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Merleau-Ponty: The Seer is Seen

danielcoffeen’s Podcast

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Lately I see a very sharp distinction between form questions and mechanism questions in research. Then of course there are the ‘why does it happen in the first place’ questions but these can be categorized as either form or mechanism questions depending on your take on science (and life in general perhaps). (I will explain - wait a second).

The first kind of questions are descriptive questions asking about the form in which some phenomenon occurs.

“Given that people often misunderstand each other, how exactly does that look like? What happens when they misunderstand each other?” Observe lot’s of people misunderstanding each other, and try to ‘get a grip’ on that phenomenon. Or take your own personal experience as a starting point.

The second kind of question asks for a mechanism. It asks “what is a misunderstanding”. And the answer is then not what it looks like, but what it ‘really’ is. Like the yellow lightball in the sky is ‘really’ a big mass of nuclear fusion, called a sun.

I have the feeling that most people would hold that the first question is a ‘lesser’ form of science. Just see the sun-example: merely describing all the various ways in which this phenomenon might be ‘presenting itself to us’ might be an interesting excercise, but we still wouldn’t know ‘what the sun really is’.

But I seriously doubt that.

Perhaps it depends on the phenomenon. When it comes to suns, we want to know what they ‘really’ are. But when it comes, for instance, to research on the interaction between human beings and the technology that surrounds them, we particularly want to know ‘what it looks like’, what form it takes. This is perhaps because interaction *is* nothing else but a form, and so asking about the *mechanism* behind interaction would be asking the wrong kind of question.

But of course the scientists might disagree. Saying: well, if you *really* want to know about interaction, you would have to know how the brain works, the body, all the physical things in the universe, and how technology works, (what it is), and then you can … well, then you could “calculate” what form the interaction will take.

So the assumption seems to be that once you know the mechanism, there is nothing left to research with respect to the form questions, you can simply let a computer calculate all the possible forms, you put into the computer the starting conditions of some particular situation, and bingo, the form comes out.

But I seriously doubt that.

Now for the why question. Biologists sometimes say: there is no ‘why’, really, things just happen the way they happen ‘because’ this is the way the universe ‘works’. So people are here because they evolved, and they evolved because, well, that’s just what happens. You should understand if you know the mechanism of evolution.

But biologists still tend to talk carelessly as if answering ‘why’ questions.  They say: birds have wings *so* as to be able to fly. Or people have eyes *so* as to be able to see far ahead. But that is a very different kind of why. It is a why question that reduces the form question to the ‘mechanism’ question: the mechanism becomes the ‘because’ of the ‘why this form’? Why does the bird look like this? Because he has evolved to fly. Why is a polar bear white? Because he needs to be invisible in the snow. That leaves us still with the real ‘why’ question. The real why question is: why is it so? Why do we exist? If I say I want to be a good person, why do I want to be that? And if I say it is good to take care of those around me, why is that considered to be good? Some people resort to a religion in order to answer these questions. They say that God has decided so.

But I seriously doubt that.

Instead I think that this latter ‘why question’, the more interesting one, is ultimately going to be a form question (and in any case most definitely never a mechanism question). And it will therefore have to be answered by looking very carefully into the form of the phenomenon that you have a why-question about. But I also think that it is not good enough to merely ‘analyse’ forms. You have to actually create them, in order to get a grip on them. That is the nicest things about forms, they can be created, by you, or by me. They are not there, ready to be ‘picked up’ by some detection method. You make them. They It is called form-giving in Dutch, but you might also call it ‘design’. It is not something that God does, or evolution, it is what we do. It is not at all the same as creating mechanisms, because mechanisms cannot be created. Mechanisms can only be ‘implemented’, which is an altogether different thing. Understand me, if you build me a machine, aspects of it might be the implementation of a mechanism, but that doesn’t mean that engineers don’t ‘give form’. I think that the machine might also be an expression of form. Sometimes we don’t see it that way, because we stay ignorant, always asking mechanism-questions all the time. Anyhow, forms, not mechanisms, can be created. You may also call it: giving meaning. Or: making sense. Making sense is just as much generating knowledge as ‘analyzing the underlying mechanism’. I do not see why the latter has more to offer than the former. Instead, the opposite may be true.

But I really have to think about this some more (give some more form to it).

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Charles Lenay, says, (and I couldn’t agree more)

Our point of view is that computers are basically technical devices, and should be treated in the same way as other technical devices. Certainly, they are devices of a special sort, and the “worlds” that are brought forth when a human being uses them are a special sort of “world” ; but the interaction that occurs (that is mediated by the machine) is between the human being and this “world”; it is not an interaction between the human being and the machine. Thus, there is something deeply wrong in the very phrase “Human-Computer Interface”. Of course, “HCI” has become a hackneyed term, but this engrained (mis)-use does not make it correct. The basic problem lies in the implication that human beings and computers are entities of the same sort, so that they could “interact” on a basis of equality. This would only be correct if one whole-heartedly embraces the “computational theory of mind” according to which humans function like computers ; but as we understand it, an important common point among members of our network is that we reject this classical paradigm in cognitive science. If we are wrong about this, we certainly need some more fundamental discussion about the epistemology of cognitive science.

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Sander and Jos both asked me whether Jonas perhaps really asked the question of “why” the coat-hanger had a Nils Holgersson figure on it. Yesterday my promotor asked me the same question with respect to my own research. He said: The whole of Western Science has been occupied for centuries with the “how” questions. Scientists believe that when you answer the how question you know what ever it is you wanted to know about ‘it’. “How” does an electron interact with a nucleus? How does a baby grow in the womb? How does evolution ‘work’? How do mountains come into existence? How does gravity work? How do children and parents evolve relationships? How does an economic crisis work, and how can we fix it?

But the more interesting questions are the “why” questions, he said. Why do we have vision? What is vision for? Not: How does the eye work, or how does the visual system work, but why does it work? James Gibson asked this question and his theory of Direct Perception is very different from ‘mechanistic’ theories precisely in that respect. He said seeing is for doing: you see what you can do. You see a chair as a “to-sit-on”, which is called it’s affordance. And the objects we perceive basically *are* affordances even before they become ‘objectified’: they are first “opportunities for action”. Cognitive psychologists that were asking ‘how’ questions then asked Gibson: but *how* does that work? How can the brain ‘detect’ affordances, how does it ‘know’ what it sees? And thus “knowledge” became interpreted as something that was needed in order to answer the how question: knowledge, and perception, and the physical characteristics of the eye were always seen, by these cognitive psychologists, as building blocks needed in order create the ‘machine’ that would be the answer to the question of “how it works”.

It is a new insight for me that designers (my promotor is from Industrial Design) should care first and foremost to ask the *why* question. Because as I saw it designers are always busy answering *how* questions: how to create this or that. But I think I may have been wrong. Because in order to design, you need to know mostly *why* you are designing. Asking why is asking: what is it for? And this is what designers ask.

The why question is the functional question, the how question is the mechanical question. I have sometimes confused myself in mixing these up. This is because cognitive science as I saw it also mixes these up in a way. The model that most cognitive models are dependent on is the ‘functionalist’ model. This model is an *answer* to a “how” question, but the mechanism it describes is based on *functions*. And functions are basically descriptions of *why* questions. I guess. Let me try to explicate.

Suppose I want to know “how does vision work”? How do we recognize objects? And suppose I observe a pattern of activation in one of the first cortical areas in my brain. But now I do not ask how this brain area works, I ask instead: what is this pattern *for*? *Why* is it there? Well I could say, this pattern in visual cortex is there in order to detect features. It is a feature-detector. Here I have defined a *function*. The function is basically the “why” question turned into a mechanism. “It is there in order to produce X” becomes “this thing works as an X producer” And so now I can also answer part of the how question: how do we recognize objects? Well, we have various mechanisms, amongst which “the feature detector” mechanism.

This is what cognitive science does.

I guess it is not what I should be doing. Still thinking about what I’m actually saying here, how to say it better (and why…)

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I will start with an anecdote in Dutch, it is also translated in English below

Gisteren keek Jonas terwijl hij de trap op liep om naar bed te gaan naar een klerenhanger van hout in de vorm van een gans, met Niels Holgersson erop. Hij vroeg: “Waarom maken de Bob de Bouwers daar zo een gans?”. (Bob de Bouwers is zijn uitdrukking voor iedereen die dingen maakt of repareert voor zijn beroep). Ik dacht: wat een gekke vraag, hij klopt niet. Ik zei zonder er verder bij na te denken “Je bedoelt zeker: “HOE” maken die Bob de Bouwers die gans?”. “Ja, hoe”, zei Jonas. Ah, gelukkig. Nu klopte de vraag wel: HOE maken Bob de Bouwers zo’n gans van hout daar op zo’n klerenhanger? Maar later dacht ik: is het nou toeval dat Jonas zo vaak “Hoe” en “Waarom” door elkaar haalt? Of zegt dat iets over de kunstmatigheid van het onderscheid tussen die twee begrippen? Zijn “Hoe” en “Waarom” eigenlijk varianten van hetzelfde, begrippen die je alleen met veel oefening kunt leren (kunstmatig) te scheiden?

Now in English:

Yesterday Jonas asked me the a question about a wooden goose (wat is klerenhanger?). He said: Why do Bob the Builders make that goose? (All engineers and craftsmen are named Bob the Builders).  I said, without thinking: O, you mean HOW do Bob the Builders make such a goose? He said: “Yes, How do they?”. Later I thought, well, this is an interesting speech error: doesn’t that tell us that the distinction between HOW and WHY is actually artificial, and that the child must *learn* that these words mean different things? Perhaps to him there isn’t really a difference between How and Why and perhaps this is also true of ourselves, we have just learned to think in a Cartesian framework in which these things are different from one another.

I will now elaborate a bit on this idea, because of course I didn’t just think all that all of a sudden, I happened to be reading about it the same evening Jonas asked that question.

For instance I read in a book (Everyday Cognition, ed. Jean Lave) that Aristotle made a strict division between theoretical thinking and practical thinking.  Theoretical thought, according to Aristotle, asks the Why questions, while practical thought asks the How questions. Practical thought is the thought of the craftsmen, the policy-maker, the engineer: how can we make it? How can we change it? It concerns questions asked for which one needs an answer in order to get something done. (So I was wrong in my previous post to think that the tradition conceives of practice as involving no thinking at all: Aristotle for one did belive that practice involved practical thinking. He just thought it wasn’t worth any effort studying it). Aristotle generally looked down on practical people because the real, Royal, Heavenly subject of inquiry was of course Theory (reason, logic, philosophy, fundamental science (which didn’t exist then, and would probably belong to philosophy or something)). And the most enlightened way of spending your time was to think about Why questions and let the How problems be solved by the lower folk. The book I was reading shows that in our everyday lives we hardly ever do ‘theoretical thinking’, we mostly think  practical. As I wrote earlier, most of our knowledge is therefore ‘know-how’: knowledge part of a skillfull coping (as Dreyfus would say). And of course the writers in the book want to show that this is well worth the effort of studying it, if one ever wants to understand anything about what it means to be human.

This priority of practice over theory is totally opposed to the way the tradition has looked on what marks the human being (relative to the animal kingdom, mostly). For example, Descartes also made a strict division between theory and practice, basically in the line of Aristotle’s reasoning, as I understand it. I just read in a book edited by John Haugeland (on Google books). the following passage (by Tim van Gelder) on anti-Cartesian thought (such as Ryle and Heidegger):

Of course the anti-cartesians, like Ryle, Haugeland, Heidegger and Dreyfus critically oppose the Cartesian view. Their thoughts on embodiment and embeddedness resonated well within the now blossoming science of embodied embedded cognition, in which practice (let’s see it as a patterned system of continuous acting with your physical body in a (social) environment, supported, but not determined, by the processes in the brain) is the fundamental starting point of all inquiry into the nature of cognition and mind.

As I now come to think, (which basically means: thinking about *how* to put some vague idea into words in this blog) cognitive science has always been an interesting mix of theory and practice. This is because it is one of the few areas within psychology that are at the same time highly theoretical (I mean nobody wanting to be a therapist would first study cognitive science, they would choose clinical psychology or some course like that) and at the same time as seen from the theoretical sciences it is also very practical, because it is a synthetic science, it generates knowledge by making things. (computational models, robots, expert-systems, and so on). The only problem perhaps is that the things that are made by standard cognitive science (cognitive science more in the Cartesian tradition) are often a sort of fake things, revolving around what has been called ‘toy-problems’. [I will not discuss Applied cognitive science, which might look like the most practical part of cognitive science but perhaps is not at all because of the way applied science typically connects to technology and society - I will need to think about this more] In any case this makes the ‘know-how’ of cognitive scientists also a fake ‘know-how’, if it is trying secretly to answer ‘why’ questions by just putting these questions into a sort of ‘how’ disguise, but not really starting any real practice (other than the academic practice, which is the practice of answering Aristotelean/Cartesian fake problems)

PS The current state of our technology-driven, consumerist society is well captured by my answer to Jonas’ question. Because note that I can philosophize all of the above out of the top of my head, but in response to his question I could only say: “Well, they saw it, I guess. With a sawing-machine. I do not know if they put on the paint with a machine as well. Maybe somebody paints the beaks orange all day, very fast, as they pass by in the factory. Or maybe this was actually hand made. You know Jonas, I really do not know how they make these things. We just got it in the store”.

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A theory is what you get when somebody tries to describe to someone else what he knows. It is thus part of a communicative act between two or more people. It is therefore part of human language. It is also per definition a derivative from something else, the something else being the knowledge. Knowledge is itself not linguistic in the above sense. It is however cultural in that it is always rooted in the practices of a culture. Knowledge is therefore basically ‘know-how’. There is a big difference between ‘theory’ and ‘know-how’. The difference has been called the gap between theory and practice, which we all have to deal with some way or another. Cognitive science has had to deal with this gap a lot, because in cognitive science it translates to the question of how the mind (theory) relates to behavior (practice). Sometimes it has been implicitly assumed that all the ‘knowledge’ was to be found on the ‘theory’ side, while a practice contained no knowledge at all. That is, one assumed that theory was to be equated with knowledge and practice was everything that knowledge was not (‘mere’ behavior). If one assumes this, then this means one also needs to have a way of bridging the gap, if one ever wants to have a theory of how knowledge has impact on behavior, which is ultimately what cognitive science is about. Traditional cognitive science states that 1) theory is knowledge and that 2) theory determines (causes) practice. Your mind (theory, knowledge) tells you what to do (practice). Embodied embedded cognitive science turns this picture on its head. It tells us first that there is always already a practice (an act) before there is ever something like ‘knowledge’. Knowledge is a derivative of behavior itself, even though, once it is there, it does have a signitifant impact on (subsequent) behavior as well. Once we are able to speak of knowledge, we then see that there are multiple patterns on multiple levels of description, each with their own particular influence on behavior. One big difference is the difference I described above, between what we usually call ‘theory’ and what I call ‘know-how’. Know-how is the knowledge that is not a description of something at all. If anything, it might perhaps best be seen as a set of constraints that together guide (but do not determine) the moment-by-moment interaction between a person and his environment, in such a way that we may say that this person ‘has knowledge’, or ‘is knowledgeable’ of its environment. But this is totally unlike using a theory of the environment in order to determine what action to take. Such a theory is what you get when someone starts to describe, in language, as a communicative act, his know-how, most likely in an attempt to communicate his knowledge to someone else. (It is the kind of stuff you are reading right now, although you might be able to relate what you read from the text to your ‘know-how’, which is not in this text, but exists only in you-in-your-situation). There is no ‘gap’ between know-how and practice. Knowledge (know-how) and practice are on the same side of the divide between theory and practice, that is, they are on the practice side. There is of course the question of how it works: know-how. Is it really a ‘set of constraints’ and if so, how does that work exactly?

Lot’s of research to be done. But this research (called ‘embodied embedded cognitive science’) is not going to bridge by itself the gap between theory and practice because it is not by itself about the gap between theory and practice. Now of course we can ask a second question and that is the question: what is the relation between theory and practice? Do the words of this-or-that researcher on paper influence my behavior in any way? I should assume they do, but if so, how? Do I also entertain personal mini-theories ‘in my head’ that are not unlike the words of the researcher on paper and do these mini-theories influence my behavior in any way? Or are they only a sort of by-product of having both a practice and linguistic capacities, such that I have the irresistible urge to describe my know-how (without the descriptions having any influence on my behavior?). I should think not. I should think that this human faculty of being able to create descriptions of things that are ultimately indescribable, our capacity for making models of real processes, or making general laws out of particular happenings, of making stories of actual facts, of making a picture of a real scene, I should think that this capacity has a function, that it really does something, that it is not just an epiphenomenon. But at the same time embodied embedded cognition tells us what it doesn’t do, namely that the models and laws and stories and pictures we generate in our mind do not determine our behavior. They do not tell us what to do. Because between the abstractions and theories we create in language, and our actual behaviors, lies something called practice and this practice contains know-how and know-how drives the greater part of our actions, while theory doesn’t.

And the most confusing part is yet to come. In fact, much of our theory (the stories, the models, the pictures) actually tell us, explicitly, in language, that they do instruct us on how to act, and in our everyday experience, we tell ourselves, and we tell each other, that we are being lead into actions caused by these theories. We say: I went into the men’s room because the picture on the door of the men’s room of a man told me that this was the place I should go to, since I am a male. We say: I read in this cook-book how to bake cherry-pie and I basically just followed the recipe, and thus I baked a pie. We say: I stopped at the red traffic light because it means that you should stop, and so I did. We say: The computer told me to enter my personal code and press enter, so I did. We say: Somebody told me to take insurance for the car, and so I did. We say: my mother told me you should always wash your hands before you eat, and so I always do this. We say: the dentist told me that I should brush twice a day in order to avoid tooth-aches, and so this is what I do. But of course, what we say we do is not what we do. And even if we do it just like we say we do, we do not know if our personal explanation was the real cause of our behavior, or if it is just another story, another theory, another reasonable description of what might have been the cause. So perhaps we brush our teeth twice a day, but not on everyday, and on average, over a year, we might really brush our teeth only 1,2 times a day. And the brushing might be triggered once a year by the dentist, but subsequently it is mostly being triggered by the tooth brush just happening to be lying exactly where it is lying, that is, at the right moment at the right time during your morning and evening rituals. You simply notice the brush, pick it up, and brush. And the same kind of patterns tricks you into eating whatever there is to snack in the fridge late at night, even though your doctor has instructed you explicitly not to take late-night snacks. So, your behavior is not particularly guided by theory even though the theory itself says it does (since it starts with phrases like “you should do the following”) and even though you yourself hold the theory that it is the theory that drives your behavior. Enough of this, let’s get to work!

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http://manwithoutqualities.com/

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Mooi filmpje via AnnePier. Kijk vooral hoe ze een fysiek geheugensteuntje gebruiken om geen vergissingen te maken in de tekst.

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Volgens Kierkegaard mist de Griekse filosofie het begrip “herboren” worden. En daarom mist de Griekse filosofie iets, dat wezenlijk is aan ons mens-zijn. Het vermogen te transformeren en als iets geheel nieuws weer tevoorschijn te komen.

Mirjam heeft vandaag het muurtje van de keuken opnieuw gewit. De hele kamer fleurt er van op: als nieuw!
Jonas heeft vandaag de zijwieltjes van zijn fiets ver achter zich geworpen en rijdt nu zomaar helemaal alleen rondjes op het plein
Ik heb ook zijn TripTrap stoel opnieuw ingesteld, met het grote vlak boven, op kleuterstand.
De passie-bloem tegen de schutting, die helemaal dood leek, lijkt toch nog weer jonge scheuten te krijgen.

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