prereflectively into my immediate apprehension of the sound as what it is; I don’t have to add a layer of interpretation to sensual data that is somehow experientially prior to HVAC systems. This sound, which in another context I might hear as the wind in the trees, shows up for me now against the background of a set of social practices and norms that govern the construction and daily operation of library facilities such as the one I am sitting in. All of this taken-for-granted social knowledge enters into my perception—I hear the HVAC system.
This way of naming my experience is the most phenomenologically rigorous. Again, I could describe the sound in naturalistic terms, but in doing so I would rely on a set of theoretical posits. Not least among these is the assumption of a naive, unacculturated, strictly individualistic hearer of sounds. This mythical creature is familiar to us all—it is the human person as conceived in the tradition of epistemic individualism that extends from Descartes’s Meditations through eighteenth-century empiricism and on to contemporary cognitive science.
We live in a world that has already been named by our predecessors, and was saturated with meaning before we arrived. We find ourselves “thrown” into this world midstream, and for the most part we take over from others the meanings that things already have. How are we initiated into these meanings? This question leads us into fascinating issues in developmental psychology.
JOINT ATTENTION
In the first weeks of life, a human infant and its caregiver attend to one another intensively, staring into each other’s eyes, smiling at each other, and copying each other’s gestures.6 Around the age of six months, the baby begins to direct its attention beyond this pairing and attend to the same object as its caregiver by following her gaze. Shortly thereafter, the baby begins “gaze-checking” with its caregiver if its initial gaze-following doesn’t lead to some object that seems worth paying attention to.
The capacity for “joint attention,” emerging sometime around the age of twelve months, entails something further. At this stage, the child has “an ability and willingness to enter into episodes in which there is a third object that mother and child are attending to jointly, with mutual understanding of the fact that the attention is shared,” as Christopher Mole puts it.7 This stage seems to coincide with the child’s dawning awareness that its caregiver’s utterances aren’t just sounds; they refer to things in the world. Joint attention is thus intimately bound up with the capacity for communication, which requires not only awareness of the existence of other minds, but mutual awareness of a joint field of reference: the shared world.
At roughly the same developmental stage, occurring around twelve months, the child’s pointing gestures take on an intentional character.8 Two varieties of pointing emerge: imperative pointing, in which the child makes a request for some object, and declarative pointing, in which the child tries to get an adult to engage with its own attention to an object. “Attend to my attending” seems to be the demand conveyed by declarative pointing.
Here, then, is a developmental account of the social reflexivity that underlies our ability to communicate about the world, which seems to be distinctive to human beings. Chimpanzees, for example, do not exhibit declarative pointings.9 Jane Heal writes that “words are, on this conception, an immensely delicate and useful way of pointing. Pointing itself is an elaborated way of focusing shared gaze. And what in turn grounds the whole enterprise is the sense of living together with another…”10
As Heal points out, it is in episodes of cooperation in some practical activity, such as playing with blocks together, that joint attention is focused and becomes an occasion for communication, such as “Oh look, the blue one has fallen over!”
The fact that we live together in a shared world, and do things together, is fundamental to the kind of beings we are. As Axel Seemann writes, “The recent surge of interest in joint attention attests to a shift away from a solipsistic conception of mind and toward a view of mental phenomena as inherently social.”11
These insights from developmental psychology tend to deflate certain problems that have occupied people in philosophy of mind since the time of Descartes. One question that loses its force in this developmental perspective is that of how common knowledge is constituted, or how it is possible, as it must be for us to cooperate. A prominent approach to this puzzle is to suggest that if you and I are looking at a tree (the same tree), the way we can know it as being a joint object of perception for us is as follows: I see the tree, I believe that you see the tree, I further believe that you believe that I see the tree, and that you ascribe a similar train of believings to me.
This is implausible enough as an account of what we are doing (what, subconsciously?) when we blithely proceed, as we do, through our shared world in which we are able to communicate about the tree. Maybe each of us takes one end of a two-handled saw and cuts the thing down. Arguably we do this without forming explicit beliefs, or having to engage in mind reading.12 Where is the problem? More particularly, this iterated-ascription-of-beliefs account runs up against a robust finding in developmental psychology, namely that children are unable to grasp the concept of others’ beliefs until about the age of four, long after they have developed the capacity for a reflexively mutual awareness of the world, as revealed by declarative pointing.13
It is in social interaction that our mental capacities develop, to begin with, and this fact seems both to secure the availability of our minds to one another and to order the way in which we apprehend the world altogether.
This is a theoretical point, but it has very real consequences. Insofar as empiricism and other forms of epistemic individualism misdescribe our experience, they tend to cause mischief. The supposed infallibility of the “eyewitness,” for example, is an entrenched assumption, but psychology has in recent decades become sophisticated about the limitations of this kind of testimony.14 Awareness of these limitations hasn’t much penetrated the legal system, however, as it is at odds with a judicial culture that often seems to value sheer volume of convictions over justice, and therefore favors rules of evidence predicated on simplistic views of cognition. Given the uses to which they get put, bad epistemologies are not culturally innocent.
The phenomenologist Alfred Schutz pointed out that our sensual memories, such as that of the eyewitness, fade quite quickly, but they also get idealized according to social norms, and in doing so they actually become more vivid (even if false); they become something that one can hold on to. Language plays a decisive role in this process: we articulate our experiences. We do so in the particular language we are born into, making use of the prevailing stock of ready-made phrases that currently circulate. In doing this we subject them to “typifying schemata of experience.” These typifications both idealize and socialize our originally private, sensual experience.
This may help to explain how social stereotypes, which we articulate in speech, infect eyewitness testimony. Or consider the fact, now widely known, that the web of norms and expectations that get conveyed in conversations with social workers and other therapeutic professionals can implant false memories in people—most wrenchingly, about child abuse. Through social typifications in language, our memories get bent toward whatever is allowed or encouraged by authoritative voices or by the larger swirl of democratic opinion.
WHAT ABOUT INDIVIDUALITY?
In light of all this, how are we to understand individuality, taken both as a fact (we are all different) and as an ideal that we cherish? Given all the ways that others set up shop in our consciousness, it seems hard to mark out “conformity” as some kind of ethical failure.
The problem is a deep one. I have argued that internal, private mental experience is not what is initially and most certainly given to us. Things in the world show up for us in already established meaning contexts that we were initiated into as young children, such as the perception of a uniformly colored wall or an HVAC system. Tools are usually not the implements of an isolated person acting on the world; their physical affordances refer to a whole set of related equipment, and thereby to social norms and practices (as in the case of chopsticks). Through the conventionality of the language we use to describe them, our initially sensual memories get bent toward social norms. The deep point is that our private experiences are founded on—would not be intelligible without—the prior disclosure of a shared world. This is the world we encounter first, as babies locked in joint attention with a caregiver.
It follows that our experiences are not simply “our own.” This is a bit alarming, perhaps. One response would be to double down on epistemic individualism, and emulate Descartes in his efforts to achieve independence of mind by excluding the testimony of others. But this is unrealistic, for all the reasons we have explored.15 My hope is that developing an alternative picture of our mental lives, one that does justice to our nature as social beings, can help illuminate the grounds on which individuality really is possible—not solipsistically but sociably, in practices that bring us into cooperation with others. Individuality is something that needs to be achieved, and in this endeavor other people are indispensable to our efforts.