Re: [xmca] Re: Kant and the Strange Situation

[Martin Packer <packer@duq.edu>]

Derek,

This is indeed such a huge topic that I hesitate to take it up. But equally
important; so here goes.

Techniques of objectifying are certainly part of any science, but surely not
the whole story. And I don't see that objectifying people reduces them to
biological phenomena, and their action to biological processes, any more
than objectifying biological entities reduces them to physical phenomena,
and their processes to physical ones. Certainly objectifying action has its
dangers, such as treating it as the output of a decision-making system, or
as a collection of factual events which can described without
interpretation. But Paul Ricoeur (below) has argued convincingly that since
action is fleeting it must be fixed in some manner, and although
objectifying action transforms it, these transformations can serve important
functions. The analysis of conversational action took steps forward when
recording technology became widely available (without treating conversation
as a biological phenomenon.

This is not to say that figuring out an appropriate science of action is
easy. But surely it's easier to study action scientifically than it is to
study a personal, private, inner mind to which by definition one can only
have first-person access!

Ricoeur, P. (1971). The model of the text: Meaningful action considered as a
text. Social Research, 38(3), 529-562.

Martin

On 1/17/09 6:09 PM, "Derek Melser" <derek.melser@gmail.com> wrote:

> Martin, Steve:
> 
> This is a big issue. I have written a bit about it. Chapter 11 ('Our
> knowledge of actions') in *The Act of Thinking* is about it. And so are the
> last three paragraphs of the essay at
> http://www.derekmelser.org/essays/essayverbal.html
> 
> The primary interpersonal attitude is the side-by-side one, the attitude of
> fellow-participants in some shared activity. Our perception of others'
> actions occurs under the aegis of this fellow-participant (or would-be
> fellow-participant, empathic) attitude; it is the light in which we see
> actions. Now and then we defect into an objective (distancing, reifying,
> alienating) attitude towards others. Rigorously maintained, this objective
> attitude reduces a person to a biological phenomenon. But biological
> phenomena don't perform *actions*, they merely exhibit derivative biological
> phenomena.
> 
> Science is the rigorous maintenance of objective attitudes and observation
> methods. My paradigm examples of 'science' are the physical sciences:
> chemistry, physics, biology... There are disciplined academic studies ­ of
> history, law, fine arts, literature, education ­ in which the topic is
> people's actions and in which objectivity and empathy alternate, in roughly
> equal measure. But these disciplined academic studies are not normally
> thought of as sciences. The thing about sciences is that they stick
> rigorously to objective methods. Why would you want to put psychology
> alongside biology, rather than alongside, say, history or education? Of
> course, you could call any disciplined academic investigation a 'science'.
> 
> Anyway, it is impossible to write briefly on such a large topic without
> pontificating, so I'll stop here.
> 
> Derek
> 
> *http://www.derekmelser.org*
> 
> 
> 
> 
> 2009/1/16 Steve Gabosch <stevegabosch@me.com>
> 
>> Derek, I have been wanting to ask you about your thoughts about how aspects
>> of human behavior that can only be comprehended through empathy are
>> therefore inaccessible to science.  Assuming, for the sake of discussion,
>> that you are right, that empathy is a necessary component of accurate
>> observation and understanding, why does employing empathy exclude doing
>> science?  Marx said (something like) "nothing human is alien to me."  That
>> attitude isn't "empathy," strictly speaking, but it is certainly on the way.
>>  Not that it is an easy or automatic thing to do, but why do you seem to
>> feel that we **can't** learn how to use our powers of empathy in social
>> science?
>> 
>> - Steve
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> On Jan 15, 2009, at 4:20 PM, Martin Packer wrote:
>> 
>>  Derek,
>>> 
>>> It depends of course on what one means by empathy. I've been arguing for
>>> years that all the social sciences draw implicitly on our human capacity
>>> for
>>> *understanding* the actions of others (Einfühlung?), and that our
>>> investigations can and should be interpretive, hermeneutic. Of course many
>>> others have made similar points. To say that genuine science is not
>>> interpretive would be in my mind simply a false claim.
>>> 
>>> Martin
>>> 
>>> 
>>> On 1/14/09 4:20 PM, "Derek Melser" <derek.melser@gmail.com> wrote:
>>> 
>>>  Unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, if mind/consciousness/thinking is
>>>> an
>>>> action, then, because our perception of others' actions always requires
>>>> empathy, and because empathy is not an acceptable observation method in
>>>> the
>>>> sciences, there will never be a genuine science of
>>>> mind/consciousness/thinking. But at least we'll no longer be bamboozled
>>>> by
>>>> the mind/body problem...
>>>> 
>>> 
>>> 
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>> 
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