Did William James 'explain postmodernism'?

William James' The Principles of Psychology was ahead of its time by at least a century.[1]

Consider the following passages from volume one [pp. 263-5], which I will quote at some length in order to reduce the risk of taking his words out of context:

Usually, the vague perception that all the words we hear belong to the same language and to the same special vocabulary in that language, and that the grammatical sequence is familiar, is practically equivalent to an admission that what we hear is sense. [...]

So delicate and incessant is this recognition by the mind of the mere fitness of words to be mentioned together that the slightest misreading, such as 'casualty' for 'causality,' or 'perpetual' for 'perceptual,' will be corrected by a listener whose attention is so relaxed that he gets no idea of the meaning of the sentence at all.

Conversely, if words do belong to the same vocabulary, and if the grammatical structure is correct, sentences with absolutely no meaning may be uttered in good faith and pass unchallenged. [...]

"The birds filled the tree-tops with their morning song, making the air moist, cool, and pleasant," is a sentence I remember reading once in a report of some athletic exercises in Jerome Park. It was probably written unconsciously by the hurried reporter, and read uncritically by many readers. An entire volume of 784 pages lately published in Boston [Substantialism or Philosophy of Knowledge, Jean Story, 1879] is composed of stuff like this passage picked out at random:

The flow of the efferent fluids of all these vessels from their outlets at the terminal loop of each culminate link on the surface of the nuclear organism is continuous as their respective atmospheric fruitage up the altitudinal limit of their expansibility, whence, when atmostophered by like but coalescing essences from higher altitudes, - those sensibly expressed as the essential qualities of external forms, - they descend, and become assimilated by the afferences of the nuclear organism.

Does this type of passage seem as familiar to you as it does to me?

Perhaps the answer depends on the content of your academic education. In my case, a postgraduate degree in 'critical theory', which introduced me to the wonders of postmodernism.
Replicating James' wonderfully wistful way of doing psychological research, I picked up my copy of Critical Theory: A Reader, (Edited by Douglas Tallack, head of my critical theory department) and picked out, as James did, a passage at random:

All history is inseparable from economy in the limited sense of the word, that of a certain kind of savings. Man's return - the relationship linking him profitably to man-being, conserving it. The economy, as a law of appropriation, is a phallocentric production. The opposition appropriate/inappropriate, proper/improper, clean/unclean, mine/not mine (the valorization of the sameself), organises the opposition identity/difference. Everything takes place as if, in a split second, man and being had propiated each other.

What James wrote next, after quoting Jean Story, seems equally appropriate to my quote of Helene Cixous:

There are every year works published whose contents show them to be by real lunatics. To the reader, the book quoted from seems pure nonsense from beginning to end. It is impossible to divide, in such a case, just that soft of feeling of rational relation between the words may have appeared to the author's mind. The border line between the objective sense and nonsense, impossible. Subjectively, any collection of words may make sense - event the wildest words in a dream - if one only does not doubt their belonging together.

The next passage is even more illustrative, for anyone with a passing familiarity with the intellectual genealogy of critical theory and postmodern theory [be glad if you don't have this]:

Take the obscurer passages in Hegel: it is a fair question whether the rationality included in them be anything more than the fact that the words all belong to a common vocabulary, and are strung together on a scheme of predication and relation, - immediacy, self-relation, and what not, - which has habitually recurred. Yet there there seems no reason to doubt that the subjective feeling of the rationality of these sentences was strong in the writer as he penned them, or even that some readers by straining may have reproduced it in themselves.

As Noam Chomsky said: "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously."

Given the capacity of language to construct 'semantically empty' sentences, I wonder how much, and to what extent, further education - and indeed what we have in mind when we talk of 'class' and 'culture' more generally - involves helping people to write collections of words which have this 'vague perception' of belonging "to the same language and to the same special vocabulary". Perhaps being middle-class, or a university graduate, allows us [for I fear only people who have been to university will read this] to better speak, write, and read an economically and culturally privileged 'specialised vocabulary' than other people, without ever quite being aware of it?

As Tony Blair said: "Britain forward not back."

[1]Of course, in making this statement, I'm suggesting a teleological view of history and human scientific progress, with 'knowledge' some form of ever expanding monument to humanity's benevolent dominion over all other aspects of the physical and biological world, directed towards some form of as-yet-unrealised-but-ultimately-inevitable technotopia: a 'singularity' perhaps.
I don't, in fact, believe this teleological narrative, especially with respect to social knowledge (an ongoing 'motif' the reader may pick up from my writings is the sense that many aspects of social theory seemed somehow more impressive and persuasive in the middle of the Twentieth Century than at the century's end). Nevertheless, the statement is the most concise (if philosophically inaccurate) one I can present as to my views on James, who managed to use introspection more effectively as an empirical research method than anyone else I have read. James' programme of 'radical empiricism' - treating subjective experiences as valid datums with with psychological theories may be tested and developed - was simply too radical for most of the Twentieth Century, and a 'Jamesian' research programme, for example with the relatively recent growth in the field of 'consciousness studies', only seems to have emerged within the last decade or so.

Sizing Up

Every so often, and not too often, I come across a book, an article, a chapter, or even a paragraph which contains an idea whose implications much exceed its word length. One such passage is as follows:

In general, we we would expect that factors will be perceived as causal to the degree that their magnitudes resemble the magnitude of the effects they are adduced to explain. In the development of causal schemata, both the notion that large causes can produce large effects and the notion that small causes can produce small effects probably precede the development of the notion that large causes can produce small effects. The notion that small causes can produce large effects probably develops very late and never attains very great stability.

This dry statement comes near the end of a relatively well known paper by the psychologists Richard Nisbett and Timothy Wilson, written in 1977 and published in the Psychological Review (Vol 84, No. 3) , called 'Telling More than We Can Know' (An allusion to and inversion of Michael Polanyi's famous aphorism about tacit knowledge that 'we can know more than we can tell').

The paper was written as a summary of, and attempt at explaining the results of, a large number of experiments involving subjects' verbal reports of explanations for their behaviours in a variety of carefully controlled situations. (Or 'formalised anecdotes', as I would call them, if I am to be consistent with myself last week when I referred to ethnographies as anecdotes.) The counter-intuitive discovery of many of these experiments seemed to be that people often don't know why they do the things that they do: we often act for one reason, but think we act that way for another.

Nisbett and Wilson's explanation - a meta-explanation, as it were - is that we possess a limited range of cognitive archetypes for causal schemas, intuitive patterns we apply to events in order to explain their occurance. Following from this, causal explanations which fit our causal schema more closely appear more intuitively plausible than those which don't, even if the plausible causal explanations can't really explain (or predict) anything, and the implausible causal explanations can.

The entire article is well worth reading. Nisbett and Wilson describe a number of qualities of intuitive causal schema, each of which have profound implications that, even thirty years after publication, still seem underexplored. As I said at the start of this entry, however, I'm going to concentrate on the magnitude-matching aspect of the causal schema, as described in the quoted passage. Nisbett and Wilson seemed to believe what they were writing isn't completely inconsequential to everyday life, culture, history, and common understanding, as the passage immediately following the one quoted suggests:

It is likely that conspiracy theories often feed on the discrepancy between officially provided causal explanations and the large effect they are invoked to explain. It is outrageous that a single, pathetic, weak figure like Lee Harvey Oswald should alter world history. When confronted with large effects, it is to comparably large causes that we turn for explanations. [When some insomniacs were asked] why they slept so little, both on particular occasions and in general, they were inclined to explain their insomnia in terms of the stress of their current life situation or even in terms of neurosis of chronic anxiety. Smaller causes, such as an overheated room, a tendency to work or exercise or smoke just before going to bed, or a tendency to keep irregular hours, were overlooked.

My guess is that this tendency to link magnitude of effect to magnitude of cause causes us to miss, or greatly under-value, a large number of seemingly inconsequential ,is-it-plugged-in-and-switched-on, explanations to some important social issues, and through this to miss the obvious. As a now relatively well-known and widely-publicised example, consider the theory that there is a link between abortion rates and crime. Another, slightly less well-known candidate for the unduly-and-implausibly simple cause-effect schema is provided by the (somewhate eccentric) experimental psychologist Seth Roberts in the form of the Shangri-la Diet. "Of course it won't work: it's too simple," seems to be the monotone chorus of response to Roberts' suggestion. "It doesn't add up." (As an example of this response, see the end of this generally excerable video about the diet, by Simon Jenkins, a nutritional scientist: a battle seems to start to rage between the 'trained' part of him which knows it should be tested and evaluated;and the latent, 'intuitive' part of him which simply can't find the idea credible.)

Within physical systems, perhaps it's easier to see how small causes can lead to big effects: within systems engineering, control theory (formally known by the much more intriguing name of cybernetics) teaches one to think about feedback loops. Positive feedback means small causes can have big effects; negative feedback means the converse: it all depends on how the causal structure in between is 'wired'.
Unfortunately, without being taught to think unnaturally, our minds tend not to consider the amplifiers and inhibitors which may lie between A and B. By default, our minds just tie A and B together with Causal String: if I feel a big tug at my end of the Causal String, I'm going to guess there's something big at the other end, even though it may just be an Imp-with-a-Winch (or an operational amplifier).

Additional Viewing:

1. http://www.b3ta.cr3ation.co.uk/data/jpg/inquest.jpg
   

First Post: Theorists and Taxonomisers

Hello!
Welcome to my first post. I intend to write something- substantial, semi-coherent - around once a week. The theme will generally be quite 'academic', focussing on particular, relatively long-standing and atemporal, rather than topical and ephemoral, issues, but this is not strictly an 'academic blog'.


Last week here at York was the 'British Association for the Advancement of Science's annual 'Festival of Science'. Perhaps attending academic lectures isn't most people's idea of a fun activity, and they've got a point, but I attended five seminars during the week, on topics ranging from anthropology to psychology to sociology, and certainly didn't feel afterwards like it was a waste of time.

What is 'science'? Going by the previous week's experience, it seems to mean something quite different to the anthropologists and the psychologists than the sociologists. (Some of the sociologists called themselves 'anthropologists', but I don't think the anthropologists presenting would: they didn't use enough statistics).
Of course the question is fuzzy and the answer will always be contentious, but I think there are two important aspects to most forms of scientific enterprise:

1. Hitherto implicit, fuzzy, and only locally-accessible knowledge is made explicit, exact, and (more) globally accessible. In short, 'facts' are generated, stored, amassed. The magnitude of the available data grows and grows. [Such enterprise generates knowledge]
   
2. The massive proliferation of data is then 'reduced' in magnitude through formal, replicable analyses. This data-reduction occurs through a process of generalisation. Similarities between datums are identified, abduced through pattern-recognition schemas, and inferences made about associations between data items, which can then be described more concisely than can the data itself ( data -> theory). Furthermore, the theories developed to link data can be used to make plausible guesses about phenomena which have not been recorded and observed. More prosaically, this part of the scientific enterprise allows people to use knowledge about things that have been observed can be used to make guesses about things that haven't. (And these things that haven't been observed may be unobserved because they haven't happened yet: i.e. science can be used to made predictions!) [Such enterprise generates understanding]
   

Of course, it's a lot more complex and nuanced than this - for one thing there's a lot of reflexivity between the 1. and 2. - but I find this a good way of thinking about the question.
Moreover, I think this is a good way of starting to think about the sociology (as it were) behind science, because my feeling is that the sort of people who tend to focus on the first part of science - the Taxonomisers - tend to be quite different to the sorts of people who focus on the second aspect - the Theorists. Taxonomisers like facts for the sake of having facts; for Theorists facts are just grist for the mill, and the less facts they have to deal with directly, the better. Facts for Theorists are just 'instances' of a general pattern, 'cases' for testing general rules. By contrast, for Taxonomisers, facts are the reason to wake up in the morning, and fact-generation is what puts food on the table.

Another way of thinking about this is to consider the differences between and gaining knowledge and gaining understanding. Very often, gaining knowledge is much more important. Consider a London black cab driver: to have (the) knowledge of the city's routes allows them to do their job; if they had deeper understanding of the generative mechanisms which begot the city road network they need to memorise- perhaps an understanding of the fractal-like nature of city growth around small centres, and the propensity for urban centres to be start near sources of clean water - then this wouldn't help.

Perhaps you can tell: I'm more of a Theorist than a Taxonomiser. I find Taxonomisers dull, ignorant pedants, obsessed with semantics, unable to see the wood for the trees (or the trees for the bark). Taxonomisers, conversely, probably consider the Theorist's enterprise foolish reductionism. Within the social sciences, Historians are probably good Taxonomisers, and Social Psychologists seem good Theorists. (The Historical Sociologist Charles Tilly does a good job of combining the two enterprises.)

Ontological experience, however, is perhaps closer to Taxonomy than Theory: we don't experience 'patterns' or 'trends' of experience, but individual instances of experience. Most people are Taxonomisers, I believe, to a greater extent than they are Theorists: informal taxonomy - experience destined to remain only implicitly and locally known - is anecdote, and people love anecdotes. (Sociologists call anecdotes 'ethnographies'.)