Philosophy and Monty Python Thanks to Zak for the link. Gary Hardcastle's thought on Philosophy and Monty Python supplement and extend my own in useful ways. Hardcastle's discussion is important because he touches on many of the topics that we'll be covering as we read Quine.  ¶ #

0 comments Post a Comment

  What it's like to be a baby.

According to M.R. Bennett and P.M.S. Hacker,

And far from it being impossible to observe a feeling in another person it is perfectly common and familiar. When someone, in circumstances of danger, blanches with fear, cries out in terror, trembles and draws back from danger -- his fear is manifest. Of course to observe another person's fear is not to feel the same fear as he ... Rather it is to observe that he is afraid -- to see the fear written all over his face, exhibited in his demeanor and behaviour. (The Philosophical Foundations of Neuroscience, p.89-90)

This particular passage is part of their criticism of certain forms of the "inner/outer" distinction. In particular, they are criticizing any discussion in which "inner" experiences are taken to be a sort of in principle inaccessible variety of exerpience or phenomena. In this, as in many of their arugments, they are pursuing a Wittgeinsteinian attack on private language. Hence, I think its not a great extension to hold that the sort of observation that they mention above is not an inference. That is, instead of inferring a person "inner" states from his facial expression, we are, in a sense, seeing the manifestation of that fear.

Now here's the interesting thing, my daughter is just a little over a month old. You should be able to see pictures of her off to the right. I've been studying her face a lot recently, and instead of the pure or monochromatic emotions that children are suppossed to be feeling, pure joy, hunger, love or tiredness, she seems to be manifesting a very different range of emotions. I watch her face and I see ironic bemusement, knowing skepticism, or other fairly subtle gradations of feeling. I would probably be even more rhapsodic about if I couldn't shake the feeling that I was the person she thought was taking himself far too seriously and had to be humored.

Of course, I understand that she's still bringing some order and control to her facial expressions. He doesn't really recognize any profound feeling between hope and sorrow, that's just me inferring feelings from her expressions in the same ways that I, and just about everyone else, can't help but find faces in all sorts of random stimuli. We're wired to look for faces and, upon finding faces, to look for emotions.

But, if I'm inferring emotions that really aren't there, what does this say about the analysis of face recognition that points towards observation of emotions as being noninferential?

For those who were there, this recapitulates my question at last weekends grad conference. Don Welton delivered the key note remarks which focused on prospagnosia and a Husserlian analysis of how we perceive emotions in the face of another. Even though there are significant differences between the Husserlian and Wittgensteinian approaches, I still think that there's an interesting question here for both perspectives. On the other hand, its a question and not an answer and says more about my fascination with little Aoife than anything else, so don't try to read too deeply into this meditation.  ¶ #

0 comments Post a Comment