Thinking thinking: Practicing radical reflection 9783495828205, 9783495488201

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Schriftenreihe der

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Donata Schoeller Vera Saller (Eds.)

Thinking thinking Practicing radical reflection

https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205

ER .

B

Schriftenreihe der D

https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

How can one approach the very thought process of thinking, if every reflective move is already a result, a manifestation, of what one is trying to conceive? Verbalizing the act of thinking seems to be doomed to run behind the phenomenon that needs to be grasped. An inquiry into thinking that accounts for the process of thinking itself can be termed radical reflection. This kind of reflection does not pretend to describe its subject as »given«, independent of the way it’s being considered. It faces the challenge of including the experience of thinking, as well as the feeling tones that play a major role in thinking and articulating. Thus, the methodologies of radical reflection manifest themselves in cutting edge philosophical, as well as in psychotherapeutic research, in anthropology as well as in the cognitive sciences. The renowned thinkers from different disciplines in this volume have this in common: their perspectives, questions and means of inquiries do not discount their own embodied practice of thinking and articulating. Their radical methodologies are reflected in new vocabularies and innovative styles of thinking beyond traditional dualities.

The Editors: Donata Schoeller, Ph.D., is teaching philosophy at universities in Switzerland, Germany and the US. She has been trained in first-person-practices such as Focusing, contemplative meditation and the Elicitation Method. Currently, she has finished her book on the development of meaning on the basis of classical pragmatism, hermeneutic and phenomenology. She has published various articles on language, with a special focus on the phenomenon she calls »tentative speech acts.« She has also written books and articles on the medieval understanding of humility as well as on Meister Eckhart, Jakob Boehme and on Hegel. She lives in Zurich and is a mother of three daughters. Vera Saller, Ph.D., is a practicing psychoanalyst. She published on the challenges of doing psychotherapy with migrant patients. Another major field of her interests and publications concern the intersection of psychotherapy and philosophy. Currently she is involved in research on the life and work of Charles Sanders Peirce. She lives in Zurich.

https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

Donata Schoeller / Vera Saller (Eds.) Thinking thinking

https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

D Schriftenreihe der Deutschen Gesellschaft für phänomenologische Anthropologie, Psychiatrie und Psychotherapie (DGAP) Herausgegeben von Stefano Micali und Thomas Fuchs Band 5

https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

Donata Schoeller / Vera Saller (Eds.)

Thinking thinking Practicing radical reflection

Verlag Karl Alber Freiburg / München

https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

Originalausgabe © VERLAG KARL ALBER in der Verlag Herder GmbH, Freiburg / München 2016 Alle Rechte vorbehalten www.verlag-alber.de Umschlagmotiv: © Thomas Fuchs Satz und PDF-E-Book: SatzWeise GmbH, Trier ISBN (Buch) 978-3-495-48820-1 ISBN (PDF-E-Book) 978-3-495-82820-5

https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

Contents

Donata Schoeller, Vera Saller Introduction . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Claire Petitmengin The scientist’s body at the source of meaning

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. . . . . . . . .

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Eugene Gendlin A changed ground for precise cognition . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Susan A. J. Stuart Enkinaesthesia and Reid’s natural kind of magic . . . . . . . . .

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Donata Schoeller Somatic – semantic – shifting: Articulating embodied cultures . .

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Terrence W. Deacon The emergent process of thinking as reflected in language processing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

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Vincent Colapietro A Peircean account of first-person »authority«: The radical implications of thoroughgoing fallibilism

. . . . . . 160

Vera Saller The detective metaphor in abduction studies and psychoanalysis – and what it teaches us about the process of thought . . . . .

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Steven C. Hayes Human language and subjective experience: The symbolically extended »us« as a basis of human consciousness . . . . . . .

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Contents

Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch Towards living subjective experience . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Index of Authors

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. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238

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Introduction Donata Schoeller, Vera Saller

[…] has the reader never asked himself what kind of a mental fact is his intention of saying a thing before he has said it? It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore: and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything! Linger, and the words and things come into the mind: the anticipatory intention, the divination is there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them successively and calls them right if they agree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if they do not. It has therefore a nature of its own of the most positive sort, and yet what can we say about it without using words that belong to the later mental facts that replace it? The intention to-say-so-and-so is the only name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate. (William James 1950)

Radical Reflection What does it mean to be engaging in the very thought process of thinking? William James demonstrated the crux of this venture more than a century ago: speaking about what we think is not the same as thinking what we want to say. How much of it consists in words? And yet, the words that »come« are in direct relation to what anticipates them. Still, descriptions fall short. The descriptive use of words is always too late, belonging, as James said, to the »later mental facts« that replace the anticipatory reflections that invite them to come. Verbalizing the act of thinking therefore seems to be doomed to remain »theoretical activity after the fact« (Varela 1991, 19), always running behind the phenomenon that needs to be grasped. How can one possibly approach this subject matter, if every reflective move 9 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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one does is already a result, a manifestation, of what one is trying to reflect? An inquiry into thinking that accounts for the act of thinking can be termed radical-reflection (cp. Merleau-Ponty 1948). It is radical by facing the challenge of not discounting its own activity, which means, first and foremost, including the experience of thinking and language-use, as well as feeling tones that play a major role in thinking and articulating something. This kind of reflection also needs to be especially creative in the choice of its methodologies, as it cannot pretend to describe its subject matter in terms of something »given«, independent of the way it is being described. Although a radical-reflective approach to thinking is not often practiced today, it is not new for philosophy and psychotherapy. It has been addressed by hermeneutical, pragmatist and phenomenological thinkers going back to the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Paradoxically, these thinkers demonstrate that radical reflection does not consist in solipsistic explorations of an internal subjectivity. Instead, they recognized that »inside« and »outside« become inseparable and have to be conceived together when reflecting the thought process radically. This has opened up new avenues for understanding the role of interaction, practice and socio-historical conditions for the development of thinking. By inquiring into the fuzzy organic process of making our ideas and experiences clear (paraphrasing Charles S. Peirce) a continuity of body-environment as well as person-sociality relations has been uncovered as fundamental to generating meaning and developing intelligence. Similarly, the pioneers of the so-called talking cure such as Freud, Jung and Rogers have contributed greatly in the practice of radical reflective approaches. They have thereby uncovered intersubjectivity as the core feature of the perspectives of the first-person. In the last 50 years, the emphasis of research has shifted increasingly to the dyadic relationship of patient and therapist, replacing a one-person psychology to a two-or-more-person psychology. Intersubjectivity has become clinically visible in considering counter-transference. Furthermore, the dyadic setting is permeated by the third person perspective: The analyst draws upon a body of theories and regularly consults with colleagues. Questions about how to deal with the interactive process of the therapeutic relation, interpretation, explication, experience and projective identification have become a point of major consideration for different schools of therapy. 10 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

Introduction

Whereas traditional epistemology posited an unchangeable structure of cognition and of logic as the source of order in experience, the above mentioned schools began to inquire into an experientially grown order that allows for the growth of knowledge and change of experience. Concepts of process thereby opened up an awareness of the scientist/philosopher deeply situated and entangled in and with the object of inquiry. The perspectives and methodologies introduced in the coming chapters continue these pioneering approaches. Thereby, they do not only open novel theoretical routes, but also new and subtle practice perspectives. These have to do with recognizing that conditions of thinking go far beyond the logical, syntactical and semantic structures of propositions. Developing and pursuing what is meaningful to us, as a process of thought and articulation, involves body and environment, present and past. This foundation cannot be represented by the propositions we make and the systems we fashion. Furthermore, thinking and articulating thoughts is a dynamic embodied process that is not entirely in conscious control. Neither is it arbitrary. Rather, the reflective process oscillates between felt, discursive and symbolized phases; it can grow, evolve, become more vivid, or it may even shut down by how we attend to it and how it is being verbalized. Similarly, it can open up in its creative dimensions or it can be constricted by the way it is conceived. The intricate relation of lived experience functioning together with symbolic forms, accounts for what Charles Taylor termed a Western »split in consciousness«, manifesting a duality of self-reflection-practices, selfcontrol and self-exploration: Both practices belong to the same culture but they are also profoundly at odds, and our civilization is constantly battling itself over this. You see it everywhere you look. You see it in the conflict today in the West between people with a very strict, narrow, technological orientation to the world and themselves, and those who oppose them in the name of ecological health and openness to oneself because the technological stance of self-control also closes off self-exploration. You get it in attitudes to language. On one side, language is conceived as a pure instrument controlled by the mind, and on the other side are conceptions of language that have led to some of the richest discoveries about human understanding, language as the house of being, language as what opens up the very mystery of the human being. (Taylor 1997, 15)

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What makes the following collection of essays significant for theoretical as well as »practical« purposes is that it does not re-instance this well described battlefield by taking sides. It suggests new ways forward in scientific and philosophical, as well as psycho-therapeutic and socio-practical terms and methods, by engaging a starting point of inquiry that is part of the interactive process itself. The responsiveness of the emergent process of having ideas and insights, of forming meanings and changing them, is explored in terms of the intricate conditions it requires. In contrast, when mental processes are assumed to be »given« in ways that can be researched from the third person perspective alone, the responsive conditions of the process (including the research process) become the blind spot of the investigation. The following chapters indicate that we have only just begun to acknowledge and think into these responsive conditions. The challenge of a radical-reflective turn in this way becomes a chance to face the fragility and sensitivity of thinking and articulating as a responsive process, that forms, shapes and develops. Finding ways to understand and research the embodied, experiential, responsive and emergent process of thinking thus opens up a deeper understanding of a continuity between body and mind, between feeling and cognition, between social and symbolic environments that need to be cultivated.

Challenges Radical reflection, thus having a tradition both in philosophy and psychotherapeutic research, can be considered from different viewpoints. Still, there are major methodological hurdles at stake that restrain research today from going forward in this direction. We want to mention just a few of them from different philosophical schools and points of views. 1) Thinking thinking (thought in process) cannot proceed according to established epistemological procedures that begin with definitions of experience, with propositions that can be analyzed or with mental states that can be represented or measured. The self-reflective turn in epistemology has to do with the understanding of assertions, concepts, perceptions and ideas not as the starting point of a reflective process, but as the products of interaction and experiential dynamics

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Introduction

(what Dilthey called »Erleben«) 1 . To think into the characteristics of lived experience and action in relation to the cognitive process requires developing new vocabularies and creating untrodden scientific and philosophical paths. After decades of research in this vein being on hold, only recently the revolutionary character of radical-reflective approaches have been re-acknowledged by cutting-edge philosophers and cognitive-scientists 2 . 2) Contemporary thinkers of analytical language philosophy have come to understand that cognitions involve a »background«. It is constitutive in ways that seem impossible to analyze and to represent in propositions because of its function in the very process of making propositions. The challenge involved also manifests in the restrictions of a vocabulary that is well developed to express intentions, but not to express how they come about. The philosopher John Searle captures this clearly: […] just as language is not well designed to talk about itself, so the mind is not well designed to reflect on itself; […] Our second–order investigations into the first-order phenomena quite naturally use the first-order vocabulary, so we can be said quite naturally to reflect about reflection or have beliefs about believing or even to presuppose presupposing. But when it comes to examining the conditions of the possibility of the functioning of the mind, we simply have very little vocabulary to hand […]. (Searle 1983, 156)

These predicaments are topped by the problem of the vicious cycle, or the unending regress, which Searle also points to in the same context. For propositions to represent the »background« they have to draw on the very background they represent. When Searle begins to spell out what it takes to form simple intentions, he soon discovers that what is implied are complex capacities that are not representable. A similar conclusion can be found in debates concerning the »frame problem«. It poses the question how an intelligent agent can come to know what information is relevant to draw upon while dealing with an issue. If every context requires a broader context to know what is relevant at the very moment, then of course one faces an infinite regress. (cp. Dreyfus 1992, Wheeler 2008) A thorough-going account of this reversed understanding is offered in Jung 2009. For example: Clark (2008), Damasio (1999) Deacon (2012), Fuchs (2013B), Jung (2009), Lakoff and Johnson (1999), Noë (2009), Thompson (2007), Petitmengin (2011), Stuart (2010), Varela et al. (1993).

1 2

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An analogous point has been made by Gilbert Ryle through his famous distinction between »knowing how« and »knowing that«. The chess player can perform his clever moves, but he cannot explicate the accumulated experience that makes him move his pieces – other than moving them the way he does. He does not possess a list of rules that spells out his clever way of thinking (cp. Ryle 1966, 30 ff.). Earlier, a similar point has been made by Michael Polanyi’s demonstrations of what he terms »tacit knowledge« (Polanyi 1962 & 1958). He shows that the scientist and philosopher does not only draw on explicit knowledge to do his or her work, but on forms of knowledge that need to be conceived according to their tacit, incorporated dimensions. The frameworks that constitute the very approach to topics and questions manifest in as basic a way as bodily competences like riding a bike or knowing how to play the piano – they need no extra attention. Similarly, the reflective framing to approach a problem and to pursue it remains »essentially inarticulable«. (Polanyi 1962, 60). 3) These challenges become even more precarious when one considers that scientific method as such is understood in terms of cultivating »objectivity«, which means having as much distance as possible from the first person perspective. Nagel’s The View from Nowhere demonstrates how the concept of scientific objectivity necessitates excluding the experience of thinking and speaking. Nagel writes: For many philosophers the exemplary case of reality is the world described by physics, the science in which we have achieved our greatest detachment from a specifically human perspective on the world. But for precisely that reason physics is bound to leave undescribed the irreducibly subjective character of conscious mental processes, whatever may be their intimate relation to the physical operation of the brain. (Nagel 1986, 7).

Nagel’s solution seems to consist in the vision that the view of the world from a detached standpoint can be complemented by the description of the first person perspective, instead of reducing the latter to the former. His central message is to spell out the tensions involved and to account for the quality of »what is it like to be« (Nagel 1974) in an objectified description of the world, – although this means living with irreconcilabilities between a scientific understanding of the world and the experienced kind of value of individual life. Nagel’s important intervention, however, does not consider how deeply the

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Introduction

objectifying methods themselves are grounded in the experiential process of what it is like to think. To reflect the engagement of tacit, background-like experiences for the scientific process is the characteristic trajectory of the authors in this volume. Their methods of investigation therefore face all of the above-mentioned challenges: to consider an »earlier« starting point than definitions, percepts, concepts, observations etc.; to inquire the dynamic of an intentional focus; to expand extant vocabularies. The task involves practicing reflective forms of inquiry and a use of words that is not yet part of shared scientific or ordinary language games. Tools that are thus developed, seem to bring psychotherapeutic and scientific methodologies closer.

Introducing the authors The boldness in facing these challenges is what drove us, the editors of this volume, in the choice of the international authors we invited to participate in this book project, which has been generously accepted by the »Schriftenreihe der DGAP«. We come from different disciplinary backgrounds, but we meet in terms of our rather passionate interest for the process of thinking which leads us in reverse ways to the edge of our respective disciplines. Whereas the epistemological emphasis on cognition is constitutive of philosophical discourse (Donata’s field), the changing, volatile and implicit processes that lead to insights, beliefs or claims can still be considered more or less a blind spot in many philosophical debates. Inquiries into the subtle functions of feeling involved in thinking and articulating remain marginal. In psychoanalysis (Vera’s field), on the other hand, the practice of articulation, the eminent role of feelings and the impact of the unconscious are in the center of attention; the functions of cognition and the process of thinking, however, seem to be taken for granted, thus constituting a blind spot in psychoanalytical theories and debates. Furthermore, we meet on another intersection: Vera, the practicing psychoanalyst is involved in research on the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, and Donata, doing theoretical work as a philosopher, also practices meditation, Focusing and TAE (Thinking-at-the-Edge). Our interest in the fuzzy, »abductive«, felt-sensing process of thinking and articulating brought us together. We met regularly to read 15 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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and discuss, to devise a seminar at the ETH (Swiss Federal Institute of Technology) Zurich, and finally to start this book project. We noticed only during the process, that our interest is also driven by an implicit concern regarding the sensitive interface of theory and practice, i. e. how the consequences of theories of mind, feeling and language have the power to impact daily communication, conflict resolution, education and therapy. So we jointly worked towards a book that would touch this interface in relevant ways and open up further avenues of thinking and further dimensions of practice. The group of thinkers gathered in this volume comes from Europe and the United States. The authors cover a wide spectrum of interdisciplinary areas of study such as anthropology, cognitive science, evolutionary biology, philosophy, psychoanalysis as well as therapy and neuro-phenomenology. For all the differences in international and inter-disciplinary backgrounds, all of the authors have something in common. Their approaches introduce perspectives, questions and means of inquiries that do not discount their own embodied practice of thinking and articulating. This manifests in their methodologies, vocabularies, research and style of thinking. Instead of focusing on static moments of thought and articulation, such as cognitions, propositions, beliefs and mental-states, each of the contributors ventures to conceive the ongoing process of thinking and articulating, thus demonstrating from different sides and approaches what it means to reflect radically. The emergent phenomena that are thereby placed into the center of attention are very fragile. They disperse when we try to think and speak according to static either/or patterns. For example: separating the conceptual from the pre-conceptual, the private from the public, the mind from the body, the body from the (sociocultural and natural) environment. The authors of this volume demonstrate in different respects, how conceiving thinking and articulating as a process involves an understanding of the first person in an interactive inseparability with its environment, immersed in social relations – as the ground from where we think and speak. This obviously implies that the observer’s perspective cannot remain the unquestioned position from where thinking can be addressed. The task at hand requires the flexibility to engage and practice different methods that can be summarized as first-, second- and third-person approaches, carefully interwoven. As Searle rightly noticed, this implies an expansion of traditional vocabulary addressing an interactive di16 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

Introduction

mension of thinking about thinking. By re-affirming innovative metaphors and vocabularies (such as »abduction«), or creatively instigating new ones (such as »felt sense«, »enkinaesthesia« »inter-affective«, »embryos of speech act«, etc.), the contributors instance an elaboration of terminology involved in approaching their subjectmatter in radical-reflective terms. In this way, the following chapters are beyond a critique of dualistic frameworks and thereby no longer in danger of becoming trapped within the paradigmatic horizon of what is criticized. Let us now introduce the authors in the order of the chapters: Claire Petitmengin, philosopher and neuro-phenomenologist, continues Francisco Varela’s pioneering work to integrate first person methodologies into cognitive scientific research. She developed the Elicitation Method which is an interview-technique engaging the first, second and third person to investigate the emergence of an idea, or creativity, in process. She thereby fills a gap by investigating an occurrence hardly ever studied by science, even though scientific progress heavily depends on it. The difficulties in studying this process concern the subtlety and complexity of the emergence of an idea that also escapes the awareness of the person involved over short or long stretches of time. Petitmengin demonstrates in her work that the logical and conceptual difficulties mentioned by philosophers need not be the last word that limits investigations to explore a movement from pre-conceptual to conceptual. She shows that it is not a matter of logical impossibility, but of skillful practice and of careful interacting to overcome the habitual directedness of intentional attention. In this way she combines the methodological surplus of two different practice traditions: Western scientific methods and Eastern meditation techniques, being a practitioner of Vipassana meditation herself. This enables her to develop interview-questions that support a de-focused awareness in order to assist the person in describing a creative process in its complex and fine-grained phases. The first-, second- and third-person-approaches thereby interact to overcome what otherwise seemed a logical or intentional limitation: the interviewer supports the interviewee to re-direct the focus of attention to how she thinks, enabling her to provide descriptions that are the blind spot to the observer-perspective, thus allowing inquiry into generic patterns of the process. 17 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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The kind of questions she developed, themselves require the versatile attentive discipline that they support in the interviewee. She writes in her chapter: »The process we were trying to describe was indeed the very process that we were mobilizing to conduct our research.« The description of the process is thus a delicate but not impossible affair, easily disturbed by premature conceptualization and theorizing. Creativity, but also abstraction, »is played in the body«, as Petitmengin surprisingly shows in her many examples. Inter-action between people as well as within one-self, navigating between discursive, pre-discursive, trans-modal and gestural dimensions of experience, are capacities involved in the maturation of an idea, – as well as in its inquiry. Eugene Gendlin, philosopher and renowned psychotherapist, is himself a pioneer in developing first-person methods (Focusing, Thinking-at-the-Edge) that expand radical-reflective vocabularies. The investigation of the creative process as well as of the healing dimension of articulation is the driving force of Gendlin’s thinking since early in 1960. Although related to the phenomenological approach, it is not easy to classify the out-of-the-box challenge of Gendlin’s philosophy. By demonstrating how every act of speaking and understanding involves vastly more ›felt sensing‹ than what is explicitly said or understood, he sheds light on the implicit kind of order involved when one thinks or speaks. It is with surprising directness that Gendlin demonstrates the possibilities to think-into the effects and characteristics of an implicit precision that otherwise seem to directly lead into logical dilemmas concerning first and second order languages or infinite regresses. One might say, Gendlin is inquiring into the kind of »emergent order« of the process Petitmengin is describing in its generic patterns. At the same time he spells out what a radical-reflective style of thinking can look like by permanently and skillfully highlighting the means by which he can do what he does. Gendlin draws a powerful distinction between the concept of experience and lived experiencing, between concepts, and the ongoing source of concepts. He describes this distinction and puts it to work in his philosophy. In engaging experiential functions, Gendlin seems to operate with a magnifying glass to notice the interactive relation between what he calls »experienced meaning«, on the one hand, and symbols, on the other, both interactively forming, shifting and creating meaning. By engaging the implicit precision of »felt or experi18 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

Introduction

enced meaning« in relation to its articulation, he can distinguish between an implicit and a conceptual kind of order. In this way, Gendlin actually tackles William James’ important question (see above quote) of how to deal theoretically with an anticipatory intention of saying something without replacing it with the words that come later. Gendlin’s theoretical and methodological answers have serious consequences for basic notions such as body, language, space, time and situation. These answers allow him to re-conceive meaning in deep continuity with body-environment interaction. The article in this volume can thus be considered as linking his philosophy of language with his main work, A Process Model (Gendlin, 2015). Like an improvisation of musicians playing similar themes on different instruments and keys, the philosopher and cognitive scientist Susan Stuart introduces the term enkinaesthesia into the context developed so far. We chose her, as her work makes conceivable, how verbalized ideas and notions are the tip of an iceberg that can make us forget the embodied conditions out of which they emerge. Stuart’s work aims at finding ways to think and describe intricate pre-linguistic forms of interaction as a condition of linguistic and scientific systems. She thus turns around engrained scientific procedures: instead of using science to explain the world, she explores, »how the ›enkinaesthetic‹ field of lived experience can be used to explain science and situate the grounds of our moral discourse« (2015). Her work sensitizes the reader (us) for the richness of somato-sensory engagement of feeling bodies, pre-linguistically and interactively grounding the development of sense-making. Stuart also detects how language-use is rooted in child-development, in the full-bodied responses of infants to their surroundings and stimulations. (This aspect will figure as a continual thread of the chapters to come). By saying she »sensitizes« the reader for a »natural language« we also refer to the kind of language she uses. She is capable of creating scientific-philosophical descriptions in an almost poetic way to stretch the imagination to its limits, brushing against the dynamic of one-dimensional and one-directional (causal) reasoning. Stuart’s descriptions of melodies of »coagential communication and comprehension«, which extend beyond individual bodies, including agents and objects, the actual and the anticipated, the cell and organ, they invigorate scientific imagination, carving out the richness of a plenisentient, enkinaestethic-base of language. In a surprising turn, she conceives of »natural language« 19 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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as a first order languaging, thus turning our conventional hierarchy upside down. Despite its superiority, the second order, symbolic level of language, from this perspective, becomes apparent in the striking »paucity of its notions«. Stuart thereby powerfully reaffirms the thinking of Thomas Reid, explicating different embodied layers and levels of meaning. These will be further explored in the coming chapters. Terrence Deacon, neuro-scientist, evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, is author of groundbreaking books such as Symbolic Species and Incomplete Nature. His inquiries into the co-evolvement of language, the capacity of thinking and the brain, develop Peircean semiosis further. Deacon is an important author for our purpose, as he demonstrates, how signs are not »simple«, but function on intertwined levels of embodied and symbolic systems. Meaning, according to Deacon, becomes a complex and many-leveled interpretative response, and language, quoting from his article in this volume: »just a recent overlay on much more ancient and basic mental processes«. Furthermore, Deacon’s teleo-dynamic approach in Incomplete Nature, shows the emergence of new structures as a continuous thread across physical, biological, sentient and conscious living. His original perspectives emphasize the aspect of »work« in each domain, thereby highlighting the pivotal role of practice. From simple organisms to complex mental activity, new structures emerge under constraint, thereby opening up unpredictable »possibilities of new forms of work« (Deacon 2012, 367). A process of understanding, or an effort to clarify difficult subject matters, can thus be considered in terms of a recursive re-organization that »reinforces the capacity to do this again«. His eye-opening emphasis on »work« goes hand in hand with his emphasis on the role of absential features (cp. Deacon 2012, Chap. 0), that characterize the makeup of purposes, goals, ideas and meaning, not being measurably present in material or energetic forms (cp. Schoeller’s chapter in this volume). What we think and articulate thus becomes conceivable as a work of reorganization, driven by absential features under constraint, gradually allowing the emergence of new symbolic structures to happen, thereby opening up new possibilities of »work«. This grants surprising perspectives on a deep family relatedness of very different kinds of symbolic activities, such as scientific, creative or therapeutic practices. In his chapter, Deacon provides neuro-scientific glimpses that 20 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

Introduction

seem to back up the work of the authors we have introduced so far. From a different scientific perspective and drawing on different methodologies, he emphasizes the importance of similar kinds of questions, like asking: »what is a concept before it is expressed in words and phrases?« and »what is a proposition or request before it is phrased as a sentence?« Deacon openly acknowledges the methodological difficulties involved with these questions. He warns the reader, that one cannot succeed in understanding an antecedent generative process within a model applicable to artificial systems, in which parts and components are combined according to certain rules (a similar point will be made by Steven Hayes). Sentences, rather, are to be conceived as »products of spontaneous bottom-up self-organizing interactions«, regulated by arousal moods that involve different brain areas linked with whole body-regulation. Looking with Deacon at the emergence of one sentence, in this way brings the whole body into play – as well as the encompassing social context. The second part of the book will approach our subject matter more closely on the intersection between psychotherapy and philosophy. As mentioned in the beginning, the sociality of the subject and his dependence on culturally shaped sign-processes is nothing new for psychotherapy. Neither is the eminent role that the unconscious plays in rational thinking; however there is a kind of blind spot in the manner that thinking is conceptualized. The following chapters show that in addition to Focusing (Gendlin), today many schools of psychotherapy are aware of the therapeutic effect of radical-reflective moments in the course of the treatment. This has lead to modifications in techniques that enable the therapist to foster such moments. The healing process facilitates the patient’s interest in his own psychic moves in order to allow obsessive parts of the personality to become more fluid and flexible. This requires new ways of support and practice. Phenomenological investigations of experiencing the »here and now« often resemble psychotherapeutic arrangements. While neurophenomenology only recently fine-tuned these techniques, psychotherapy’s discovery of the healing effect of being aware of the moment is grounded in the inter-subjective encounters of the therapeutic practice. The phenomenological, semiotic, pragmatic and neuro-scientific approaches that move away from mechanistic theories and the shift within psychotherapy towards existential healing mo21 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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ments, enable a fruitful exchange between the disciplines. This allows psychotherapy to share its deep understanding of the emotional and motivational processes and thus to take part in the interdisciplinary debates more actively. How lively this conversation between a philosophical and a psychoanalytical approach on thinking can become, is demonstrated by our next author. Vincent Colapietro, himself a philosopher, has contributed greatly in making Peircean philosophy accessible. His book, »Peirce’s Approach to the Self. A Semiotic Perspective on Human Subjectivity« (1989), has initiated a new understanding of the classical pragmatist’s theories. Against the backdrop of a common understanding of the Peircean semiotic community (cp. Umberto Eco), Colapietro demonstrates how Peirce’s pragmatist semiotics is significant for the study of human thinking, and even for the understanding of psychology. He also indicates how Peirce has distanced himself from the metaphysical approach to the self as propagated by his close friend William James. Whereas the latter suggests personal minds as being isolated from one another, Peirce’s maxim is that of a continuous interchange of self and others, understanding human beings as submerged and part of an incessantly moving sea of references and signs. It is on these lines that the phrase »we ought to say that we are in thought, and not that thoughts are in us« (Peirce 1984, 227n) is to be understood. Colapietro also opened up a new field of investigation by comparing the Peircean understanding of the self with Freud’s. Peirce often addressed unconscious states in the sense of the Freudian descriptive unconscious. The automated, habituated behavior, in fact, belonged to his favorite subjects. It was questionable, however, if Peirce also advocated Freud’s notion of an unconscious characterized by repression or other defence mechanisms. Colapietro successfully showed that the classical pragmatist explicitly also refers to states that correspond to what Freud conceived as dynamically unconscious. Colapietro’s chapter masterly reconstructs the fine-boned Peircean arguments and thereby shows how »radical« Peirce’s thinking is, while being nonetheless »commonsensical«. Reminding us of the possibility of knowing the other’s state of mind more accurately than the person herself, Colapietro does not remain on an abstract philosophical level of discussing »other minds«. Although he understands the self as being immersed in signs and relations, he is careful not to 22 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

Introduction

overstate the position, especially in regard to the therapeutic situation. The analyst may know more about the client’s moods, but it is the client himself who has to find words and symbols in order for that knowledge to become efficacious, that is, to enable the patient to stand her own ground when faced with others. Whereas in its early days, psychoanalysis was understood as a theory of an isolated individual’s drive history, the emphasis on the sociality of the human development increasingly permeates the theoretical discussions of the last 60 years. Acknowledging the importance of the relationship between patient and therapist, psychoanalysis has left behind the illusion of an omniscient therapist. A similar development can be traced in behavioral therapy. The two practices now have an increasing common denominator in their focus on learning as understood in terms of acquiring new meaning. An exponent of this new relational and mindfulness based form of behavioral therapy is Steven Hayes, our next author. The psychologist and acclaimed founder of the »third wave« of behavioral therapy, ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy), is known for his innovative approach to meaning and language. The Relational Frame Theory (Hayes et. al. 2001) conceptualizes the complex cooperation of different forms of learning that develop into networks of meaning that vary from individual to individual. His approaches make the radical-reflective turn we are pursuing in this book very apparent. To our delight, this is also noticeable in the manner he wrote his chapter. It is the individual’s experiential background that, due to Hayes extensive research, re-enters the picture of a scientific take on language. At the same time, his work demonstrates how individual experience has to be conceived as always socially-linguistically immersed, how the private and public domains in this way belong together without being identical. By inquiring into the complex framework of meanings that differs from person to person, Hayes demonstrates how publicly shared meanings of words go hand in hand with eliciting individual connotations, feelings, experiences. By investigating this network and its complex growth and logic, Hayes opened behavioral therapy up to new horizons of practice, showing that retraining clients’ behavior need not be the only route forward. Training an enhanced awareness of the present moment, of what it is like to be here and now, allows the reframing of what otherwise seems necessarily and unchangeably connected. 23 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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In this chapter, Hayes echoes the methodological challenge running through the foregoing chapters, by announcing his core analytic unit as an »ongoing act in context«. Similar to Deacon, he reminds us that this kind of unit cannot be analyzed in terms of the parts and components involved. Rather, it needs to be considered according to its situatedness and purposiveness. In addition, Hayes points out the limitations of understanding the first-person as an internal subjective process. Instead, each individual needs to be considered as a social being, extending across »the cognitive relations of time, place and person.« Finally, his radical-reflective methodology openly plays out when he invites the reader to notice the flexible dimension of meaning while reading the chapter. Our last author, Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch, connects the dots by bringing together intersubjectivity, the psychological process and its immersion in cultural environments, with philosophical non-reductive approaches. Being both a philosopher as well as a psychoanalyst, she is a practiced thinker across disciplinary fields. Her approach to lived experience takes account of the reality check she, as a therapist, faces in her everyday work: »Psychoanalysts receive the unique opportunity to take part in the living subjective experience of their patients.« Giampieri-Deutsch, in her chapter, gives an overview of the characteristics of non-reductionism in contemporary theories of mind. In this way, her chapter provides ample research highlighting the emergent properties of consciousness as well as bottom up causation that accounts for the ways in which verbal cures work (even on a physical basis). She links her research explicitly to questions concerning the body and mind gap and suggests original directions that lead across the split, for example by referencing phenomena of transference. That mutual interconnectedness of persons sharing meanings goes beyond language and becomes apparent in the very moment of relational empathy: »What patients cannot tell us, they will show us. This experience offered by patients in the analytic session may even be the instantiation in vivo of their very early preverbal past experience«. From the practice-perspective, thoughts are never just a mental state, but a »psychophysical, embodied experience«. Awareness of the moment was also emphasized back in 1967 by Wilfred R. Bion, who recommended that the analyst plunge into the session without »memory and desire« in order to accept the patient 24 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

Introduction

how she is right now. This radical acceptance of the presence is the core characteristic of meditation practices. Honoring the contributions of established practices, Giampieri-Deutsch at the end of this volume, as did Petitmengin in the beginning, reminds us how much the Buddhist meditation tradition has to offer to Western psychotherapies. She emphasizes that it is experience that allows us to re-establish »contact and continuity between the own mind and the own body.« Thinking thus can be conceived not only as one (mental) side of a dualistic framework, but as the very means to reaffirm the continuous relationship between what is called mind and what is called body. To conceive of thinking, articulating and meaning as emergent, embodied phenomena does not render the »hard problems« (Chalmers 1995) of consciousness and the »really hard problem of meaning« (Flanagan 2007) any easier. This can definitely be drawn as one conclusion from the chapters of this book. It becomes more challenging, – but in ways that open up »new avenues of research« (Petitmengin in this volume), »begging new questions, demanding new methodologies, requiring far more interdisciplinary approaches than before« (Deacon in this volume). Research questions and -methods that open the implicit process involved need to know how to skillfully engage the fine-tuned gestures and transmodality of thought in process; a philosophy that takes account of a carrying forward-capacity of symbols needs to become responsive to the way it articulates; describing a natural language needs to draw on the lived experience of plenisentient perception, proprioception and movement; conceiving the emergent process of language needs to deal with the question of how to think in ways that do not substitute the process with its result; describing moves of thinking that go beyond deduction and induction needs to engage in states of experience that do not stem from logical rules and explicit forms of discourse. All of this implies novel theoretical perspectives of closing the mind-body gap. Nevertheless, there is more at stake than a purely theoretical outlook. Lived experience of meaning re-enters the picture of scientific and philosophical theories in ways which affect scientific and daily approaches to living beings by bearing in mind what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the vulnerable subject (cp, Merleau-Ponty 1976). Considering an embodied vulnerability that is at the very basis 25 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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of thinking, reflection about thought processes can become sensitive in regard to the effects of its own results. Our volume hopes to make its contribution in ways that enhance this kind of awareness.

References Bion, W. R. (1967). Notes on memory and desire. Psycho-Analytic Forum, 2:3, 271–280. Chalmers, D. (1995). Facing up the problem of consciousness. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 2(3), 200–19. Colapietro, V. (1989). Peirce’s approach to the self. A semiotic perspective on human subjectivity. Albany: State University Press. Clark, A. (2008). Supersizing the mind. Embodiment, action and cognitive extension. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Damasio, A. R. (1999). Feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace. Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. New York: Putnam Publishing. Deacon, T. W. (2011). Incomplete nature. How mind emerged from matter. New York: W. W. Norton & Company — (1997). The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain. New York: Norton. Dewey, J. (1938). Logic – The theory of inquiry. New York: Henry Holt & Company. Dreyfus, H. L. (1992), What computers ctill can’t do. Cambridge: MIT Press. Flanagan, O. (2007). The really hard problem: Meaning in a material world. Cambridge MA: MIT Press. Fuchs, T. (2013A). Verkörperung, Sozialität und Kultur. In Interdisziplinäre Anthropologie: Leib – Geist – Kultur, T. Breyer, G. Etzelmüller, T. Fuchs & G. Schwarzkopf (eds.). (Pp. 11–33). Heidelberg: Winter. Fuchs, T. (2013B). Das Gehirn – ein Beziehungsorgan. 4. aktualis. und erw. Aufl. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Gendlin, E. (2015). Ein Prozess-Modell. Übers. und eingel. von D. Schoeller und C. Geiser. Freiburg: Alber. Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the flesh: The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books. — (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hayes, S. C.; Barnes-Holmes, D. & Roche, B. (eds.) (2001). Relational Frame Theory: A post-Skinnerian account of human language and cognition. New York: Plenum Press. James, W. (1950). The Principles of Psychology. Bd. 1. 1890. Neuaufl. New York: Dover. Jung, M. (2009). Der bewusste Ausdruck. Anthropologie der Artikulation. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter

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Introduction Mead, G. H. (1934). Mind, self, and society. Ed. by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1976). Phénomenologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. — (1948). Sense et non-sense. Paris: Nagel. Nagel, T. (1986). The view from nowhere. Oxford & New York: Oxford Univ. Press. — (1974). What it is like to be a bat. In: The Philosophical Review, LXXXIII: 4, 435–50. Noë, A. (2009). Out of our heads. Why you are not your brain, and other lessons from the biology of consciousness. New York: Hill & Wang. — (2004), Action in perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Peirce, Ch. S. (1984). Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A chronological edition. Vol 2. 1867–1871. Compiled by the editors of the Peirce Edition Project. Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. Petitmengin, C. (2011) (ed.). 10 Years’ viewing from within: Further debate. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 18: 2. — (2007). Toward the source of thoughts: The gestural and transmodal dimension of lived experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14: 3, 54–82. Polanyi, M. (1962/1983) The tacit dimension, Gloucester: Peter Smith. — (1962). Personal knowledge. Towards a post-ciritical philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press Ryle, G. (1966). Concept of mind. London: Hutchinson. Searle, J. R. (1983). Intentionality: An essay in the philosophy of mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stuart, S. A. J. (2015). http://www.gla.ac.uk/schools/humanities/staff/susanstuart [2015. 06. 15] — (2011). Enkinaesthesia: The fundamental challenge for machine consciousness. International Journal of Machine Consciousness, 3: 1, 145–62. Taylor, Ch. (1997). Self-exploration and modernity. In: F. Varela (ed.): Sleeping, dreaming and dying (p. 14–21). Boston: Wisdom Publications. Thompson, E. (2007). Mind in life. Biology, phenomenology and the sciences of mind. Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University. Varela, F. J. & Maturana, H. R. (1987). Der Baum der Erkenntnis: Die biologischen Wurzeln menschlichen Erkennens. Bern: Goldmann. Varela, F. J., Thompson E. & Rosch, E. (1993). The embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Wheeler, M. (2008). Cognition in context: Phenomenology, situated robotics, and the frame problem. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 16(3), 323–349. Whitehead, A. F. (1929) Process and reality: An essay in cosmology. New York: Macmillan Company.

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The scientist’s body at the source of meaning Claire Petitmengin

»Knowledge is nothing else than a rumor until you feel it in your muscles.« (Proverb of shamans of New Guinea)

The lived experience associated with the emergence of a new idea has been little studied. An empirical approach consisting in gathering precise descriptions of the ideation process of scientists, as well as their process of expression, led us to explore a deeply pre-reflected, gestural and transmodal dimension of experience that seems to be the very source of meaning. After describing our research method, we present the results of our survey, and then describe the structural characteristics of this dimension. We conclude with a number of lines of thought on the pedagogical and epistemological consequences of the recognition of the gestural character of meaning.

1.

Forgetting the experience of the scientist

How do new ideas arise? When a new idea appears, in the mathematical, philosophical or technological field, the interest usually focuses on the content of the idea and the exploration of its consequences. But very surprisingly, even when a discovery has important repercussions on our daily lives, very little attention is paid to the experience of the scientist at the creative breakthrough. In the scientific domain, efforts focus on understanding the process that can prove or demonstrate the new idea, focusing very rarely on the process that allows the researcher to find it (Holton 1972). In the philosophical domain, the attention concentrates on the theoretical elaboration of the content of the idea into a coherent system, while very few pages are devoted to the exploration of the singular and concrete conditions of its emergence. In the technological field, innovation, that is to say the imple28 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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mentation of an invention and its integration into a social and cultural environment, has been investigated from multiple perspectives: economic (Schumpeter 1935; Schmookler 1966), sociological (Akrich, Callon & Latour 1988; Alter 2000), philosophical (Guchet 2005; Stiegler et al. 2008), managerial and juridical. However, the upstream experience of invention has been little studied in itself. In all these domains, the absorption of attention in the content of the idea and its implications conceals the lived experience of its emergence. What is true at the collective level is also true at the individual level: the absorption of the attention of the scientist in the content of his ideas occults their genesis, which usually remains unnoticed, »pre-reflective« in phenomenological language. Nevertheless researchers from various disciplines – mathematicians, biologists, philosophers, economists, psychotherapists – have been interested in ideation. But their aim was to develop an explanatory model of the creative process rather than to describe the experience associated with the emergence of an idea. The most common explanation consists in reducing ideation to an unconscious inference from subliminal perceptions (Berne 1949; Reik 1948), or to an unconscious recognition of familiar patterns (Simon 1987; Weisberg 1986; Dreyfus 1986; Reber 1993; Damasio 1995). »Scientists solve problems by modeling them on solutions previously found for other problems« (Kuhn 1972, 224). However these explanations, by reducing ideation to the recognition of a past situation, and therefore the content of the idea to something already known, do not explain the emergence of truly innovative ideas, which implies a rupture, a discontinuity. Other explanations try to account for the emergence of novelty by invoking a cognitive mechanism that involves a point of unpredictability: serendipity (Walpole 1754), abduction (Peirce 1878), association (Poincaré 1970; Changeux et Connes 1992) or »bisociation« (Koestler 1965) of ideas, restructuration of a representation (Scheerer 1963; Smith 1995), feeling of coherence (Polanyi 1962; Bowers 1984), transduction (Simondon 1958). However, none of these explanations relies on a detailed study of the experience of ideation. Even researchers who are obviously inspired by their own experience (such as Poincaré whose four phases model of mathematical discovery serves as a universal reference for the creative process), quickly slip from the description of their experience towards an explanatory model. It is striking that in trying to explain the appearance of new contents of knowledge, all these models reduce ideation to an abstract and disem29 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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bodied cognitive mechanism, where the researcher is reduced to a »pure spirit.«

2.

Research method

We adopted a different approach based on the collection of disciplined descriptions of the experience associated with ideation, which we consider as a necessary prerequisite to the development of an explanation. To overcome the difficulty of such a collection, due to the usually unrecognized character of this process, we used an appropriate interview method, the »elicitation interview« or »micro-phenomenological interview« (Vermersch 1994/2010; Petitmengin 2006). The main devices of elicitation consist in: – helping the subject to choose a singular experience, precisely situated in space and time, and bringing him back to this singular experience each time he shifts surreptitiously towards the expression of judgments, interpretations, explanations and beliefs about his experience; – encouraging the evocation of this past experience (which may be remote in time) by helping the subject to retrieve the spatialtemporal and sensory context of the experience, until the past situation is »re-enacted« to the point that it becomes more present than the interview situation; – helping the subject to redirect his attention from the »what« or content of his evoked activity (the content of the innovative idea) towards the »how«: micro-adjustments of the attention mode, inner images and discourses, subtle emotions and feelings which accompany – usually pre-reflectively – the emergence of the new idea. To do this, the interview uses a questioning which is both neutral and very precise, relying on verbal and nonverbal cues of implicit information. The structure of an interview is an iterative structure which consists of bringing the subject to re-evoke his experience several times, while guiding his attention towards a diachronic or synchronic grain which is finer each time. A work of analysis and comparison of the collected descriptions then enabled us to detect patterns and to highlight a generic structure of the ideation process that is independent of the content of ideas, and where bodily experience plays a key role.

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This chapter builds on the results of three empirical studies based on the collection and analysis of elicitation interviews: the first one focuses on the experience that accompanies the emergence of an intuition (Petitmengin 1999 & 2001); the second one is devoted to the exploration of the non-conceptual and non-discursive source of meaning (Petitmengin 2007a and 2007b); and the third one deals with the experience of technical invention (Remillieux 2014). The emergence of the ideas we have traced fall within various areas: from the philosophical domain (Lise and Michael) to digital technologies (design of the virtual world »Solipsis« by Joaquin), from astrophysics (discovery of the logical structure of quantum mechanics by Arnold) to economics (evaluation of financial risk calculations by Christophe). We also relied on the scattered testimonies of scientists who provided some indications of their experience of ideation, such as Einstein, the Nobel Prize winner in biology Barbara McClintock, or the mathematician Laurent Schwartz. Our investigation led us to explore a little recognized dimension of experience, which is pre-noetic and pre-discursive, transmodal and gestural, and where the distinction commonly drawn between »mind« and »body« dissolves. The exploration of this dimension gradually prompted us to extend our investigation from the process of ideation or emergence of meaning to two other processes that play an essential role in the scientist’s thinking: the process of expression and transmission of meaning, and the process of understanding meaning. For this we built upon the work of researchers such as Marcel Jousse, Daniel Stern and Eugene Gendlin, who explored this dimension. Finally, throughout this research, we relied on a work of autoelicitation of the process of emergence and expression of our own ideas. The process we were trying to describe was indeed the very process that we were mobilizing to conduct our research. Far from introducing a bias, this attention to our own experience seems to have enriched our work. It enabled us to detect in the descriptions of other researchers some aspects of the ideation and expression processes that we might have missed in the absence of a personal understanding of them (and many aspects probably eluded us because of our limited experience). Our research process was an instance of our object of research and they both continuously enriched one another. Let us add that our practice of the vipashyana meditation, by drawing our attention to the microgenesis of thoughts, played an important role in this work. 31 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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We will consecutively present the results of our investigation into the ideational experience and into the experience of expression, before highlighting the structural characteristics of the source dimension of meaning.

3.

The corporal anchoring of ideation

All the testimonies we have collected converge on the following points: – The emergence and maturation of a new idea is not the result of a deductive and discursive process. Unable to be hurried, forced by an effort of will, the idea surges unexpectedly, out of our control. Ideation is not an action but an event, a process, or more accurately a microgenesis that contains a great amount of spontaneity and unpredictability. The micro-genesis of meaning unfolds in a deep pre-reflective dimension of experience, which is preconceptual, pre-discursive, »felt«, and has very specific sensory, spatial and dynamic characteristics. – If there is no method to produce an idea, its emergence may be fostered by a favorable inner disposition. And this disposition may be elicited by specific actions or »inner gestures« that notably induce a transformation of the relationship to the body.

3.1 The propitious inner disposition »I was walking on that day across the forest along the Silvaplana Lake; near a great boulder that stood like a pyramid, not far from Surlei, I made a stop; that’s where this idea came to me.« (Nietzsche, Ecce Homo, in Works, p. 1173). Like Nietzsche relating the circumstances of the emergence of the idea of the Eternal Recurrence of the Same, in August 1881 in Engadine, many scientists, from the peripatetic philosophers until today, consider walking or more general body movement, as propitious or even essential to thought. Darwin, for example, used to find the inspiration that led him to write his two major works, The Origin of Species and The Evolution of Man, by walking along a small path which described a loop from his house, crossed a park and returned to his home along the meadows, which he called his »path of thought.« »Methinks that the moment 32 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.« 1 – Thoreau wrote. Closer to our time, the mathematician Laurent Schwartz relates: »Personally, I would say that my favorite method of work is to be outdoors, in the countryside, with books around me – unlike other sciences, mathematics must be researched alone – and to wander on foot. I am unable to think of mathematics while sitting (this is why I have always found written exams difficult while oral examinations always worked for me).« (Schwartz 1987, 329). According to the testimonies we collected ourselves, movement has several positive effects. On the one hand, it may induce a shift of the area which is perceived as the center of attention, often felt at the level of the head, towards the body. And this moving of the inner »center of gravity«, this »going down« into the body, induces a releasing of the tension of the mind on the problem at hand, which frees a space where new ideas can arise. On the other hand, the movement creates an internal rhythm, a particular tempo which, more than a condition propitious to the emergence of ideas, might be the very germ of the idea, as we will see below. It also seems that physical activities, that is to say different qualities of movement, by eliciting different qualities of thought, might be adapted to the resolution of specific types of problems. The movement, the rhythm and the easing of tension which are favorable to the emergence of the idea may also be fostered by drawing. This may be a simple »scribble«, which helps to loosen the concentration of attention and will on the problem, and creates a space »where anything is possible« (Peter). The drawing is sometimes more completely elaborated, but its fluidity helps in liberating from the technical constraints and gives free rein to the imagination. »The drawing is so fragile […] it made it more possible to imagine something else because it wasn’t the thing itself, it was a representation, it was symbolic.« (Roz) As the mathematician Hadamard testified: »Words are totally absent from my mind when I really think. […] Any mathematical research requires me to build a schema, which is and must always be vague so as not to mislead me.« (1975, 75–77). More generally, it seems that the condition for the emergence of the idea is associated with the abandonment of the abstract and discursive mode of thinking for an imaged and kinesthetic mode, more

1

Thoreau’s Journal (August 19, 1851)

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or less internalized. For example Arnold, an astrophysicist, a few moments before the unexpected appearance of an idea, is reading a scientific paper whose results are perceived »as an overlay and a succession of changing and interconnected geometric representations, much like crossfade«. The problem is seen as a changing »landscape« in which the researcher sometimes becomes immerged. Christophe, a specialist in financial risk management, told us: »In the computer list, I see my results as a layer with peaks and valleys, and I have the feeling of moving up and down along this layer.« Joaquin, a designer of video games, proceeds in the same way: »To resolve the problem, I had to transform it into a landscape. I’m imagining myself on a lake. There is a bridge starting here, another bridge there, I’m walking on it. And I want to go now to a particular place, I have the coordinates of the place: such a longitude, such a latitude. How do I get there?« »When I’m looking at a cell – said the biologist Barbara McClintox – I go down inside and look around me. I do not have the feeling of being outside of what I see, I’m inside, in my preparation.« (Fox Keller 1988, 132 and 154). The loosening of tension around the problem and the transition to an imaged way of thinking may also be elicited by a hypnagogic state. From Kekule to Laurent Schwartz, the history of science is full of testimonies of researchers relating how a new idea appeared to them in a state of deep relaxation, half asleep, or even in a dream, under an imaged form. We collected numerous descriptions of this type too. The inner disposition which fosters ideation is therefore characterized by a shifting of the center of attention from the head to the body. This descent is associated on the one hand with the abandonment of the discursive mode of thinking for an imaged and kinesthetic mode, and on the other hand to an open attention. Unlike focused attention that is concentrated on a specific content, and narrow, this mode of attention is panoramic, peripheral, spherical – all these adjectives were used to describe it. The mathematician Alain Connes evokes his indirect strategy of mathematical problem solving in this way: »The mistake not to be made is to attack the problem head-on. You have to proceed indirectly, laterally. […] I used a framework in which my mind could move, evolve, whereas in the too specific context of the problem, with one’s back against the wall, thought froze, and was blocked by the difficulty.« (Changeux & Connes 1992, 112– 115). This open, diffuse attention is nevertheless very fine, and it is 34 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

The scientist’s body at the source of meaning

sensitive to the most subtle discontinuities. As James notes, it is often the attention to a forgotten detail that triggers a discovery: Round about the accredited and orderly facts of every science there ever floats a sort of dust-cloud of exceptional observations, of occurrences minute and irregular and seldom met with, which it always proves more easy to ignore than to attend to. (James 1890, 361)

Finally, this attention is unintentional, that is to say characterized by the looseness of the fixation on the goal to be reached. Though very alert and awake, it is relaxed and receptive. While being in intimate, almost corporeal contact with the question or object being explored, to the point of sometimes being immersed in it, the researcher remains open to anything that may arise. One must have the patience »to listen to what the material has to say,« and remain open enough to »let it come to you« (Fox Keller 1988, 248). As Duhem wrote, »The physicist does not choose the hypothesis on which he founds his theory. […] He merely opens his mind, through attention and meditation, to the idea which must germinate in him, without him.« (Duhem 1981, 390).

3.2 The microgenesis of the idea The researcher cannot therefore target directly the production of a new idea, but only create the conditions for its self-unfolding. Then when the idea appears, it rarely arises as a sudden »enlightenment«, under an immediately complete, precise and communicable form. Most often, it rather emerges as a blink, or a tiny movement that may go unnoticed. As one of the inventors who participated in our study says: »This is just a perturbation, trying to say: ›There, there is something there! There is a solution here!‹« (Mehdi). Arnold describes the nascent idea as a »flickering«: The idea appears, and there is a moment of hesitation, it is as flickering … Oh, oh, that’s new«. During a process whose duration is very variable – from several seconds to several years – the germ of the idea is going to unfold gradually. Again, this process cannot be forced. It is characterized by a strong sense of passivity, of lack of control, which has been described to us in all the interviews: »It escapes from me«, »It happens to me«, »It’s given to me«. As Arnold said: »There is no discursive analysis at all. This is so to speak 35 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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contemplating the own development of this idea.« Any conceptual effort to categorize, interpret and use the germ of the idea immediately has the effect of freezing the process. »The early stages of a new idea may be too nebulous to seize it by formatting it logically. We are naturally inclined to dwell on such an idea in order to bring it to clear consciousness, by giving it an outline and a defined shape. The free flight of the idea is cut short and it finds itself pinned like a butterfly on the cork board of the collector.« (de Bono 1972, 180) But the process can neither be left entirely to itself. We must remain attentive to the elusive sensations that are the seeds of the idea, staying in contact with them to accompany their ripening. Which form does the idea take during this maturation process? Einstein gives us a hint: »For all these years there was a feeling of direction, of heading straight for something concrete. It is of course very difficult to express this feeling in words. But I had a sort of overview, in a way, visually.« (Holton 1972, 440–441) The idea takes the form of an inner direction, an inclination, a line of force that evolves over time, according to the rhythm of the meetings, discussions and readings of the researcher. This evolution is punctuated by subtle internal criteria that inform him about the unfolding of the process: feelings of sudden »cohesion« between elements previously scattered, of »coherence« between the pieces of a puzzle, of »encounter« between several paths, of »completeness«, of filling a »gap«. It is for example a »feeling of penetration« which allows Arnold to assess the relevance of his idea: »The impression that the subject is enriched, that the idea is accurate in the sense that … this is difficult to describe, but there is this feeling of going further. A sense of depth and vastness, that there was something, a new field, that opened up, which was exceeding the question I was asking myself, that I was encountering something much broader.« To which dimension of experience do these subtle »noetic feelings« (Dokic 2012) fall into? Non-conceptual, non-discursive, they do not belong to the emotional or purely physical order, like the feelings of pleasure, joy, excitement, relaxation or peacefulness that also punctuate the emergence of new ideas. These are vague and fuzzy feelings, which can nevertheless be very intense and persistent. They do not belong to one of the senses in particular, but are nevertheless endowed with some sensoriality, some spatiality … These vague and fuzzy feelings can be found in other areas of our experience. For example, a memory may sometimes surge forth 36 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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unexpectedly, under a sensorial form that is immediately precise. However at other times, it is slow to emerge and take precise form: the usual infinitesimal stage of its emergence stabilises for a few instants, sometimes even for a few hours, which leaves us time to turn our attention to this strange experience, so subtly described by Proust in Swann’s Way. Before we can even recognise the memory and name it, before the emergence of images, sounds and emotions which are precise and identifiable, we are overwhelmed by a feeling which does not belong to a specific sensorial register, but which is nevertheless specific and intense, full of carnal and living density. As Gusdorf has noted (1950, 193), »the value is often given to us before the representation«. When we begin to identify internally these fuzzy feelings, we quickly realize that they are constantly with us. For example, if you had to sum up right now in two sentences the pages that you have just read, you would certainly need to access within yourself the »felt meaning« (Gendlin 1962) corresponding to your understanding of these pages. This is not only a sense of approval, or disagreement and discomfort, but an overall impression, both vague and specific. It could be described as a kind of interior landscape, or as a special taste. And if you have no felt meaning, you will not be able to say anything, or just phrases empty of meaning. This is, for example, the case of a speaker who has »lost the thread« of what he was saying: he cannot continue to speak. He tries to recover this thread by directing his attention inside himself, towards the feeling of what he was saying, so that the words can spring forth again. We hypothesize that this »felt« dimension of experience, which seems to be at the source of even the most abstract thought, is the very dimension of meaning.

4.

The bodily dimension of expression

The descriptions we collected confirm the importance of accessing the »felt« pre-discursive dimension in the process of written or verbal expression. Most of the time, the spontaneity and rapidity of expression conceal this dimension. But some privileged circumstances, or a particular adjustment of our attention, may enable us to recognize it and identify the micro-gestures that allow us to relate to it. We de-

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tected three main micro-gestures, which confirm the descriptions Gendlin provided of this process 2 .

Coming into contact To tell a story, it is essential for the storyteller to rediscover in himself the »landscape« of the story, i. e. not only its overall atmosphere, but the »milestones« which form its points of articulation, the felt meanings that will guide him throughout the story. At each stage of the story, it is from these anchoring points that the images, sounds, smells, and emotions evoked by the storyteller will emerge. The scientist does not proceed otherwise. To express an abstract idea, he has to retrieve, behind the word that he has perhaps used until now to designate his idea, the line of force, the inner gesture, this living, moving and quivering thing which is his idea: »What do I mean exactly?«. »That« which I mean, and which has not been said yet, is the felt meaning of my idea. This coming into contact with the non-verbal dimension is particularly well demonstrated in the process of translation. A close observation of this process indeed shows that translating is not an operation of transcoding between two languages, consisting of finding in one language the words and grammatical structures which correspond to those of the other language. The translator does not translate words, but a meaning. »If you want to be understood, take as your point of departure the idea you have grasped and not the other language.« (Seleskovitch & Lederer 2001, 73) The process of translation unfolds in three stages: reading or listening to the original speech, de-verbalising the units of meaning, and expressing these units in a new discourse. In the exercise of translation as in any verbal activity, it is this de-verbalized meaning which is transmitted from one interlocutor to another, and it arises from words but is different from them. According to the testimonies we have collected, a book, a story, or a lesson, once »stripped of its language,« takes the form of a moving »inner landscape«, or more precisely a certain path in this landscape, a succession of inner gestures, akin to a dance. The anthropologist Marcel Jousse, who was an extremely lively teacher, used to For example in »Introduction to thinking at the edge« and »Making concepts from experience« (http://www.focusing.org).

2

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stress this point very much: »The secret of the great teachers who really bring something is only that: to consent to verbalize only when they have gestured to the depths. Language should come only at the very end. […] First, you must compose your entire lesson without words. Afterwards, and only afterwards, as a simple way to ›intercommunicate‹, will you have to look for words.« 3 Let us add that the gestures that accompany verbal expression, often in the absence of awareness of the speaker – gestures of separation or merger of planes, balance, swinging, expansion, spurting out, progression, involution, growth, fall – are an open window on the inner gestures that constitute the meaning. »Anyone who thinks finely, deeply, in a new way, thinks with their hands.« 4 wrote Jousse while referring in particular to Bergson.

Confrontation with the felt meaning All through the process, it is the confrontation with the felt meaning that allows the pertinence of the expression to be evaluated. For example, you want to express an idea that germinates in you, and a phrase offers itself to you. But when you compare it with this something inside yourself that has not yet been said, you realise that it is not appropriate, and you reject it. No, »this something that has not yet been said« is more precise. It is this inside you that knows what must be said, and knows that this phrase does not precisely formulate it. Inadequate words may even make you lose this »something«, the felt meaning of your idea. It is then preferable to pronounce or write phrases which are strange, but do not make you lose this contact. If you do not get discouraged, you may then discover that you can use ordinary language to talk about this something that has not yet been said. Words have no fixed and definite meaning, you can use them otherwise, so as to make them say something new. Jousse stressed the need to »break the words« and Merleau-Ponty wrote: »I express myself when I use these already talking devices to make them say what they have never said.« (1953, 84) M. Jousse, »Le jeu de l’enfant et la mémoire«, Cours à l’Ecole d’Anthropologie du 3 janvier 1938 4 M. Jousse, »Psycho-physiologie générale du geste«, Cours à l’Ecole d’Anthropologie du 7 novembre 1932 3

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Transformation of the felt meaning What does the felt meaning become once the right words have been found to express it? Does it die, petrified by words? Or does it disappear to leave its place to words, as if it was finding its accomplishment and true existence in them, as Hegel puts it: »The ineffable is in fact obscure thought, thought in the state of fermentation, and what becomes clear only when it finds the word. Therefore words gives thought its highest and truest existence.« (Hegel 1939, § 463) It seems that once expressed, far from disappearing, the felt meaning becomes more intense, more precise. Expression not only makes it more precise, but makes it evolve, enabling us to discover new aspects of it. The quality of the situation, problem or idea, the interior landscape which is associated with it, undergoes a metamorphosis. This transformation is particularly noticeable in the therapeutic process, where it has been observed and described in detail by Gendlin (1996). But we also find it in other fields, such as the philosophic or the scientific fields: words help the felt meaning of the idea, the essential gesture that underlies it, to unfold and become more precise. Once expressed, the felt meaning continues its underground and unpredictable life. It remains the fluid and silent stuff where words take on a meaning, and without which there are only sounds. Words seem to have no other role than helping the felt dimension to unfold. The talking subject – Merleau-Ponty writes – expresses himself »not only for others, but to know himself what he is aiming at« (1953, 83). But what he is aiming at is this non-verbal dimension that words help to unfold. »It is towards this felt meaning that I come back to reunify my thought when it becomes dispersed. This felt meaning is very elusive. Words enable me to hold it back, and therefore to move towards greater precision and finesse. But what is becoming more precise and finer? It is this felt meaning that is beneath the words.« (Lise)

5.

Structural characteristics of the felt dimension

Although blurred and fuzzy, the felt dimension is characterized by a very specific structure.

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Specificity A felt meaning is first characterized by its specificity: although fuzzy, it cannot be confused with any other. The felt meaning of a nascent idea, as well as that of an emerging memory, is completely different from one idea to another, from one memory to another.

Transmodality The second characteristic of a felt meaning is its trans-modality. The analysis of the descriptions used to describe the »texture« of a felt meaning has shown that it does not fall within a specific sensory modality: it is strictly speaking neither an image, nor a kinesthetic sensation, nor a sound. However it has specific sensory submodalities such as shape, intensity, rhythm and movement … which have the characteristic of being »transmodal 5 «, that is to say transposable from one sense to another. While temperature and texture are specific to touch, color specific to vision, intensity, direction and rhythm may characterize an image, a sound, as well as a tactile sensation. These belong to the »common sensibles« already identified by Plato 6 and Aristotle 7 . In a »felt meaning«, the border usually perceived between the different sensorial registers is more permeable, it resolves somehow. It is as if the five senses condensed themselves in it.

Rhythmic and gestural character This transmodality of meaning is associated with a certain form of spatiality: »Beneath the word, there is the idea, which is a particular inner space, with a specific density and texture, an orientation, a direction, tensions, inner movements … The space of this idea is quite

The term »synaesthetic« (made up of a simultaneity of sensations of different modes) does not seem appropriate to us, as in a synaesthesia: 1) the sensation modes simultaneously perceived are precisely identified, 2) each of these sensations is usually very precise (for example a sound and a colour), whereas a felt meaning is not only blurred and fuzzy, but does not relate to a particular sensorial mode. 6 Théétète 185a-186a. 7 De Anima, II 6, 418a12 et 418a18–20. 5

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different from the space of this other one.« (Lise) Far from being an abstract geometrical space, the »space« of an idea has a texture, a density, a rhythm … which are specific to it. This is an inner »landscape«, comparable to the space that unfolds when listening to a piece of music. The idea emerges as a pattern, a rhythm … »There’s a rhythm that emerges, sometimes through only two or three words, which carry a specific rhythm, and this rhythm carries writing. It’s an inner rhythm, specific to this idea that I want to express. When I feel this rhythm, I am filled with it, inhabited by it. I know that what I’m going to write will be alive, vibrant. But this rhythm comes or does not come, you cannot force it. I don’t find it in front of my blank page, but in the countryside, walking, listening to music […] this is where I find the rhythm of my idea. I become impregnated with it, and I feel it resonate inside me. Then I can write.« (Lise) The transmodality of rhythm enables Lise to describe her idea either as a kind of musical pattern, or as a particular movement or gesture: »This idea, if you like […] has the consistency, the texture, the movement of an opening. I’ve noticed that I often make this gesture (opening fingers) to express my idea, because that’s it, it’s something like that. That means: there’s something whiff […] which is spreading out, which is spreading out.« The essential gesture of this other idea is quite different: »It’s like a kind of spiral, which goes deep down. We can say that there are different spaces, with different brightnesses, rhythms, and densities. Those spaces I feel them more and more within myself, it gets denser inside, at the level of the chest. The first is large, the second begins to make itself denser, and the third is a node.« (Lise) The descriptions we collected bring a »first person« confirmation to the hypothesis of the gestural anchoring of thought made by Marcel Jousse. According to him, even our most abstract ideas are nothing else than the »replay« inside us of concrete gestures. In fact, our body, similar to a »flexible and living mirror« 8 , reverberates in itself, since early childhood, unconsciously and unintentionally, the rhythms of living beings and inanimate world: »I feel very well inside me, in my body, the flowing river, or the poplar tree rising towards the sky, or the poplar swinging on the banks of the Sarthe, when it’s very

M. Jousse, »La mimologie ou langage des gestes«, Cours à l’Ecole d’Anthropologie du 20 février 1933

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windy.« 9 As examples of gestures, Jousse likes to take the flight of the bird, the race of the animal, the movement of foliage, light or water. But when you are able to observe them finely, these movements have an infinite variety: »The seagull will be mimicked by a very different gesture than the pigeon or the finch, the raven or the magpie, or than all these birds that have – for an acute observer – their characteristic gestures« 10 All these rhythmic gestures, we record them inside ourselves in the form of »mimèmes« that are in our body »the slightly hinted gesture of the thing itself« 11 , and we reenact them throughout our lives. We may reenact them under a macroscopic form, in a large and visible way. But we may also reenact them internally under a microscopic form, in a very fine and invisible way. Everything we call »thoughts« – Jousse says – are only microscopic inner gestures, »very fine radiating attitudes that we call thoughts, and are probably thoughts, but are also bodily irradiations.« 12 We think, he says, through all our muscular fibers.

Vitality dynamics For Jousse, the child is particularly sensitive and responsive to the rhythms of the world around him. Interestingly, the work of the psychiatrist Daniel Stern confirms that the world experienced by the child is of a transmodal and rhythmic nature. He highlighted this from very detailed observations of mother/child interactions, completed by »micro-analytic« interviews with mothers (Stern 1985). The world of the infant is not a world of images, sounds and tactile sensations, but of subtle modifications of movements, intensities and rhythms, in other words of transmodal qualities, transposable from one modality to another, which he calls »vitality dynamics« (not to be confused with categorical affects like happiness, sadness, fear, anger, disgust, surprise, and shame). The child doesn’t perceive acts as such, as adults do (taking the baby’s bottle, unfolding the diaper), but the vitality dynamics M. Jousse, »Le jeu manuel de l’enfant«, Cours à l’Ecole d’Anthropologie du 24 janvier 1938 10 M. Jousse, Cours à La Sorbonne du 30 avril 1931 11 M. Jousse, »La mimologie ou langage des gestes«, Cours à l’Ecole d’Anthropologie du 20 février 1933 12 M. Jousse, »Psycho-physiologie générale du geste«, Cours à l’Ecole d’Anthropologie du 7 novembre 1932 9

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bound to these acts (how his mother holds him, takes the bottle, folds the diaper, combs her own or his hair). These rhythms enable the »affect attunement« between mother and child. From moment to moment, in a pre-reflective way, mother and child attune their internal rhythms: for example, a mother will reply to the babbling of her baby with a caress of the same intensity and the same rhythm. This rhythmic synchronization, which enables the resonance or tuning of two interior universes, seems to be the basis of affective intersubjectivity. Stern’s research led him to the conclusion that the dynamic and transmodal world that the small child experiences does not correspond to a stage of his development that is then abandoned to make way for other modes of functioning. On the contrary, this stratum of experience remains active throughout life, although generally below the threshold of awareness. Stern replaces the traditional stage model, developed for example by Piaget, by a layered model, where the stages of the child’s evolution correspond not only to successive phases but to simultaneous strata of self experience (Stern 1985, 26– 34). Beneath the perceptions, emotions, thoughts and actions that constitute our conscious experience, the transmodal and rhythmic dimension is always with us, it is the very stuff of our experience of every moment.

6.

Lines of research

What is the effect of recognizing the gestural character of meaning on the pedagogical and epistemological levels?

Re-enchanting school If the meaning is gestural, are our teaching methods well adapted? For at present, teaching consists in most cases of transmitting conceptual and discursive contents of knowledge. For example in the scientific domain, the teaching methods usually conceal the stage of the emergence of the idea. When the theory arrives in textbooks, it is in the mold of an educational pattern which tends to highlight the axiomatic structure and experimental evidence for the idea, and to hide any clue of the first stage (Holton 1972, 414). But are such teaching methods able to create real understanding? To make a student under44 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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stand an idea isn’t it essential to invite him to experience the essential gesture which is at its source, and which the scientist himself mobilized? Which teaching methods instead of transmitting knowledge contents would be able to elicit, to initiate the inner gesture which gives them coherence and meaning, through a process which does not link the head to the head, but the body to the body? For this initiation to be effective, the listener or reader, far from being a passive receiver, must retrieve the gesture behind the words, which requires a very special activity. For example, we usually read in a quick, superficial manner, without taking the time to delve into the deep meaning of the text. But there is another way to read, which is slower, consisting in »penetrating to the sleeping heart of the text, in order to wake it up and give it life.« (Jousse 1935, 23) How? For Jousse it is by finding and reenacting inside ourselves the subtle gestures that the author himself lived when writing the text. We must fill the book with our childhood experiences, because »it is during our childhood that we embodied the truly alive and invigorating elements that allow us today to infuse a new life into dead texts.« (1935, 23) The more mimèmes we store in us during childhood, the more we become able to think finely, in a personal and original way. This is why it is essential to let the child »look at everything, touch everything, break everything, reenact everything, everywhere. Because when he is thirty or forty years old, he can only reenact these gestures according to their richness and their multiplicity.« If genius cannot be learned in books, but in living gestures, what should we think about our teaching methods that impose immobility to the child, until we have progressively limited his gestures to the movements of his eyes to read and of his fingers to write? Recognizing the gestural dimension of thought leads to a teaching approach based more on initiation than on transmission, an approach still little explored. Such a pedagogy, by allowing children and students to come into contact with the depth of their experience, could re-enchant school.

»Abstract« thought How can the scientist develop abstract, intersubjectively valid knowledge from a physically anchored »felt meaning«? The answers which emerge based on our investigation follow 45 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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this line of thought: a felt meaning, a dynamics of vitality, is already an abstract structure. »Direction«, »intensity«, »rhythm«, are transmodal characteristics which are abstracts because transposable from one sensorial modality to another. It seems that, curiously, we can feel these qualities as such, regardless of the »substrate« of a particular sensorial modality. It is as if during the microgenesis of an idea, abstraction was first. A new idea is a »motif«, a structure which makes it possible to organize the studied field, a pattern that its transmodality makes generic, transposable from one sensorial modality to another, from one object to another, from one context to another. We assume that this organizing structure is already present in the germ of the idea. The process is continuous, without any gap between the immediate experience and the abstract domain of »thoughts.« The researcher’s work does not consist in freeing himself from the singularity and mobility of immediate experience in order to extract, by deduction, comparison and abstraction, general and stable concepts. It does not consist in moving from the level of sensory experience to the level of abstract ideas, but in listening to subtle inner movements that animate his sensory experience, and even once the idea has been expressed in a formal language, constitute its meaning. Abstraction is played in our body. Therefore there is no »abstract« thought, every thought is gestural. »What you call ›abstract ideas‹« – Jousse said – »are simply transpositions into words of gestures of which you have forgotten the roots.« 13 In this perspective, the rigid separation that we usually establish between »body« and »thought« dissolves. In the experience of »lived body« (Leib), this distinction vanishes. In other words, when we release the fixation of our attention on the contents of thought to explore the microgenesis of meaning, we do not experience a rigid distinction between body and mind. In the dimension of meaning, mind and body meet. In an enactive perspective, we hypothesize that this illusion of separation is created and maintained from moment to moment by a deep pre-reflective micro-activity (Petitmengin 2005). Unless there exist particular circumstances or training, only the result of this process appears to consciousness in the form of a rigid separation between physical body and mind. However it may happen that thought, cutting itself from its gesM. Jousse, »Le jeu manuel de l’enfant«, Cours à l’Ecole d’Anthropologie du 24 janvier 1938

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tural source to evolve only at the level of the words, disincarnates, »necroses« and dies. But from the perspective of Stern, which is confirmed by our investigation, living thought is gestural right throughout. The gesture is and remains the locus of meaning. Any expression takes its source in it, any understanding returns to it. As Francisco Varela wrote: »The concrete is not a step towards something else. It is how we arrive and where we are.« (1995, 11)

Conclusion The study of the scientist’s lived experience, by highlighting the embodiment of meaning, renews deeply our understanding of what thinking, speaking and understanding are. Many avenues of research are opening up. How is the transition made from a gestural and prediscursive meaning to the verbal level 14 ? How, in the process of understanding, is the reverse transition made from words to their gestural meaning, and how can we elicit this transition? How can thought cut itself from its living source? Recent methods of microgenetic description now allow us to study these processes. Such studies could have a significant impact not only on our teaching and research practices, but on our very conception of the scientific process.

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This question has been precisely asked by Daniel Stern (1999).

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Claire Petitmengin Duhem, P. (1981). La théorie physique. Son objet. Sa structure. Paris: Vrin. Dreyfus, H. L. (1986). Mind over machine. The power of human intuition and expertise in the era of computer. New York: MacMillan, Free Press. Fox Keller, E. (1988): L’intuition du vivant. La vie et l’œuvre de Barbara McClintock. Paris: Tierce. Gendlin, E. (1962). Experiencing and the creation of meaning. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. — (1996). Focusing-oriented psychotherapy: A manual of the experiential method. London: The Guilford Press. — (2004) Introduction to thinking at the edge. http://www.focusing.org/tae_intro.html — (1995) Making concepts from experience. http://www.focusing.org/think96. html Guchet, X. (2005). Les Sens de l’évolution technique. Paris: Éditions Léo-Scheer. Gusdorf, G. (1950). Mémoire et personne. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Hadamard, J. (1975). Essai sur la psychologie de l’invention dans le domaine mathématique. Paris: Gauthier-Villars. Hegel, G. W. F. (1939). La phénoménologie de l’esprit, Vol. I. Paris: Aubier Montaigne. Holton, G. (1972). The scientific imagination. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. James, W. (1890). The hidden self. Scribner’s Magazine, 7, 361–173. Johnson, M. (1987). The body in the mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. — (1991). Knowing through the body. Philosophical Psychology, (4)1, 3–18 Jousse, M. (1974). L’anthropologie du geste. Paris: Gallimard. — (1935). Mimisme humain et psychologie de la lecture. Édition numérique du laboratoire de Rythmo-pédagogie de Paris. — (1932–1938) Cours à l’Ecole d’Anthropologie, CDRom édité par l’Association Marcel Jousse. — (1931) Cours à la Sorbonne, CDRom édité par l’Association Marcel Jousse. Jullien, F. (1993). Le détour et l’accès. Paris: Grasset. Koestler, A. (1965). Le cri d’Archimède. Paris: Calmann Lévy. Kuhn, T. (1972). La structure des révolutions scientifiques. Paris: Flammarion. Lakoff, G. & Johnson, M. (1999). Philosophy in the Flesh. The embodied mind and its challenge to western thought. New York: Basic Books. — (1985). Les métaphores dans la vie quotidienne. Paris: Editions de Minuit. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1953). Eloge de la philosophie. Paris: Gallimard. Nietzsche, F. (1993). Œuvres. Paris: Laffont. Petitmengin, C. (2007a). Towards the source of thoughts. The gestural and transmodal dimension of lived experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14(3), 54–82. — (2007b). Vers la source des pensées, Mémoire de HDR (non publié). — (2005). L’énaction comme expérience vécue. Intellectica, 2006/1, 43, 85–92. — (2006). Describing one’s Subjective Experience in the Second Person. An

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The scientist’s body at the source of meaning Interview Method for the Science of Consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Science 5: 229–269. — (2001). L’expérience intuitive. Paris: L’Harmattan. — (1999). The intuitive experience. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6(2–3), 43–47. Peirce, C. S. (1978). Écrits sur le signe. Paris: Seuil. Poincaré, H. (1970). Du rôle de l’kntuition et de la logique en mathématiques. La Valeur de la Science (pp. 27–40). Paris: Flammarion. Polanyi, M. (1962), Personal knowledge. towards a post-critical philosophy. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Reik, T. (1948). Ecouter avec la troisième oreille: l’expérience intérieure d’un psychanalyste. Paris: Epi. Remillieux, A. (2014). Les coulisses d’une invention. Une description expérientielle du processus d’invention technique. Intellectica 61: 279–310. Rilke, R. M. (1996). Les cahiers de Malte Laurids Brigge. Paris: Seuil. Rowan, R. (1986). Intuition et management. Comment transformer l’intuition en un outil de management efficace. Paris: Rivages. Scheerer, M. (1963). Problem-solving. Scientific American, 208, 118–128. Schmookler, J. (1966). Invention and economic growth. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Schumpeter, J. (1935). Théorie de l’évolution économique. Paris: Dalloz. Schwartz, L. (1987). De certains processus mentaux dans la découverte en mathématiques. Revue des Sciences morales et politiques, 3, 327–340. Seleskovitch, D. & Lederer, M. (2001). Interpréter pour traduire. Paris: Didier Erudition. Simon, H. (1987). Making management decisions: The Role of Intuition and Emotion. Academy of Management Executive, 12, 57–64. Simondon, G. (1958). Du mode d’existence des objets techniques. Paris: Aubier. Smith, S. M. (1995). Getting into and out of mental ruts: A theory of fixation, incubation, and insight. In R. J. Sternberg & J. E. Davidson, The nature of insight (pp. 229–251). Cambridge: MA, MIT Press Stern, D. N. (1999). Pre-reflexive experience and its passage to reflexive experience. In C. Petitmengin (ed.), Ten years of viewing from within. The legacy of Francisco Varela (pp. 307–331). Exeter: Imprint Academic. — (1985). The interpersonal world of the infant. New York: Basic Books. Sternberg, R. J. & Davidson, J. E. (1995). The nature of insight. Cambridge: MA, MIT Press. Stiegler, B., Moulier Boutang, Y. & Cadix, A. (2008). Le design de nos existences: A l’époque de l’innovation ascendante. Paris: Mille et une Nuits. Varela, F. J. (1995). The re-enchantment of the concrete. In L. Steels, and R. Brooks (eds.), The artificial life route to artificial intelligence. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates. Varela, F. J. & Shear J. (ed.) (2009). The view from within: First-person approaches to the study of consciousness. Exeter: Imprint Academic. Vermersch, P. (1994/2010), L’entretien d’explicitation, Paris: ESF. Weisberg, R. W. (1986). Creativity: Genius and other myths. New-York: Freeman.

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A changed ground for precise cognition Eugene Gendlin

In this article I will argue that there is an implicit kind of precision different from the logical but not unrelated. The two kinds have to be kept separate. The power of logical inference depends on the concepts’ own patterns and would be lost if they were mixed with something implicit. So we must keep the concepts’ own patterned form, and return to them if we also employ something implicit. What is currently called the »background« appears to be vague and peripheral but I will show that it is a more precise kind of order. It functions in the formation of new and ever more precise scientific concepts. It has an implicit precision which we constantly use, but in an unavowed way. When we examine the implicit precision, we will become able to use it deliberately and systematically with great advantages for logical analysis as well as for a wider kind of thinking. This article will make the implicit kind of precision visible, explain how it enables new logical concepts to come, and discuss its wider import.

I.

Two kinds of precision

I-1) The »background« is implicit in the figure Currently the background is portrayed as vague, peripheral, unconscious, without thinking, lacking precise »figures,« a »holistic« merger suggesting anything but precision. The background is known chiefly by what it is not: not conscious, not precise, not logical, not capable of being stated, not clear. But those who point to the background don’t mean these negatives. We assert something positive and valuable, not a hopeless dead end. The negative terms are used because there has been no vocabulary to say what we want to say. Of course we know what we mean, 50 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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but we cannot communicate or think further from statements that deny what we mean. I offer new kind of terms in which we can say how the background we are discussing actually functions in our speaking and thinking. I will show how new terms can be made. I ask my readers: Please don’t just agree. The new terms generate a new model in which we can say what we mean. Please notice the new model. Currently we are said to be »unconscious« of the background. We can drive the car »unconsciously« while attending to other thoughts. But we don’t mean that we could drive if we were unconscious from a blow on the head. The background is not unconscious, but we need new terms to define »consciousness« as vastly wider than the narrow scope of attention. And, our »background« is not just vague. We could not drive without attention if what functions were only a vague, peripheral knowledge of driving. Actually each detail of knowing how to drive functions precisely. So we do not mean what the word »background« currently says. The word »background« invokes the figure/ground metaphor according to which the figure appears by contrast with its background. The figure would disappear if the background had the same color and texture. The visual background is around the figure; it occupies a different space than the figure. But this is not how the »background« of cognition functions. The background we are talking about doesn’t function like the background in the figure/ground relation. We can examine what we want to mean by »background« if we examine how it functions in our actual speaking and thinking. Let me point out one strand of meaning in our use of the word »background:« Suppose I am trying to read a technical article in a field with which I am not familiar. Then I could say, »I don’t understand the article because I lack the background.« This strand of meaning is also intended, for example, if I open a new book in the middle and read a page. I would not understand it as I would if I had read the book from the beginning. Or, if I join an ongoing conversation in the middle, I won’t fully understand what people are saying. From these examples we can see that by »background« we mean what functions in the understanding of a present event. Our »background« is not on other pages or at an earlier time, but rather how »all that« functions in our understanding of this page or this remark, now. If we call what is before us a »figure,« then this background is in 51 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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this figure, not around it. Our figure and background are not next to each other. Our background does not have a different time and space location of its own. What happened earlier happened bit by bit, one event at a time. But the background is »all that,« a great many things functioning now here, in one event, in understanding (or in the author’s producing) this page or this remark. The explicit cognitions from different pages have become implicit. When they become implicit they join the body’s implicit functioning which is always already a great implicit intricacy. I argue that our background functions »precisely.« I mean that there are a great many details, each of which is functioning in its own way. We do not mean that the background is only »vague.« It can seem vague because we don’t see what it contains bit by bit. But what it does is not vague. What it does involves the precise function of each of many details. Just as when we drive without attention, each detail of knowing how to drive functions precisely (if we don’t crash), so it is always with the background. We don’t see the details separately (which is why it seems vague), but the details have their precise effects. If just one detail fails, I might crash. If I lack one detail, I might not understand what I am reading or hearing. I also argue that what functions implicitly is »more precise.« I mean that when explicit cognitions have become implicit, how each functions takes account of the other details and of everything in the body’s implicit functioning. For example, when one first learns to drive one has to think separately about many moves. Only when the explicit moves become implicit do they have the precise effect which is their purpose. In a sport our performance can be improved by expert advice, for example, to bend the left knee. For a while we have to keep thinking of this, but when it joins the rest of what functions implicitly then our game really gets better. So it is also in many other activities. In an implicit »all that« the effect of details is more precise than one can attain when each functions alone. If I come late to a film, someone might whisper a summary for me, but this could not protect me from many misunderstandings, since I would lack the function of many details. Similarly, when we miss a detail in science, our prediction may go wrong. Each implicit detail retains its precise function. In addition to explicit events which have become implicit, there are always also a great many details which have never occurred sepa52 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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rately. Body process is an implicit intricacy from which we can separate out endlessly many details which are functioning precisely without ever being separated out. These details interaffect each other without ever occurring singly. That is why actually seeing the first part of the movie cannot be replaced even by a very full report. Experiencing with the body involves so much which interaffects precisely without occurring singly. Analyzing can make something much more distinct and impactful, but only if we have first experienced it. The analysis cannot replace the precise detail in the bodily experience. The background has been considered a fuzzy merger because we are accustomed to think of order only as separately occurring units. The background seemed to be a merger before units were separated out. But it is rather an order of a different kind. Yes, the background seems indeed vague when we first find it, but I will show how we can enter it so that it opens and we can examine the precision directly. It is true that we don’t attend to each object, but consciousness is vastly wider than attention. Yes, when we look right at an object, the background seems like peripheral vision because we don’t see what is around sharply, but that functions precisely nevertheless, or we would stumble when we walk. The whole body functions implicitly in any perception. That includes the surrounding objects and much more. In the currently available terms we cannot think how the unseparated details of an »all that« can each function precisely. Interaffecting keeps the details »separate« in a way that is more intricate than our usual separate or merged. So we have to stop saying that this background is »unconscious,« »vague,« »holistic,« »peripheral.« How else might we say it? We will need new phrases. Words are defined by phrases. For example I say: The background is implicit in the figure. The functioning background is implicit in our present understanding. What is implicit functions in all explicit meanings. The word »implicit« also has some strands of meaning which we don’t mean. All words do. (The »implicit« does not mean hidden, folded under.) Only new phrases made directly from what we mean can retrieve words from what we don’t mean. Or, I phrase it this way: »What we explicitly say is produced and understood in the implicit background (in the »all that«). Note the odd pattern: »in« goes both ways here. The implicit is in the figure, and the figure is made and grasped in the implicit. This two-way »in« is a more intricate relation which we will further examine. It is not 53 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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the usual kind of preposition. In the space before us things are either in or out, either under or over, either behind or in front, either separate or merged, either two or one. But implicit and explicit are »in each other« in a more intricate kind of »space« which we will examine in Section II. We can always trace implicit strands of meaning in what we are saying and in what we want to mean, as I just did with several strands of what »background« means. Evidently we have some access to the implicit. I will discuss several kinds of access next. We can set out new concepts, some of which don’t fit the usual model (like an »in« that goes both ways). We can make concepts about the implicit directly from how it functions now in our ongoing speaking and thinking about it (or about anything else). We keep these concepts apart from the unit-defined concepts, although the new kind can also function logically. Let me set out six concepts we have just made above, to give the »implicit« an initial characterization: Six characteristics of implicit functioning: 1) No space or time position of its own. The implicit is always in the occurring event. Implying has no separate space or time position. 2) Environmental interaction. The implicit is an environmental occurring and implies a next environmental occurring. 3) Many in one: The implicit »all that« functions in one occurring. 4) Separate cognitions become implicit. They continue in the body’s implicit functioning from then on. 5) Details perform their function precisely. An implicit multiplicity is not merged. The implicit has another kind of order. This order is accessible and we will make it visible. 6) Interaffecting. A great many details affect each other precisely without ever occurring as separate units.

I-2) Accessing the implicit: We can always easily say a lot from the implicit First I will discuss an easy way of access, then a more difficult way. You can see how the implicit functions in anything you think or say. You can always say a ton of things about what you are saying and why you are saying it. That comes easily, if you are asked (or ask 54 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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yourself) to say some of what is involved. When you answer, you speak from what is implicit. You might be asked: Can you say more? Why are you saying that? Why do you think this or that part of it? What are you really trying to get us to see? (to understand? to do?) Who agrees with this? How does it affect X or Y or Z? (an endless number of other issues). You may or may not have good answers, but each time you can easily say something from what functioned implicitly for you. Your response was not formed until the question was asked. Thinking and speaking always involve development. When you tell more and more, you can no longer distinguish just what was implicit from what has developed further. There is no such line. Speaking and thinking involve »carrying forward« (my concept for this kind of change, no line between what changed and what stayed the same) Carrying forward expands the thing in the telling, but doesn’t change it into a different thing. So, in some sense the further developments »were« all implicit in what one said at first. 1 I call this the »easy saying.« I distinguish it from another, more difficult way of access which I will discuss next. What the word »meaning« means is famously controversial. The words alone are not the meaning, nor is the meaning the implicit without words. We can say what »meaning« means if we keep both words and the implicit. We will further examine this »and.« We can say that »meaning« consists of the few words we say and the gigantic »all that« which functions implicitly in what we say and mean. But can we never in any respect have the implicit apart from the particular sentences?

A further distinction is needed: Since the endless and easy further saying is a developing carrying forward, therefore we see that not all of what comes was implicit at first. As we say (explicate, carry forward) some of what was implicit, more and more becomes implicit. (See the term »held« in A Process Model VIIAo.). It follows that there is no finite numbered »everything« that the implicit »was.« Vermersch and Petitmengin (2004/2010; 2013) find that people can describe what happened in a few seconds of carrying out a simple instruction. I think they could go on indefinitely if they were asked every conceivable question, rather than only »what was happening?

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I-3) A direct referent (DR, also called a »felt sense«) Humans are never without words because the language is implicit in our bodies. Therefore words are implicit in any human experience. The word »preverbal« rightly says only that the implicit can be sensed without a particular string of words. We can sense the implicit »all that« in a bodily way, »kinaesthetically,« like we sense our muscles and being in motion. There are many common instances in which we implicitly have what we want to say without any particular words. Here are some examples: Example 1: When we have said something quite well but the other person didn’t understand it, we lean back and think how else we might say »it.« Thereby we have separated an »it« from the original set of words. But what exactly do we have at such moments? Here we can directly examine this. What do we have when our meaning is no longer only in the words we just used, and not yet in another set? Since another way to say »it« will soon come, we see that this »it« contains implicit words even before a particular statement has formed. And if we don’t accept the one that comes, another will come, and then still another. We can hold out for a statement that seems to us to say »it.« The implicit »it« consists of a lifetime of learnings but it implies just this. We see that the precision of the implying is stubborn. The »all that« implies just this stubborn next step. It can make us reject many restatements that suggest themselves. The rejection shows the implicit precision. We reject the restatement because what is implied is more precise than the statement. Different phrasings don’t leave »it« unchanged, but they do not change it into something else (»carrying forward«). So we see that it is not determined only by the statements, although each rephrasing develops it further and also loses some implications. We see that we can refer directly to an implicit »it« that can come without a particular string of words. Example 2: There are other occasions when we refer directly to what we mean apart from a string of words. For example, we may forget what we were about to say. We didn’t have words prepared; we just knew we were ready to speak. Now we have a residual sense of it left, but it is closed so that we cannot enter into what it »was.« If we refer to this left-over bodily quality (a nameless quality, »that, there …«) and spend a little time there, it may

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suddenly open so that what we wanted to say floods back – still not in words, but now open (»nascent«) and ready to be spoken from. We can lose and regain this readiness to speak. But what exactly is a readiness? If we have lost the readiness, we refer to the left over bodily quality which is at first still closed. Pausing and spending a little time with this quality (a closed direct referent) may let it develop into one that is open and ready to speak from. When it does (»Oh, I’ve got it back!«), it is still without words until they come. We can follow the same procedure also when we want a new step at any juncture of thought. Although not something we already had and lost, the bodily quality can come and then open into a readiness, a wordless »Oh, I know …« which then leads to new phrases. We can let one next-implying come. This may at first feel like standing in front of a gray surface, nothing distinct. But we can attend to the bodily quality, as in the example of getting back what we wanted to say. We can ask: »Is this heavy, jumpy, or neither?« Then we can wait or return to it again and again. Soon we are not sitting with a blank, rather with a bodily »this.« Then we can welcome whatever comes, even something small or odd. It will soon lead further. Many insufficient statements may suggest themselves along the way. Although they get something right, we reject them because they are not precise enough. But how can we know this when we don’t yet know what more is implied? The next section will explain how it is possible. Here we only see the fact that the implicit can be more precise. One might be tempted to infer an »it« theoretically, as if an »it« were always there. When »it« comes and opens, we feel, »Ah, yes, this is what it ›was‹ !« But actually it is more. There was no »it« unless it came. Its coming is a further development, a carrying forward. That is why further steps can come from it, which could not come just in the easy saying. Only when we lose the readiness and must »get it back,« then we focus on the bodily quality until the readiness returns, and then words come. The bodily quality isn’t usually there as such either. It comes in response to our referring. We have to refer to it while it isn’t there yet. This is odd but one learns how to do it. At first it is a little fitful; it may come or not, and it has various degrees of distinctness at various times.

The examples show that we can refer to the bodily quality of the »all that,« and then to the direct referent that opens without any one set of words. But the examples also show that we usually speak from just the readiness to say something, not from a direct referent. Examining this readiness will lead us much further.

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I-4) Readiness to speak; implying-occurring But what is a readiness to speak? And how do the words come to us? I open my mouth – and they come. Has no one asked these questions? Language is implicit in the human body but not as in a dictionary, where the words themselves are there. The language is implicit as the ability to form sentences from any »this,« any aspect of experience we set apart by referring. When any aspect however large or tiny is made a »this,« the implicit language can form sentences to speak just from it. The particular words only come as we speak. Since there are no established concepts about »implicit language,« »readiness to speak, and how words come,« let us establish new concepts. Let us allow these three phrases to be concepts. But what do they mean? Well, first off they mean what they do here: how they themselves are speaking from implicit language, from the readiness to speak, and from the coming of the words. Of course we will say more and more with and from them; we will let them generate more specific phrases and concepts in which they can say more about themselves. With these three concepts we can go on to redefine »human body« as always including implicit language, readiness, and the coming of words. This expands the meaning to include what the word »body« has been doing in my discussion so far. The human body is not only the externally observable structure, but also the body sensed from inside. The reason why what we sense from inside can form fresh phrases is that language is implicit in the body. The words come already appropriate to the situation. They don’t come singly as if we had to put them together. Rather, they come arranged in grammatical sentences to say this to this person in this situation. The words have arranged themselves implicitly; by the time they come they are all arranged. So we see that the body implicitly »knows« (has, is, implies …) the situation and action (including speaking) to meet it. But what is a »situation?« A situation is not just the external facts, not that there is a river there, but that I need to get across, or that it protects me from pursuers, or that I could support myself by setting up a ferry here. The demand to meet the situation is implicit and not yet the behaviors or sentences. To »meet« it means acting to change it, but not into a different situation, rather into how this situation demands (implies). Only if we break up the situation have we 58 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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changed it into a different one. An action that meets it develops and reveals what the situation really »was.« Here again we need our concept »carrying forward,« a change but not into something else. We could derive »carrying forward« from this familiar character of situations. The readiness implies what we will do or say. So it is a kind of future that is here now. We need a concept for that kind of future. Let us allow my phrase »the body implies« to conceptualize how what has not yet formed and occurred is here now. 2 The readiness and the coming of words are one kind of »implying« and »occurring« (according to our broader model). The readiness to speak is just one instance of the body’s implying. The bodily quality of a situation opens into small steps and then a whole field of cognitions. So we can directly observe that cognition is a bodily process. Cognition is a special kind of behavior, and behavior is a special kind of bodily process (as I will show further, below). They are not three different things. There are not lines between them.

I-5) Occurring into implying We can conceptualize all organism bodily processes (including the lowest) as implying and occurring. The readiness for speech and the coming of words is just one instance of the body’s implying and occurring. What occurs from the organism enacts something like what the organism implied. I say »something like« because the implying (like the readiness to speak) is not yet any particular words, behavior, or tissue process. The implying is »all that,« many past events, but it implies one next occurring. The occurring is not formed until it comes in the environment. Therefore implying is never the same as what the occurring enacts. We can define the word »enacting« from how it just worked: »Enacting« means the environmental occurring of – something like – what the body implied. The implying is not indeterminate, rather more determined than

Currently spoken of as »anticipation,« see Gallagher 2005. It is not recognized as the implying which is always part of body process and behavior formation. A Process Model IVB has the more intricate model of time that is implicit here.

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something that has just one form. This is why it can be difficult to get sentences that carry the implying forward. Although what is implied has not formed a set of words, behaviors, or bodily events, the implying can be more precise than anything that has ever happened. We see that it is so, but how can this new precision be explained? It is because the body’s implicit functioning is always already more than what cognition will ever carry forward. A second reason is that cognitions and events join the vast »all that« in a fresh implying. And, implying is always fresh, and so is occurring which depends both on the implying and on the momentarily present environment. That is why the implying can be so immensely stubborn, leading us to reject many possible statements even though it has never as yet been said. The implying implies one next occurring which will carry the implying forward. If that happens, the implying is carried forward so that it implies a further occurring which, if it happens, will carry the implying forward to imply a further occurring. Implying-occurring is a process. We have derived a model of process. According to our model, process is never just occurring-occurring-occurring, never only formed events. Occurring carries the implying forward so that it implies a further occurring which carries the implying forward so that it implies a still further occurring.

I-6) Implying is body-environment interaction Implying and occurring are enacted in the environment. The implying implies an environmental occurrence and the occurring is an environmental event. All implicit functioning is body-environment interaction. Implying exists only within occurring, not in a space and time of its own. The implying happens in the environment. The body is body-environment interaction. When the body senses itself from inside itself, it senses itself as the environmental interaction it is. But the readiness (the implying) is usually enacted without being sensed as implying. But we can sense the implying, the body’s readiness to speak, to act, to eat or breathe. When we do sense »it« as such, that is a newly intervening event. In biology the very material of the body is understood to be engaged in environmental exchange. But biology considers only an ex60 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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ternally observed body. And, biology constructs the body out of existing units that we have already defined. I say rather that the body is environmental interaction first, before it forms also as a structure, and before units are divided and defined. (See A Process Model.) The body sensed from inside the body is environmental interaction. When we sense the readiness as such, that is not only »inner,« not »subjective.« It is body process, the ongoing body-environment interaction. This fact has not been well understood in philosophy.

I-7) We can move on from where philosophy is currently stopped In my philosophy the body is »interaction first,« and only secondarily a separate structure. This applies also to the body as sensed from inside the body. What we sense is always environmental interaction. Nothing is only »subjective.« I share the denial of anything purely subjective with Wittgenstein and Heidegger. I agree with Heidegger that all experiencing is being in the world. But after 1926 Heidegger thought that only a variety of highly abstract conceptual models gives meaning to events. For him practice and experience are determined only by language and conceptual models of »Being.« Wittgenstein is misinterpreted to have denied inner experiencing altogether, as if we didn’t have any all day. He did not say that. 3 He said (as I do) that »inner« experiencing is always already involved in »forms of life,« i. e., consists of interactions in situations. When you sit down on a chair you »expect« it to hold you. He argued that such an »expectation« is not a separate »inner« event, apart from sitting down in the chair. The expectation is only that you would be surprised if the chair collapsed under you. (As I would say this, an »expectation« of holding you is implicit whenever you sit down on something, but I agree with him that (what I call) the »implicit« is always an environmental interaction, never only »internal« or »subjective.« After Heidegger and Wittgenstein, philosophers have assumed that only language gives meaning to sensing the body »from inside.« See my article »What happens when Wittgenstein asks ›What happens when …‹ ?« (1997). See also Cavell (1979) and Schneider (2014).

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The common experiencing we have all day is philosophically ignored because they think of it as merely internal and indeterminate, made interactional only by language. There is a big difference between my view and that of the current philosophers. They say that the body as sensed from inside is meaningful and interactional only through language (which includes concepts, culture, and history). If we find a bodily sense meaningful, they think this can only be what language and culture have trained into our bodies. For example, Foucault ridicules the people he met in California who think that their experiencing can be a source of thoughts and meanings. Philosophers think they know that meaning is determined only by language. Currently emotion (affect) is being discussed, but the implicit is not emotion. The implicit is much wider and very different. The bodily sense which leads to a direct referent is usually slight, opening into a vast »all that« and a whole field that is differentiable. The implicit as environmental interaction is currently not widely known. If at all, it is known as the »not« (not determined, not formed, not precise, not logical, not capable of being stated, not clear), the discouraging »contextualism.« The implicit which we can easily speak from, and the direct referent which can come, are still largely unknown. Bodily sensing is supposed to consist only of the five kinds of sense-data, intakes of external objects or parts of the body such as muscles and limbs, considered as if they were external objects. The word »body« means only the externally observed body in an »external« space that is split off from »internal interpretations.« But as we have seen, the »internally« sensed implicit is environmental interaction too. It is part of the body’s implying. In the body’s implying there is no division between hunger, the next action, and the next saying. The body’s implying is not divided into separate compartments. The implying is an interaction in the situation. The breath is not separate from the whole situation and what we are ready to do and say. It is true that human bodies are never without implicit language. But »never without« language has been confused with »determined only by« language. Language profoundly changes and develops the human animal all the way through, but the body’s implying is and remains more than what language determines. To view bodily experiencing in this new way changes the frame 62 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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of theoretical thinking. It leads to new concepts of the body, behavior, perception, language, and nearly everything else. The role of experiencing in concept formation becomes understandable, greatly expanded and systematically used. When never without language is confused with determined only by language, then one misses how experience functions in the language we speak. How we experience speaking and thinking is not studied, and not engaged to study itself, its own forming and coming. In 1993 I wrote that »words can say how they work.« Now we can examine how a word speaks from what it is »doing« – how it »works« – in this use in this situation right here. Human experience is never without a huge cluster of implicit words and concepts, and never without their history. But most philosophers currently take this »never without« to indicate that only language, concepts, and history determine human experience. Therefore it seems to them that bodily feelings cannot be meaningful in any way before what language says. The human body is never without language but I argue that »never without« need not mean »determined only by.« And the reason it does not mean »determined only by« language is because the bodily implying is environmental situational interaction, can be sensed from inside, and is always much more than we can say. But spoken and conceptual advances also add and develop the bodily implying. When they become implicit they have greater effects than they had just as discrete occurrences. There is always a big difference between the implicit kind of precision and the logical kind of precision. Neither can replace the other. Logical concepts expand the implicit, which can lead to new concepts, which then further expand the implicit. They expand each other reciprocally.

I-8) The apparent »breaks« in the logic of science are actually its reciprocity with the implicit We will understand and use our unit model science very differently when we consider it within the reciprocal movement between the logical and the implicit precision. To so consider science also solves many philosophical puzzles. Let me discuss one of them which will let us further examine the reciprocity. 63 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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There is a well-known discontinuity between this year’s scientific concepts and those of a few years ago. Many concepts have disappeared, each replaced by six or more new ones. Kuhn pointed this out long ago. More recently Fodor (1974) examined the problem extensively and saw that there is really no answer. That is to say, there is no answer in the current terms (what I call »unit model« terms), which assume that nature is given in discrete entities with logical relations between them. No logical progression can be constructed from last year’s to this year’s concepts. The new concepts are more numerous and just different. This discontinuity in science looks like a break. What lies in the »break« is concept formation. Logic happens between already-formed concepts. Science cannot account for itself. It does not proceed only logically. The process of forming new concepts is not logic. Neither is it really a break. We have seen that the previous concepts continue implicitly, like the previous pages of a book we are reading. Implicitly they have more effects than as concepts alone. They interaffect with the whole of the bodily implying and with each other. That is why more precise and numerous new concepts can come from the implicit. We must keep our conceptual systems separate from the implicit, as I said at the start, but in the wider system we are developing we can examine how the logic and the implicit precisions relate and reciprocally expand each other. Crease (2004) has pointed out that scientists do much more in the lab than test predictions from theory. What they mostly do is rather a kind of »play.« They try all sorts of things, and then hold on to anything that happens regularly in response. From something regular (»If we do X we get Y«) they define a new entity. When the play in the lab produces new entities, then theory enters. The scientist asks: How come it responds like that? And no theory can account for something without relating to our many other theories where the same terms are used. A huge implicit »all that« is involved whenever a theorist thinks. In devising or revising a theory, the implicit functions indispensably, as I have shown elsewhere at length (Gendlin 2009 A). Theory, operations, and the implicit are three inherently linked dimensions of science. One kind of doing is testing predictions. Why can operational testing (for example, turning on a newly built machine) disconfirm 64 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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our logical predictions? It is, as I have long argued, because empirical testing is direct environmental interaction. Operations don’t happen within our conceptual system; they happen directly in the actual environment. We don’t test concepts; we test operations. Because operations are fresh environmental interaction, therefore its results can differ from what we logically predicted. That is also why they always produce vastly more data, not just what confirms or disconfirms our predictions. We see that the nature science presents is not just an »is« that lies there. Nature is also its response to what we do, as Francis Bacon said long ago. (Nature also includes its response to what animals and plants do.) Nature is a responsive order. 4 Our doings lead to new entities, new concepts, and new machines which enable us to do many vital things and »play« in further ways. We live and act directly in the environment; we are not surrounded by our conceptual systems. All conceptual systems we know are always implicit for us but they never displace fresh environmental interaction and experience. Bodily implying (including what of it we sense from inside) consists of direct interaction with the environment. Behavior and cognition are special kinds of body process. The logical kind of precision can also arrive at new results. The Artificial Intelligence people were not wrong to point out that logical inference and computers can lead us to results and new environmental interactions which our implicit understanding could never have reached. But then we look around there and do something there. The new results become implicit and interaffect everything else in the bodily »all that,« which then enables us to arrive at new concepts and doings which the computer could never have reached. The reciprocity between logical and implicit precision has obtained throughout history, but it has not been understood as such. 5 See my »The responsive order: A new empiricism.« Man and World, 30 (3), 383– 411. (1997). 5 Historically dialectic is a systematic mode of thought that does not reduce to existing concepts. And it did assert a cumulative wisdom (Plato) or »aufheben« (Hegel). But dialectic attributes the coming of new concepts to the contradictions between the old concepts, thus making the role of the implicit invisible. But a contradiction just of concepts cancels out to nothing. Plato’s Socrates refused to discuss anything without an actual person as interlocutor, which recognized an unavowed role of the implicit and our process. Hegel eliminates individual persons by subsuming them into the 4

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Our conceptual systems (including this new one) are never all of whatever we are studying. The process of thinking and doing is always a body-environment interaction which involves the process as well as the content of what we think. Nature (the environment, whatever we study …) is an implicit intricacy, never equivalent to explicit concepts, never just objects of a knowledge, never just an »-ology.« This is not a drawback, not a terrible problem (as it seems from the unit model alone), rather the guarantee that more can happen. Conceptual systems can never be what explains everything. Conceptual systems (concepts with their own logical form and power) have to be understood as explications, products of concept formation, a wider process of implying and occurring that leads to further implying. We can use the reciprocity systematically in concept formation. It has been a mistake to assume that we cannot think further about the implicit. We can speak from how the implicit functions, which leads to a new model, concepts of a new kind, in terms of which we can explain how the implicit functions, and generate new logical concepts as well. We saw – but have not yet explained – how the »all that« can imply one next move. How does the vast amount of implicit experience imply the single next occurring and how does it come? We have also not yet explained how the new occurring »takes account« of the previous experiences in its very coming. The next section will explain the coming and the taking account.

II.

Coming and forming in the coming

II-1) Two questions: the coming and the taking account It has seldom been asked how the words to say something come to us. I open my mouth – and they come. We will find more and more about this coming by speaking from the implying in our actual speaking and

movement of concepts. Everything is due to the concepts. But the dialectic moves only because the (unavowed) role of the implicit exceeds the existing concepts. See my discussion of Plato’s Meno in my »Plato’s dialectic« 1966.

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thinking. This is what we have been doing. The coming in our actual speaking has rarely been examined very far. 6 Consider the coming in the special case when we work on a problem. At first nothing comes. (If we are asked about the problem, we can easily say many things, why it matters, how it came about. Many old thoughts are implicit, but if we don’t ask about those, nothing comes to advance the problem. The »nothing comes« is really quite smart. It involves the implicit »knowing« why each old thought has no chance of providing even a small advance on the problem. What comes can include many unlikely ideas that fail examination immediately, but the old solid answers do not come. You can observe this implicit knowing if someone asks you about any one of the old wellknown thoughts. You could say why it won’t advance the problem. So you can observe that each old thought has functioned quite precisely in the nothing comes. We have already seen this precision of each detail in many examples. Now we want to explain it. 7 We can feel when a thought has the slightest chance of advancing a problem. It might be a big idea or only a little lead. Whatever comes might fail immediately on examination. But if it came at all, it had some slight chance to move the problem. If we wonder why it came, we can usually trace why it had a chance. So we can observe that the »nothing comes« has taken account of all that in allowing the thought to come. We have two questions: (1) Why does the »taking account« not require going through the previous moves singly, one by one? (2) How does taking account happen in the very coming of the next move? Before I explain, consider an example.

Now that we see how to do this, we might expect phenomenology to have done this, but it did not. I say more about that below and in the last section. 7 Perhaps the new concepts do not take account of all the previous (as Kuhn pointed out). Something that was ignored might later be resurrected and gone on from. But we would certainly not adopt new concepts as better and more precise if they required losing much of our previous technology and if we could no longer do and explain what the earlier concepts enable us to do and explain. Revising a theory would be easy if we could simply change it to accord with new findings. It is hard and can long remain impossible to do, because the theory has to be consistent with a great many other theories in which the same concepts appear. See my discussion of how scientific theories are revised, in Gendlin 2009 A. 6

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An example: chess masters. Dreyfus (2004) has pointed out that chess masters make new moves without deliberating. They don’t spend time considering each of the many possible moves. Only the new move comes to them. We are explaining this. Masters have spent years studying books of games; they know many possible moves at any point. Now they don’t have to run through all those old moves (as the computer does). Those moves don’t come to mind to be considered. Nothing comes until a new move comes. 8 The master doesn’t deliberate when playing with ordinary players. When masters play each other, they want every minute of the allotted time to examine the move they are about to make. Several new moves may occur to them, but certainly not the many old moves. A new move cannot be examined in terms of old moves. The consequences of each old move fourteen moves ahead are accounted for, and also their consequences in relation to each other. The old possible moves result in a problematic situation in which the new move is already more promising. We can see that all this has implicitly happened, if we ask the master about any one old move, »Why didn’t you do well-known move X?« The master would be ready to reply by comparing its possible consequences fourteen moves down with those of the new move. To compare old and new consequences would generate a new logical system which could not have been created before the new move came. The new consequences are new units, implicit in the new move but not yet generated separately. To examine the new move, the master generates the possible consequences one by one. This might reveal some possibilities that had not been taken account of and need to be pursued or avoided. Here we can see the inherent reciprocity between logical units and how the implicit functions. The new coming is more than the old moves, but generating the new possibilities unit by unit makes still more possible.

All this applies not only in chess, of course. A new thought can come in any situation and when it does then we examine what follows from it. We examine it in terms of the new units which are generated from it. We do that also with any new phrase or course of action. We could of course examine why the new one has more promise than any one old thought, but there is no need to do that. We rather trace the consequences of the new thought. Although we trace them one by one,

Of course the chess rules form a conceptually limited scheme which is not changed by a new move. It is not yet known whether there may be a limit on possible new moves so that the computer might eventually contain all possible moves and defeat chess masters as it has occasionally defeated Kasparov.

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we carry all the different consequences with us; implicitly we think »all that.« Then, if need be, we also generate a logical system with these new units which could not have been generated before the new move came. The implicit kind of precision of the coming is not logical deducible in advance because the units are new. But the implicit kind is certainly not not-logical, as we see, since logical systems can be generated from it. Not deductive but not not-logical is an interesting kind of order, isn’t it? It is a more intricate pattern than the usual kind of order that consists just of units. The coming takes account of the previous units to generate something that does not follow just from them. New units are not there either, but can be generated from what came. Then with the new units we can logically explain what came. The consequences of the new coming are new units, a changed field of possibilities. But what is a »field« of possibilities and consequences together? Let us examine what »field of possibilities« means here, and how it changes in the coming of a new thought.

II-2) The space of behavior possibilities To see the implicit kind of precision, let us ask: What is this implicit »field of possibilities?« How is it ordered and how is one occurring – one coming – a change in the whole field? Many behaviors are always possible for us. At any moment there are always many alternatives. Let us examine how these are interrelated. If we consider just the things before us, they appear to be side by side in the familiar kind of »space.« This space seems to exist with or without objects, but is empty without them. This is the familiar »space« in which objects move, i. e., change their locations. But each object comes with many possible behaviors. (Gibson called them affordances.) Behaviors are not mere motions, not mere changes in location. We perceive objects with the ways we could behave with them, for example hold them, or push them, eat them, sit on them. The possible behaviors do not appear side by side like their objects. Let me expand this key point: Behavior possibilities are not sideby-side. An object is perceived in a cluster of possible behaviors. Only 69 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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the objects are spread out side by side in location space; the behavior possibilities (what we can now do) are organized in a different way. The behavior possibilities constitute an implicit space that is quite different from the space that consists just of objects. How are they organized? A behavior changes what other behaviors can be done and how they can be done. If we kick the ball we can no longer pick it up and throw it. If we kick someone, we can no longer fondle the person, or the fondling will now be a comforting. If we boiled the eggs, we can’t then fry them. Each behavior is a change of the cluster of implicit »cans.« If we do this we can no longer do that, or not in the same way as before. On the other hand, after each behavior we can do some that we couldn’t do before. A behavior is not only itself, not only what occurs. A behavior is a change of the implicit cluster of other behavior possibilities. A behavior alters the field in which it occurs. The whole cluster is changed in any possible behavior. The behavior occurs in the changed cluster. Each of the other behaviors is also such a cluster-change when it occurs. Each of the many possible behaviors is a cluster that includes the one behavior which just occurred. They are all implicit in what each is. If the behavior that occurred is new, each of the possible behaviors now has the new one in its cluster. Now we see more clearly how the many different consequences are taken account of in relation to each other (which we discussed in the chess move). Each behavior possibility interrelates the consequences of the possible behaviors in its cluster. Each is a version of all of them, and the one behavior that actually comes re-forms the cluster of all these versions of »all of them.«

II-3) We perceive objects in the implicit space of behavior possibilities Objects are behavior possibilities. Many possible behaviors come with any object. The objects exist not just in locations but in the space of behavior possibilities. The behavior space is the space in which we act and perceive. 9

9

Current theory assumes »sensory-motor coupling.« But I argue that there won’t be

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Perception does not consist only of momentary intakes from the sense organs. We perceive objects in the wider space of behavior possibilities. The momentary sensations occur into the wider behavior space. The organ intakes are separate colors, sounds, and smells, etc. The separate intakes come into the behavior space. We perceive behavioral objects, not just colors and sounds. The dog doesn’t see colors as colors. The dog sees me coming, sees that I’m eating food, and would like some. Humans do also perceive colors and sounds as such, but like the dog, we perceive the objects. We perceive not only colors and smells but also the food we could eat. We take the food out of the oven and see that it is still not cooked enough. In the space of our behavior possibilities we also perceive changed possibilities. We perceive that someone could walk in because the door was left open. When what we could do with an object has just changed, we perceive not only the object but the fact that what we could do has changed. We perceive that we can’t go for a walk now because it has begun to rain. We perceive that an object with which we could have done behavior X has just changed so that now we cannot do X, but now perhaps we can do Y. We perceive that the steaming water is too hot to drink, i. e. we perceive it in the space of behavior possibilities. We perceive that the dirty chair needs brushing off before we sit down in it. Even at the moment we have no organ intakes from the things at our side, we perceive that they are still at our side. We perceive the objects in front of us in the space of the behavior possibilities which includes that we could turn to the things at our side. Perceiving things in behavior space includes sensing the space and objects behind us (as Merleau-Ponty said, and I explain.) We perceive and walk in a space in which we could back up or turn around and go. We would be shocked if we suddenly perceived nothingness behind us, a sheer abyss into which we would disappear if we backed up. Because the body implies objects in the space of behavior possibilities, therefore we can do skillful actions with the body without clear findings until behavior, rather than just motion, is assumed to be coupled to sensing. See Noe (2005) and Gallagher (2005).

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first having a separate perception (a »just-perception,« I call it) to see how we can. Without first just perceiving how I will do it, my hands rotate the empty pot so I can grab the handles. For example, I am surprised to find my thumb sticking out to keep the stack of papers next to me on my easy chair from moving with me as I get up. Similarly, Damasio observed that before he perceived it his body had switched his cup of coffee from one hand to the other so he could grab the bannister. But Damasio attributes it all just to »evolution« and leaves it dark. We are explaining how the body does it, and why it can. My thumb move comes because the space in which I perceive and act changes as I get up. That perceived space includes the objects in front, behind and next to me, and how they would change if I got up. In the past the papers next to me have slid forward and fallen on the floor. »All that« functions implicitly in the coming of my next behavior. For my thumb to come out, my body did not first need just to perceive how the papers could be kept from sliding. The perception is part of behavior formation. I call this kind of perception »in-behav perception.« It is not a separate event of just perception. If »perception« is defined only as the present organ intakes, then all the above has to be considered »interpretation,« something »only internal,« therefore »subjective.« But behavior possibilities are not just subjective since we can do them. The space of behavior possibilities and its change is environmental interaction. Humans do also perceive separate colors and sounds as such, but not as objects. In separation the five kinds of sense data are not objects. One cannot behave with just sound or just color. An intake in a single sense is never perceived alone, rather it comes into the space of possible behaviors with objects, and modifies that space. Behavior objects are not constructed from prior separate sense data alone. 10 The body implies objects because it implies behavior. In behavior the objects are implied in all five sense modalities. The body implies five-sense objects even when only one sense is coming from an organ

Aesthetics will greatly profit, if it is understood that perception is part of behavior formation and body process, and only as part of that is it also the response to colors and sounds as such.

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just now. A behavior that is now forming is modified by a single organ intake. If there is an intake from a second sense, it would also modify the ongoing formation, so it would join the first intake. This explains Gallagher’s »intermodal« perception. He has established the concept of »intermodal perception,« but how the connections occur has remained a puzzle because of the mistaken assumption that perception consists just of separate intakes from the different single organs. It seemed that something had to connect prior separated senses, but no such neurological connector has been found. (Newborns connect the five modalities long before additional neurological connections develop.) The analysis in terms of organ-intakes is valid and highly useful, but perception cannot be conceptualized only as organ intakes. We perceive in the formation of behavior.

II-4) Immediate formation is forming-into Now we can explain the taking account which we questioned on a previous page (p. 15). Since the forming of a behavior is also the reforming of the behavior possibilities, therefore the occurring behavior forms-into the implicit cluster of behavior possibilities. Therefore a behavior cannot form without (what we called) »taking account« of the previous moves (the cluster of other behaviors), since its forming and coming is their re-forming. This is the reason why the taking account happens in the very coming. The coming is the taking account of the other possibilities, because it is also their re-formation. So the behavior cannot form except by forming into them. This is why an infant lamb stops at the edge of the cliff (in the experiment with a glass plate over the cliff), even though it has never seen anything like that before. It doesn’t »know,« but a walking sequence cannot form with the cliff feedback. It may seem that the lamb could just »walk« forward and fall off the cliff, but the body implies the feedback from the ground in the walking. Walking cannot form with a cliff. To form, the environmental effect of each bit of the sequence has to be such that a next bit can form. This kind of perception has to happen in the very formation of the behavior. Even with all the human developments, our behavior can still happen only if environmental feedback continues the sequence. Our 73 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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walking now can form only with the present environmental feedback from the ground and the whole space. Or, for example, to go on hammering, the nail must be going in or at least continue to stick up straight. If the nail got bent over, we stop hammering. The behavior continues only if the in-behav perception changes the implying into the next implying in the sequence. We have hammered many times before, but this hammering is again a fresh formation. Each time requires that the nail not bend. The whole behavior sequence is implied but to occur again it must form freshly each time. Now we have now answered the two questions we had. It was a puzzle why the »taking account« doesn’t require going through the previous moves singly, one by one, and how taking account happens in the very coming of the next move. We have seen that a behavior forms-into the implicit cluster of the others so that it cannot form if it is not also a way to reform them. So we see why the taking account happens in the very coming. The new model: Implying happens only in an environmental occurring. Implying has no separate space and time position of its own. Occurring changes implying from this implying to the next. The implying in this occurring implies the next occurring. Linear time is not prior. The linear unit model of successive selfidentical times is generated from the more intricate model of time. (See A Process Model IVB.) Linear time is only occurring occurring occurring which is derived from occurring implying occurring implying. Because the next organismic events can only form into the previous, therefore implying implies into the environment, and the environment occurs into the implying. Here we explain the two-directional »in.« The past environments are in the implying, but the occurring is the momentarily present environment occurring into the organism’s implying. This is because the implying exists only in the environment. The organism is environmental interaction, not a separate structure and then separately also in interaction with the environment.

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III. Systematic use of the »background« III-1) Logic consists of external relations: We have made concepts for behavior possibilities that are implicit in each other (ieo), and for new forming and coming which changes the behavior possibilities in the coming. These new concepts seem odd because they cannot be broken into units that can be understood each separately. 11 In logical relations the units are external to each other. Logic relates separable units. They are external to each other insofar as each is supposed to be fully understandable (fully determined) by itself. Logical units are what I call »self-identical.« Each unit has its own space-time location and relates to units that have their space and time locations. The units relate in a grid of space and time. (Now with Quantum the space-time grid can vary; it is no longer just Newton’s.) 12 My talk of »external relations« can be confusing because logic is sometimes spoken of as internal relations. A redundant analytic judgment such as »Bachelors are unmarried« follows simply from the fact that »bachelor« is defined as »unmarried.« So the notion »unmarried« is already »in« the notion of bachelor. When we divide something into parts and re-construct it out of those parts, we say that we have explained the thing. Many different things can be divided and re-composed of the same units. When we can convert them into each other by re-arranging the units, then the two things are logically related. We build the same units into the In the philosophical tradition such relations were called »internal relations« but have never been explained. That is why calling them »holistic« today is discouraging, as if one could not make concepts from them and could not think precisely and specifically from them. They were assumed to be what cognitive analysis lays out in units, but this isn’t so. Internal relations are implicitly much more than cognitive analysis explicates, and cognitive analysis implicitly generates still more. We are now explaining how internal relations relate to the spread-out external relations. Since this was assumed to be an equation, it has never been explained how internal relations function as a ground of explication. 12 Unitized entities move in space but remain the same ones. An observer must define this unit here as the »same« one that was earlier over there. (Quantum space and energy are slowly changing this, but still cling to »analyticity« which means the permissible equations have to be reducible to units, even if they have to be »virtual particles.«) 11

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concept of each. Then the relation between events becomes »logically necessary.« Of course this is different from interaffecting (how the many are related in an implicit »all that«). How units relate and combine is explained by how each unit is understood alone. Units are self-identical, »external« to each other. 13 When the units seem to define the thing, the implicit drops out of consideration. It seems to be neither in the thing nor in our understanding of the thing. There seems to be neither a space of possible behaviors nor the forming and coming. There seem to be only intakes from the external, the »outside.« How does this externality come about? The explanatory power of the units depends on them having their own definitions. So they seem to hide the »all that« which played a role in how we made them and is always still implicit in the units. Their own definitions seem sufficient to determine them fully (although we will change them in a year or two). Logical relations between units constitute a grid of their own interrelations. Of course we are the ones who do the dividing and experimenting to make and conceptualize these units and relations, but they constitute a grid of their own interrelations, external to us. This grid splits their »real« effects in »external« space off from their effects on the body-environment interaction (our bodily-implied behavior in the situation). The body feels (is, experiences …) how the events affect its implying. But now there is a split between supposedly internal and external effects. The real events seem to happen only in the »external« space of the unit grid. Therefore the body-and-situation seems to be only »internal,« only subjective. But this is not so. The bodily implying is environmental interaction too, and primarily. The situation is in the body and the body process happens in the situation. (A situation doesn’t exist without the person whose situation it is, of course.) But the gap seems unbridgeable between the external mesh of logical relations and the implicit effect which we feel. The grid of external logical relations covers – and seems to be – what exists. Any event is split in two: the effect in the external space before us is split off from the implicit effect which seems to be only a subjective interTAE (Thinking at the Edge) generates such logical relations from internal relations so that a TAE theory has both. 2009B, p. 350 and Gendlin et. al. (2004).

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pretation, something added to »perceptions« that are purely intakes. The perceived object is assumed to be composed of prior separate sense-intakes. When considered on the grid of logical units, »perception« seems to be only momentary intakes. The body’s implying seems subjective. We seem to live in the external space of flat conceptualized entities. I call them »flat« when they seem to be without their »all that,« lacking internal leads to a next behavior or thought. 14 Our technology depends on this conceptualized »environment,« this grid of interrelated unit relations. We perform wonderful interventions in this external »body« and environment. What appears in the external grid is explained and manipulated, while the implicit relations are left dark, considered the so-called »human world.« But we need not limit what we study to the externally observed body and environment. We can also study the effects on the body’s implying and how the next behavior comes. We have to keep the two approaches separate because the logical power of the unit-relations depends on splitting the implicit away from self-identical units and relations, as I just explained. What has been called the »hard problem« is to reconnect consciousness to the self-identical unit concepts which inherently exclude it. But this isn’t just hard. The problem is posed in a form in which it is inherently insoluble. What is excluded by the very nature of the unit concepts cannot be added directly to them. Consciousness can certainly be studied, but in terms of a different kind of concept, and by the reciprocity with the implicit which we have been discussing. The unit concepts are inherently self-identical, i. e., without anything implicit and without us. In my main work I offer a well worked out derivation of how consciousness develops. 15 But we can see right here Although the implicit is still always there, thoughts go »flat« when we take them only as the conceptual generality because the implicit »all that« does not follow from the general concept and cannot be gotten back from it alone. Even one’s own new conceptualizations directly from the implicit can go flat when one exchanges them for the concept one just made. Therefore one should (and can) carry what one implicitly senses along with the concept, and think with both. 15 See A Process Model VI. Consciousness arises in behavior and occurs in all animals. The human capacity to respond to patterns and to separate sense data as pictures of (the bodily symbolizing) is derived in A Process Model VIIA. Of course a shart paper can give only some hints of it. 14

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that consciousness cannot be rendered in the grid of units that split consciousness away. The »problem« comes from assuming that everything must be explained in terms of already-formed (i. e., selfidentical) externals, splitting away the function of the implicit. The gap is not between body and mind, not between meaningless matter and interpretation, not between existence and thought. In the body there is no such separation. The seeming gap is actually the inherent connection between what appears before us and the implicit generating of what appears before us. The tremendous human advances have come with the kind of concepts that bring their own inferences separately from us who obviously generate and think them. These concepts have their own power by working »alone,« without us. (»Mathematics would be true even if there were no people,« it is always said). Of course we cannot connect the implicit consciousness to these concepts across the gap of their own power, and miss how they are already inherently connected in implicit relations. This »alone« from us but made and had by us is obvious, no puzzle. It becomes a puzzle only if we first deny that what is implicit exists, or that what exists is an implicit intricacy. Then it seems that what exists is only this »alone« made by us. The space of reality seems to be the mesh of »external« relations that we make. Kant assumed that what can exist must appear in the space and time grid of logical relations. Nothing unshaped in space or not determined in time can exist; it would be mere flow (and even so it would be in linear time). Everything seems to be our mere representation of something that may or may not exist on the unimaginable other side of an unbridgeable gap. But what exists apart from affecting us is a different question. It seems to be the same question only if we first assume that nothing other than clearly shaped units can exist. Then we need what we think and say to have the same form as what exists, and we can never know whether this is so. Without the implicit there is only occurring – occurring – occurring, the linear time positions. We can derive linear time from implying – occurring – implying simply by dropping out the implying. The denial of anything implicit creates a metaphysical gap instead of the inherent implying-occurring connection. If only what appears exists, then what exists is »external,« in front of us, other than us, as if alone from us, over-there from here. To »exist« came to mean to appear to us. The very word for things became (and still is) 78 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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»phenomena.« This is the old subject-object puzzle: what exists can only be a known-by. The metaphysical puzzle comes here only if we first assume that what exists must have a self-identical shape in space and time. Then there seems to be nothing but formed forms imposed on – nothing. People want an implicit to determine which of several relevances, formulations, or terminologies is the right one. Since the implicit doesn’t do that directly, they deny an implicit altogether. But to evaluate alternatives one has to re-enter the implicit and discover the intricacy behind the either/or. Then one can arrive at a formulation that goes further. The implicit does not have the single form or shape that a formulation has. It is always a great many interaffecting details which imply the next environmental occurring. The implicit is never equal to the occurring, never already the occurring. As we have seen throughout, what occurs is not formed until it comes in the environment. What is now occurring is always this implicit intricacy, this way, just so. It may also have this form, this saying, this concept, but many different terminologies, concepts, and relevances can always carry it forward. Instead of assuming that nothing exists other than self-identical things, let us access the implicit which is always right now functioning, and let new phrases and new concepts come.

III-2) Pitfalls of theory in the unit model Analysis in the unit model can mislead us because it assumes that everything is composed only of discrete units. So it comes to conclusions without taking implicit functions into account. We can correct such a theory, but we will be misled as well if we explain only in terms of concepts, even our »odd« ones. We recognize that nothing consists only of conceptualized entities. What misleads is this »only.« We can keep whatever we say connected to what is implicit in our thinking and saying that. With reciprocity we can move back and forth, expanding each in turn. From working with the implicit we can generate more precise unit model concepts with which to correct the cognitive analysis where assuming units misleads it. To correct the pitfalls of the unit model we can use our »odd« 79 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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concepts like »behavior possibilities,« »forming in the very coming,« and our model of implying-occurring (and the characteristics of implicit functioning). We can keep these separate but generate more specific unit model terms to correct the theory.

III-3) Correcting the current theory. Three examples a)

Behavior is more than motion

Current researchers look for »sensory-motor coupling.« Research will probably be much more successful if we look rather for sensorybehavior coupling. 16 Noë, O’Regan, Gallagher and others miss the space of behavior possibilities because they think of behavior as motion. But motion is what the »external« logical grid splits off. Motion is a sophisticated product which requires an observer to define this here and that there. It involves paths of changes in mere location. Behavior does not consist of motions and cannot be reduced to motion. Noë says, for example, quite rightly that seeing an apple includes seeing the ways we could move with and around it. But motion is a separated abstract product of cognition. Behavior does not consist of this much later product. We might walk around the apple, or eat it, or save it for someone and tell them about it. b)

Behavior formation unites the intakes from the sense organs

The »intermodal« effect which Gallagher quite rightly posits does not actually connect five already separate sensations. Our bodies imply five-sense objects. When a behavior is forming with just one sensory intake, that intake modifies the behavior. Then if there is an intake from a second sense, this joins and modifies the ongoing behavior

It has been found that momentary intakes in the visual cortex contain nothing like the elaborate visual field we perceive. There is also a great deal more brain activity than can be accounted for by the momentary intakes, also in regard to early brain development and plants prior to behavior. Mahoney’s (1991, pp. 100–102) summary of puzzling neurological findings is very revealing in this respect, and in regard to early brain formation. These findings have been largely ignored for half a century because there was no theoretical vocabulary even just to discuss them.

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formation which already involves the first sensory intake. They are joined in modifying a behavior formation. The new intakes from the separate organs modify a behavior formation which the body implies with five-sense objects. Therefore research does not find what connects the intakes even in newborns that have developed no neurological connections. For example, we are walking down the road and see a fallen branch in the road ahead of us. Immediately we walk at an angle toward the right so that we will be passing the branch when we come to it. The branch is perceived as a solid five-sense object although we only see it. Or, we hear a car coming. Immediately we move sharply to the right and walk on the side of the road, although we have only heard, not yet seen the car. With our human developments we can pay attention to the visual or sound patterns as patterns, if we want to consider only the visual or auditory patterns, as when looking at a picture or listening to music, but experience is never made just of separated intakes, even if we have all five. c)

Agency and consciousness are generated in the course of behavior formation

It is not the case that a whole behavior runs off and produces one feedback which must then be separately perceived (just perceived) to give one the sense that one did what just happened. The perception and the bodily feel of it happen as behavior formation. Behavior is a sequence of environmental interactions. The formation of the next bit of the sequence is the bodily effect of the environmental feedback. In the forming and coming the feedback which is this bit changes the implying into the implying of the next bit. Behavior forms freshly each time, both when it is new, and when it has happened before. In order to walk or do anything we must perceive each bit of sequence to enable the next bit to form. A behavior sequence stops the moment the feedback doesn’t enable the next bit to form. That is why the infant lamb stops before the cliff (as I mentioned earlier). Although it has never seen a cliff before, the walking sequence cannot form with the environmental feedback of the abyss. Perception is not just a picture but a bodily-felt effect which forms

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the next bit. And, behavior formation has to occur freshly; it doesn’t consist of repetition or memory. There is a sense of agency since each next bit forms from the environmental feedback to what the body just did. The environmental feedbacks make the bodily changes which are the behavior. (See A Process Model VIA.) Therefore behavior formation is also the sense of agency. The current theory misses this because it constructs agency as a series of separate perceptions at linear time points. The theory has no way to think of a forming process. And, it cannot consider body process and behavior before the development of discrete entities.

III-4) The practice of thinking In my book Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (ECM) I insisted that we need at least one term to stand for (what I called) »experiencing.« I present how philosophy changes if the concepts are taken in relation to experiencing. By »experience« most philosophers mean their concept of experience, not the experiencing we are (live, have, sense, find …). To enter there is a kind of »practice of philosophy,« an ongoing source for concepts, for the creation of meanings. The source is how we just now perceive, speak, and think. Of course it is the only way one can examine and discuss how the implicit actually functions. If we think-from our ongoing thinking and speaking (not only from how we already think about them), we discover that thinking and speaking are very different from what is usually said about them. In how they actually occur we find a different kind of pattern, new concepts about thinking and speaking. We have been thinking and speaking both from and about thinking and speaking. In speaking from the ongoing process of thinking and speaking, the words do double duty: they say what they are doing, since they speak from and about the speaking they do just now. Elsewhere I have written that »words can say what they do,« which can sound mysterious. It becomes obvious when we speak from our speaking. On any topic (not only about speaking and thinking), what the words say, instances the process of saying, by which they say that. In philosophy we discuss concepts and language, so anything we 82 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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say is just then also a sample of the ongoing process of thinking and speaking about thinking and speaking. Of course what we say about it instances the process. But also on any topic, whatever we think or say is an actually experienced sample or instance of thinking and saying that kind of thing (and the »kind« is not a conceptual classification, as I will explain). Philosophy has always been on what I call the »metalevel,« always concerned not only with what was said, but with how one could know such a thing. The words have always done the producing of what they tell about, but this present process was not directly employed. The process of thinking and speaking was discussed only in terms of concepts that were not the ongoing process but rather only the products of that process. Philosophers have always repositioned the main words, used them in new ways with new concepts and distinctions, but have not avowed how they obtained these. They have not explained how acquiring new meaning is even possible for words. They presented only results, not how the results actually came, and why they can come. How does Aristotle come up with a new distinction on almost every issue? How does Leibniz know about the monads? It seems philosophers just say: »I know this; you don’t. So I’ll tell you.« Some philosophers do speak about a »reflexive turn,« but they only tell a conceptual story about it. (Aristotle’s »grasping« [thigganein] and »thinking about thinking« is more than just a concept, but he stops right there.) Those who spoke of a reflexive turn didn’t present their doing it so that we could find it. The dialecticians claim to get their next steps just from contradictions in the concepts. But just contradiction cancels out. Asserting »X and not-X« would yield nothing if something more were not involved when we think. A paradox is a next-implied step that has not yet come. It is an invitation to think further, on-in, the experienced implying of the concept we need. We can think on-into it. It need not always generate a new concept; we can also just think better if we think with it. Plato visibly uses this but does not say so except dramatically via his characters. Hegel does not do this. He does not employ or consider the implicit context of his concepts. He has a well formulated chain and asserts just that chain about each new concept he considers. He stays

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within the Kantian puzzle, only knocking out Kant’s last reference to something more. Phenomenology should have made the turn to ongoing implicit process. It does take off from experiencing but fails to return to check its assertions against experiencing and let them re-emerge from experiencing. We can systematically use the reciprocity I have been discussing. When we move back and forth we find each going further. Instead, most phenomenology continues merely conceptually and becomes like any other philosophy. Even Husserl, who did return each time, did not understand that experiential conceptualizing must always imply further, and lead further and further in. He complained that he always found more and more. He lamented, »Others build edifices; I only dig deeper into the ground.« He assumed that there are ultimate fixed forms. I think he was right to seek and value conceptual forms, but he didn’t grasp the reciprocity I have been featuring, the implicit and the conceptual expanding each other. Of course we need the explications themselves, but they also carry forward on-into ever further implying. Recent philosophers have all lacked this turn on its actual ongoing. Heidegger assumed that only the highest generalizations (which he called »Being«) determine everything including all practice. Derrida considered everything including »metaphor« as deconstructed concepts, not as the ongoing metaphoric process, which he used all the while. Wittgenstein featured the doing of words, the implicit, and the bodily experiencing, 17 but he was convinced that this could not be further spoken about. If he were to talk about language, he said, it would be the old representational trap, only a story or picture. These philosophers all pointed beyond mere concepts, but were convinced that speaking about and from is not possible. And this was because referring to something implicit and speaking from it was unknown. They all did it, but did not observe and avow doing so. If we avow our use of the implicit (the »background«) we can employ it systematically and in reciprocity with logical concepts to go much further, as I hope I am instancing.

See what he says about »verwickelt« and see the last part of PI: »The body is not a dumb block.« See pain and »expectation« in my paper »What happens when Wittgenstein asks what happens when …«

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There have been many critiques of the narrowness of our current science and the »loss« of the human world, but there was no alternative. Now we have an alternative approach to philosophy and theory in A Process Model. 18 In Focusing and TAE (Thinking at the Edge) 19 we have specific steps of practice – how to think from directly referring. Of course everyone modifies these steps since they have to come from them. TAE is now being used in schools, and being improved upon. The first part of TAE can be used by anyone; the last part shows how to move from direct referring to theoretical concepts with logical relations. What comes from directly referring comes from an entirely different, more bodily level. At first just a slight bodily sensation, it opens a whole field of relevant considerations carried forward from what was implicit. That is always very different from what one had thought. It shows that the body process implies cognitions. It shows that cognition is a special carrying forward of the present body-environmental interaction. Body life is situational. In TAE in class the youngster asks: »Am I my body or do I have a body?« The question comes because evidently neither pattern fits. But it can seem that we make no sense at all if we answer: »Neither ›am‹ nor ›have,‹ rather this more intricate way you just found.« We don’t settle just for »neither, nor,« just two negatives. Rather, this way as a direct referent. Even without further steps we understand more with the »this,« and further steps can also come there. In this mode of thinking we retain the link to the direct referent also when we have a concept. The concept may be clear but it means the direct referent, »this way,« and therefore can lead further and further.

III-5) New powers for logical analysis Logical analysis is currently recovering. Until recently Rorty had convinced many Analytic philosophers of the severe limits of analysis. Postmodernism has made logical analysis seem hopeless (see for

In A Process Model (available on http://www.focusing.org/process.html). For TAE, see Gendlin, in press, Section IV; Gendlin 2009B, Appendix (also in The Folio, 2004); Gendlin 2004 (also available at http://www.focusing.org/tae-intro.html).

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example, Putnam 1990; Margolis 1997, and my reply to Margolis, Gendlin 1997] 20 . Postmodernists lacked the implicit. Therefore they viewed science as ungrounded construction. They assumed that other than logical conceptuality there is only disorder, contradiction, and limbo. Postmodernism was still the unit model, but used against itself. It did achieve one good result: People understood that ultimate formulations are not possible. But this is not something to hold against science and logic. Ultimate formulations are not possible because what exists implicitly is never equivalent to a formulation. Therefore it never grounds just one. That doesn’t make formulations relativistic, just relative to something implicit which they explicate. Formulations are explications. Let me cite some new analytic powers: a)

We can differentiate a strand of meaning

We can differentiate the strand of meaning that was actually at work for us in any use we made of any term (word or phrase). We can do this with or without letting a direct referent come. We can find our specific strand of meaning just by attending to and speaking from what we implicitly meant (via the easy readiness to say more, to speak at length from anything we said or thought). When we look for what strand from the concept is at work, we always find more specific strands. Why is this so? It is because the application of a concept does not merely impose the concept. The concept does not eliminate the intricacy but »crosses« with it, so that the concept is always more intricate in application than alone. A technical concept may be well defined, but it always works with much more specificity in use. We can enter into our implicit sense of this use, and differentiate the more precise strand of meaning that is working here. The crossing always yields more than pre-existed in the concept and what one applies it to. But what emerges is not plain new; it is a development (a carrying forward) although people say (with hindsight, retroactively) that all this »was« already implicit. In a specific use the concept can reveal much more precisely what we meant (and what we did not want to mean). 20

See references.

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Of course the strand can be further and further differentiated, but this is most useful only after we use the first differentiation for a while, so that our implicit knowledge develops further. This power to differentiate is not generally known. It is assumed that a well-defined technical concept has the same meaning in any use, and that all of it is at work in each use. To know what strand is at work is very clarifying. b)

Differentiating ordinary language

Somewhat differently but analogously, any bit of ordinary language can be differentiated to find the more precise strand of meaning that is at work. That words are imprecise in common usage is well known. When a statement is taken alone it doesn’t have a single clear meaning. In natural language there is not really a supposedly shared »propositional« meaning. Anything we say is always much more intricate than the cultural generalities. In a serious conversation we must often discover what the other person means by a word or phrase. This is done best not by the threatening demand »define your terms,« but gently and personally: »What more did you want this word to mean?« Similarly, one can ask oneself. Then one can think further with greater clarity. c)

New concepts

Within our own specialty we have usually thought somewhat beyond the state of the field. Therefore it is not unusual that we know somewhat more. This can often seem just an unclear puzzlement but when we know a field well, then such an inarticulate »edge« can give rise to new concepts. It is a distinct move to assume that something in the whole unclarity may be more precise than the clear terms. We can wonder what that is, and invite it. We will need new phrases. If we try to say it in the existing concepts, it will probably remain unclear. The new concept will come, first perhaps in tiny steps and odd phrases. These have to be received for a few minutes or days. Then they lead further. Eventually we have a new concept.

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d)

Reversal; the specific can redefine the generality

Since the strand is more specific it will at first seem to come »under« the general meaning of the term. But that old meaning may block further thought. We can let the more specific strand redefine the broader generality instead. But suppose it is very broad, perhaps the name of the whole field? The current assumptions in the field may make our strand seem quite impossible. We can redefine the field in regard to these assumptions so that our strand becomes possible. The specific definition has more parameters and can therefore redefine the more general.

e)

A new set of units

We can always generate a new set of units to enable a new logic to bite in at any point. We don’t lose the existing set. We don’t loosen logic. Even the slightest addition, subtraction, modifying even one unit will disorganize the logical inferences we draw from a stable set of units. But there is no loss in creating a new set. Then if we wish, we can make a logical correction in the old set. f)

Using many models and systems

Although different sets of units are not consistent with each other, anything we conceptualize in one set can be conceptualized in another. This is because we can have what is actually observed and bodily experienced, which is implicitly more intricate than any set of units. So we no longer have to assume that there is nothing at the bottom, just the different floating forms. What we experienced by using one formulation is not lost if we change to another. The conflicting systems and statements cannot be reconciled, but any specific conflict can always be further explicated. Any actual observation or experience obtained with one system can be formulated in any other system if one allows the differentiation and expansion. And, as we saw, analyzing in units expands the implicit. After a second conceptualization the implicit can now lead us to modify the first conceptualization as well. This is also very little known. It is another advantage of thinking with what is implicit as well as with the logical formulations. One can employ many ways of defining units, many philoso88 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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phies, models, conceptual systems, and kinds of terminology. What is observed with one need not be lost (as it seems) with another. We still have the implicit and can let it define itself by expanding another system which had not shown it. One rarely needs to go back and forth between systems because we can refer to what we need directly in the implicit. Meanwhile we get the benefit of finding what appears in the various approaches. g)

Using an actual sample of what we want to formulate

When we have often observed something, we may feel no need to recall one specific occasion. But a particular event or observation is inexhaustible and implicitly quite different from any conceptual rendition. Knowing this gives one the advantages of using a particular sample. Then we can think from its inexhaustible implicit content, rather than from any already-formed concept of it. We can also check any concept by applying it to the sample. More specific corroboration or difference will then come from the sample. h)

Operational definitions

Operations and referring to the implicit are two different ways of thinking with something independently of one set of words, concepts, and assumptions. Like the implicit, operations are environmental interactions. Insofar as something is defined operationally, it is no longer identical with its conceptualization, but can function in relation to many kinds of units, many kinds of models, concepts, and terminology. By referring to the implicit we can find where a given research operation misses something with which we are concerned. That can lead us to devise a new operation. We need only ask ourselves what environmental action would show it, and then compare some situation with and without that action. i)

Choosing among research instruments

In many sciences such as psychology the technical terms are still so general that many very different instruments exist ostensibly for the same variable. There are many instruments on offer to measure, for example »anxiety.« If we hypothesize that anxiety will affect some89 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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thing we are studying, we need an instrument which will tap into the kind of anxiety we mean in our hypothesis. To get an implicit sense for what an instrument actually measures, we administer it to ourselves. Then we find out whether it measures the »anxiety« we mean, or not. And, if no available instrument does, we can devise one (as I showed in f). j)

Protection against mistakes

Thinking with the implicit along with many formulations protects us from mistakes we would make with only one. Even though just now we use only one, we don’t make the mistakes which the other formulations make visible. Since all formulations we have ever employed now function in our implicit meaning, we don’t make mistakes to which the other formulations have sensitized us. So we don’t make the typical mistakes which those of our colleagues make who use only the formulation we now use. This is another advantage of keeping the implicit with us along with our formulations. It too is a little-known point. People think they must give up the insights and observations which one’s chosen formulation doesn’t make visible. But this need not be so at all. Human thinking need never again do without the systematic practice of thinking. Of course we also retain the unit concepts and technology. We don’t lose the logical integrity of those concepts »alone.« Rather, their power is expanded, corrected, and guided by reciprocity with the wider system.

References Cavell, St. (1979). The claim of reason. Wittgenstein, skepticism, morality, and tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crease, R. (2004): Philosophy of science. The Folio, 19(1), 32–42 — (1993). The play of nature: Experimentation as performance. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Dreyfus, H. L. (2004). A phenomenology of skill acquisition as the basis for a Merleau-Pontian non-representationalist cognitive science. Berkeley, CA: University of California, Department of Philosophy. Online version: http:// istsocrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/pdf/MerleauPontySkillCogSci.Pdf [26. 05. 2015].

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A changed ground for precise cognition Fodor, J. (1974). Special sciences and the disunity of science as a working hypothesis. Synthese, 28, 77–115 Gallagher, S. (2005). How the body shapes the mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press Gendlin, E. T. (In press). What first and third person processes really are. Forthcoming in Journal of Consciousness Studies. — (2009A). We can think with the implicit, as well as with fully formed concepts. In Karl Leidlmair, Ed. After cognitivism: A reassessment of cognitive science and philosophy (pp. 147–161). Dordrecht, Heidelberg, New York, London: Springer. — (2009 B). What first and third person processes really are. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16(10–12), 332–62. — (2004). Introduction to Thinking at the Edge. The Folio, 19(1), 1–10. http:// www.focusing.org/tae-intro.html [25. 05. 2015]. — (1997). Reply to Margolis. In D. M. Levin (Ed.), Language beyond postmodernism: Saying and thinking in Gendlin’s philosophy (pp. 332–338). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. — (1993). Words can say how they work. In R. P. Crease (Ed.), Proceedings, Heidegger Conference, pp. 29–35. Stony Brook: State University of New York. — (1966). Plato’s dialectic. http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2231. html [26. 05. 2015] Gendlin, E. T. & Marion Hendricks (2004). Thinking at the Edge (Tae). Steps. The Folio, 19(1). http://www.focusing.org/tae_steps.html [15. 05. 2015]. Gendlin, E. T. et. al. (2001–2004). Thinking at the edge: A New Philosophical Practice. The Folio, 19(1). http://www.focusing.org/folio-back-issues.htm#19 [25. 05. 2015] Mahoney, M. J. (1991). Human change processes: The scientific foundations of psychotherapy. New York: Basic Books. Margolis, J. (1997). Language as lingual. In D. M. Levin (ed.), Language beyond postmodernism: Saying and thinking in Gendlin’s philosophy (pp. 321–332). Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Noe, A. (2005). Action in Perception. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. Petitmengin, C., Remillieux A., Cahour C. & Carter-Thomas S. (2013). A gap in Nisbett and Wilson’s findings? A first-person access to our cognitive processes. Consciousness and Cognition, 22(2), 654–669. Putnam, H. (1990). Realism with a Human Face. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Schneider, H. J. (2014). Wittgenstein’s Later Theory of Meaning: Imagination and Calculation.With a Foreword by Charles Taylor. Hoboken, NJ: WileyBlackwell Vermersch, P. (2004/2010). L’entretien d’explicitation. Paris: ESF.

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Enkinaesthesia and Reid’s natural kind of magic Susan A. J. Stuart

In concentrating on Reid’s claim that mankind’s invention of an artificial language first necessitates the possession of a natural language, I will argue that kinaesthesia, direct perception and, most significantly, enkinaesthesia are the necessary characteristics of the natural, and the origin of the artificial. Central to my thesis will be the claim that we are deeply and naturally kinaesthetic and enkinaesthetic, aware of our bodily movement and our action in the world, but also able to affect others and be affected by them, moving and being moved within a reciprocal affective neuro-muscular dynamical temporal flow. It is this rich somatosensory engagement of feeling bodies which manages the proto-modal, prelinguistic interactivities of agents and plays an integral role in full-bodied sense-making relations. A fleshed out notion of this enkinaesthetic sense in combination with the claims in support of Reid’s fourth axiom – That there is life and intelligence in our fellow-men with whom we converse – reveal Reid to have been aware of how, as living beings, we concert our first-order natural languaging; it is this, I will argue, which underpins the invention of artificial signs and, subsequently, the acquisition and use of secondorder cultural constructs.

Introduction In An Inquiry into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense Thomas Reid is concerned with the nature and origin of spoken and written language, or what he refers to as ›artificial language‹. He is writing in the eighteenth century and, as is every writer in every century, concerned with how his theories might be received and understood. His concern derives from the fact that if he is to present his claims clearly, he will need to invent terms or use familiar terms but with subtly different meanings. My situation in this current paper is 92 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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very similar. The century may have changed, almost two hundred and fifty years have passed, but I am still concerned with the underpinnings for language, or what might be described as its preconditions, and I will introduce some novel terminology with which you may not yet be familiar. We will begin with an appropriate quotation from the opening chapter of Reid’s work. To understand it fully in our contemporary context you must substitute the term ›philosophers‹ with ›the academy‹. The language of philosophers, with regard to the original faculties of the mind, is so adapted to the prevailing system, that it cannot fit any other; like a coat that fits the man for whom it was made, and shows him to advantage, which yet will sit very awkwardly upon someone of a different build, although perhaps as handsome and as well proportioned. It is hardly possible to make any innovation in our philosophy concerning the mind and its operations, without using new words and phrases, or giving a different meaning to those that are received; a liberty which, even when necessary, creates prejudice and misconstruction, and which must wait the sanction of time to authorise it. For innovations in language, like those in religion and government, are always suspected and disliked by the many, till use hath made them familiar, and prescription hath given them a title. (Reid 1769, Chp. 1, Sect. 2, p. 7)

This quotation is especially relevant to the focus of this paper, not simply because we are each concerned with language, but because language, taken in its pre-theoretical sense to be a shared system of public signs, can sometimes present an obstruction to our shared understanding, whether in terms of our introduction of neologisms, our adaptation of terms already in use, or the fact that we speak radically different languages. The focus of this paper will be the non-linguistic, necessarily relational, necessarily embodied conditions that make a shared system of public signs possible in the first place. I am not here interested in linguistic systems of symbols and their construed meanings, except as a consequence of the non-linguistic conditions. But I am hoping that the introduction of a new linguistic term, ›enkinaesthesia‹, will not create an obstruction to our shared understanding. I will begin by presenting Reid’s argument for the claim that mankind’s invention of an artificial language first necessitated the possession of a natural language, and examine what he means by ›natural language‹. In support of Reid’s thesis I will draw on Gendlin’s notions of ›implicit intricacy‹ and ›felt sense‹ (Gendlin 1966 & 1992), 93 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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and on Maturana’s notion of ›bodyhoods‹ and ›languaging‹ (Maturana 1988). Following this I will flesh out a notion of enkinaesthetic being-with as the rich somatosensory interrelations of feeling bodies which manages the prelinguistic interactivity of agents and plays an integral role in full-bodied sense-making relations. It is this enkinaesthetic being-with which constitutes the Reidian natural language and, which I will present, following Cowley (2009), Thibault (2011), Stuart & Thibault (2015) as first-order languaging.

Reid’s ›Natural Language‹ Reid opens Chapter 4 »Of Hearing« with the claim that mankind without language could not expect to consider itself any better than animals. There is no great surprise here for the reader, for Descartes, writing in the seventeenth century, claims that it is language that sets us apart from animals 1 , but it would be an injustice to Reid to say that this is his point; his claim is much more subtle. Reid argues that, even though we are distinguished from ›the brutes‹ 2 by possessing a superior degree of invention and reason through which we have con-

»For it is a very remarkable thing that there are no men, not even the insane, so dull and stupid that they cannot put words together in a manner to convey their thoughts. On the contrary, there is no other animal however perfect and fortunately situated it may be, that can do the same. And this is not because they lack the organs, for we see that magpies and parrots can pronounce words as well as we can, and nevertheless cannot speak as we do, that is, in showing that they think what they are saying. On the other hand, even those men born deaf and dumb, lacking the organs which others make use of in speaking, and at least as badly off as the animals in this respect, usually invent for themselves some signs by which they make themselves understood. And this proves not merely animals have less reason than men but that they have none at all, for we see that very little is needed to talk.« (Descartes 1637/1960, p. 42). And, in his letter to the Marquess of Newcastle, 23 November, 1646, he continues »I cannot share the opinion of Montaigne and others who attribute understanding or thought to animals. […] the reason why animals do not speak as we do is not that they lack the organs but that they have no thoughts« (See Cottingham, et al. 1991). It is certainly a shame that Descartes didn’t have the opportunity to learn about Alex, Irene Pepperberg’s African Grey parrot (Pepperberg 2002), or Sue Savage-Rumbaugh’s bonobo, Kanzi (Savage-Rumbaugh & Lewin 1994), he might have been more sympathetic to Montaigne’s point of view. 2 »[T]he brutes have some natural signs by which they express their own thoughts, affections, and desires, and understand those of others.« (Reid 1983, Chp. 4, Sect. II, p. 32) 1

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structed an artificial language, we share with them the capacity for thinking and acting purposefully, all of which can be expressed and communicated prelinguistically, that is, without the additional artifice of signs and symbols. Language is commonly considered as purely an invention of men, who by nature are no less mute than the brutes; but, having a superior degree of invention and reason, have been able to contrive artificial signs of their thoughts and purposes, and to establish them by common consent. (Reid 1983, Chp. 4, Sect. II, p. 31–32)

So, he continues, »the origin of language deserves to be more carefully inquired into, not only as this inquiry may be of importance for the improvement of language, but as it is related to the present subject, and tends to lay open some of the first principles of human nature« (ibid., p. 32). So, Reid proposes to examine the aetiology of language and, in so doing, he also expects to reveal something which must be true about human nature, a first principle, and, most significantly, one which makes the creation of an artificial system of signs and symbols possible. He says: I think it is demonstrable, that, if mankind had not a natural language, they could never have invented an artificial one by their reason and ingenuity. For all artificial language supposes some compact or agreement to affix a certain meaning to certain signs; but there can be no compact or agreement without signs, nor without language; and, therefore, there must be a natural language before any artificial language can be invented. (ibid., 32)

Natural language is an »original constitution of our minds« (ibid., 41) that is common to all human beings. It is the means by which we are sensitive to our world and to one another. It is not learnt as a matter of habit and custom, but exists as an a priori condition of our experience. Thus, we are able to perceive and interpret the content of our perceptions directly and without mediation, they »suggest it, or conjure it up, as it were«, adds Reid, »by a natural kind of magic« (ibid., 43). Objects in our perceptual field cause sensations and make us aware of their qualities, but our conception of the object is not derived from the sensation; in fact, the sensation tells us nothing at all about the object because, as far as we can tell, sensations bear no resemblance to the qualities of the object (or to the qualities of our minds) which cause them. Rather what we have is a process of suggestion, where qualities are suggested through sensation, and here we begin to gain some insight into what Reid might mean by ›a kind of magic‹. 95 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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Reid uses the notion of ›suggestion‹ in a pseudo-linguistic manner as a way in which we intimate, in a preconceptual intersubjective, somatosensory manner, our intentional states, moods, and so on. It is not some explicit verbal suggestion to, for example, move to the right or raise your voice and use a particular word, because explicit verbalism affects us indirectly through some learned socially-constructed artifice of meaning. Natural signs suggest directly a pre-linguistic understanding of the intentional trajectory of the other, in other words, what we anticipate they are likely to do, and vice versa. These signs have their shared meaning prior to any public compact or agreement because they belong to the original constitution of our minds and thus to the ways in which we »express [our] own thoughts, affections, and desires, and understand those of others« (Reid 1983, Chp. 4, Sect. II, p. 32). Two questions arise and both are central to this paper. Firstly, in what way might we spell out Reid’s notion of prelinguistic communication as ›a kind of magic‹, and secondly, why is no compact or public agreement necessary in natural language? We can only answer these questions properly when we have taken a more detailed look at Reid’s distinction between first, second and third classes of natural signs. The first class of signs are those in nature which we observe and from which we can develop our everyday empirical engagement with our world. As natural signs they result from a non-propositional sensory questioning of our environment. An example might be the position of the Pole Star (Polaris) as (relatively) stationary, with the rest of the Northern sky appearing to rotate around it; in this way it functions for us as a means for judging – somewhat heuristically – a northerly direction. The second class of sign is known as meaningful or significant because of some basic principle of the mind. So, for example, I perceive an angry countenance and immediately I feel afraid. There is no intervention of concepts and no exercise of cognitive conceptualisation such that I need to reason from what I see to what I should think. There is a feeling, so immanent in my experience, that I am able to anticipate in the nature of a countenance or an attitude the intentionality of its bearer, and this prepares me for a particular range of future possibilities. To paraphrase Ricoeur, understanding is not about knowing certain facts about those who are copresent with us in any given moment, but about grasping possibilities of being and becoming (Ricoeur 1991); and, since we know that the intentional trajectory of the other’s actions and movements will ex96 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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pand or limit those horizons of possibilities, it is crucial that we grasp their intentional trajectory as swiftly and non-inferentially as we can 3 . Note that, in the first and second class (of signs), there is something we are perceiving and that we have a history of perceiving, so this notion of an individual experiential history is important because it permits us to imply that we have established a variety of skilled somatosensory means of coping with or responding to changes in our world. In the case of the third class we recognise something as significant even though we have not previously experienced what it signifies. An example might be the suggestion or sense we have of there existing a self that persists through time and which is the subject of our experience. Reid says of this that »The conception of a mind is neither an idea of sensation nor of reflection; for it is neither like any of our sensations, nor like anything we are conscious of. The first conception of it, as well as the belief of it, and of the common relation it bears to all that we are conscious of, or remember, is suggested to every thinking being, we do not know how.« (ibid., 43). So, in the third case we conjure up the idea of something which has a significance, but of which we have no experience and cannot experience. […] though we never before had any notion or conception of the things signified, [the mind] do suggest it, or conjure it up, as it were, by a natural kind of magic, and at once give us a conception, and create a belief of it. (ibid.)

So, the third class of signs lead us to conceive of what they signify simply because we are built in such a way as to have such conceptions on encountering such signs. Such a tendency is, according to Reid, simply an inescapable feature of our constitution, and one which we can understand by examining the natural enkinaesthetic relations through which we perceive and are with our world.

This view is noteworthy and, I maintain, entirely correct because it runs wholly counter to the contemporary work on the theory of mind, or how we can tell that and, more particularly, what another person is feeling or thinking. There are two predominant theories: (1) a theory-theory of mind, where children construct theories to explain everything they experience (For proponents of this theory see, for example, Gopnik, 1996a & 1996b, and Gopnik & Meltzoff, 1997), and (2) a simulation theory, where we understand the minds of others by simulating the mental processes in us that would bring about those actions. (For proponents of this theory see, for example, Gordon 1986 and Goldman 2006)

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Reid’s distinctions are insightful and precise and I concur with each of them, but it is only in the case of the third class that he thinks something mysterious is going on, and it is with this claim that I have another, though this time, minor quarrel with his work. There is something just as mysterious or ›magical‹ going on in the first and second classes, and it is the same sort of magic that occurs in the third, except that there is an extra chapter of the story which would need to be told for the third class. 4 It is the ›magic‹ which will be the subject of the second half of this paper, wherein I offer an explanation in enkinaesthetic terms. Taking one of Reid’s examples, in this case an example of the second class of sign, will help us see more clearly what he means. An infant may be put into a fright by an angry countenance, and soothed again by smiles and blandishments. A child that has a good musical ear, may be put to sleep or to dance, may be made merry or sorrowful, by the modulation of musical sounds. (ibid., p. 43)

The claim is then that there is a natural direct and unmediated comprehension of the world which does not first require that the infant be taught what an angry countenance means, the sensations she feels within her body suggest to her an appropriate response, whereby ›appropriate‹ is a meaningful response that demonstrates a grasp or comprehension of the situation. The child responds rhythmically to the music, sleeping, dancing, becoming sorrowful or merry, and again it is because her unmediated bodily sensations suggest these as appropriate interpretations and responses to the different sounds. They are, and will likely become, consistent ways of interpreting the circumstances confronted and felt by the body. This then is the clue to the ›kind of magic‹ to which Reid refers: it is the direct somato-sensory affective experience we, as active agents, have in our felt interrelations with our worlds. The ›magic‹ is the immanence with which the sensation and its suggestion are felt, understood and responded to as This is not a ›chapter‹ that I will attempt to write here, but if I were to write it, it would need to include some examination of the thorny issue of identity and how we justify the continued and distinct existence of objects, how action, action-anticipation, and horizontal possibilities are integrated with bodily kinaesthetic imagination (Stuart 2010a), and, of course, a thorough discussion of Reid’s Common Sense approach in Chapter III Of First Principles in General (Reid 1983). In enkinaesthetic terms the corresponding felt responses and neuro-muscular changes with the third class of signs are minimal compared with the first and second, so, some additional discussion in this vein could also prove very useful.

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though the experiential distance between the perceiver and the perceived has collapsed. Gendlin (1992) describes how this phenomenon is possible in terms of the »implicit interactional bodily intricacy« that characterises the proto-modal relationships of human beings in their practical, everyday, moment to moment engagement. He emphasises the bodily sense we have of our situatedness, the affective kinaesthetic tonalities that underpin these relationships, saying: There is an implicit interactional bodily intricacy that is first – and still with us now. It is not the body of perception that is elaborated by language, rather it is the body of interactional living in its environment. Language elaborates how the body implies its situation and its next behaviour. We sense our bodies not as elaborated perceptions but as the body sense of our situations, the interactional whole-body by which we orient and know what we are doing. (Gendlin 1992, 352)

This bodily intricacy is a precondition for experience, but at the same time, it is feeling bodies in a network of interactions – folding into, enfolding with, and unfolding from other agents and objects – which constitute experience. Its existence is implicit as one of the necessary structures of natural language, that is, of co-agential communication and comprehension. We perceive a smile and there is a bodily change, we are affected and there follows an unmediated urge to smile in return. 5 The intricacy extends beyond individual bodies and agents to the intricate web of interrelations between, for example, agents and objects, the actual and the anticipated, and even between cell and organ. They are all interactional, acting on one another in a reciprocally recursive manner, so that affect in one, affects the other, and so on, and all as aspects of pragmatic living; as Gendlin emphasizes »nature is an implicit intricacy, not a system of self-identical units« (Gendlin 1997, 347). Thus nature is characterized as dynamically-coupled coaffective co-existence, with all action embodying a natural questioning, interpretation, and communication. In our co-agential actions we are continually asking tacit, non-propositional, pre-reflective, preconceptual, plenisentient questions about how our world is, how it I am only now realising the profundity of a remark made by an octogenarian presenter on Highland Radio, Donegal. His name was Don O’Doherty and he used to finish every show with the phrase »If you see someone without a smile, give them one of yours.«. Given what we now know about affective co-agency and enkinaesthesia, it would seem, like Reid before him, he had grasped something ›magical‹ about the felt nature of human interaction.

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continues to be, and how it might be were things different. These questions can be as simple as taking a step forward, reaching out tentatively with our hand, poking something with a stick 6 , or listening attentively to judge if the cause of the sound might be a potential threat. All of this activity is inherently intentional. Being-with and being-among, in the natural implicit intricacy, is necessarily relational and comes already clothed in ›aboutness‹, we might say, that it is already saturated with intentionality for its being relational and coaffective implies that it cannot be otherwise. 7 Every action is directed, every action is anticipatory, every action takes place within a horizon of action possibilities for the agent, and every action asks the implicit non-propositional questions »how is my world now?«, »how is it […] becoming?«. The response to these questions affect the agent and perpetuate a continuously unfolding fresh horizon of action possibilities. It is this perpetual plenisentient, non-conceptual questioning in action and questioning in responding, which constitutes the ›knowing‹ referred to by Gendlin, and such a ›knowing‹ can only occur in natural agents through an enkinaesthetic affective enfolding that enables the balance and counter-balance, the attunement and co-ordination of whole-body action through mutual reciprocal adaptation. Maturana refers to this as ›languaging‹. To language is to interact structurally. Language takes place in the domain of relations between organisms in the recursion of consensual coordinations of actions, but at the same time language takes place through structural interactions in the domain of the bodyhoods of the languaging organisms. […] As the body changes, languaging changes; and as languaging changes the body changes. Here resides the power of words. Words are nodes in coordinations of actions in languaging and as such they arise through structural interactions between bodyhoods. (Maturana 1988, § 9.5)

Languaging occurs within the intricate web of organic interrelations; it is what maintains the structural integrity of the network and the interrelations themselves. It is what occurs between plenisentient questioning and interpreting bodyhoods in the domain of reciprocal affective adaptation, and it is only from this incipient natural language, and in the case of human beings, that an artificial system of See »Curious crows use tools to explore dangerous objects« at http://news.bbc.co. uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_9353000/9353588.stm reported on 14th January 2011, original article Wimpenny, Weir & Kacelnik (2010) 7 For an excellent study of the notion of saturated intentionality see Steinbock 1999. 6

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unique complexity in words and symbols can arise. Thus, Maturana’s notion of languaging has two phases that we can call first-order languaging which emphasises the body, co-agency, and adaptivity, and which is comparable to Reid’s natural language; and second-order languaging which is concerned with words as nodes in the co-ordination of action and the reportability of mental states and states of affairs, and parallels Reid’s artificial language. We find this too in Gendlin’s work, first through the ever-flowing ever-thinking felt body sense of our situations, and second through our shift from the somatic to the semantic, from felt knowing to conceptual knowing. Feeling is always a living texture of environmental interaction. Therefore the flow of felt sense which–along with verbal sound-images–is our thinking, this flow of felt sense implicitly contains the complex world we live in, the environment, our perceptions, the context of all that has been done and said till now, what is being gotten at, the purpose, the definitions, and a very great deal more. And therefore, thinking can be about something […] even though it seems to be only sound echoes and felt sense. (Gendlin 1966, 46)

The enkinaesthetic felt sense lies deep within Reid’s notion of natural language, but to emphasise its processual persistence in the felt sense of the living organism, we must use Maturana’s term ›languaging‹ and shift from ›natural language‹ to ›natural or first-order languaging‹. This shift is crucial for two reasons. Firstly, it captures the essential community and reciprocity that is fundamental for lived experience, and secondly, it represents the dynamics of affective bodyhoods within a horizontal process of plenisentient experientially-entangled communication. All life, all bodyhoods, are situated ›in the world‹ within an implicit intricacy of felt interrelations. A corollary of this is that true agential autonomy is a myth. All action is affective interaction, and all change creates reciprocal change. It is this which we will now develop in relation to the notion of kinaesthesia, enkinaesthesia and direct perception as necessary and sufficient criteria for natural language or first-order languaging.

Enkinaesthesia and Experiential Spilling Over One of our most basic and firmly-held assumptions is that the world of human beings consists of individuals, each with a body which con101 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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stitutes the limit of their experiential world. What we, all too frequently, fail to notice is that it is the semi-permeable nature of the body’s boundary which provides us with the possibility of experience in the first place. Our skin, that semi-permeable membrane, is overrun with an abundance of receptors – sixty kilometres of nerve fibres, fifteen kilometres of veins, with millions of sense receptors for pain, temperature, pressure and touch (Hoffmeyer 2008, 18) – and opens us up to the world, disclosing it to us through our inescapable engagement with it. And the skin is not alone, it is supplemented by the plenisentience of visual, proprioceptive, kinaesthetic, auditory, gustatory, and olfactory senses which are affected by change or motion within our world and which, with internal feedback, can bring about affective change within the sense organs and the rest of the body. Still, it is through our motor, skin and haptic enquiry that we first encounter our existence – we feel the sensation of motion and the directedness of action with its sensory feedback, all of which plants the epistemic seeds of a point of view – and through which we establish our Lebenswelt. From as early as eleven weeks the foetus stretches, reaches and touches the local world within which it is situated. Human foetuses tentatively touch the placenta, umbilicus and the uterine wall with their hands at 11 weeks. They make jaw movements and swallow amniotic fluid, expressing pleasure or disapproval at tastes injected into it by sucking and smiling or grimacing with disgust. Complex movements of trunk, arms and legs position the body, and may react to the mother’s body movements and the contractions of the muscles of her uterus (Lecanuet, et al. 1995; Piontelli 2002; Trevarthen, et al. 2006). (Trevarthen & Reddy 2007)

This motor enquiry develops corporeal capacities like the proprioceptive ›material me‹ (Sherrington 1906) and the tactile senses through afference and re-afference (feedback) which confirm the sensory affects and effects of moving. So, as agents we are naturally kinaesthetic, quickly becoming aware that our bodily movement and action is our own, that it possesses a quality of self-givenness that is immediately manifest in our experience 8 (Henry 1963) and without which our experience would In some fascinating work, Piontelli (2002) reveals marked differences in the behaviour, the community and reciprocity with their world, of twins and singles in utero, and even here there appears a rudimentary self-givenness that grounds their action.

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be meaningless (Merleau-Ponty 1962). In this felt action we become aware of our being, not as a state but as an ongoing process of acting and becoming, always within the ebb and flow of the horizon of action possibilities, and without fail within an affectively-laden, enkinaesthetic dialogue of bodyhoods. 9 We affect others and are affected by them, we move others and are moved by them (Bråten 2007), and all within a reciprocal affective neuro-muscular dynamical temporal flow. Enkinaesthesia, like intersubjectivity and intercorporeality relates to notions of affect, but in this case it is with the affect we have on the neuro-muscular dynamical flow and muscle tension of the other, including other animals, through our direct and our indirect touch. Direct touch includes the physical touch of a caress, a pat on the back, a hug, or the rebuff of the shrugged pulling away from contact. Indirect touch can be achieved through a look 10 where one becomes the object of someone else’s subjective attention and experience, for example, in an unspoken admonishment, a papal blessing which can shrive us of your sins, a friend’s wave from a departing train, or in the way words and language, perhaps a word of recognition and confidence, can alter the way we feel. 11 We exist within an ongoing processual dialogue from our earliest moments in utero to the time in which we cease to feel, and at that point others do not cease to feel, that is, to be enkinaesthetically linked to us. 12 This is part of a universal dialogue that consists of a topologically complex web of relations of the community and reciproBy ›dialogue‹ I mean only the interactivity of agents and not textual, linguistic, or conversational activity. 10 For an interesting elaboration of how we can be affected by the look of another read Chapter 1 of Part 3 of Being and Nothingness by Sartre. 11 Direct touch may be straightforward to describe but experientially it is as vast and variable in effect and affect as indirect touch; the reason has to do with surfaces, boundaries, and borders, and what we perceive to be the limit of the bodily ›self‹. 12 In Stuart 2010b I wrote about how an enkinaesthetic thesis might be used to explain: »[…] the loss of the reciprocal felt intentional relation in grieving for the death of another. For example, a friend has recently lost her cat to cancer, she grieves for the loss. Perhaps we might explain the grief in the following way: the dialogical relation she had with Sara [the cat] continues even though Sara has gone. She still thinks about Sara, expects to see her and to reach out to touch her, and anticipates her purr and her vocalisations. In part my friend’s grief is a result of the absence of the habituated enkinaesthetic feedback in that topologically rich dialogue. We become used to interacting with and being affected by the other, anticipating and receiving feedback from the other, like the purring that the cat does when we stroke it, but that deeply felt 9

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city of sensing and experiencing agents and things and their felt implicit, and, sometimes, explicit intentional co-agency. It is this which co-constitutes conscious relations and the experientially recursive temporal dynamics of the non-symbolic, non-representationallybased experiential horizon for all agents. This is the framework for Reid’s natural language and the hypostasis of the ›kind of magic‹ with which it necessarily engages with its world. The organism does not develop in isolation from what happens around it; it is literally created (hence poien) by nature, while at the same time modifying both nature and itself. In this respect, autopoiesis more accurately describes what in the phenomenological structure of Paarung is generally presented as an experiential circularity, because the former stresses that the autonomy of the living [being] is the very result of its contextual dependence. (Depraz 2008, 240)

In addition to emphasising the neuromuscular dynamics of the agent it also emphasises the entwined, blended and situated co-affective phenomenological structure of Paarung, for example, the rhythmic response to music, to dancing, and becoming sorrowful or merry depending on our company and circumstances. Unlike the circularity that characterizes Paarung, enkinaesthetic activity possesses a recursive dynamics, and it is these experientially recursive temporal dynamics that lead to the formation and maintenance of integral enkinaesthetic structures and melodies. The success of these melodies – the attunement and co-ordination of meaningful whole-body action through first-order languaging – is a »natural kind of magic«. Such deeply felt enkinaesthetic melodies emphasise the dialogical nature of the feeling of being as necessarily having the feeling of being-with, being-among, or even being-in-with our local and distal community, our Mitseinwelt (Stuart 2010b), and demonstrate the paucity of those notions that individuate agents and objects and treat them as singular and independent, that is, as states and substances. It is certainly our ›cohabitation‹, our being in affective relations of community and reciprocity, that secures our living consciousness for one another; the pragmatics of the commitment, of the living and working together are, in a strong sense, to do with survival. But »our living consciousness for one another« is just one element of a much broader ›practical commitment‹ expressed throughout the enkireciprocated response is no longer there to be received. The co-engagement is absent, and the lack of affective feedback is felt quite simply as negative affect and loss.«

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naesthetically co-ordinating, values-realising ongoing processual situation which comprises no well-defined boundaries between agents, actions, substances, and objects, and so, we come to adapt a claim made by Varela by adding in ›enkinaesthetic‹ : If one may consider the environment of a system as a structurally plastic system, the system and its environment must then be located in the intricate history of their structural, enkinaesthetic transformations, where each one selects the trajectory of the other one. (Varela 1989 quoted in Bitbol & Luisi 2004, 102) Thus we exist in a continuous flow of the creation and fragmentation of agential-kinaesthetic, interpersonal, intersubjective, intercorporeal, enkinaesthetic melodies. We routinely spill over into the bodily experience of others for it is this which establishes the community and reciprocity of our affective co-engagement. We might say that, in our cohabitation, we inhabit the other’s activity, for that’s how we learn, how we become enculturated, and how we develop the sensory and kinaesthetic and enkinaesthetic imagination that enables us to anticipate what the other might do. It’s a process that begins with synrhythmic regulation 13 coupling the »volitional and experiential functions of the minds of infant and mother through sympathetic response of their brains to the anatomical forms and dynamics of movement in structures of their body« (Trevarthen, et al. 2006, 107). Thus, the givenness of the infant’s own experience is never in isolation from the givenness of the Other. Enkinaesthetically we experience the feeling of presence of the Other (agential and non-agential alike) alongside the anticipated intentional arc of the Other’s action and movement. As I have argued elsewhere »In our intersubjective openness we don’t just possess a transcendental intersubjectivity (Zahavi 1997), we possess a transcendental enkinaesthesia.« (Stuart 2010b); it is an original constitution of our minds. Through its enkinaesthetic sensitivity the agent can establish the reciprocal affective enfolding required for the timely response and

›Synrhythmia‹ can be defined as the reciprocal co-regulation of well-being or experience. »In each environment the vitality of the child is dependent on regulations across a succession of ›frontiers‹ with the human world, first physiological or amphoteronomic, then by the special direct psychological communications which we define as synrhythmic, and finally by sharing symbolic awareness of culture and language.« (Trevarthen 2006, p. 69)

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adaptation it will need post-natally to survive, and the greatest advantage afforded the burgeoning agent is to feel as it moves, to move as it feels, and to grasp its world ab initio.14 So, enkinaesthesia is the primary somato-sensory-kinaesthetic which enables, through its implicit bodily intricacy and its anticipatory dynamics, the creation of kinaesthetic memories, kinaesthetic melodies, and kinaesthetic imagination. 15 By kinaesthetic memories, melodies and imagination I mean bodily skills or praxis that includes both fine and gross motor skills, like writing with a pencil, playing a musical instrument, or riding a horse, and more local bodily affective activity, like the unreflective, visceral response that provides us with a pre-cognitive ›feeling‹ about potential actions. Enkinaesthesia operates intra- and inter-specifically 16 , but also interobjectively, which is to say, I can be moved by an object, indeed I must be if I am to evaluate it as having an affordance for me; so, without my experiential entanglement with objects and things in my world, I would fail at values-realisation or constraint recognition. 17 This apprehension of a possibility of being, that is, how things might change and what might become, is possible in all organisms because of our phenomenologically primitive experiential entanglement, (Ratcliffe 2008). This entanglement makes it possible for the The ambiguity with the term ›grasp‹ is intentional. For more on the notion of kinaesthetic imagination see Stuart 2007. 16 Interspecies communication is recognised by Reid »A dog or a horse understands, by nature, when the human voice caresses, and when it threatens him.« (Reid 1983, Chp. 4, Sect. II, p. 32–33). 17 In conference presentations of this work I have, at this point, brought up on screen two paintings: Rembrandt’s »Old Man in Red« and Da Vinci’s »Madonna and the Child (The Benois Madonna)«. The aim is not so we could deconstruct the symbolism but instead that we could try to grasp the meanings that we feel in the complex felt relationships that are immediately and directly established between us and them. In the case of the »Old Man in Red« there are two spots of light, one that presents his face and his gaze, and the other reveals his hands. The directness of his gaze and the light on his hands draws our eyes to his hands which are lightly clasped in his lap. His hands are arthritic, his gaze is steady, and his figure is composed. There is calm. There is no anticipation of sudden action or harsh words. Our enkinaesthetic being-with the portrait creates these pre-noetic sensations within the body and all of them meaningful; to express them here requires interpretation into an artificial, second-order language and some part of their significance is lost. Paintings are used in presentations, so that the audience will find themselves in a set of felt relationships with something they could not have predicted. The point is that it makes evident the immediacy of the experiencer’s enkinaesthetic realisation of values. 14 15

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organism, through its intricate felt interrelations, to grasp the intentional trajectory, in relevant cases, of those things with which it exists and co-acts. In this way it anticipates the possibility of change and what that might mean within the action possibilities of its own experiential horizon. It is a pre-noetic sense-making in which the other (organism or object) with whom or with which it is in felt relation is affected by its action and it by theirs. 18 As Cowley, et al. argue »Affective and experience-based systems can thus, together, shape the flow of joint sense-making.« (Cowley et al. 2004, 110). The intentional arc of action is not just a means of putting ourselves into a situation (Merleau-Ponty 1962), it is the means with which we propel ourselves through the – experientially entangled, continuously folding, enfolding and unfolding – situation which constitutes our Lebenswelt with its inevitable Mitseinwelt, and by which we make sense of our world. We can see this in Reid’s basic Principles, particularly Principle Eight Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man which states »That there is life and intelligence in our fellow-men with whom we converse.« (Reid 1983, 277–8). 19 When we approach this philosophically we tend to do something rather convoluted and end up with indirect and inferential notions of subjectivity and others’ minds. But it is the ›magic‹ of direct and non-inferential justification for believing that there is life and intelligence in our fellow-men that Reid wants to maintain, and which he seems to grasp as needing no second-order means of expression. It may be that Reid, with his common sense philosophy 20 , could feel the air thick with the felt relations of a natural language weaving the world together in a community of meanWe must strive to remember that the languaging of bodyhoods is never simply a pair; we are continuously in a topologically complex web of relations of sensing and experiencing agents and things and their felt implicit, and, sometimes, explicit intentional co-agency. This is a fundamental aspect of lived, experiential co-existence. 19 Some readers might think that this is an odd claim to have to make, one might think it is a matter of common sense, but this is exactly why Reid feels the burden to make it. Descartes’ individuating philosophy makes the mind a singularity, a solitary consciousness, that can exist, as a thinking thing, even without sensation; his claim has left a long legacy, for even now we speak about the problem of other minds, the possibility of the philosophical zombie (Viz. Nagel 1970; Kripke 1972; Kirk 2005), solipsism, and so on. 20 See also the work of Dugald Stewart (1753–1828), William Hamilton (1788–1856), and Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746) as Scottish Enlightenment thinkers of the common sense school. 18

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ing, a sensus communis. No artificial language is necessary for sensemaking of this kind. Co-agential enkinaesthetic affect is immediate and direct; it is also unworded and unmendacious without the contrivances and verbal ambiguities of the artifice of spoken and written text.

Conclusion In developing the notion of enkinaesthesia in relation to Reid’s natural language, the implicit semantics of Gendlin’s textured felt sense, and Maturana’s languaging of bodyhoods, I have laid »open [one] of the first principles of human nature«: »That there is life and intelligence in our fellow-men with whom we converse.«, where by ›converse‹ I take Reid to imply the activity of both natural and artificial languaging. In each case the conversation is affectively-laden, dependent on the living texture of our felt sense and what flows between the somatic and the semantic, for in each case »feeling is capable of being explicated into such complex chains of meanings« (Gendlin 1966, 47). In shifts of this kind we are able to establish what matters or has, for us, an affordance, and in making judgements of this kind we are without fail engaged in differential values-realising activity. I have argued that natural languaging activity of this kind begins in utero as the infant begins to establish bodily habits and expectations. These gradually slide into the background, apparently unnoticed, over a period of approximately eighteen to twenty-four months post-natally as the primacy of its prelinguistic, natural first-order languaging comes to an end and the mastery of a second-order, public symbol system begin to take hold. Very soon the artificial secondorder is dominant and is taken as the characteristic of the superiority of human being. Yet, Reid argues that the replacement of the first with the second is a devastating corruption of the natural that plants »in its stead dull and lifeless articulations of unmeaning sounds« (Reid 1983, Chp. 4, Sect. II, p. 34), for the sounds and their words are a matter of human artifice and compact. 21 The essence of the paper has been the claim that Reid’s embodied natural language is a first approximation of Maturana’s structural Interestingly Nietzsche has something similar to say about language in »On Truth and Lie in an Extra-Moral Sense« (Nietzsche 1976).

21

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interactions that arise between bodyhoods, and these interactions are meaningful richly textured enkinaesthetic relations, which exist prenoetically and which give grammar to our Mitseinwelt, our beingwith the world. In its capacity to do this, it is a kind of ›magic‹, and with our proclivity to concentrate on artificial language and blatantly overlook the natural, it has – possibly quite literally, given the anatomical and communicative importance of the hands – performed a very dextrous sleight of hand, remaining hidden or considered insignificant for far too long. The plain truth is that, if we are ever to understand how we become encultured and acquire an artificial language with its dull and lifeless articulations, we must first understand the conditions that make it possible; primary amongst these is the preconceptual enkinaesthetic dialogue, the ›magic‹, of bodyhoods in the implicit intricacy of their felt interrelations.

References Bitbol, M. & Luisi, P. L. (2004). Autopoiesis with or without cognition: defining life at its edge. Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 1, 99–107. Bråten, S. (editor) (2007). On being moved: From mirror neurons to empathy. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Co. Cowley, S. J. (2009). Distributed language and dynamics. Pragmatics and Cognition, 17(3), 495–507. Cowley, S. J., Moodley, S. & Fiori-Cowley, A. (2004). Grounding signs of culture: primary intersubjectivity in social semiosis. Mind, Culture and Activity, 11/2, 109–132. Cottingham, J., Kenny, A., Murdoch, D., & Stoothoff, R. [eds.] (1991). From the letters of 1646 and 1649. In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Depraz, N. (2008). The rainbow of emotions: at the crossroads of neurobiology and phenomenology. Continental Philosophy Review, 41, 237–259. Descartes, R. (1637/1960). Discourse on method, and other writings, (trans. by A. Wollaston). Baltimore, MD: Penguin. Gendlin, E. T. (2009). What first and third person processes really are. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16(10–12), 332–62. — (1992). The primacy of the body, not the primacy of perception. Man and World, 25(3–4), 341–53. — (1966). The discovery of felt meaning. In J. B. McDonald & R. R. Leeper (eds.). Language and meaning, Papers from the ASCD Conference, The Curriculum Research Institute (Nov. 21–24, 1964 & March 20–23, 1965), (pp. 45– 62). Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2039.html

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Susan A. J. Stuart Goldman, A. (2006). Simulating minds: The philosophy, psychology and neuroscience of mindreading. New York: Oxford University Press Gopnik, A. (1996a). The scientist as child. Philosophy of Science, 63, 485–514. — (1996b). A reply to commentators. Philosophy of Science, 63, 552–561. Gopnik, A. & Meltzoff, A. (1997). Words, thoughts and theories. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Gordon, R. M. (1986). Folk psychology as simulation. Mind and Language, 1, 158–71. Henry, M. (1963/1973). L’essence de la manifestation/The essence of manifestation. The Hague: Nijhoff. Hodges, B. H. (2007). Values define fields: The intentional dynamics of driving, carrying, leading, negotiating, and conversing. Ecological Psychology, 19(2), 153–78. Hodges, B. H. & Baron, R. M. (2007). Values as constraints on affordances: Perceiving and acting properly. Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 22(3). 263–94. Hoffmeyer, J. (2008). Biosemiotics, An examination into the signs of life and the life of signs, trans. J. Hoffmeyer & D. Favareau. Scranton & London: University of Scranton Press. Kant, I. (1787/1929). The critique of pure reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith. London: Macmillan Press (A edition 1781 + B edition 1787). Nietzsche, F. W. (1976). On truth and lie in an extra-moral sense. In The portable Nietzsche, edited and translated by W. Kaufmann. New York: Viking Press. Kirk, R. (2005). Zombies and consciousness. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kripke, S. (1972). Naming and necessity. In Semantics of natural language, eds. D. Davidson & G. Harman (pp. 253–355). Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel Maturana, H. (1988). Ontology of observing: The biological foundations of selfconsciousness and the physical domain of existence. In Donaldson R. (ed.), Texts in cybernetic theory. American Society for Cybernetics conference workbook. Felton CA: IV.1–IV.53. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1962). Phenomenology of perception, trans. Colin Smith. New York: The Humanities Press & London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Nagel, T. (1970). Armstrong on the mind. Philosophical Review, 79, 394–403. Pepperberg, I. M. (2002). The Alex Studies, Cognitive and communicative abilities of grey parrots. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ratcliffe, M. (2008). Feelings of being: Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ricoeur, P. (1991). From text to action. Essays in hermeneutics, II, eds. K. Blamey & J. B. Thompson. Evanston,IL: Northwestern University Press. Reid, T. (1769). An inquiry into the human mind: On the principles of common sense, Third Edition. London: Cadell & Longman & Edinburgh: Kincaid & Bell. Reid, T. (1983). Inquiry and essays, ed. R. Beanblossom and K. Lehrer. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Savage-Rumbaugh, S. & Lewin, R. (1994). Kanzi: The ape at the brink of the human mind. New York: Wiley. Steffensen, S. V. & Hodges, B. H. (2010). The ecology of values-realizing in dia-

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Enkinaesthesia and Reid’s natural kind of magic logical and social system. Paper given at the symposium Expression, Engagement, Embodiment: The Ecology of Situation Transcendence, University of Glasgow, February 2010. Steinbock, A. J. (1999). Saturated intentionality. In The body: Classic and contemporary readings, ed. D. Welton (pp. 178–99). London: Blackwell. Stuart S. A. J. (2010a). Conscious machines: Memory, melody and imagination. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 9(1), 37–51. — (2010b). Enkinaesthesia, Biosemiotics and the ethiosphere. In St. J. Cowley et.al. (eds.), Signifying bodies: Biosemiosis, interaction and health (pp. 305– 30). Braga, Portugal: Portuguese Catholic University. — (2007). Machine consciousness: Cognitive and kinaesthetic imagination. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 14(7), 141–53. Stuart, S. A. J. & Thibault, P. J. (2015). Enkinaesthetic polyphony as the underpinning for first-order languaging. Emotions in Language, Theory-researchapplication. U. M. Lüdtke (ed.) (pp. 113–134). Amsterdam, NL: John Benjamins Publishing. Thibault, P. J. (2011). First-order languaging dynamics and second-order language: The distributed language view. Ecological Psychology, 23(3), 1–36. Uexküll, J. v. (1982 / 1940). The theory of meaning. Semiotica, 42(1), 25–87. Wimpenny, J. H., Weir, A. A. S. & Kacelnik, A. (2010). New Caledonian crows use tools for non-foraging activities. Animal Cognition, 14, 459–464. Zahavi, D. (1997). Horizontal intentionality and transcendental intersubjectivity. Tijdschrift voor Filosofie, 59(2), 304–321.

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Somatic – Semantic – Shifting: Articulating Embodied Cultures Donata Schoeller

1.

Language as Process

This chapter will sketch an approach to language which takes account of a thoughtful process of articulation. The content developed in the course of this process cannot be conceived of in terms of identifiable intentions. Rather, what is said clarifies aspects of a background that functions in the meaning of what is said. A kind of subtle practice is required. Drawing on Antonio Damasio’s ›somatic markers‹ as situational information experienced in embodied ways, and on Eugene Gendlin’s ›felt sense‹ as a feeling of experienced intricacy, I want to demonstrate how cultural as well as biographical ›contexts‹ can thus become more articulate. Considering articulation as a subtle kind of intrapersonal interaction opens up new realms of meaning that can also enhance (interpersonal as well as transcultural) understanding. In daily conversation as well as in scientific and creative work there is a risk of relinquishing one’s viewpoint when trying to formulate it, even though the formulation is grammatically correct. Furthermore, by drawing on language games that are easily comprehensible what we actually say in comprehensible terms can sometimes destroy the very significance and subtlety of what we actually mean. Thomas Nagel captures this point in regard to meaningful questions when he describes how: We can feel a question apart from its verbal expression, and the difficulty is to pose it without turning it into something superficial, or inviting answers that may seem adequate to its verbal form but that don’t really meet the problem beneath the surface. (Nagel 1986, 56)

In order to conceptualise this well known challenge Nagael describes, a theory of language has to be able to accommodate the possibility of continuity between a felt context and its articulation, all the while taking possible disturbances or interruptions in that continuity into 112 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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account. When one learns a new language, for instance, one feels the disruption by being able to say only crudely what one thinks or feels. This kind of disruption is felt as a kind of awkwardness or being stuck (stuckness), a feeling that might be described as not being able to move in the language one uses. But the same can happen in one’s own native tongue. A disruption of continuity can be felt if the question one ›feels‹ or the point one is trying to make does not find its adequate form in what one says. According to analytical theories of language, this failure is due to an unclear referent that makes the speech act impossible in principle (Searle 1969). However, if one waits and continues to try one might become more successful in later attempts. This phenomenon implies a view of languaging along the lines of an experiential interaction, rather than symbolic representation or construction. Being aware of this interaction may open up an understanding for the connectivity between (individual) bodies, contexts, cultures and meaning that is unfold-able and also transformable on the basis of practice. This, of course, again implies that practice is at the basis of this kind of connectivity. To understand this requires philosophical models that break away from the skeptical interest in meaning that is focused mainly on truth conditions of finished propositions and their classifications. In the following paragraphs I want to provide a rough sketch of philosophical approaches that can provide perspectives on a continuity involved in the very fabric of meaning that necessitates bringing body- environment interaction, practice, context and culture together. According to classical epistemology, it is primarily the structure and the content of experience that counts as relevant to »knowledge«. Significant epistemological concerns address the kind of sensation that is experienced, the category that can be applied, the cognitive operation involved or the truth-value of a judgment or a claim. The descriptions of clear cut cognitive elements and operations also characterize a computational view of thinking and of human language. To philosophically and scientifically pay attention to an experiential process rather definable cognitions can be considered the result of a radically different kind of epistemological starting point and interest. Due to the pioneering work of hermeneutical, classical American pragmatist and phenomenological philosophers, cognitions came to be understood as the result of primary processes and human rational capacities as developments grounded on historically and multi-generationally grown embodied interactional processes in actual situations. These 113 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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approaches are being widely re-discovered and re-acknowledged today in what is conceived as embodied or situated cognition (cp. Fuchs 2013, Jung 2009, Gallagher & Zahavi 2008, Thompson 2007, Noë 2006, Varela & Thompson & Rosch 1993). The following brief account indicates an opening that is relevant to demonstrate what I seek to term an unfolding or developing dynamic of articulation that can explicate and thereby change the contextual framework in which it operates. Dilthey’s emphasis on the role of »Erleben« highlights an antilinear, even illogical characteristic of experience, which seems essential for thinking. He demonstrates how sequences of experience do not obey categories and logical rules that traditional epistomology has drawn upon to create a cognitive order. Also, the connectivity of life, which Dilthey refers to as »Lebenszusammenhang« (cp. Dilthey 1983), does not obey temporal linearity. Yet, it is this kind of connectivity experienced in the way we live our daily lives that is the ground on which to know how to apply categories. Experienced connectivity, constitutes an implicit sense of self without which logical concepts and categories such as identity or substance would not make sense. With this perspective, Dilthey turns the Kantian epistemological order around: categories of reason cannot be the only basis for constituting our sense of reality. They need to be complimented with what Dilthey terms »Real-Kategorien«. These are not conceptual and do not rest upon definitions. It is the organic development of life and the lived experience situated in historically grown cultures that functions as their point of reference: Eine Formel, die eine reale Kategorie eindeutig bestimmte, ist nicht möglich, da die Unergründlichkeit des Lebenszusammenhangs für das begriffliche Denken in jeder Kategorie wiederkehrt. Und die Ordnung derselben ist nicht zu bestimmen, da man gleichsam an ganz verschiedenen Zipfeln diesen Zusammenhang erfassen kann. (Dilthey 1983, 204)

From this perspective, a one-sided and uni-directional applicability of categories to experience for the sake of conceiving knowledge breaks down. More so, the limitations of categorical thinking come into view, carefully explored by Dilthey in comparing the real-categorical sense of self-identity with the abstract and categorical understanding of identity. What is capable of being conceptualized according to categorical systems and logical rules cannot grasp what can be drawn together according to sequences that are experienced as the »Lebenszu114 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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sammenhang«. Yet, Dilthey does not open up a new dichotomy between thinking and experiencing. He points to a more complex relationship between what might be termed experiential universality, on the one hand, and conceptual universals on the other; both are codependent in more interdependent dimensions than Kantian epistemology prefigures. By conceiving limits of conceptuality that cannot be noticed inside logical and epistemological systems, Dilthey connotes language to be an experiential source of order that is wider than a conceptual one. However, the relation of both is not graspable in hierarchical terms. By noticing and demonstrating how experienced connections, for instance, can deepen the sense of a word’s meaning and how the use of words again reflexively deepen and open up the experience to which they are applied, Dilthey provides perspectives to think of articulation in interactional terms and relations. »Instancing« (cp. Gendlin 1997) a kind of reflectivity that can draw on more than the classical categorical systems of epistemology, he forges ways to think fruitfully into the tension that Thomas Nagel mentions above. With Dilthey one can begin to understand that this tension includes experienced or felt connections that draw on an embodied life story in its historical and cultural embeddedness that, in addition, always exceeds the explicit categorical connection patterns available. What is needed to access this kind of background are formulations that ›work‹ in the experience. Working means that the formulation opens up an implicit question or point in ways that coextensively deepen the experience involved. On a similar note, John Dewey dwells on the presence of a situation as decisive for a relevant use of language and choice of distinctions (Dewey 1931) 1 . By pointing out that situations are not perceived like objects or like a multitude of sensations that only need to be categorically ordered, he allows for this term to expand the epistemological approach, most of all a traditional notion of experience. In a careful phenomenological study, Dewey describes the way in which one »has« a situation as a kind of feeling, even though it cannot be equated with an identifiable emotion or explained as a subjective internal state. Instead of indicating an individual’s state of mind, the kind of feeling Dewey brings to our attention allows access to a context, a kind of background that functions as the framework for being able to ›know‹ John Dewey is increasingly recognized as pioneer on an embodied approach to the mind by Joas 1996, Jung & Heilinger 2009 and Crippen n.y.

1

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what is relevant to say. It is this regulative function of a felt quality of a situation which Dewey emphasizes as necessary, also for inquiry and abstract thinking. The only way not to get lost in the quantity of data collected or not get stuck in a conceptual framework is: sensitivity to the quality of a situation as a whole. In ordinary language, a problem must be felt before it can be stated. If the unique quality of the situation is had immediately, then there is something that regulates the selection and the weighing of observed facts and their conceptual ordering. (Dewey 1938, 70 f.)

This kind of sensitivity takes up the challenge mentioned at the beginning. The danger of losing or letting go of one’s point by verbalizing it can now be described in terms of a sensitivity to the quality of a situation that can be ignored or that can function in formulations in order to stay ›in touch‹ with felt situational regulation. Dewey thus suggests an open process of articulation that involves a situated context that is not »given« as an inner entity, feeling or state of mind, but that needs to be felt or attended to so as to function within a relevant sense-making use of language that provides distinctions that can work in the situation. Even earlier, William James noted a form of subtle intentional regulation that cannot be identified with an explicit intention (feeling, idea etc.). He points to a moment in the languaging process that is not yet language but necessary for the words to come to a speaker as an »intention of saying a thing before he has said it«: It is an entirely definite intention, distinct from all other intentions, an absolutely distinct state of consciousness, therefore: and yet how much of it consists of definite sensorial images, either of words or of things? Hardly anything! Linger, and the words and things come into the mind: the anticipatory intention, the divination is there no more. But as the words that replace it arrive, it welcomes them successively and calls them right if they agree with it, it rejects them and calls them wrong if they do not. It has therefore a nature of its own of the most positive sort, and yet what can we say about it without using words that belong to the later mental facts that replace it? The intention to-say-so-and-so is the only name it can receive. One may admit that a good third of our psychic life consists in these rapid premonitory perspective views of schemes of thought not yet articulate. (James 1950, 253)

Again, the challenge in holding the dynamic between not yet articulated anticipatory thoughts and formulations that come is to conceive of a continuity of sense-making that begins before the finished pro116 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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position. The difficulty thus consists in not identifying (and thereby confusing) the anticipation with the formulation and thus falling into a »double world legend« of an inner and outer world of representable things that constitute the meaning of words, which has been convincingly deconstructed by major thinkers of the 20th century such as Ryle and Wittgenstein. In this volume, Deacon points to a similar challenge. James stresses the regulative function of this continuity, by suggesting an »intention to-say-so-and-so« functions to invite and choose the words, even though this »welcoming« or »rejecting« faculty is not in words itself. Further on in the same chapter, James points out how the same »anticipatory intention« that lets words come, and shifts as a unified whole with every new word being said. In saying what has been intended it may thereby become »fuller and richer than the initial way« we had it (cp. James 1950, 280). MerleauPonty points to a similar characteristic when describing the articulation of a thought as a process of completion. Drawing on organic terms, such as »maturation« to characterize the experience of a formulative process (Merleau-Ponty, 1976, Chapt. VI), Merleau-Ponty points out that the experience of articulating is more like filling a deficit or a need which is felt for as long as we have not succeeded in accurately expressing thoughts. Articulation as an interaction process, ›working‹ in an experienced connectivity (Dilthey), in the felt quality of a situation (Dewey), in the unrepresentative tension between anticipation and formulation (James), in the maturation of thoughts (Merleau-Ponty) becomes even more apparent when studying the process more closely. Mindfulness-related practices involving articulation such as »Focusing« (Gendlin 1981) or the »Elicitation Technique« (Petitmengin 2006) cultivate an awareness of this kind of interaction process on a micro scale. By being attentive towards subtle shifts happening at a fine-grained experiential level when we articulate, one can think, feel, experience and articulate oneself more deeply into the felt relevance of the situation. Thereby, further connections of the experience open up, developing or changing a felt background. In the following, let me demonstrate this in more detail using »Focusing« practice as a basis. »Focusing« makes us aware of how an articulation uncovers a crossing of vast past experience, as fuzzy as it may be, and the present (this might be one reason why in daily communication one agrees on the striking oversimplification of saying »fine« or »good« whenever asked »how are you?«). In feeling a situation, an issue or problem, as 117 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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unclear as it may be, there are volumes of content: What was learned and experienced long ago, what may have happened this morning, the tacit cultural-political conditions we move in, a difficult relationship at home, an upcoming decision at the office, a pain in the back etc., – all this not separately, but in a bodily sense of how we are doing. To paraphrase Damasio, it is »the feeling for what happens« (Damasio 1999), or – what Gendlin calls – a felt »unseparated multiplicity« (Gendlin, 1991B & 1997) that makes situations diversely rich and multi-interpretational from individual to individual. By living in situations, humans carry with them a vast complexity that is not »inside« like furniture inside a house. Rather, the complexity needs attentive development to decipher actions one can account for, to shortterm and long-term intentions that become clearer along the way and to articulations that make sense.

2.

Close Talking

Carl Roger’s pioneering attempts to measure psychotherapeutic progress provides evidence of the kind of interaction involved when trying to articulate something that is not yet easily retrievable in words. To the overall disappointment of the therapeutic professionals, change proved to be dependent not so much on the therapist’s competence and schooling, but on certain ways the clients related to (experiencing) his or her felt situation now. »No significant change is brought about through more analyzing or more intense feeling of emotions« (Gendlin 1964). Gendlin, who played a major role in Roger’s research project, shows that the one factor that seems to matter most is an awareness, a kind referential closeness to the present experienced situation, even if that seems utterly unclear, »fuzzy and murky« (Gendlin 1961 & 1963) and therefore at first quite unable to be formulated. Staying with this kind of feeling, and articulatingfrom rather than about it, slows down the way we usually speak. People might pause for quite a while in the midst of a sentence or frequently correct themselves. Research on this kind of attentive articulative process has shown how experiential connections and meanings open up that affect the experience one is speaking-from« (Gendlin et al. 1968, Klein et al. 1969, Egendorf & Jakobson 1982, Hendricks 2001, Todres & Galvin 2007). The term ›speaking-from‹ (cp. Gendlin 2004) indicates a mode of speaking unlike ›speaking 118 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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about‹ the problem from a detached position that interprets, analyzes and theorizes but that has descriptive words which come ›from‹ feeling the situation. To say it with Dewey: having the felt situation »function« in the emergent relevant distinctions requires immersing oneself in that very feeling. Research on this therapeutic progress also affirms what James said: the anticipatory feeling which lets words »come« moves in relation to the way it is being articulated. It closes down, feels more stuck and tense, or it moves around – quite noticeably in the body – shifting, opening up further, unfolding into pictures, linking to further situations, instances and memories. The noticeable responsive shifts that occur can lead to discernable tension release (cp. Klein et.al. 1985). But evolves more than physical tension release: new ways of experiencing a situation, a problem or an issue become experientially available and thus new possibilities of thinking, acting and communicating. Gendlin calls this kind of responsive sense »felt sense« and the dialogical kind of process that interacts with it »Focusing«. »Focusing« (serves for me as an example that) indicates the kind of subtle yet powerful practice involved in articulations that are able to speak-from backgrounds in ways that do not pre-suppose them, but makes them accessible and understandable by developing and thereby changing the feeling one speaks-from. However, »Focusing« is a misleading term as it invites the idea of a kind of focused attention or intention. But »Focusing« neither means to introspect on »internal objects« nor to intentionally focus on an idea or emotion. Rather, it is better explained with the words of Petitmengin and Bitpol as a »defocusing of the field of attention« by practicing a »non-observational awareness« (Petitmengin, Bitpol 2013 p. 179 f.). The authors show how Husserl had already become very specific in characterizing phenomenological reduction as giving access not to the inner world, but rather to the whole field of experience before exclusive »intentional focusing has narrowed down the region of our full awareness« (ibid). Along these lines, Petitmengin and Bitpol suggest a characterization which captures the Focusing attitude rather precisely: »far from being like a gaze on some object (be it focused or expanded), it is tantamount to (re) establish an intimate and close contact with what is to be explored (with the field of lived experience)« (ibid, p. 181). Metaphors of touch seem more accurate to explicate one’s relation to experiential backgrounds than perceptual descriptions. A similar point has been made by Ratcliffe who observes that in tactile sensation, as in experience, there are no clear 119 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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boundaries between what is noticed, experienced or felt and the person noticing, experiencing and feeling something (cp. Ratcliffe 2008 B). Early on, Gendlin describes the »field of lived experience« as an intertwined relation of thinking and feeling, – a revolutionary concept back in 1960. Damasio indicates something similar today, emphazising how such a view is still very counter culture. Gendlin conceives a notion of feeling that is not identical to emotions, but incorporates a vast scope of contextualisation as »a living texture of environmental interaction.« It contains the »complex world we live in, the environment, our perceptions, the context of all that has been done and said till now, what is being gotten at, the purpose, the definitions, and a very great deal more.« (1966, 45) Gendlin’s notion of the »felt sense« in this way also anticipates Ratcliffe’s criticism of a too rudimentary juxtaposition of bodily feeling and emotional intentionality (2008 A). More importantly, Ratcliffe notes that it is only through a change in existential background-feelings that these kinds of feelings can come to awareness and become conscious. Gendlin’s contribution is to demonstrate how awareness of this feeling-dimension can intialize a consciousnessenhancing process of change that is driven by being articulated. This difficulty of becoming aware of this kind of feeling dimension has to do with the fact that one is trained to be intentionally focused on thoughts, contents, bias, emotions and knowledge. Therefore, one hardly ›knows how‹ to pay attention to feelings that are continuously there. This makes it difficult to broaden awareness, as Peirce has clearly pointed out: It is extremely […] difficult to bring our attention to elements in experience which are continually present. For we have nothing in experience with which to contrast them; and without contrast, they cannot excite our attention […] the result is that round-about devices have to be resorted to in order to enable us to perceive what stares us in the face with a glare that, once noticed, becomes almost oppressive with its insistency. (CP 1:134) 2

The »roundabout device« that the practice of »Focusing« establishes is not only to learn how to »defocus« our field of attention in order to become aware of experiential processes »continually present« and thus most difficult to notice – as in mindfulness meditation –, but to I quote following Dewey: »Prefatory Remarks«, to G. H. Mead, Philosophy of the Present, Prometheus Books: Chicago 2002, 33. The omissions are his.

2

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engage in articulating them. This again needs a certain training technique in what one might call close talking. Close talking, a term I derive from close reading, is a mode of talking that does not detach from the specific way the situation is felt at that moment. That is, it does not jump to interpretations or conclusions. Instead, as in close reading, it stays carefully close to the felt »texture« of the issue, situation or problem. Very helpful for this process is the presence of an empathic person who listens. This support-frame helps to stay focused on what usually is not in focus, by seeming to double the situation in some way: the listener, listening and reflecting the articulative process helps the person articulating to be attentive in an unusually close way. The listener, by repeating what is said, thus helps the speaker to stay in touch with tacit dimensions of experience that are not easy to express because they are present in such a constitutive and background-like way and not available like an easily identifiable referent. Paradoxically, in practicing this defocused way of attention, it becomes possible to »refer directly« to what is situationally experienced at that very moment (cp. Gendlin’s direct reference in his article in this volume), by developing it with the means of language. One might say: by mirroring or saying back, the listener in this way helps to »hold« a referent-in-forming. In a daring analogy drawing on quantum-mechanics, one might even say: like a particle forming by being observed what is being described in »Focusing« forms as »something« by this very process of attending and speaking-from it. Contents arising in this way do not come about by developing the conceptual, logical or analytical implications of the words applied, however interesting that may be. Instead, speaking-from the experiential process means always to go back and sense what has changed, that is, to attend to the bodily response of what has been described and again – speaking-from there. This back and forth movement of attention leads one to notice how the process creates subtle experiential contrasts as »felt sensing«, thus responding in very precise and yet undeterminable ways to the articulations applied. Even a feeling which seems entirely somatically based, like a cramp in the neck, a pinching in the heart area or pressure in the stomach can either step by step or suddenly open up into meaningful incidents that clarify the present situation by creating connections that allow a more conscious experience of what before was only implicitly felt. A feeling that in the beginning may have only seemed »fuzzy and murky,« thus opens up in precise aspects with interrelated entanglements to many other 121 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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situations, factors, values, thoughts. This reaches far beyond the embodied alphabet offered by the New Phenomology of Hermann Schmitz, which only accounts for narrowness or wideness. »Focusing« on a »felt-sense«, a vast alphabet of feeling opens up: one can feel »empty boxes that hurt«, »knots that push«, »thick walls that separate from aliveness«, one feels »the good feeling of not being alone«, one feels specific »qualities of connectedness«, or »feels cutting pain that is not bodily«, one feels »the pressure of something grey […]« (cp. Gendlin 1998). Paradoxically, close-talking as a »responsive« way of articulating thus conveys an awareness of a situation, issue, problem, that leads beyond it. Whereas detached theorizing does not change the felt quality of the situation, no matter how far fetched the interpretations may be and where they lead us, close-talking techniques of »Focusing« unfold thick connections that enrich, expand and change the sense of the situation as well as the logical routes of thinking possible in it (Gendlin 2004, Deloch 2010). An understanding of background evolves that makes it possible to ›objectify‹ in an embodied and not theoretical way what was previously considered non-communicable. This opens new routes for understanding a situation and for making oneself understood. In this way, the close interaction between ›verbalizing‹ and ›felt sensing‹ open new continuities, new ›ways forward‹ in articulative sequences that also shift the experiential process. This kind of ›movement‹ is captured in Gendlin’s term of »carrying forward« (cp. Gendlin 2004). From here, the feeling of being stuck and the paralysis that I mentioned at the beginning become graspable. What I then termed a disruptive continuity between the sense of the question and its articulation can now be understood in terms of an interaction that needs practices which involve more than ordinary training in languagegames that contemporary philosophers of language have emphasized since Wittgenstein. It needs the engagement of a felt quality of a situation that is not to be identified with the intentions one communicates. This implies a ›defocused‹ attention to ›touch‹ a felt background so that it can function in the ›coming‹ of the words that interact in ways that change it. In this way, language can be used to overcome contextualized (biographical as well as cultural) presuppositions, which prove helpful in therapeutic and creative processes. These practices may also prove increasingly vital for fostering trans-

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cultural methodologies of understanding and integration in the context of problems caused by migration. On this note, the importance of that attitude of kindness in the process cannot be overemphasized. The value of kindness or gentleness as a reflective mode is rarely noted. Kindness or friendliness seem to be an attitudinal environment, one might say, that allows a subtle and micro-genetic sequence to unfold into a more conscious way of »having« the lived experience of one’s present situation (always of course involving uncountable past situations). What, according to Peirce, stares us in the face with regard to its insistency in this way becomes a secure resource for experiencing a felt situation in its rich connectedness to many more aspects of lived experience and »Lebenszusammenhänge«. In the following section, I wish to briefly indicate how the abovementioned articulative process affects our understanding of the body. The possibility of somatic-semantic shifting that carries us beyond disruptions caused by the incapacity to say what is at stake in a background-like way calls for a philosophy that is capable of accounting for a continuity of embodied situation and use of language, i. e. for the »carrying forward capacity« of using words.

3.

Responsive Process

In his book Incomplete Nature, Terrence Deacon reflects in »Chapter 0«, that what matters in our actions is not available as a materially and energetically present thing that can be measured and analysed into its components. He describes how value and purpose even of a book, for instance, is what is not there in the way the book is there as an object with a certain weight and size and materiality. He makes the same point with regard to science and academic activities: what keeps it going, what keeps scientists working are not the things, the buildings, the books, the machines, but the driving force of what Deacon calls »absential features«. They do not lend themselves to measurements and descriptions in the scientific terms with which scientists work. »Absential features« – what is lacking or absent in terms of a measurable quantity – is what constitutes the fabric of purpose, aim, values, goals, that is: the specific centre around which human lives, activities and strivings evolve. Thus, Deacon critically comments: »If the most fundamental features of human experience are considered 123 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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somehow illusory and irrelevant to the physical goings-on of the world, then we, along with our aspirations and values, are effectively rendered unreal as well.« (Deacon 2011, 12) 3 Deacon’s point demonstrates the specificity of what a philosophy of language must tackle by thinking into the interactive challenge of an articulative process. Dewey’s emphasis on »need« as the core feature of an organism’s relationship to its environment complements with this perspective: Need remains a constant factor but it changes its quality. With change in need comes a change in exploratory and searching activities, and that change is followed by a changed fulfillment or satisfaction […]. Of human organisms it is especially true that activities carried on for satisfying needs so change the environment that new needs arise which demand still further change in the activities of the organism by which they are satisfied; and so on in a potentially endless chain. (Dewey 1938, 28)

Gendlin’s philosophy of language evolves around this kind of need as characteristic for the organism’s relationship to its environment. His thinking shows how this essential feature must not be lost when dealing with the dynamic of symbolic processes. One might say that his approach draws on »absential features« methodologically, in order to think a continuity of body-environment interaction and the human use of symbols in situations. Gendlin not only describes »absential features«, he demonstrates their »working« or »functioning« in the kind of concepts he uses to grasp a focused yet open relation of body and environment evolving in an undeterminable evolutionary process. Along these lines, Gendlin introduces a notion of »implying« that embraces a relation of body-environment that cannot be grasped according to logical concepts alone, but instead according to organic sequences, such as hunger and feeding. Taking Dewey’s radical comparison of thinking and digesting one step further 4 , he draws attention to the family-relatedness of an articulative process and the process of eating. It is not enough to describe both sequences in external Deacon adds: »No wonder the all-pervasive success of the sciences in the last century has been paralleled by a rebirth of fundamentalist faith and deep distrust of secular determination of human values.« (2011, 12) 4 Dewey writes: »Material used in reflection change even more rapidly than materials employed in meeting hunger and thirst. Their metabolism is at quicker pace. Genuinely to think of a thing is to think of implications that are no sooner thought of than we are hurried on to their implciations. There is no rest for the thinker, save in the process of thinking.« (Dewey 1958, p. 118) 3

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temporal terms of an observer noticing only that hunger comes before feeding or a sentence after someone intends to say something. The consecutive relation between hunger and food does not only apply metaphorically to an anticipatory intention of formulating something and finding the right word for it. Rather, one must engage the experiential dimension to open up a more specific relation that, as a surprising consequence, cuts across the mind and body split in order to be explicated. Gendlin demonstrates this with a simple step. By suggesting that on an experiential level hunger »implies« eating, one again needs the experiential level to be able to formulate what eating is in relation to hunger. Gendlin notes: If hunger is the implying of eating, then eating is the »…« of hunger. The term we want is implicit in the »…« and when we get the term it will do to our »…« what eating does to hunger. (Gendlin 1997, 8)

To be able to say what eating is in relation to hunger, one has to engage the experience of what it is like to eat »into« hunger. Many different formulations, words and descriptions may come. Filling the open slot with a fitting formulation will not copy or construct the happening experience, but will »function« within an implicit understanding in ways that may or may not carry forward an experienced meaning in the forming of a sentence. The expressions will change the unfinished sentence in a more or less satisfactory way that one can also feel the more closely one tries to explicate the experience. This simple example assimilates what seems far flung in terms of the Cartesian paradigm – the »body’s« act of eating, on the one hand, and the »mind’s« act of symbolizing, on the other. To fill the gap in the sentence, the experience of what it is like to eat functions in allowing words to come. Symbolization and the bodily experience work together. Gendlin discerns seven different functional relationships of »felt meaning« and symbols (Gendlin 1962). A Process Model spells out the bodily, behavioral and cultural intricacy involved. Every word, phrase, sentence, every emerging structure and connection, every new definition can thus be understood as »carrying forward« an »implying« that is very precise. However, what is thus developed is not predetermined. At the same time, not every formulation will do. It is this kind of implicit precision that the text develops while developing the model. One could also say: explicating the process of explication provides its basic concepts of continuity: »occurring into implying« 125 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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(Gendlin 1997, 10). It proves to be applicable from body-environment interaction up to abstract discursive processes. The concept of »occurring into implying« can itself be understood as functional and not representative: it functions into the implicit understanding, which can thereby unfold further and become more differentiated. The »special relationship« of body-environment that Gendlin primarily spells out as »occurring into implying« can thus open up into further process concepts. The relationship of what occurs and what is implied is not a logical one in the sense that what occurs is identical with what is implied. Rather, it is a process of change, albeit not in an arbitrary way. Gendlin refers to it as a »carrying forward« (Gendlin 2004). Carrying forward proves to be a concept of continuity applicable to any occurring in relation to living processes by formulating a decisive characteristic: how an organism relates to an occurrence depends on how this, changes or stops the ongoing interaction-process. When something occurs that is »implied«, a process is thereby »carried forward« that changes the »implying«. This change does not happen in random ways. Rather, implying implies a change in implying (cp. A Process Model, Chapter II). Following this, a next specific occurrence is needed to carry the new implying forward. Gendlin emphasizes: only after carrying forward has occurred can one ›know‹ what ›was‹ implied. The point is to distinguish a kind of relation between occurring and implying that can account for continuation, but also for interruptions, stops in the process or even an entirely stopped process. Also, »occurring into implying« makes conceivable that nothing happens to a living organism that does not have more complex consequences and changes than the spectator can observe. On this conceptual foundation, Gendlin’s selfreflective methodology develops an amazingly intricate understanding of the inseparability of body-environment, of feeling, behavior and of language that steadily grows in implicit complexity, making conceivable how even slight occurrences (such as a movement, a feeling or a word) can make for tremendous impact and change. At the same time, Gendlin’s approach provides an understanding of how living organisms re-create the environment that is inseparable from their process. This feature manifests as a red thread from simple organic processes to the abstract process of writing and thinking. A contextual environment is created by means of an active process of felt meaning interacting with symbols and carrying forward a deliberate development we call thinking. In Wittgensteinian terms, the 126 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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meanings of the words we use in writing a text depend on how expressions become meaningful in the specific ways we use them in a situation. Re-working the situation can also manifest ways of opening up further thinking, feeling and communicating. Meaning and context in this way evolve and grow together. Gendlin writes: It is important to realize that for us today, also, words form in a bodily way. The right words must come to us. (If they don’t, there is little we can do about it, except wait, and in a bodily way, sense what our situation is, and what we sensed that we were about to try to say.) It is our bodily being in the situation we are in, that lets the right words come. If the reader would stop for a moment, and self-observe, it will be immediately clear. The words of speech and thought ›just come‹. How do they come? We do not sift through many wrong words, as if going through a file. We don’t ›select‹ words from among many other words. The right words, or close to the right words, ›just come‹. What precedes this coming? Sometimes a bodily sense of the situation. But often there is no separately attended to sense of this kind. Being in the situation lets the words come. The system of interrelated words and the system of interrelated situations and interactions is, in some basic way, a single system. And, in another basic way, there are two interrelated systems: the system of words and the system of our living in situations (1997, 188).

By Chapter VIII of A Process Model, Gendlin has created a new language to explicate the plasticity and implicit richness of the interaction between these two systems. Situated feeling, its precise and intricate kind of implying interacts with a system of symbols that is able to reconstitute its own situations. The »crossing« of the two allows for growth of meaning (Gendlin 1995). The emergence of symbolic processes grounded deeply in the relation of bodily-environment-interaction in this way spells a Deweyan idea of continuity, which the classical pragmatist describes as follows: its meaning excludes complete rupture on one side and mere repetition of identities on the other; it precludes reductions of the ›higher‹ to the ›lower‹ just as it precludes complete breaks and gaps. The growth and development of any living organism from seed to maturity illustrates the meaning of continuity. (Dewey 1938, 23)

On the foundation of a basic model of body-environment interaction in the first five chapters, Gendlin gradually conceives of behavioral capacities as a thick and complex space extending and changing the 127 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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body-environment relation. In this space, gestures and sounds may begin to function in new ways that do not only carry forward behavior. Gendlin proposes how this enables the generation of a new space, growing out of behavior and the way body is and feels itself in the behavior space. Step by step the model thus makes conceivable how symbolic interactions take over, becoming the new space in which humans behave and interact, without leaving the already complexly elaborated felt behavior space behind. Vast new possibilities constitute the symbolic space thus emerging by »crossing« and »versioning« behavioral sequences in new ways, creating a new system of (symbolic-situational) interrelations, and also new ways to feel, to have and to carry forward actions. The »crossing« of these two spaces and systems that »inter-affect« each other is what Gendlin calls a situation. Gendlin conceives of the emerging complexity on each level by formulating concepts to express mutually implict relations, such as »original interaffecting« or »schematized by schematizing« or »cross-contextual formation« (cp. A process model, Chapter IV). A kind of organic thinking is thereby cultivated enabling us to understand every occurence in terms of a complex change of implicit sequences interaffecting each other (as mentioned above). The resulting possibility to conceive how a present occurrence can thus change its own implicit conditions, rather than being only determined by them, concerns the philosophy of time as much as an understanding of the effects of psychotherapy. The inside/outside split thereby appears as an emergent property of human living in a surprisingly straight-forward way: much more happens in gesturing or speaking than can be observed only as simple signs or sounds. The human space with its symbolic connections has become wider, has more experiential possibilities, more implicit sequences, more interaffective relations than a behavior space without symbolic elaborations. Symbols do not adequately »copy« the vastness of behavioral possibilities. Gendlin introduces a new verb to grasp how gestures and then symbols function in behavior: they version behavioral sequences and implicit sequences implied by these sequences as well as bodily process implicit in behavior. Symbolic versioning thus forms and changes the implicit structure of situations. Along these lines, one can slowly begin to philosophically underpin the difficulty I began with: Nagel’s challenge of adequately articu128 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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lating the sense of a question »without turning it into something superficial, or inviting answers that may seem adequate to its verbal form but that don’t really meet the problem beneath the surface«. The complexity of the two interaffecting and inter-related systems of occurring situations and symbols make this difficulty far more interesting than a dubious metaphysical encounter of inner and outer worlds and their representations. (Understanding this challenge on the basis of a creative continuity furthermore emphasizes the role of practice. This will become clearer, I hope, in the following and final section of my article.

4.

Felt Sense and Somatic Marker

What Gendlin depicts as the effective interaction of symbols and experienced meaning can also be partnered with Damasio’s differentiation between emotion and feeling. Emotions, as Damasio suggests, are not just the classical joy, anger, sadness etc. but »complex bodily (bio-chemical, neuronal, organic, muscular) »responses« that help the organism to lead its life. Damasio writes: »Emotions are about the life of an organism, its body to be precise and their role is to assist the organism in maintaining life.« (Damasio, 1991, 51). The changes caused by emotions in the brain, in the biochemical homeostasis of the body, the visceral and muscular states, are depicted as feeling. We can also register the changes that these emotional changes trigger. This is what Damasio calls feeling. There are complex confluences of resonance between emotion, feeling and feeling of the feeling that Damasio describes in the following: We can feel our emotions consistently and we know we feel them. The fabric of our minds and of our behavior is woven around continuous cycles of emotions followed by feelings that become known and beget new emotions, a running polyphony that underscores and punctuates specific thoughts in our mind and actions in our behavior. (Damasio 1999, 43).

Feeling, according to Damasio, is the »very threshold« between being and conscious being. It is this processual approach of transitions from feeling to consciousness that importantly relates Damasio’s and Gendlins’s perspectives. It applies a phylogenetic as well as ontogenetic 129 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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level. This conception of feeling does not involve a rigid separation between different degrees of consciousness. Feeling has the potential to lead one from background states one is hardly aware of to deliberately experiencing aspects of an intricate background. This is what Gendlin’s practices and philosophy demonstrate vividly. According to Damasio, feeling is a kind of informative shadow of the cognitive process, which contains further bodily data to be experienced and to be processed. Damasio writes about the constant co-occurence of a cognitive and felt process, which he emphasizes contra the tide of dominant conceptions in cognitive science: Feelings are just as cognitive as any other perceptual image, and just as dependent on cerebral-cortex processing as any other image. […] Feelings let us mind the body, attentively, as during an emotional state, or faintly, as during a background state. They let us mind the body ›live‹, when they give us perceptual images of the body, or ›rebroadcast‹, when they give us recalled images of the body state appropriate to certain circumstances, in ›as if‹ feelings. Feelings offer us a glimpse of what goes on in our flesh, as a momentary image of that flesh in juxtaposed to the images of other objects and situations; in so doing, feelings modify our comprehensive notion of those other objects and situations. (Damasio 1994, 159)

Damasio’s powerful notion of »minding the body« expresses how fine visceral and muskuloskeletal adjustments confer informative responses to a situation, which – as cerebral patterns – echo cerebral patterns of thought, memories and decisions. He is known for pointing out the importance of these functions in decision-making. When the felt feed back loops are damaged, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to navigate through the boundlessness of all things to be considered, that is, to be able to live efficiently on a daily basis. This is where Damasio’s »somatic marker« comes into play. In most situations in which something has to be decided, the components needing consideration unfold with extraordinary speed, even if only in glimpses, not completely thought through, so fast that not everything can be considered. In this process Damasio discovers the role of what he calls »gut feeling« (Damasio, 1994, 173). The possibility of which he conceives as a kind of automated signal, formed out of situative trainings, learned sequences, punishment and reward-procedures as embodied patterns. Somatic markers contain complex information and they change with further living experience. He writes:

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Somatic markers are thus acquired by experience, under the control of an internal preference system and under the influence of an external set of circumstances which include not only entities and events with which the organism must interact, but also social conventions and ethical rules. (Damasio 1994, 179)

As they are modalities of situational learning, the programmed patterns are individually different. In this sense one can talk of embodied cultures that differ from individual to individual. They support decision-making concerning the plentitude of embodied scenarios, concerns, risks, innumerable aspects, which need consideration, by reducing the effort to go through all these details: »because they provide an automated detection of the scenario components, which are more likely to be relevant« (1994, 175). Although Damasio describes the intricate kind of relation and complex information contained in these markers, his language for the signal effect emphasizes a dual character: »happy« or »sad feeling«, »danger« or »go for it«, »painful«, »not-painful«. Noticing this dual kind of response – this kind of »definite« answer from the body is what the popularizing literature to »somatic markers« further propagates and which one can find as a reduced content in seminars for managers and the like. Like the »somatic marker«, the »felt sense« denotes an interwoven constellation of preferences, circumstances, events, habits, conventions and rules. But the significant distinction is that Gendlin conceives and uncovers the possibility of a responsiveness referring to this complexly unclear sense. He also emphazises that this kind of »sense« becomes a referent only through the act of tending to it, staying with it, interacting with it, rather that merely re-acting to it. In attending to this felt mesh, which we experience as a situation or the challenge of deciding in a situation, differentiating connections to other situations, values and experiences open up and make new ways of deciding and approaching available: From a felt sense we can obtain much more intricate and better information about the situation, and how we are living in it. The great amount of preseparated information I mentioned earlier is implicit in the felt sense. But at first, when a felt sense comes, it is an unclear, murky sense, and seems quite unpromising. One does not know what it is one feels. To spend time attending to such a concrete sense of something, without quite knowing what it is, that is what we call ›focusing‹. (1991A, 258)

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One can therefore summarize the relation between the »somatic marker« and the »felt sense« as follows: what Damasio describes as the complex conditions of the possibilities of a »somatic marker« (the embodied culture incorporating the situations in which it forms) manifesting in dual possibilities, becomes potential, accessible information, by attending to the »felt sense«. What thereby opens up is a more conscious way of understanding ourselves in our situation. In other words, what Damasio conceives of as the complex conditions of the possibility of »somatic markers«, i. e. everything we have learned and experienced, (being all the situations that participated in forming these markers), Gendlin thinks of as a gradually accessible content, which has the potential to unfold step by step into a more conscious way of being in the situation 5 . Becoming more conscious of a situation by realizing how the somatic signal relates to a mesh of situations, one better understands why one feels and thinks the way one does. Furthermore: feeling in this gradual understanding way can subtly shift the way one feels. Thus a space is created in which experiencing functions without determining our spectrum of possible actions and reactions. Responding to the somatic sense as an embodied culture in this careful way allows a movement that carries out-dated patterns forward so that they need not stay the same. Finally, understanding the intricacy of our own experiencing in this way enables a more skillful, non-reductive interaction with the complexity of others. This kind of practice, which attentively engages felt aspects of meaning in articulation leads to an understanding that helps think across the mind-body split, as well beyond the limitations of incorporated cultures. This again opens up the possibility of more degrees of freedom in communicative practices enhancing interpersonal as well as intercultural means of understanding.

As I quoted above: »we must take care not to forget that one can ›specify‹ highly detailed aspects of (this kind of feeling), each of which can be referred to very specifically by our attention, each of which can be employed to give rise to very many specific meanings.« (Gendlin 1962, 14 f.)

5

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References Bitbol, M. & Petitmengin, C. (2013). A defense of Introspection from within. Constructivist Foundations, 8 (3), 269–279. Crippen, M. (n.y.). Refinements of the wheel: Dewey, situated cognitive science and greek thought. (Under Review) Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society. Damasio, A. R. (1999). Feeling of what happens: Body and emotion in the making of consciousness. New York: Harcourt Brace. — (1994). Descartes’ error: Emotion, reason and the human brain. New York: Putnam Publishing. Deacon, T. (2011). Incomplete nature. How mind emerged from matter. New York: Norton & Company, Deloch, H. (2010). Das Nicht-Sagbare als Quelle der Kreativität. E. T. Gendlins Philosophie des Impliziten und die Methode Thinking at the Edge. In S. Tolksdorf & H. Tetens (eds.): In Sprachspiele verstrickt. Oder: wie man der Fliege den Ausweg zeigt. Verflechtungen von Wissen und Können (pp. 259–284). Berlin, New York: de Gruyter. Dewey, J. (1958). Experience and nature. Mineola: Dover Publications. — (1938). Logic of inquiry. New York: Holt. — (1931). Qualitative thoughts. In J. Dewey: Philosophy and Civilization (pp. 93–116). New York: Minton, Balch & Company. Dilthey, W. (1983/1832): Leben und Erkennen. Ein Entwurf zu erkenntnistheoretischen Logik und Kategorienlehre. In Texte zur Kritik der historischen Vernunft. Herausgegeben von Hans-Ulrich Lessing (pp. 190 ff.). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Egendorf, A. & Jacobson, L. (1982). Teaching the very confused how to make sense: an experiential approach to modular training with psychotics. Psychiatry, 45, 4, 336–350. Fuchs, T. (2013). Das Gehirn – ein Beziehungsorgan. Eine phänomenologischökologische Konzeption. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Gendlin, E. (2015). Ein Prozess-Modell. Übers. und eingeleitet von D. Schoeller und C. Geiser. Freiburg: Alber. — (2004). The new phenomenology of carrying forward. Continental Philosophy Review, 37 (1), 127–151. — (1998). Focusing-oriented-therapy. A manual oft he experiential method. New York: Guilford Press. — (1997). A process model. New York: Focusing Institute. — (1995). Crossing and dipping: some terms for approaching the interface between natural understanding and logical formulation. Minds and Machines, 5 (4), 547–560. — (1991A). On emotion in therapy. In J. D. Safran & L. S. Greenberg (Eds.), Emotion, psychotherapy and change, pp. 255–279. New York & London: Guilford. From http://www.focusing.org/gendlin/docs/gol_2068.html

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Donata Schoeller — (1991B). Thinking beyond patterns: body, language and situations. In B. den Ouden & M. Moen (Eds.), The presence of feeling in thought (pp. 25–151). New York: Peter Lang. — (1981) Gendlin, E. (1981). Focusing. New York: Bantam. — (1966). The discovery of felt meaning. In J. B. McDonald & R. R. Leeper (Eds.), Language and meaning. Papers from the ASCD Conference, The Curriculum Research Institute (Nov. 21–24, 1964 & March 20–23, 1965), pp. 45– 62. Washington, DC: Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development. — (1964). A theory of personality change. In P. Worchel & D. Byrne (eds.), Personality change (pp. 100–148). New York: John Wiley & Sons. — (1962). Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning. Chicago: Chicago University Press. — (1961). Experiencing: A variable in the process of therapeutic change. American Journal of Psychotherapy, 15: 2, 233–245. Gendlin, E., Beebe, J., Cassens, J., Klein, M. & Oberlander, M. (1968). Focusing ability in psychotherapy, personality and creativity. In J. M. Shlien (Ed.): Research in psychotherapy. Vol. III (pp. 217–241). Washington: DC: APA. Hendricks, M. (2001). Focusing-oriented/Experiential psychotherapy. In D. Cain & J. Seeman (Eds.): Humanistic psychotherapy: Handbook of research and practice (pp. 221–251). Washington, DCL: American Psychological Association. James, W. (1950). The principles of psychology. Bd. 1. 1890. Neuaufl. New York: Dover. Joas, H. (1996). Die Kreativität des Handelns. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Jung M. (2009). Der bewusste Ausdruck. Anthropologie der Artikulation. Berlin & New York: De Gruyter. Jung, M. & Heilinger, J. (Hg.) (2009). Funktionen des Erlebens. Neue Perspektiven des Bewusstseins. Berlin/New York: De Gruyter. Klein, M. H., Mathieu-Coughlan, P., Gendlin, E. T., & Kiesler, D. J. (1985). The experiencing scales. In W. P. Pinsof & L. S. Greenberg (Eds.), The psychotherapeutic process: A research handbook (21–72). New York: Guilford. Klein, M. H., Mathieu, P. L., Gendlin, E. T. & Kiesler, D. J. (1969). The experiencing scale. A research and training manual. 2 Vols. Madison: Wisconsin Psychiatric Institute. Merleau-Ponty, M. (1976). Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard. Nagel, T. (1986). The View from Nowhere. Oxford & New York: Oxford Univ. Press. Noë, A. (2006). Action in Perception. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Petitmengin, C. & Bitbol, M. (2009). The validity of First-Person Descriptions as authenticity and coherence. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 16(11–12), 363–404. Petitmengin, C. (2006). Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person. An Interview Method for the Science of Consciousness«, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 5, 229–269. Ratcliffe, M. (2008 A). Feelings of being. Phenomenology, psychiatry and the sense of reality. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Somatic – Semantic – Shifting: Articulating Embodied Cultures Ratcliffe, M. (2008 B). Touch and situatedness. International Journal of Philosophical Studies. 16 (3), 299–322. Searle, J. (1969). Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, Ch. (1997). Self-exploration and modernity. In F. Varela (ed.): Sleeping, dreaming and dying (p. 14–21). Boston: Wisdom Publications. Todres, L. & Galvin, K. (2008). Embodied interpretation: a novel way of evocatively re-presenting meanings in phenomenological research. Qualitative Research, 8(5), 568–583.

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The emergent process of thinking as reflected in language processing 1 Terrence W. Deacon

Introduction It has been common practice to explore the process of thinking in terms of our most familiar publicly available aid to thought: language. Much of contemporary cognitive theory takes its lead from a detailed analysis of language. But in evolutionary terms language is an unprecedented, most recent, most divergent, most highly differentiated form of social communication and its role in organizing cognition is likely also just a recent overlay on much more ancient and basic mental processes. Indeed, I will argue below that modeling cognition on the analysis of language artifacts like written sentences, may actually have inverted the process logic of both thought and linguistic communication. The assumption that the minimal lexical units of language are primary and that its composite structures—phrases and sentences— are derived from combining these more basic units seems too obvious to question. Most sentences are novel products, while all words and grammatical markers have ancient origins. How could sentences ever be prior to the words that compose them, either historically or mentally? In fact, as is our common experience, it is not a sentence per se that is prior, but rather what might be described as the imagistic impressionistic frame of the sentence. The classic compositional analysis of sentence generation is based on a formal or engineering analogy. In such artificial systems, a set of design instructions (or assembly constraints, or both) and a set of component parts precede all operations. Complex structures are accurately modeled by combining components according to these A few paragraphs included in this paper were presented previously in Deacon (2005), though they have been significantly re-edited to reflect the difference in context.

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rules. So it seems natural to assume that the neural production of sentences should also proceed this way. And yet there is a troubling parallel in biological thought. Although we often describe the structures and functions of bodies as though they are marvels of engineering, they achieve this appearance by means almost diametrically opposed to engineering design. In biology parts never precede wholes, but rather differentiate out of less differentiated whole units (e. g. blastulas and embryos) or evolve from simpler whole organisms. Language too is a spontaneously evolved phenomenon produced by a biological organ, and biology is not engineering. Moreover, language processing is ultimately carried out with the same brain structures that other primates use for nonlinguistic functions. Could we be analytically inverting the logic of language processing, and by implication cognition in general, by thinking in engineering terms?

Brain development parallels Consider a parallel with brain development itself. It has become increasingly clear that the vast majority of the »design information« expressed as brain structure is not encoded in genes. Mouse brains, which are roughly the size of the last digit of your little finger, develop using roughly the same number of corresponding genes as does the human brain, which is roughly the size of a pineapple. With each neuron interconnected with roughly a thousand others in both kinds of brains, the information embodied in these two structures differs by many orders of magnitude. So where does the extra information come from to build human brains? The answer does not come from reapportioning influences of nature versus nurture, but rather from neither. The extra structural information arises spontaneously, not by magic or divine intervention, but by a process that, like evolution, can spontaneously generate adaptive correspondences and novel complex structure and function without external guidance. Indeed, brain development resembles a kind of microevolution in many important respects. And both evolution and embryology take advantage of a variety of spontaneous ordering tendencies as well. The way that open dynamical systems fall into orderly patterns without extrinsic imposition of these regularities has come to be 137 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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called self-organization, and the dynamical structures that arise from such processes (as well as from evolutionary processes) are generally described as emergent (for an overview see Deacon 2012). Examples of autonomous pattern-generation can be seen in the formation of hexagonal convection cells in a heated liquid (Bénard cells), the individually idiosyncratic yet hexagonally symmetrical growth of snow crystals, and the interwoven spirals of seeds, leaves, and petals that spontaneously organize to exemplify the Fibonacci number series (which is not explicitly encoded in the plant’s genes). These regularities of structure and function are not prefigured in any antecedent instructional process but come into existence dynamically as the repeated interactions of components gradually reinforce some structural biases and damp others. Self-organized regularization can lend itself to selection dynamics as different patterns of interaction are pitted against one another in a larger »ecology«. An interplay between self-organization and selection processes is responsible for much of the emergent structure and adaptive complexity of brains. For example, in the process of brain development, patterns of connection are initially generated by the self-organizing interactions of axonal growth processes extending between regionally organized distinct cell populations. These distinctive cell groups also arose from antecedent self-organizing and competing cell proliferation and interaction processes. Converging axons then compete with one another in an »ecology« of signal-processing demands. The resulting selection process culls many and preserves other cells and connections that are more synergistic in activity patterns. In this way, much like phylogenetic evolution, the developing nervous system can augment the biasing influences of the genes by using this as a base from which to »explore« adaptive correspondences between different neuronal populations, between regionally different signaling patterns, and between organism and environment. This contextually sensitive sculpting of cell populations and connections results in the spontaneous emergence of complex functional synergies as the developing brain adapts to the body it finds itself in. This should not be misunderstood to mean that brains of humans and brains of chimpanzees, for example, mostly differ with respect to these plastic connections. Human brains resemble other human brains, not chimp brains, because of the influence of genetic differences which set slightly different initial conditions (mostly with respect to quantity of neurons produced in each region) for this con138 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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nectional development. Subsequent self-organization and selection processes augment the subtle biases contributed by these genetically established differences affecting cell-cell interactions to produce large-scale systemic change. This exemplifies a logic that is roughly analogous to some physical self-organizing processes, like snow crystal grow (for example). Individual snow crystals share remarkable family resemblances despite diverse conditions of origin, because of (not in spite of) the regularizing affect of self-organization. Though stochastic factors may make the fine details unpredictable, general patterns are reliably produced even though this emergent structure is not predetermined. Similarly, selection processes tend to produce convergence toward common forms (e. g. streamlining in diverse aquatic species) despite diverse origins and substrates. This is an important point, which is often misrepresented by overzealous critics of genetic determinism. Emergent structures are often highly predictable and can converge on universal features, even from quite different initial conditions. This is of course relevant to language regularities, as well. When brain development is viewed through the prism of selforganization and selection processes, little remains of the engineering logic that is so familiar, and yet the result can still be precisely organized. Brain development demonstrates that just because a biological structure is highly predictable, complex, and systemic in organization we need not appeal to algorithmic or instruction logic to explain this fact. Moreover, the extensive role played by self-organizing dynamics in brain development should make us highly suspicious of engineering analogies used to explain brain functions like language production.

Language as a differentiation process 2 Languages and human language abilities have evolved spontaneously. Like other naturally evolved complex phenomena we should expect to find that they exhibit the hallmarks of this undirected process reMy thinking about this has long been influenced by an early paper by Jason Brown (Brown 1979) and his so-called microgenetic analysis of brain function. This theory has its roots in Gestalt theories of brain function. However, while the approach discussed here incorporates aspects of the embryological analogy implicit in microgen-

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flected in an emergent architecture. Language has an emergent architecture to the extent that its structure is a product of spontaneous bottom-up self-organizing interactions, not top-down imposition of structure or constraint by any pre-existing template. This requires conceiving of basic linguistic units as differentiated end-products of a cognitive process rather than as fundamental atoms of a constructive process in which they are »merged« to form progressively larger functional units. To reconceive language processing in emergent terms we first need to analytically de-differentiate the many levels of a speech act, but this introduces a conceptual difficulty. We cannot start with the familiar components of expressed language—e. g. words or morphemes—but must instead derive these from something far less concrete. Finding adequate ways to describe such an undifferentiated starting condition has troubled psychology since its inception. We must ask »What is the form of a thought before it is put into words?« We find it difficult if not impossible to gain introspective insight into the nature of a word before it is formed, or the idea that a sentence conveys before it is encoded into words. Remarkably, for all the difficulty we have describing this, it is probably fair to say that a good deal, if not most, of our mental life is lived in this not-quite-articulated not-quite-formulated state. Sometimes this is described in terms of »mental images« not quite formed or desires and intentions to achieve some imagined goal only vaguely formulated. This stage of cognition that serves as the nearly unconscious and automatic ground of language use is also the anticipatory/preparatory stage of perceptual assessments and implemented behaviors. When serving as the ground for linguistic expression it is quickly and effortlessly resolved into words and sentences. As in the case of differentiating other forms of action, we are usually entirely focused on aiming for and achieving expressive goals, not on selecting function words or following grammatical rules. So long as these results are achieved without any serious hitch (e. g. because of word-finding difficulties) the antecedent generative processes go unnoticed. But if sentence structure is produced analogous to the way embryos develop, not as machines are built, then words and sentences esis theory it does not assume either its anatomical or phylogenetic assumptions. This parallelism and divergence was initially described in Deacon (1989), published in a collection that also included a paper by Brown.

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must also begin as some less differentiated cognitive structures. Following this analogy it suggests that we should consider language processing as though words and phrases differentiate from more inclusive generic precursors. But what are the undifferentiated cognitive precursors to complex sentential structures with their multiple component parts? These precursors are not linguistic units, but rather more general cognitive, semiotic, and pragmatic structures. From this perspective the apparently most elementary phonetic and morphological features of language are, in contrast to standard linguistic analyses, late-stage developments in the progressive differentiation of these larger semiotic neurological »embryos« of a speech-act. So in this approach to reconstructing the process of language production we must begin with the most difficult step first: identifying these most abstract levels of what can be called the »infralinguistic« hierarchy. The questions »What is a concept before it is expressed in words and phrases?« and »What is a proposition or request before it is phrased as a sentence?« must be given serious attention as linguistic issues. Let’s begin by considering a simple declarative sentence produced with the intention of describing some state of affairs. It may have a social context, which directs and constrains the kind of information that will best fit, such as being produced in response to a request or expectation. This will play a role in promoting one’s change in arousal to speak and in eliciting certain memories or shifts of attention to relevant events. The social-pragmatic context includes a shift to a specific mode of communicating as well—e. g. providing or seeking information—and may consequently involve activating habits associated with this social role. This first stage is thus a social and pragmatic orientation stage that creates both a specific communicative frame and an arousal to act within it. Even merely interpreting someone else’s speech requires establishing such a communicative framing of activity along with attention focused on certain expected general content. It is what amounts to the act before it is initiated, the content before it is developed or fully interpreted, the perceptual experience that is anticipated. It is a focused readiness and expectation with respect to social interaction. Within this framing of social-communicative arousal what might be described as the »mood« of the speech or interpretive-act is differentiated. This forms the minimally differentiated space of options from which further differentiation of content and expression 141 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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can proceed. But the neural trace that constitutes this extrinsic framing does not get »passed on« to some subsequent brain structure for processing (as might be imagined for a component assembly process). Rather this »mood« needs to be maintained in parallel throughout the sentence generation or interpretation processes, and is updated only if there is a shift in communicative intent or a challenge to expectations. Maintaining this continuity requires a distinct neural substrate specialized for maintaining social orientation and arousal, and for monitoring conditions that would require a shift from this state. In contrast, the differentiation of this communicative orientation into distinct linguistic details must take place in other linked (yoked?) neural substrates.

»Languaging« in the brain So neurologically we should not expect to find that the areas of the brain associated with the undifferentiated phases of language behavior are specifically associated with speech production or comprehension per se. The arousal process almost certainly involves limbic structures and adjacent peri-limbic cortical regions, as well as deeper brain structures associated with social arousal. Cortically, this probably includes the anterior cingulate cortex, which mediates the arousal and monitoring process, and other midline »background« attentional and motivational systems. These earliest phases are also comparatively slow-changing, maintaining a constant orientation. This stability may need to persist long enough for many sentences to be differentiated within a single generalized communicative mood. Later phases will therefore correspond with the generation of many temporally shorter and more fleeting aspects of speech production or analysis. Damage affecting the brain regions associated with this arousal and monitoring of communication produces deficits that are seldom described in terms of aphasia, since word-choice, grammar, and phonetic decisions are unaffected. But more global disturbances of language are typical. Most notably, damage to midline frontal regions, including anterior cingulate cortex and supplementary motor area (especially bilaterally) is known to produce akinetic mutism. This has often been described as an inability to generate sufficient arousal-to-act though it can suddenly and transiently abate under high 142 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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arousal conditions. In vivo imagery has shown that differentially elevated anterior cingulate activity is also associated with many language generation tasks, even when motor speech functions are controlled for (e. g. see Deacon 1997). It is notable that midline frontal regions are also the only cerebral cortical regions from which primate vocalizations have been elicited by stimulation, and are also associated with laughter in humans. In both cases there is evidence that the role of these dorsal midline cortical areas is inhibitory and that the vocalizations are produced with release of their inhibitory control. Although speech cannot be elicited by cortical stimulation in humans (only blocked or modified), there have been reports of expletives being elicited by stimulation of limbic structures in human patients and such automatic arousal-correlated word production is often all that is spared in cases of severe global aphasia with massive damage to left peri-sylvian areas. Within this mood frame the first specific orientation and expectations of the semiotic process are next generated within adjacent cortical areas. These include the intended goal of the communication and the selection of major categorical orientations relevant to this context. This is a phase of neural processing in which specific sensori-motor orientations relevant to the communication become more specified and need to be sustained in the face of competing and interfering alternatives. These processes appear to involve sub-regions of prefrontal, parietal, and middle temporal cortex. These areas of cortex are mostly polymodal, judging from their primate homologues, and in classic (misleading) terminology were described as »association cortex«. Consequently, damage to parietal and middle temporal areas tends to result in difficulties of maintaining attentional focus and distinguishing distinct objects of interest, respectively, especially when multiple modalities of discrimination are involved. Damage to lateral prefronal areas disturbs the ability to manage multiple competing sensori-motor attentional options, irrespective of salience, recency, or immediate reward contingencies. Prefrontal functions are sometimes referred to as »working memory« because they involve the ability to hold many simultaneous competing predispositions in mind at once so that they can be assessed with respect to one another. In vivo imagery studies consistently show differential activation of the left ventral prefrontal region (anterior to what is more commonly defined as Broca’s area) 143 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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during word association and memory tasks that involve rapid symbolically mediated decisions (see examples in Deacon 1997).

Language as semiosis With respect to language differentiation processes I think this can be understood as the phase in which predication differentiates out of a more general mood of communicative arousal. In many ways, the structure of predication has much in common with specific sensorimotor orientation. The logical structure of predication, formally symbolized by a function F operating on one or more variables, in the form F (x), or F (x, y), etc., can be interpreted in semiotic terms as a symbolic relationship F indexed to (pointing to) some locus or loci (x, y) in the world, which may include loci within the physical communication process. In computational terms these comprise an operation and one or more ›slots‹ for pointing to the »addresses« for the data to be operated on. In terms of semantic theory, F is a predicate (e. g. verb) and x and y are arguments to which it applies (e. g. subject and object). In neurology we may see an analogy to the trace of a sensory or behavioral association and an attentional orientation toward some locus or loci to which it currently applies (either external or internal to the organism). Despite this parallel, this structure is not, however, due to intrinsic neurological organization, but rather to semiotic constraints that are relevant to both cognition and communication with symbols. By ›symbol‹ I am not referring to the sort of complex sign vehicles that constitute, for example, artistic, sacred, or mythical processes, but merely the sort of referential relationship that is exemplified by the words of a language. The relevant issue is that even this most basic form of symbolic reference is mediated by a system of symbol-symbol relationships. In this respect symbols effectively refer to other symbols. This is well illustrated by the organization of a dictionary or thesaurus. This is why the utterance of a lone noun or verb almost never constitutes a completed act of communication, but merely invokes associated symbols as possibly relevant. Standing alone it is a fragment, lacking a necessary functional component that if present could point outside the symbolic web. But notice that when coupled with a pointing finger or uttered in a context where a specific object or state of affairs is obviously salient 144 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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to the message recipient, this missing role can be filled. The coupling must be immediate, however, since the very basis of indexicality is connectedness in space, time, or expectation with what is indicated. What this tells us is that the missing linguistic unit, now supplied by the pointing act, would have played an indexical role. Because of this system-internal web of relationships each symbolic function requires an associated indexical operation (as a bound index) in order to point outside this system to objects of reference. This suggests that a complete symbolic communication, so to speak, consists of at least one semiotic unit playing a symbolic role and another playing an indexical role. In terms of the F (x, y) formalism, F is the symbolic operation and x and y serve as its bound indices. Even though these variables can be filled with other symbolic operations, these too must be individually indexed or reference fails. And indeed, this indexical function requires an immediate proximate coupling between the unit playing the symbolic role and the unit(s) playing the indexical role(s). If this coupling is broken or ambiguous reference will likely fail. Are these constraints difficult to learn? Actually, they are probably acquired long before language in infancy. Uniquely in human development there is a period during the first year and a half of life where the infant communicates with its caretakers largely by indexical means, and in particular by pointing. The success or failure to achieve a desired result by enlisting one’s caretaker’s actions is dependent on disambiguating indexical communication. So by the time the infant begins to do this with words combined with gestures and eventually with words alone, there has already been extensive experience with the demands of this process. The semiotic infrastructure on which linguistic communication will be built is already in place. The transition is not discontinuous from non-linguistic to linguistic, but rather a case of further differentiating communication tools already well developed. The infant already »knows« the logic of these »rules« of indexicality before learning how to implement them with strings of words, not because they are innate knowledge but because they are implicit in the experience of communicating in general. To the extent that prefrontal, parietal, and middle temporal systems play critical roles in maintaining and selecting among specific orientation and action options, they are also relevant to parallel operations on the virtual objects of symbolic reference as well. For example, the traces of object-attribute associations are likely generated 145 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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in posterior (temporal- parietal-occipital and polymodal cortex), while the traces of orientational dispositions with respect to them— and thus also the neural correlates of indexical operations—are likely generated and maintained in lateral prefrontal cortical areas. A classic descriptor of a global deficit common to patients with damage to one or more of these prefrontal and parietal cortex is the »loss of abstract attitude« (see discussion in Lecours et al. 1983). Though difficult to characterize, it generally refers to the overly literal way these patients approach language and behavior in general. This can be understood as an impairment of the ability to inhibit prepotent orientation to concrete sensori-motor associations compared to those that are more indirect and symbolically mediated. Also in classic aphasia terminology the so-called transcortical aphasias offer relevant correlates of damage involving these still early stages of language differentiation. These leave perception, repetition, and production of speech intact but diminish control of these higher order content orientations. Damage to parietal and middle temporal regions can produce confusions of associative analysis (transcortical sensory aphasia, and semantic aphasia) in which spurious interpretive substitutions may arise despite minimal nonsense paraphasia (nonword substitutions). For example, there may be word substitutions that reflect wildly divergent and incompatible categories, though they represent real words of the language and may even be appropriately inflected. Damage to lateral prefrontal areas; this can involve a weakened control of speech by predication with respect to merely reactionary or echolalic speech (transcortical motor aphasia). 3 Historically, these aphasic syndromes have come under critical scrutiny and have been considered by some to be of questionable validity as discrete syndromes or specific language disorders. This ambiguity reflects the semiotically more general character of this early phase of processing before word choice, syntax, and phonological realization are relevant. In this sense these kinds of deficits are often described in terms of ideational difficulties rather than linguistic impairments. Persistent transcortical motor aphasia also appears to require damage to underlying white matter and basal ganglia structures, but as we will see, this is a feature that appears common to all frontal language deficits. This is often considered an argument For a classic review of the history of aphasiology, see the comprehensive review by Roch Lecours et al. 1983.

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against identifying frontal cortical structures with language processing per se, but this is an over-reaction. The relatively greater importance of deep forebrain nuclei to frontal systems almost certainly reflects the far greater elaboration of cortical-basal-ganglia-thalamiccortical circuits in frontal as compared to posterior cortex, and not a reduced importance of anterior cortical areas to language processing. This predication-orientation phase of differentiation establishes the frame in which the first distinctively linguistic differentiation functions emerge, and for which there is general agreement that correlated impairments constitute true aphasias. These involve superior temporal regions, including Wernicke’s region, and the ventral frontal and prefrontal regions including Broca’s region. 4 In this phase of language differentiation the distinctions between frontal and posterior functions become more divergent and their functional interdependence decreases. This is in part a function of the decreased time domain for these functions to be performed, which limits the possibilities for complex interactions. Functional integration and coordination have however already been established by earlier phases that are more globally coupled. The temporal regions adjacent to Heschl’s gyrus (the site of the primary cortical auditory map) that comprise Wernicke’s region are extensively interconnected with middle temporal and inferior parietal polymodal areas. The predication-orientation established in these polymodal systems (which also activates parallel differentiation of more specific sensory imagery in modality specific areas to which they are also connected) superimposes corresponding constraints and biases on these more auditory specialized regions. This facilitates the activation of relevant classes of phonological traces for words (in anticipation of producing them or of the high probability of hearing them). Many cycles of word elicitation may occur within the frame of a single predication-orientation. This frame must also impose agreement constraints on the subsequent elicitation of words. Damage to cortical areas at this level of processing effectively interrupts this constraining and facilitation of word-sound expectation by predication relationships. Thus Wernicke’s aphasics typically are not confused about their intentions to communicate and may understand much of the intention of others trying to communicate with them, I prefer the designation »region« to the more common »area« in order to avoid the implication of anatomical boundedness and functional homogeneity.

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but they tend to make both production and comprehension errors at or just below the word-formation level. While content words (carrying much of the load of predication) are inaccurately differentiated in these patients, resulting in frequent nonsense words and word substitutions that are »in-category« but wrong in detail (e. g. »chair« for »bed«), function words (e. g. »why« »that« »but« »it«) tend to be retained and used fluently in appropriately structured phrase and sentence frames despite the paraphasias (e. g. word and sound substitutions). We can describe this as a failure to differentiate the primary linguistic tokens despite maintenance of both the predicate frame and the indexical supports. Before analyzing these temporal functions further, consider the complementary role of frontal cortical systems associated with Broca’s region. The functions of this layer of processing take place within the predication-orientation frame established by prefrontal and polymodal posterior systems. The prefrontal contribution (as distinct from the parietal-temporal contribution) to establishing this predication frame is primarily with regard to the orientation or indexical component of this frame; i. e. the orienting with respect to different conditions and objects of attention. In general this aspect of the predication frame can be described as a schema for conditionally shifting orientation and redirecting attention. This is a fundamental feature of most complex learned behaviors in general. The subsequent phase of processing, characteristic of the cortical regions associated with Broca’s region, involves the differentiation of the elicitation and sequencing schemas regulating word production. This is accomplished by using the orienting constraints of the indexical frame to regulate predispositions activated by phonological cues from posterior processes and high frequency word-association habits keyed by prior word production. But this is one stage less differentiated than the motor production of the content words themselves, and can probably best be envisioned as generating the ordered slots into which these words will be inserted. But the indexical orientations of the previous level differentiate into at least one form of overt motor output at this level: the production of function words, pronouns, and articles that serve as the markers for these syntactic slots and phrase transitions. These syntactic markers are the overt trace of an orienting and pointing schema that has differentiated in parallel with the posterior differentiation of words and their phonology. 148 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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These classic language areas thus represent the first level in which there is differentiation of linguistic units per se, but this interface should not be construed to be discontinuous from earlier stages. The various »component« linguistic units derive their referential power and combinatorial constraints from these many levels of prelinguistic processes within which they are nested. These lexical units may appear to self-organize as though they possessed intrinsic structure, but this apparent structure is rather a reflection of the fact that they are merely surface markers for the end stage of a cognitive differentiation process. Well before these specific lexical units are crystallized into aural-vocal traces, their combinatorial options have been constrained by prior differentiation processes involving larger less differentiated semiotic frames. Broca’s aphasia is typically identified with labored production of words and non-fluent speech, despite relatively spared vocabulary and comprehension. The non-fluency is also in part due to the absence of function words and grammatical markers. Although difficult production may indicate adjacent motor area damage, it may also simply be the result of the absence of sufficient cuing by syntactic markers whose function is to mark and point to the space where symbolic operations are required. The subsequent, most differentiated levels of language processing — phonological analysis and vocal articulation of sentences — constitute a surface map on which linguistic tokens mark the terminal differentiation of these many prior levels of the differentiation processes occurring in parallel in anterior and posterior cortical regions. In well-organized speech, the concatenated linguistic tokens that result provide sufficient cues concerning this hidden differentiation process to allow listeners to independently recapitulate these processes. So although the interpretation of a spoken or read sentence appears to require that a reverse process of merging and combining words via syntax into meaningful strings must take place, this is misleading. In the course of normal communication, sentence interpretation is embedded in a rich matrix of interpretive expectations. So there are already present extensive expectations and predictions concerning new information that is yet to be provided. These partially pre-differentiated sentence frames that pre-bias and potentiate laterstage processes can thus be rapidly differentiated with minimal effort.

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Counter-current information processing So how does this interaction between phases of sentence differentiation produce anything? What exactly is provided by the adjacent linked cortical areas, each to the other reciprocally, in this interaction? Or to put this in anatomical terms, since adjacent cortical areas in these nested processing hierarchies share reciprocal connections, what sorts of signals are being sent in each direction? Here again it is important to remember that this is a temporally nested set of differentiation processes, not a string of steps. So that terms like »early« or »late« stage do not refer to any linear temporal sequence, but rather stages that must be established with a certain differential priority. Each less differentiated frame must persist long enough for all later differentiation stages to complete. So a major feature must be that while cortex of an earlier stage is providing rather stable information to a later stage, in the reverse direction rather more rapidly changing more differentiated information is being provided. The reciprocal connections linking adjacent cortical areas are not symmetrical in the laminar patterning of neuronal cell bodies and connections. 5 This asymmetry reflects the differences in the type of information being exchanged in each direction. This pattern of cortico-cortical connections is depicted in simplified and somewhat idealized drawings in Figure 1. Interestingly this pattern is roughly paralleled in both frontal and posterior cortical areas, despite the fact that motor areas are located in frontal cortex and sensory areas are located posterior cortex. In the direction of increasing differentiation (from peri-limbic toward more peripherally specialized areas) pyramidal cells in deep layers (layer v) tend to project their axons into the most superficial layer (layer i) of the next area in the sequence and to some extent also to layer vi. The patterning of their termination in the target cortex tends to fan out laterally to contact the apical dendrites of many pyramidal neurons. This termination pattern is similar to that of thalamo-cortical inputs from midline limbic related thalamic nuclei and intralaminar nuclei. These thalamic nuclei projections tend to terminate in patterns that span multiple adjacent distinct cortical areas. An initial report describing the cortico-cortical laminar connectivity patterns for areas of monkey cortex that are homologous with human Broca’s and Wernicke’s regions was presented in Deacon (1992) and more general discussion of these patterns in other cortical areas is provided in Deacon (1989).

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This non-specific pattern suggests that topographically specific information is not being relayed in this direction. So that in the differentiation process successive levels each must generate their content intrinsically, not »adding on« to complex details relayed from previous levels. The prior level of development merely constrains and biases this differentiation process in the succeeding level, probably with respect to temporally organized but spatially distributed activity simultaneously influencing background thresholds of whole suites of neurons in the target area. Pyramidal neurons from layer v are also the principal output neurons from cortex, projecting to subcortical sites, such as basal ganglia, midbrain, cerebellum, or spinal cord, depending on the cortical region of origin. So the information being supplied to further differentiate activity in the succeeding level is effectively a reflection of the fully differentiated output of the source area. In the reverse direction (originating from more peripherally specialized areas and projecting to more generalized cortical areas) the connection patterns are quite different. The output pyramidal neurons are located in layer iii and project their axons to the more generalized cortical area of an earlier differentiation stage in columnar patterns primarily terminating in layers iv and iii. This termination pattern is also characteristic of thalamo-cortical projections from socalled principal projection nuclei of the thalamus, which relay specific information from peripheral subcortical systems. Layer iii pyramidal neurons do not tend to target subcortical sites. The columnar termination pattern is also topographic (largely maintaining map-like correspondence between areas). This suggests that these connections are providing specific information about the spatio-temporal details of the activity of the source area. And since it corresponds in organization with principal thalamic nuclear inputs it likely maintains this organization from area to area. This reciprocal stage-by-stage pattern of connections links limbic-arousal systems at one extreme to peripherally specialized areas at the other. This pattern is exhibited in both anterior and posterior cortical regions within each separate sensory or motor modality. Elsewhere (Deacon, 1989) I have argued that this pattern is reminiscent of counter-current diffusion processes found in other physiological systems. These include most notably fish gills and kidneys, among innumerable other systems where extremely efficient diffusion is required. This is because actively moving fluids in opposite directions 151 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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on either side of a selectively permeable interface can drive the diffusion of heat or chemical solute far past equilibrium. In the case of fish gills, for example, oxygenated water flows front to back while deoxygenated blood flows back to front. In this way deoxygenated blood picks up oxygen as it moves forward, continually meeting water, with slightly more oxygenated areas at each increment. The result is that the concentration of oxygen in blood can be pushed close to its concentration in water as it enters the gills (see Figure 2). The analogue for cerebral cortex is that opposite ends of these pathways are receiving inputs of information with inverse properties. Cortical areas adjacent to limbic structures are receiving information 152 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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about generalized arousal states and physiological states. These receive information in the form of a small fixed set of input states about relatively undifferentiated drives and general physiological conditions. This information is lacking in topographic detail and is slow to change from state to state. In contrast, cortical areas that are specialized to receive more or less direct sensory information from peripheral sensors are constantly receiving highly differentiated signals about difficult to predict external conditions. This information is often topographically complex and rapidly changing. Similarly, with respect to the differentiation of complex behaviors, quite generalized intentions to act in response to simple drive states contributed by anterior peri-limbic cortices entering at one end of the stream is contrasted with information about just completed specific movements and differentiated motor coordination information relayed from the cerebellum. One way to think of their relationship is that information developing along a limbic-to-specialized pathway is progressively differentiated by interacting with information being relayed along the inverse-parallel specialized-to-limbic pathway. Indeed, precisely this stepwise interchange of attributes at each stage is what is required to differentiate vague mnemonic and intentional processes to the point where they produce the attentional focus and behavioral response patterns that are optimally fit to current conditions. In other words, this interaction is the necessary means by which vague internal states come to be matched in detail with the demands of a highly variable and complex external world in real time. Unlike many naturally evolved fluid counter-current processes the cerebral cortical variant is a step-wise, not continuous, process. Analogous step-wise counter-current systems have been developed, however, in such engineering applications as desalination and extreme cooling systems (e. g. nuclear reactors and ultra low temperature applications). In the nervous system this might help explain some of the confusing effects of cortical damage, since damage to some intermediate stage will interrupt the access of motivational processes to peripheral details and peripheral details will poorly update motivational systems. This does not mean that no information is provided from these sources, since every cortical area receives thalamic input relaying both peripheral and limbic sources. But these are themselves differentially pre-processed to an appropriate level of detail by subcortical systems. For example, although the peripherally specialized »primary« visual cortex receives information from the 153 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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thalamus (LGN) which relays information from retinal ganglion cells, visual areas further along the sequence toward limbic areas receive signals that are relayed through the thalamus (pulvinar) from superior colliculus and pretectal midbrain structures that relatively indirectly convey pre-processed retinal information. So interrupting this counter-current process essentially affects a distinct level of differentiation and adaptation. A counter-current process analysis may also provide new insights for understanding other counterintuitive neurological processes and dysfunctions. Recall that both sensory and motor counter-current connections are organized in the same way. So one might ask: »How is sensory processing like motor processing and vice versa?« Clearly, both sensory attentional focus and behavioral precision depend on differentiation. One way to think of the differentiation process in terms of sensory experience is to consider perception as a sort of peripherally constrained hallucination process. Recall that the same neurons that give rise to the limbic-to-peripheral pathway are also the final output neurons of each cortical area. We can thus spec154 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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ulate that sensory experience is the result of peripheral information »sculpting« this internally (limbic) originated source of »self« information. This way of understanding perception may thus provide insight about both the nature of normal hallucination in dreams— where there is an absence of peripheral input to sculpt the effects of subcortical excitations of intrinsic patterns—and dysfunctional hallucination, as in schizophrenia—where limbic originating signals may be hyperactive and irregular, thus overwhelming the peripherally originating information. Counter-current dynamical organization also provides the basis for rapid change on the fly. In counter-current fluid exchange systems, for example, a change in the parameters of either input (e. g. oxygen content in either blood or water entering fish gills) is spontaneously compensated for without any oversight because of differentials all along the pathway. Neurologically this helps to explain what appears to be the real-time facility of our adaptation to rapidly changing highly variable peripheral inputs. Counter-current organization allows all levels of differentiation to adapt in parallel. But this doesn’t mean that the adaptive work-load is always equivalently distributed in this array. Although we often tend to portray perceptions and actions only in terms of fully differentiated states, in fact, this tends to ignore what is probably the greater fraction of mental activity. Moreover, almost certainly what we are conscious of at any moment in time may involve a different level of this differentiation process. This is likely determined by the amount of neurological work being done at whatever level of this process is impacted with the greatest mismatch between the information converging at that point from these two streams. This predicts that fMRI should be able to track such changes of the locus of elevated neurological work to resolve such mismatches (= focus of consciousness) as it occurs in areas at corresponding levels of differentiation.

Implications and conclusions In summary, I have sketched a conception of cortical functions in general and language functions in particular that suggest that they can only be understood in process terms. In this view, these functions are conceived as neurologically emergent consequences of dynamical interaction processes where final organization is a product of the 155 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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complex synergy that develops between multiple systems and nested levels of progressive differentiation. Moreover, language processing is described in a framework that shows it to develop in a way that is entirely homologous to sensory and motor processing in general. By explaining cortical processing in counter-current terms we also provide a way to conceptualize how the language differentiation process is accomplished. In this view, language comprehension and production begins in a relatively undifferentiated state that is not distinct from sensori-motor processes, neither in its neurological locus nor in the neural dynamical process itself. At these first few relatively undifferentiated stages, language cognition is coextensive with other sensori-motor processes. Indeed, this helps explain why the phenomenology of sentence comprehension and production is typically imagistic (in a multimodal sense) and not of the form of words or lexical categories. These linguistic phenomena are late stage correlates of the differentiation process. Each stage of differentiation involves correlated processing in corresponding levels of anterior (intention-action) and posterior (attention-sensory) cortical systems. These parallel differentiation processes are maintained in synchrony by reciprocal connections linking parallel levels of frontal and posterior systems in the early differentiation stages. Each relatively less differentiated stage of processing establishes constraints and biases that are the ground from which the succeeding stages of differentiation begin, and within which they are »enveloped« and develop. Subsequent phases involve both more specific and more rapidly differentiating and shifting processes, so that often a number of higher-order developments will occur under the relatively more persistent state of differentiation of the prior phase. This produces a multilevel nesting of more specific phases of differentiation within less differentiated frames, embedding shorter within longer time domains of operation. The processing of the exceedingly rapid phonological transitions of speech perception and the production of the rapid and subtle motor transitions of speech articulation are thus highly constrained by this nesting in a way that minimizes both the diversity of alternatives that must be anticipated with respect to the demands of maintaining large scale functional integration. Interestingly, the anterior and posterior cortical areas involved in the final few stages of differentiation are not connected with one another, and so tend to operate autonomously, constrained to roughly simultaneous development by the linked previous stages of develop156 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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ment. These latter processes are also relatively rapid and automatically completed. So how does this translate into terms that linguistics might understand? Most current linguistic paradigms analyze grammar and syntax at one level—the level of terminally differentiated linguistic structures—and derive rules and principles for handling all possible relations among these units. The consequence of this approach is that complex instructional architecture and massive processing capacity must be postulated to handle all the presumptive operations. This has further fueled the expectation that a language »processor« must be present in the brain and that only special language mutations of the genome could have made this possible. From a neural differentiation perspective, however, language production and comprehension is envisioned to develop through nested levels of operations in which only the final stages involve the familiar words and syntax of linguistic analysis. The early stage levels are not explicitly represented as distinct linguistic units and largely involve neural systems that are strongly homologous in function to their nonhuman primate counterparts. Only the very last levels of functional differentiation correspond to linguistic compositional features. This treats the composite structure of a phrase or sentence as a post hoc re-presentation of the entire differentiation hierarchy, not a recapitulation of it. The kind of question we must ask of our linguistic theory, then, is something like »What kind of semiotic unit—not linguistic unit—is a sentence or phrase?« This is a question of referential function and communicative pragmatics more generally. It suggests that a more sophisticated embedding of linguistic theory in semiotic theory is necessary in order for progress to be made in bridging the gap between linguistics and neurological processes. In many respects, this analysis provides an understanding of language and thought that is more consistent with phenomenal experience than that provided by formal linguistic analysis. Indeed, linguists often remark that the processes underlying the application of the rules of grammar and syntax comprise a vast unconscious automatic and inaccessible algorithmic mechanism, since we don’t experience ourselves applying rules to our utterances or judging grammaticality by noticing rule violation. But understanding language as a variation on the emergent dynamics of mental processes in general, in which quite global and familiar semiotic constraints must be re-

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spected, obviates the need to explain why we don’t experience it as rule-governed construction and analysis. Unfortunately, the study of language is not made easier by shifting to an emergence paradigm. Indeed, it begs new questions, demands new methodologies, and requires a far more interdisciplinary approach than before. Moreover, this is not yet a theory, but merely a first speculative suggestion of another way of tackling this mystery. It is lacking in the linguistic details and the descriptive power that is offered by even the simplest formal generative approaches. But the comparison is not fair. Formal theories have a post hoc tautological character—reverse-engineered by millions of person-hours scouring linguistic data. Their derivational logic is thus inevitably more elegant, their predictions are more accurate, and their domain of application is more comprehensive, so long as neural processing and evolvability considerations are not at issue. But ultimately these »organic« considerations must trump predictive adequacy and formal elegance. The formal design metaphor has diverted scientific attention and research resources from the implications of these biological considerations for a half a century, but refocusing attention on these factors does not mean turning our backs on formal linguistics, only abandoning the search for its literal counterparts in genes and the neural processes that generate language communication. Paradoxically, the successes of formal generative linguistic theories may have impeded progress toward understanding language neurology and language evolution, even while they have provided such remarkably sophisticated tools for the description of language structures. This is because the apparently remarkable adequacy of formal models to account for the complexities of language structure have contributed to an unwarranted assumption that language can be studied as though its structure was designed by a kind of instruction logic, as are other formal systems. Yet despite compelling evidence that language has a formal-structure consistent with top-down rulegoverned systems, its status as an evolved biological phenomenon raises serious questions about the plausibility of extrapolating from this descriptive analysis to a theory of language processing. I imagine that future linguists will look back upon this period in the history of the science and wonder why we didn’t see the obvious utility in reserving engineering logic for the study of machines, formal logic for the study of computation, and organic logic for the study of brains and language. 158 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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References Brown, J. W. (1979). Language representation in the brain.In H. Steklis and M. Raliegh (eds.), Neurobiology of social communication among primates (pp. 133–195). New York: Academic Press. Deacon, T. (2012) Incomplete nature: How mind emerged from matter. New Yok: W. W. Norton & Co. — (2005) Language as an emergent function: some radical neurological and evolutionary implications. Theoria, 54, 269–286. — (1997). The symbolic species: The co-evolution of language and the brain. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., New York. — (1992). Cortico-cortical connections of the inferior periarcuate cortex in the monkey brain. Brain Research, 573, 8–26. — (1989). Holism and associationism in neuropsychology: An anatomical synthesis. In E. Perecman (ed.), Integrating Theory and Practice in Clinical Neuropsychology (pp. 1–47). Mahwah NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum & Assoc., Pub. Roch Lecours, A., Lhermitte, F. & Bryans, B. (1983). Aphasiology. London: Baillière Tindall.

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A Peircean Account of First-Person »Authority«: The Radical Implications of Thoroughgoing Fallibilism Vincent Colapietro

My suspicion is that the unmarked signifier is the first-person singular. 1 When we use the term (»first-person«) without qualification, I suspect that most hearers or readers take it to designate »I« rather than either »we« or »I« and »we.« I cannot prove this and, indeed, I know no way of doing so. It is, nonetheless, a deeply engrained suspicion of mine. 2 Any »we« is not only the first-person plural but also (by virtue of what this plurality concretely means) »the first-person in interaction.« Any »I« is always connected to countless other selves. 3 Just as the »we« is never anything less than Thou and I in dynamic interaction, the »I« itself is never absolutely by itself (s/he is caught up in processes of being addressed by, and addressing, others). Whenever they are concretely realized, these connections are truly dynamic: the »I« is dynamically connected to others, that is, s/he is constitutively interacting with them. 4 But it has been all too easy, for deep-rooted reasons, to portray the »I« in isolation from others as Markedness is a technical term in linguistics (cf. Shapiro 1972). It is also at least a quasi-technical term in semiotics. If one happens to read, »The judge handed down a verdict of guilty,« the gender, age, race or ethnicity of the judge tends not to be specified. If a female judge renders a verdict in a case of (say) rape, the gender of the judge is likely to be specified, i. e., the signifier (»judge«) is likely to be marked (»female judge«). 2 Another revelation is in order here: while I reject atomistic individualism, I espouse what might be called social individualism (individual selves are in their very individuality thoroughly social selves). The sociality of the self does not preclude individuality; rather it is a condition for organisms being transformed into what are properly called »selves« (cf. Rucker 1980). 3 As I will use these terms in this paper, »I« and self are practically interchangeable. The self is in large measure defined by reflexivity (see Colapietro, 2013. That is, s/he is an agent who at the very least can use the term »I.« 4 The force of this claim needs to be appreciated. It is not as though there is a self in place apart from these interactions; rather the self comes into being and, indeed, is maintained, transformed and even undermined in and through these interactions. In brief, these interactions are constitutive of selves. 1

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primordial and sovereign 5 (cf. Foucault 1990), the point 6 from which to start and the ruling authority in epistemic matters. For the pragmatists no less than Hegel, however, there is no »I« without »we.« The first-person singular is inseparable from the firstperson plural. In turn, there is no »we« without the implication, however attenuated or precarious (cf. Foucault 1990; also Rorty, 1989), of that »we« having the status of an »I,« in particular the efficacy of a more or less personal agent. In other words, what today is often designated as collective agency is, from a pragmatist perspective, a defining feature of any concrete instance of the first-person plural. 7 »We, the people […]« is a fiat uttered in the name of more than a mere collection of disparate selves; it signifies – indeed, enacts – a collective decision, one concerning the very constitution of the »we« as a »we.« In this paper, I will elaborate several of the most important implications of Peirce’s understanding of mind, consciousness, subjectivity, and agency for the purpose of addressing an important question regarding the first-person in interaction (in interaction with other reflexive agents but also with itself 8 ). For the most part, however, this essay is a reflection on reflexivity, a consideration of the relationship between the self and itself, though one undertaken with the thoroughgoing conviction that individual selves are in their reflexivity as much as anywhere else social actors. This means that the relation of the self to itself always involves both relations to others and relations of the self to itself as other (Kristeva 1994). The relation of the self to In a casual conversation with John Greco, he suggested to me that there are still epistemologists today who are, in effect, engaged in »a first-person project.« It is one thing to give an account of first-person authority or privilege, quite another to do so in the service of »a first-person project.« Such a project formally grants, say, the value of social epistemology but effectively discounts what the emergence of this approach implies for epistemology. It proceeds with business as usual (the task of epistemology as though the social turn had not been taken). 6 Charles Taylor’s (1985) use or image of the punctual self might be invoked here. It is intended to convey the sense that the self is indivisible. In contrast, Peirce argues that the self is indefinitely divisible and, in certain respects, actually divided from (and arguably against) itself. That is, he rejects the image of the punctual self as strenuously as does Taylor. 7 In his Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel is quite explicit about this. In one of his later essays, Peirce is no less so. 8 Reflexivity is, from a Peircean perspective, bound up with sociality, so much that our relationship to others and that to ourselves cannot be completely disentangled. 5

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itself is never absolutely immediate; rather it is mediated by its relationships to others. Moreover, that relationship is not unproblematically identical, such that “‘I”’ = “I’” in the same sense as “‘A’ = ‘A.’” The identity of the self is largely a function of the identifications of that self with others and, in turn, these identifications carry within themselves the seeds of conflict. The identity of the self is, hence, inherently problematic and conflictual, though the harmony between any concrete »I« and its constitutive others, its interior strangeness, might hide this from us in some instances. The question on which I would like to focus is that of self-knowledge, more precisely, that of the character of this self-knowledge – still more precisely, the allegedly privileged access or authoritative position which individuals have to the contents, states, and processes of their own minds. What is ordinarily meant in contemporary discourse by first-person privilege or authority is that I (not just this I, 9 but virtually any I) is in an especially privileged or advantageous position to know my own mental processes and states. Such privilege is typically taken to imply a fundamental asymmetry between first-person and second-person knowledge, my knowledge of my own mine and my knowledge of yours. The terms in which questions regarding first-person epistemic access, privilege, and authority are debated today are for the most part not those in which Peirce could have addressed these questions, since they have come into use after his death. These terms (including »first-person« 10 ) have emerged as terms of art from a sustained series of often highly technical debates, among philosophers and other theorists. Even so, Peirce would have had no difficulty at all comprehending the substance or contours of these debates. My elaboration of the implications of Peirce’s position, for the sake of sketching what his position would have been concerning the topic at hand, is, hence, a rational »reconstruction« of a substantive position nowhere to be found in Peirce’s actual writings. I am nonetheless convinced that it is thoroughly Peircean. For it fully accords with his basic commitments and, of greater weight, demonstrably flows from not only these commitments but also a not insignificant This of course means the bearer of the proper name »Vincent Colapietro« in its unique reference to me and only me. Cf. Wittgenstein (1965). 10 There are however notable occasions when Peirce does use the expression »firstperson« in a sense closely akin to contemporary usage. 9

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number of specific texts clearly bearing upon the contemporary question of first-person access, privilege, and authority. Just as (say) William Alston (1989) can quote from the writings of a number of canonical figures 11 and safely infer how their statements carry direct implications for contemporary debates, we can do so by considering Peirce’s questions, assertions, and arguments. In general, I suppose that it is more important to attend imaginatively and carefully to his or, for that matter, any other historical figure’s own questions rather than pressing Peirce or some other predecessor into the service of providing novel (or simply corroborating or even dissenting) answers to our questions, to what today are, often with little reflection, taken to be the most pressing or important or fundamental questions. But using Peirce or some other forerunner as a resource in aiding us to question our questions (cf. Wittgenstein), to consider whether these questions truly have the urgency, fundamentality, or even simply coherence or unity 12 we take them to have, certainly does not preclude the possibility of finding in Peirce’s or some other predecessor’s writings compelling, at least intriguing, answers to contemporary questions. Part of the value of studying the history of philosophy and, more generally, thought is that any genuine attempt to attain an interior understanding of some intellectual forerunner’s actual position tends to displace present preoccupations and fixations. Even so, present concerns and questions often possess a legitimacy and importance at least as great as the possibly recoverable topics and problems of previous epochs. And the question of firstperson privilege is, in my judgment, one such question. While Peirce is helpful in suggesting other questions regarding this topic than the ones currently addressed, he is also of service in providing invaluable hints for a novel answer to this contemporary question. Regarding a

In »Varieties of Privileged Access« Alston (in 1989) cites (among others) René Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, Sir William Hamilton, and Franz Brentano. 12 »[P]ersonality, on both sides, that of the unification of all of a body’s experiences, and that of the isolation of different persons, is much exaggerated in our natural ways of thinking,—ways that tend to puff up the person, and make him think himself far more real than he veritably is. A person is, in truth, like a cluster of stars, which appears to be one star when viewed with the naked eye, but which scanned with the telescope of scientific psychology is found on the one hand, to be multiple within itself, and on the other hand to have no absolute demarcation from a neighboring condensation« (quoted by André De Tienne 2002. The number of the Peirce manuscript is R 403). 11

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range of questions concerning first-person knowledge, we can take this to be more than a possibility. It is nothing less than a likelihood. The best way to draw out the implications of Peirce’s position for addressing the question at hand would be to focus on his critique of Cartesianism, a critique mounted in the late 1860’s when he was a young man, though one espoused without modification for the duration of his life. An assessment of the force and fairness of this critique itself depends upon an acquaintance with the target of Peirce’s criticism. Hence, our first task is to attend to the most salient details of the Cartesian position. According to Descartes, we know our own minds better than we know anything else. 13 In order to overthrow skepticism decisively, once and for all, we must secure absolute certainty and the only way to accomplish this is by the performative announcement of existential self-affirmation (Cogito, ergo sum) (cf. Hintikka 1962). 14 The selfThe possibility of setting up a straw man is here a quite real one. »Descartes marks the period,« Peirce suggests, »when Philosophy put off childish things and began to be a conceited young man. By the time the young man has grown to be an old man, he will have learned that traditions are precious treasures, while iconoclastic inventions are always cheap and often nasty. He will learn that when one’s opinion is beseiged and one is pushed by questions from one reason to another behind it, there is nothing illogical in saying at last, ›Well, this is what we have always thought; this has been assumed for thousands of years without inconvenience.‹ The childishness only comes in when tradition, instead of being respected, is treated as something infallible before which the reason of man is to prostrate itself, and which it is shocking to deny. In 1637, Descartes (aged 41) published his first work on philosophy, the Discours de la méthode pour bien conduise sa raison et chercher la verité dans les sciences. In the fourth part of this dissertation, after insisting upon the doubtfulness of everything, even the simplest propositions of mathematics, in a strain quite familiar to readers of the present work, he goes on to say how at one time »je me résolus de feindre que toutes les choses qui m’étoient jamais entrées en esprit n’étoient non plus vraies que les illusions de mes songes.« Thereupon follows the grand passage: »Mais aussitôt après je pris garde que, pendant que je voulais ainsi penser que tout étoit faux, il falloit nécessairement que moi qui le pensois susse quelque chose; et, remarquant que cette vérité: je pense, donc je suis, étoit si ferme et si assurée que toutes les plus extravagantes suppositions des sceptiques n’étoient pas capable de l’ébranler, je jugeai que je pouvois la recevoir sans scrupule pour le premier principe de la philosophie que je cherchois.« »Descartes thought,« Peirce adds, »this ›très-clair‹ ; but it is a fundamental mistake to suppose that an idea which stands isolated can be otherwise than perfectly blind. He professes to doubt the testimony of his memory; and in that case all that is left is a vague indescribable idea. There is no warrant for putting it into the first-person singular. ›I think‹ begs the question. ›There is an idea: therefore, I am,‹ it may be contended represents a compulsion of thought; but it is not a rational compulsion. There 13 14

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certainty thereby obtained provides, according to Descartes, an absolutely firm foundation upon which it is possible to erect the full edifice of human knowledge. The movement of his thought in the Meditations is worth recalling here: from absolute thought he moves to absolute self-certitude; from such certitude he is compelled to prove the existence of God and presumes the capacity to do so by recourse to nothing more than the ideas in his own mind; from the existence of God Descartes ultimately recovers the physical world. In brief, this movement is from doubt to »I,« from »I« to God (from the human »I« to the divine »I« and, hence, at least implicitly, to a »we«), from God to the world, though the world of bodies conceived as extended things, not obviously that of other minds conceived solely as thinking things (i. e., disembodied minds). Adjudication of our knowledge of physical objects must, then, await the sixth and final Meditation, whereas the (alleged) triumph over the strongest possible formulation of the skeptical position occurs early in the second Meditation. Descartes does not recover his body until near the end of the text. He however never appears to recover the company of others, other than God. At the outset he imagines other selves to be mere automata whose minds (if they truly have any) remain inaccessible to him. At the conclusion, however, he never attempts to redeem our knowledge of other minds, as he does in the final Meditation try to recover the world of extended things (or physical bodies). His relationship to his own body is, given his manner of conceiving minds and bodies, rendered utterly inexplicable or mysterious. But, at least of equal significance, his relationship to other human selves has been completely ignored. The first-person relationship (the relationship of I to itself)

is nothing clear in it. Here is a man who utterly disbelieves and almost denies the dicta of memory. He notices an idea, and then he thinks he exists. The ego of which he thinks is nothing but a holder together of ideas. But if memory lies there may be only one idea. If that one idea suggests a holder-together of ideas, how it can do so is a mystery. To make the reflection that many of the things which appear certain to us are probably false, and that there is not one which may not be among the errors, is very sensible. But to make believe one does not believe anything is an idle and selfdeceptive pretence. Of the things which seem to us clearly true, probably the majority are approximations to the truth. We never can attain absolute certainty; but such clearness and evidence as a truth can acquire will consist in its appearing to form an integral unbroken part of the great body of truth. If we could reduce ourselves to a single belief, or to only two or three, those few would not appear reasonable or clear« (CP 4.71).

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so fundamental to the project operates in complete abstraction from second-person knowledge (the knowledge of others as selves or »I’s«), save in connection with God. 15 His self-knowledge is truly an individual and indeed solitary, not a communal or social, achievement. What drives Descartes’ project is nothing less than the quest for certainty, whereas what animates Peirce’s »quest of quests« is his desire to assist in the growth of knowledge. The former assumes the overthrow of skepticism is a necessity, while the latter exhibits little anxiety in the face of the hyperbolic threats of traditional skepticism. In summation, then, Descartes is anxious to secure the possibility of knowledge; Peirce is desirous to assist the growth of knowledge. It should be no surprise that the knowing self equipped to execute these radically different tasks stands in sharp contrast to Cartesian consciousness. Is the Cartesian cogito any match for the Peircean vir? 16 Peirce does not begin with subjectivity, transcendental or otherwise, but with agency, embodied and social. Bodies are always already entangled with one another; living bodies or organisms are always enmeshed in an environment (cf. Ingold), hence with other living beings in an unimaginably complex and unfathomably intimate manner. From Peirce’s perspective, those organisms which or, better, who acquire reflexivity are social animals and reflexivity is in great measure a function of their sociality. There is widely presumed to be an asymmetry between the way one knows one’s own mind and the way one knows other minds. This is not exactly so for Peirce, who, on the one hand, grants a certain kind of »immediacy« to our knowledge of other minds, not only of our own, and, on the other hand, insists on all knowledge being mediated (put otherwise, on no knowing being strictly speaking »immediate«). Consider, then, this remarkable passage from »The Law of Mind« (1892): The recognition by one person of another’s personality takes place by means to some extent identical with the means by which he is conscious of his own personality. The idea of the second personality, which is as much to

But even here it is important to note that God hardly possesses the status of a Thou in Descartes’ discourse. 16 I regret the masculinist connotations of this word, but not the association with strength (most of all, strength of character). 15

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say that the second personality itself, enters within the field of direct consciousness of the first person, and is as immediately perceived as his ego, though less strongly. At the same time, the opposition between the two persons is [itself] perceived, so that the externality [or radical otherness] of the second is recognized. (6.160; emphasis added)

I take Peirce’s use of terms here to be careful: his term is recognition, not inference. In addition, I take his recourse to the adjective immediately to be very significant, even if it loudly calls for disambiguation. A first, very rough approximation of Peirce’s position would be this: We do not infer the existence of other minds from the movements, gestures, and utterances of the bodies commonly taken to be uniquely connected to these minds (»Your gesture allowed me to infer this about the contents of your mind«). A better formulation would be this: We no more depend on formal inference in the case of knowing other minds than we do in that of knowing our own minds, but in both cases knowledge is mediated, almost certainly complexly mediated. This however needs to be squared with Peirce’s claim that he immediately perceives or recognizes the other as an ego or I. In the strictly technical sense, such perception or recognition would not be immediate, that is, intuitive. But, in the colloquial sense, Peirce obviously has no problem saying that he immediately perceives or recognizes the ego of another. This means that he effortlessly, spontaneously, unhesitantly, confidently, and in countless instances rightly recognizes or acknowledges the other for what that other is: a who rather than a what (cf. Velleman 2005 & 2009). I happen upon a friend in an unusual place but nonetheless »immediately« recognize her. Whatever Peirce’s critique of intuitionism implies, it does not imply that we must deny we have a capacity for such recognition or perception. Indeed, Peirce emphatically affirms, in the passage from »The Law of Mind,« our possession of just this capacity. Some forms of human knowledge, even though they might be complexly mediated, assume primarily the character of readily available skills (e. g., the ability to recognize that the milk has turned sour or that one’s child is sick). The reason is that these forms of knowledge are principally practical skills, so that knowing that derives to a far greater extent than we ordinarily imagine from knowing how. Knowledge as a set of somatically operative skills underlines knowl167 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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edge in its more allegedly sophisticated forms 17 (e. g., knowledge as a growing system of formally enunciated propositions). Our knowledge of bodies and minds is, according to Peirce, grafted onto our innate or instinctual dispositions to anticipate in subtle, variable, and nuanced ways the movements of bodies and the conduct of selves. The bearing of this on our topic is simply that the human animal possesses a more or less integrated set of cognitive capacities, at the center of which is the ability of such an animal to recognize immediately other selves. The fact that the full acquisition of this cognitive capacity requires learning, also the fact that its exercise ordinarily drives toward the refinement of this capacity, do not (at least as far as Peirce is concerned) count against seeing this capacity rooted in instincts. In the colloquial sense, then, we »immediately« recognize others as selves; but, in the strict sense, this very capacity is »instinctual« or »innate.« At least, this capacity traces its roots to the instinctual tendencies of the human animal, however much these roots require nurturance to grow beyond their original form as tender and fragile filaments. In light of this, we can safely say that Peirce does not so much deny the alleged asymmetry between self-knowledge and knowledge of other selves as he forcefully challenges the ease with which we suppose there is – indeed there must be – such an asymmetry. As it turns out, however, this challenge does go some distance toward a denial of this asymmetry, at least as it is ordinarily understood. But, for the moment, it is imperative to attend to the manner in which Peirce qualifies his claims regarding our knowledge of other minds. First, consider the first sentence in the passage quoted above: The recognition by one person of another’s personality takes place by means to some extent identical with the means by which he is conscious of his own personality« (6.160; emphasis added). Peirce is not claiming an unqualified identity of his knowledge of himself and his knowledge of others, only that the means are »to some extent identical.« Moreover, he is not claiming that his perception of the other as ego is exactly the same as his perception of his own ego. »The idea of the second personality itself, which is as much to say that the second personality itself, enters within the field of direct consciousness of the In Human Nature and Conduct, John Dewey goes so far as to assert: »A certain delicate combination of habit and impulse is requisite for observation, memory and judgment. Knowledge which is not projected against the black unknown lives in the muscles, not in consciousness« (MW 14, 124).

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first person, and is as immediately perceived as his ego, though less strongly« (6.160). The personality or, perhaps better, person of the other actually enters directly into the field of my personal consciousness. It does so with such force and in such a manner that I am practically certain about being in the presence of another self. My recognition of the other as an »I« is, in other words, akin to my recognition of myself as an »I.« Whatever asymmetry might turn out to mark the one species of knowledge from the other, self-knowledge from knowledge of others, it must, at least for Peirce, be understood in light of this kinship. On Peirce’s account, then, our mental lives truly interpenetrate. This is not intended as hyperbole or (mere) metaphor. It is offered rather as an exact statement of one of the most significant features of our mental lives. One of the most suggestive ways in which Peirce has articulated this point opens with the question, »[A]re we shut up in a box of flesh and blood?« 18 and then immediately proceeds to denying that the human self is an impenetrably bounded being: »When I communicate my thoughts and sentiments to a friend with whom I am in full sympathy, so that my feelings pass into him and I am [in turn] conscious of what he feels [so much so that his feelings pass into me], do I not live in his brain as well as in my own, – most literally?« (7.591). I am far from identifiable with, or even locatable in, my own brain! What would cognitive science look like if it took with the utmost seriousness Peirce’s claim regarding interpenetration (cf. 7.366; also 7.376)?! Let us leave this aside and turn back to Peirce, attending to the contrast implicit in his question »Is the ›I‹ a box of flesh and blood?«. A thing can only be in one place at one time. In contrast, the very being of a symbol enables it to be in innumerable places at any given In a different context and, indeed, for a different purpose, it attends to the metaphor of a receptacle or container. »[T]o say that an object is in the mind,« Peirce suggests, »is only a metaphorical way of saying that it stands to the intellect in the relation of known to knower« (8.18; emphasis added). Earlier he informs his readers that the realist in his sense does »not […] sunder existence out of the mind and being in the mind as two wholly improportionable modes. When a thing is in such relation to the individual mind that that mind cognizes it, it is in the mind; and its being so in the mind will not in the least diminish its external existence. For he does not think of the mind as a receptacle, which if a thing is in, it ceases to be out of« (8.16; emphasis added). In this and related instances, a picture has, in Wittgenstein’s (1953) memorable expression held us captive, and our language, in the seemingly innocent reliance on in, has repeated it to us inexorably.

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time. Peirce uses the example of the word »Six.« If I inscribe »Six« here on a blackboard, that does not preclude me inscribing it countless times elsewhere. Indeed, the very being of the symbol is bound up with its replicability: to be a symbol is to be replicable. Since the self or person is, in Peirce’s judgment, not a mere thing but a living symbol, the locus of the self (or person) is never absolutely singular. Any individual self does not have a locus, that is, a single or simple locus; it qua symbol has a multiplicity of loci. In certain circumstances, at least, the other’s feelings and thoughts penetrate me and mine penetrate that other, so that the boundaries of the self show themselves to be far more porous than those of the skin, at once protecting the functional integrity of the organism and facilitating a complex commerce between the subcutaneous and the extra-somatic regions of organic existence. What A. N. Whitehead calls the fallacy of simple location (the supposition that being here precludes the possibility of being anywhere else) seems especially egregious when it pertains to selves. Peirce goes so far as to call it a »metaphysics of wickedness« (7.571). 19 However this might be (and I am inclined to agree with Peirce in this characterization of the position), his point pertains primarily to the ontology of the self, not to ethics or theology. This point is simply that continual, perhaps continuous, interpenetration is one of the most fundamental features of the mental life of social animals such as human beings. Whatever Peirce holds regarding self-knowledge needs to be understood in reference to his insistence upon this feature of our lives. To appreciate this, however, we have to attend more carefully to the details of his position, especially as they were originally articulated in the »cognition series« in The Journal of Speculative Philosophy papers (see Delaney 1984). This is of course where we encounter most dramatically Peirce’s struggle to dethrone the universally acknowledged father of modern philosophy (cf. Bernstein 1971). Peirce’s critique of intuitionism is at the center of his critique of Cartesianism. While Cartesianism encompasses far more than the doctrine of intuitive (or immediate) knowledge, it comprises at least this. The position to which this critique led Peirce is, at once, more radial and more commonsensical than is ordinarily appreciated. I have »Most of us, such is the depravity of the human heart, look askance at the notion that ideas have any power« (2.149; emphasis added) or, what in the end amounts to the same thing, that there is a life inherent in signs, at least in symbols.

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already stated the purpose of this essay. But, now, I am in a better position to offer a more precise articulation of my main objective. The goal is not just to offer a sketch of Peirce’s account of self-knowledge, with special attention being paid to contemporary debates regarding first-person access, privilege, and authority. It is, more precisely, to show just how radical Peirce’s position is, while being nonetheless commonsensical. On the surface, at least, there is a tension here. On the one hand, the radical character of the Peircean position seems to imply the denial of commonsensical »intuitions« 20 (what virtually everyone knows – or what everyone »knows«- and indeed, what no one would deny or, in the judgment of some, could possibly deny 21 ). On the other hand, the commonsensical character of Peirce’s view appears to preclude the possibility of radical implications flowing from this view. Hence, my aim, in its more exact formulation, is to show that this apparent tension is just that – an apparent tension, not a substantive inconsistency. Paradoxically, common sense is, at least in some important respects, more radical than we commonsensically presume. In turn, the radical implications of the Peircean approach to first-person knowledge are not nearly as counterintuitive or implausible as they are likely to strike many hearers or readers, especially upon first encountering these implications. Another way of putting these points is this. On the one side, common sense is more skeptical than we ordinarily suppose. Indeed, it is or tends to be a concrete embodiment of »healthy skepticism« 22 (not academic or theoretical skepticism – i. e., not »paper doubts« – but a workaday skepticism, i. e., living doubts as they arise in the course of lived experience and, moreover, as they help to orient human actors in the ongoing course of their twisting experience). On the other side, radical implications, precisely because This term is being used not in Peirce’s technical sense (see, e. g., 5.213; or, for the same text. EP 1, 11–12), but as it is used in contemporary philosophy (a usage derived in no small measure from John Rawls, in particular, his advocacy of the method of reflective equilibrium). 21 For example, whatever account of mind we offer, it will be inadequate if it does not accord with our most basic »intuitions« regarding communication. Social animals such as human beings communicate with one another. Of course, it is important not to beg important questions about the nature, limits, conditions, forms, and other aspects of communication. But it is at least as important not to explain away the fact! 22 This is an expression which Peirce himself uses. I am however not using it in quite the same sense as he did. He meant something more reflexive and methodic than I intend here. 20

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they are radical (precisely because they go to the root or, in Latin, radix of the matter) frequently have a simplicity and, by virtue of that simplicity, a force it is difficult to evade or ignore. Aye, here’s the rub! What stares us in the face is discernible only to those who have eyes to see (cf. EP 2, 147; also in CP 5.42). But our ability to see in this instance, as in countless other ones, is itself dependent on our willingness, frequently our courage, to confront and acknowledge what is possibly other than our expectations and especially our wishes dispose us to believe. 23 Wishful thinking bears upon first-person knowledge, possibly in a quite fundamental way. That the self actually exists, more cautiously, that it possesses the solidity and coherence we habitually presume, might be closer to wishful thinking than most humans are open to considering seriously (Short 1997; cf. Parfit 1986). Two passages especially need to be recalled here. The first is one from which I quoted an expression already, but the text in full needs now to be set before us: If you embrace synechism [or the doctrine of continuity], you must abjure this metaphysics of wickedness [the view that, ›I am altogether myself, and not you at all‹]. In the first place, your neighbors are, in a measure, yourself, and in far greater measure than, without deep studies in psychology, you would believe. Really, the self you like to attribute to yourself is, for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity. In the second place, all men who resemble you and are in analogous circumstances are, in a measure, yourself, though not quite in the same way in which your neighbors are you. (CP 7.571; emphasis added)

The second text commanding our attention at this juncture is from »The Simplest Mathematics« (!): Nothing is ›inconceivable‹ to a man who sets seriously about the conceiving of it. There are those who believe in their own existence, because its opposite is inconceivable; yet the most balsamic of all the sweets of sweet philosophy is the lesson that personal existence is an illusion and a practical joke. Those that have loved themselves and not their neighbors will find themselves April fools when the great April opens the truth that neither selves nor neighbor selves were anything more than vicinities; while the love they would not entertain was the essence of every scent. (CP 4.68)

Wittgenstein (1984) makes this plea: God grant the philosopher insight into what lies in front of everyone’s eyes. In this respect, his project and Peirce’s are akin. And this kinship bears directly upon the topic at hand, the character of our self-knowledge.

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Our conception of the self is almost completely illusory or, even more strongly, delusional (it is, as just noted, »for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity« [7.571; emphasis added]), but it is not completely so. The self is as much as anything else a locus or neighborhood (in Peirce’s own word, a vicinity) in which others are forever entering and leaving, a trick played on us by our own vainglorious selves. 24 Of course, the perpetrator of this cruel April fool’s joke must be in order to be deceitful (rather than deceived!). And, in some measure, this perpetrator does exist – and not simply as a fantasy, figment, illusion, or delusion. Self-knowledge is, from a Peircean perspective, itself as much a self-disillusionment as anything else, a process of coming to terms with the extent to which the self is a delusion of vanity. But the slight degree to which the human self actually exists should not be belittled or, worse, ignored. In its insular and private sense, the self is almost wholly (if not completely) an illusion. But, in its positive and outreaching 25 sense (i. e., in its interpenetrating, interpenetrated, and agential sense), it escapes from being simply fictive or illusory. When Peirce pronounces that the »individual man, since his separate existence is manifested only in ignorance and error, so far as he is anything apart from his fellows, and from what he and they are to be, is only a negation« (EP 1, 55; emphasis added), he is at the same time implying, I insist, that the individual self, in its shared concerns with other selves and also in reference to the open-ended histories of their conjoint endeavors, is more than a mere negation. The »outreaching identity« of this implicit self possesses, in Peirce’s judgment, »absolute worth« (CP 7.591). The impenetrable insularity, the invincible privacy, of the Cartesian subject however is a metaphysical fiction rooted in a moral failing of truly epochal magnitude: the Cartesian subject is, after all, in one (dis)guise or another the modern subject

But the individual self is not merely such a vicinity. It is always in some measure an agency. 25 »Each man has,« Peirce insists, »an identity which far transcends the mere animal; – an essence, a meaning subtle as it may be. He cannot know his own significance; of his eye it is [as Emerson suggests] eyebeam« (7.591). Then he immediately adds: »But that he truly has this outreaching identity – such as a word [or other species of symbol] has – is the true and exact expression of the fact of sympathy, fellow feeling – together with all unselfish interests [i. e., genuinely shared or communal ones] – and all that makes us feel he has an absolute worth« (CP 7.591; emphasis added) 24

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(e. g., the Lockean or Kantian no less than the Cartesian) (cf. Foucault, 1990). The Peircean subject is, in contrast, a postmodern figure in whom a contrite fallibilism and high faith in the reality of human knowledge (CP 1.14) are intricately woven together. 26 The experience of ignorance and error, of not knowing but also being mistaken, are found not only at the genesis of our self-knowledge but also at every critical juncture wherein the finite, fallible self is thrown back upon itself, thereby forced by this experience to acknowledge its finitude, fallibility, and possibly even its fallenness (see, e. g., CP 7.345). What does this conception of subjectivity imply about selfknowledge? Let us begin to answer this question commonsensically, but then allow common sense to turn upon itself and draw out – at least point to – the radical implications of thoroughgoing fallibilism. Commonsensically, then, I ordinarily know my own mind – its states and processes and contents – better than others do. More cautiously, I commonsensically presume this to be the case and the presumption seems to be, at the very least, far from unreasonable. But (and please note: this is the pivot around which everything important in this paper turns) there are countless occasions when others know my own thoughts and even feelings better than I do. One can certainly make too much of this point. It is personally (hence, interpersonally), therapeutically, and politically dangerous to push this point too far. Even those adults who have demonstrated time and again that they can barely, if at all, manage the affairs of their own lives should be granted the prerogative to live whatever life they can manage. Paternalism is offensive because it is immoral; and it is immoral because it infringes on the personal authority of fallible agents to make of their lives what they wish and will. To repeat, then, the point made above can be pushed too far and there are very real dangers in doing so. But, then, one can make too little of this point (the extent to which our minds or psyches might be more readily or fully accessible to others than they are to ourselves). And this itself carries its own dangers. Peirce tended to subsume the root of these dangers under the rubric of »nominalism« (cf. Forster, 2011), but rarely specified these »Indeed, out of a contrite fallibilism, combined with a high faith in the reality of knowledge, and an intense desire to find things out,« Peirce contends, »all my philosophy has always seemed to me to grow […]« (CP 1.14).

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dangers in much detail, let alone fully arrayed the particular dangers inherent in an uncritical espousal of the nominalist outlook. 27 One danger is connected to individualism or, more precisely, that form of this orientation in which the isolated or insular individual (de Tocqueville, 2003) is granted absolute authority. The absolute worth of individual selves has nothing to do with their (alleged) absolute authority. This worth is bound up with their »outreaching identity,« not their alleged omnicompetence in matters pertaining immediately to what they see as »vitally important topics.« The danger here is that the regimes and relations of power instituted to protect the absolute sovereignty of the isolated individual do not so much protect individuals, especially the ones most in need of protection against the onslaughts and manipulations of the powerful, as they render the most powerful individuals unaccountable agents and, thereby, foster as cultural ideals irresponsible individuals. Effective networks of mutual accountability (cf. Polanyi, 1958), such as those instituted, sustained, and refined by the conscientious commitment of experimental inquirers, tend in such circumstances to be corrupted 28 by regimes in which those making the most important decisions can act with impunity, because they can act outside most (if not all) bounds of accountability. Our concern is however not with the enveloping cultural context in which human agents exercise their personal authority, but with a very specific form of this personal authority (that pertaining to the epistemic authority of reflexive agents, i. e., human actors who make claims about their own minds or psyches). In Peirce’s judgment, no human agent, least of all one who is willfully isolated from invaluable sources of communal correction, possesses absolute authority, epistemic or otherwise. I am disposed to suggest that, for him, the question of first-person privilege or accessibility is, at bottom, one of first-perThe dangers inherent in the realistic outlook are, at least, hinted at by James in his Principles of Psychology and Wittgenstein, especially in The Blue Book. The latter casts under suspicion our »craving for generality« because it all too often is animated by a »contemptuous attitude toward the particular.« (Wittgenstein 1965 p. 18) 28 Scientific communities are, in my judgment (and I take this to be implicit in the Peircean ideal of the infinite community of scientific investigators – hence, in Peirce’s judgment also), such effective networks of mutual accountability. But they are far from isolated from the structures and loci of power in the culture in which these networks emerge and evolve. The corruption of such communities by power is, alas, a commonplace. 27

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son authority; and, in turn, that of first-person authority is itself an inherently complex question, because it is a multifaceted one. This means that I cannot do anything more than focus on one facet of this question, but this is misleading since the facet of most pressing importance is the irreducibly multifaceted character of our self-knowledge! So, at this juncture, I will attend only one aspect of self-knowledge, its many-sidedness. The epistemic strand of such knowledge is woven together with the social, moral, and political strands so intricately that the question of epistemic authority is always more than an epistemological question. This move needs to be seen for what it is. For me, the only adequate epistemology is a social epistemology, a truly social theory, in which the human knower is seen, first and foremost, as a social actor entangled in typically complex relationships, relationships often of an asymmetrical character, also ones in which deeply systemic yet largely undetected forms of injustice are built into the very structure of our epistemic practices (cf. Fricker, 2009; Mills, 1999; Taylor 1985). So, in focusing on one facet of the question of self-knowledge, I am doing so with an awareness that it is inseparably connected to thorny questions of social practice, ones calling for a fuller treatment by social epistemologists. 29 My self-knowledge is, at once, a personal and a communal achievement. My participation in a community of interpreters or inquirers, a participation often demanding deference to the authority or insights of others, does not entail any thoroughgoing self-effacement. As a participant in such a community, »I« not only remain »I« but also in the best of cases become more so! The testimony of my own senses needs at least occasionally to be checked against the testimony of other observers. My appeal to their observations and interpretations of what is perceived (or experienced) does not eradicate the need for me to attend to the disclosures of my own experience, the testimony of my own senses. The appeals are made as integral parts of an ongoing dialogue between self and other, also between the self and itself as its own other. This means that I might not know my own states – often deeply but not consciously felt ones – without the Insofar as this suggests that such epistemologists have yet to address these issues, my statement is misleading. While I think there is much more to do in this regard, a growing number of social epistemologists have addressed at least some of the most important questions in an illuminating, probing, and systematic manner.

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prompting, guidance, challenges, and assistance of others. My anger might elude me no less than my unhappiness. But any interpretation of my own states cannot be simply imposed upon me by external authorities. However slight, defeasible, and indeed corruptible is the »little brief authority« in which I am disposed to dress myself, it possesses in some small measure at least a nobility and importance which are necessary to acknowledge, if the character of this authority is exercised with an acute sense of its ineradicable fallibility. A Jamesian faith needs to be added to Peircean doubt, though we must of course appreciate that Peircean skepticism (see especially CP 1.344, also CP 8.43) is not Cartesian doubt. This marriage of opposites might insure a harmony of complementarity. Here as in some many other cases, faith in the fact may help create the fact; in particular, faith in the fact of anyone having the ability to learn to be more reliably authoritative or knowledgeable in that individual’s self-ascription and self-characterization might help create the fact (may, indeed, facilitate the acquisition of this ability). It is hard, if not impossible, to imagine that such humane faith would be anything but a necessary condition for the delicate nurturance of this reflexive competence. It is, in principle, possible to charge any human speaker with not knowing what s/he is talking about. 30 This extends to what such speakers say about their allegedly or truly »private« mental states, processes, and contents. Peircean fallibilism carries such radical implications. But it is, in practice, almost always rude or arrogant or worse to say this bluntly to another human being, even when it is demonstrably true! Indeed, the truer it is, the less effective saying so is likely to be, especially when the claim is made in a direct or straightforward way (rather than a gentle and somewhat indirect manner). Such a

»It would certainly, in one sense be extravagant to say that we can never tell,« Peirce observes, »what we are talking about; yet, in another sense, it is quite true« (3.419). For most practical purposes, we have a rough and ready command of what we are talking about; for some purposes – and not just strictly theoretical ones demanding a higher degree of exacting precision than most practical purposes – our identifications of the objects and events under consideration are so partial and in other respects inadequate as to make them, in certain respects, misidentifications. We cannot hold in our minds the objects of our discourse, especially when these objects are so vast, complex, and elusive as (say) the self or mind, with the same firmness, completeness, and confidence as we can hold a small shell or rock in our hand. This is hardly a violation of common sense; indeed, it is one of its most confident dicta.

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claim is mostly likely to prompt defensiveness, not elicit acknowledgment of its truth. There are reasons why the most effective forms of psychoanalytic and other therapeutic strategies tend to be sensitively circuitous, rather than mercilessly linear. There are also deep reasons why the most humane forms of parenting and teaching more generally tend to be the most effective, their efficacy residing in knowing when a frontal confrontation is in order, but knowing as well when gentle and indirect suggestions are called for. To take anyone’s word with the utmost seriousness does not require granting the speaker or utterer indefeasible authority, even concerning what is most interior, thus presumably accessible, to the individual’s life. But it does require in general showing respect for the fallible authority of that speaker, if only as an implicit expression of a nurturing faith in the fact the speaker will come into fuller possession of self-knowledge. The radical implication of such fallibilism is not at all at odds with the commonsensical understanding of humans. Errare humanum est, as Peirce was so wont to say. This proverbial truth is as much a part of common sense as any such truth. There is no possibility of drawing a circle around some domain of our discourse, least of all that pertaining to our innermost selves and pronouncing: while erring might be human, no error is possible regarding what is enclosed in this circle. What I have offered in this essay is, in effect, a pragmatic clarification of a term of art (»first-person privilege«) by indicating the habits of humane response to first-person singular pronouncements. This term of art however refers to commonplace locutions uttered in everyday circumstances. So, my pragmatic clarification extends to such locutions and settings. It would be illuminating to trace out the implications of this for the ethics of both friendship and therapy. But, at present, my attempt at a pragmatic clarification of first-person authority must conclude here. Or, better, it should conclude where Peirce himself was disposed to return, time and again, when reflecting on this topic – with several lines from one of Shakespeare’s play: Man, proud man, Drest in a little brief authority, Most ignorant of what he’s most assured, His glassy essence […]

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may nonetheless be real. There are occasions when it is indeed noble, at least necessary, to insist upon one’s own authority – and these often concern our self-portrayals and simply our most modest forms of self-ascription. Without such authority, there is no agency; and without agency, there is no self, divided, deluded, fallible, or otherwise. The self might be, »for the most part, the vulgarest delusion of vanity« (emphasis added), but it is not completely so. Insofar as the outreaching identity of the individual selves is taken, rather than their allegedly invincible privacy or absolute interiority, to be the most critical factor, they possess an absolute worth, if not an absolute authority.

References Alston, W. P. (1989). Epistemic justification: Essays in the theory of knowledge. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bernstein, R. J. 1971. Praxis and action. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Colapietro, V. (2013). The ›inner‹ life of the social self: agency, sociality, and reflexivity. Noéma: Rivista Online di Filosofia, 4–1. — (2008). Toward a Pragmatist Acknowledgment of the Freudian Unconscious. Cognitio (PUC-São Paulo), 9, 2, 187–203. — (2000). Further consequences of a singular capacity.« In Peirce, Semiotics, and Psychoanalysis, ed. John Muller and Joseph Brent. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. — (1995). Notes for a sketch of a Peircean theory of the unconscious. Transactions of Charles S. Peirce Society, 31, 3, 482–506. Delaney, C. F. (1984). The Journal of Speculative Philosophy Papers,« a Preface to Writings of Charles S. Peirce: A chronological edition, volume 2. Bloomington. IN: Indiana University Press. De Tienne, A. (2002). The sign in person. Caderno do 5 Jornado do Centro de Estudos Peirceanos (October), 28–38. de Tocqueville, A. (2003). Democracy in America. London et.al.: Penguin Classics. Dewey, J. (1922) [1988]. Human nature and conduct. The Middle Works of John Dewey, volume 14 (Carbondale, IL: SIU Press). Cited as MW 14. Forster, P. (2011). Peirce and the threat of nominalism. Cambridge University Press. Foucault, M. (1990). Politics, philosophy, culture: Interviews and other writings, 1977–1984, ed. Lawrence Kritzman. London: Routledge. Fricker, M. (2009). Epistemic injustice: Power and the ethics of knowing. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Vincent Colapietro Hegel, G. W. F. (1976). Phenomenology of spirit, trans. A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hintikka, J. (1962). Cogito, ergo sum: Inference or Performance? Philosophical Review, 75, 3–32. James, W. (1982) [1903]. »Emerson« in Essays in religion and morality Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Kristeva, J. (1994). Strangers to ourselves, translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press. Lane, R. (2009). Persons, signs, animals: A Peircean account of personhood. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 45 (1), 1–16. Main, R. (2009). From fancy amoeba to fallible self. Peirce’s evolutionary theory of human persons. European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy [online]. Mills, Ch. W. (1999). The racial contract. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. Parfit, D. (1986). Reasons and persons. Oxford University Press. Peirce, C. S. (1931–1958). The Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, volumes 1–6, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, volumes 7 & 8, edited by Arthur W. Burks. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Polanyi, M. (1958). Personal knowledge; Toward a post-critical philosophy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rorty, R. (1989). Contingency, irony, and necessity. Cambridge University Press. Rucker, D. (1980). Selves into persons: Another legacy from Dewey. Rice Studies, volume 66 (Fall), 103–118. Saller, V. (2014). Perception, experience, and unconscious in Peirce and Psychoanalysis. Presentation at the 2015 Charles S. Peirce International Centennial Congress (Lowell, MA). July 17, 2014. Shapiro, M. (1972). Explorations in markedness. Language, 48 (2), 343–64. Short, T. L. (1997). Hypostatic abstraction in self-consciousness. In The Rule of reason: The philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce, edited by Jacqueline Brunning and Paul Forster (pp. 289–308). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Taylor, Ch. (1985). Philosophy and the human sciences: Philosophical papers 2. Cambridge University Press. Velleman, J. D. (2009). The possibility of practical reason. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Library. — (2005). Self to self. Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, L. (1984). Culture and value, translated by Peter Winch. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. — (1972).On certainty. New York: Harper & Row. — (1956) [1978]. Remarks on thefFoundations of Mmthematics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. — (1965). The blue and the brown books. San Francisco: Harper Torch. — (1953) [1986]. Philosophical investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd.

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The detective metaphor in abduction studies and psychoanalysis – and what it teaches us about the process of thought Vera Saller

I will start with a few general notes on abduction and its role within the canon of inferences and process of investigation. The detective metaphor will serve to add more detailed information about the process of abduction. It helps me to build a bridge to psychoanalysis, because here the detective metaphor is in quite frequent use as well. I will also take account of the emotional experience of abduction and stress abductive attitude that, in a way, corresponds very much with analytic, evenly suspended attention. My conclusion will be that abduction is a ubiquitous human activity, without which we would not have the capacity to think. The term abduction was coined and introduced into philosophical discourse by Charles Sanders Peirce more than 100 years ago. This innovative thinker is considered the originator of the term of abduction, the third form of inference, although he himself claimed to have rediscovered a term originally used by Aristotle. It was Julius Pacius who used the Latin term abduction for the first time in 1517 when he translated the Greek term apagoge into Latin (cf. CP 1.65, 5.144; Reichertz 2003, 18). Meanwhile, it should be mentioned that the term did not lead to any real consequences at that time and in the contemporary context any time someone refers to abduction he in fact draws on Peirce. Until a few decades ago, abduction was a marginal subject in epistemological debates, but nowadays it attracts a good deal of attention in the scientific community (cp. Reichertz 2011; McKaughan 2008). Daniel McKaughan even entitles an article on abduction with the saying »from ugly duckling to swan« (2008) and Jo Reichertz, taking up a term coined by Wirth (1995), speaks of an »abductive turn«:

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Social researchers who take an interest in the fluctuation of their own professional vocabulary have been able, for more than two decades, to witness the flourishing of a concept which is around 400 years old: it concerns the term abduction. The boom has been so significant that we sometimes hear talk of an ›abductive turn‹ […] (Reichertz 2010).

Abduction addresses creativity within the framework of rational thinking. However, over long stretches of time, mainstream philosophers and historians of science were preoccupied with defining what scientific investigation was. Their worry was centred around banning the aspect of creativity from their understanding of what scientific investigation is and should be. This was formulated by the momentous differentiation of contexts of discovery and justification by Hans Reichenbach (cp. Hoyningen-Huene 1987). Furthermore, pragmatism, which was founded by Peirce – another pivotal contribution of his– first became very influential in the US 1 , but later lost its place in mainstream philosophy to analytic philosophy. For decades, investigations in the pragmatist venture lay in the hands of a small few. The mainstream’s focus on the analysis of language as a set of rules was not favorable towards ideas which shed light on the margin of the understandable in order to understand how rules come into being at all. Peirce’s ideas of abduction were rediscovered step by step, beginning in the late 50ies, yet on a critical note. Harry G. Frankfurt mentions Peirce’s paradoxical tendencies and inadequate explanations: We are, then, faced with the seeming paradox that Peirce holds both that hypotheses are the products of a wonderful imaginative faculty in man and that they are products of a certain sort of logical inference (Frankfurt 1958, 594).

He even accuses Peirce of unsatisfactory explanations and recommends instead upon relying on his own ideas! If, for the moment, we turn away from Peirce’s unsatisfactory explanations of the nature and function of abduction and examine the matter on our own […] (596).

Following Thomas S. Kuhn’s first edition of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962, the interests of historians and theoreticians The influence was maybe biggest at the University of Chicago where with the Chicago School of Sociology, the first Sociology department in the United States, was founded (cp. Wiley 2006).

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of science began to move in new directions. In history and social sciences more and more investigators veered away from scientism and qualitative methodologies began to flourish; abduction was rediscovered. The German author Reichertz examines critically the role of abduction for different streams of social theory (2010; 2003). There are a couple of contemporary methodologies of qualitative research, which name abduction as one of their founding principles. This is especially true for the Grounded Theory, a systematic methodology for constructing theory through analysis of data, which was suggested by Barney Glaser and Anselm Strauss (1967) 2 . Reichertz mentions in a footnote that the founders of this American model theory of qualitative research did not, at the beginning, refer to Peirce at all. Although Strauss had studied in Chicago, surely the place where Peirce’s ideas had the biggest influence, he did not explicitly mention Peirce in his classical opus on Grounded Theory. Abduction, following Reichertz suggestion, »found its way into grounded theory methodology via Germany« (2010). Only after his visit to Germany did Strauss begin overtly to fashion a relationship between his approach and Peirce’s. Reichertz attributes a »secret charm« to abduction, consisting in its nurturing the social scientists hope to be acknowledged as a genuine science. Social scientists conceive of the possibility that with the aid of abduction »new discoveries [could be made] in a logically and methodologically ordered way« (2010). The search for new ideas on the one side, and an orderly method of analytical thinking on the other, seem to be the promise the term abduction carries. After all, it was Peirce who stated the following: Abduction is the process of forming an explanatory hypothesis. It is the only logical operation which introduces any new idea (CP 5.171).

Reichertz (2003a & b) especially criticizes the belief that abduction, qualified as a logical inference, automatically leads to proofed truth. It was never meant like this, least of all by Peirce, who always insisted

2 Cp. also later developments of the theory with B. G. Glaser: Theoretical Sensitivity. Advances in the Methodology of Grounded Theory (1978) on the one hand, and A. L. Strauss & J. Corbin: Basics of Qualitative Research: Grounded theory procedures and techniques. (1990), further cp. Rosenthal 2011; Legewie 2006; Böhm 1994.

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that abduction only generates hypotheses, hypotheses that have to be tested by a combination of deductive and inductive methods. In his comprehensive book (2003a & 2013) Reichertz differentiates two phases in the development of the term and assigns them to phases of Peirce’s lifetime. His claims that adding abduction to the famous, generally known logical forms of induction and deduction was a preoccupation of the younger Peirce, whereas in his later life he studied the role of creativity within the process of scientific activity which he conceived as a sequence of activities implying deductions, inductions and abductions. Another point Reichertz stresses is the differentiation between hypothesis and abduction. According to him, the confusion between these two terms is at the bottom of many misunderstandings (2003a, 20–21). He primarily blames the editors of the Collected Papers for this confusion, who, as is generally recognized today, did indeed commit several editorial errors. 3

What is abduction? Let us begin by trying to explain what abduction is. As already mentioned, Peirce in his youth investigated the possibility of widening orthodox syllogistic logic. Whereas the meaning of induction and deduction should be clear to a great majority of readers, abduction has to be explained. We could explain it simply as follows. Induction corresponds to the generalization of an explanatory principle, found in a singular case, whereas in deduction, we are already in possession of a general rule, which we apply to a particular case. Put like this, these two forms of inference seem to reflect one another, and there is no room for a third form. The crucial question is, however: where does the explanation or the rule come from? Looking for the creative aspect and investigating the possibility of discovering new thoughts, Peirce dissolves the vacuum in which classical syllogisms are located and puts them back into the center of ordinary everyday thinking, where they belong. Finding a third logical form of inference itself manifests in an abduction: suddenly one becomes aware that the rules have not been stable from the beginning but also have their history of invention. Thus, the three forms of inference can be related as fol3

For the making of the Collected Papers cp. Dauben 1995, 105 & Houser 1992.

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lows: In deduction we have a rule and apply it to a special case. Deduction can never err because the inference’s truth is already implied in the premises – as for example the well-known example of the rule »every man is mortal« and its application »Socrates is a man«. The inference, »Socrates is mortal« was already laid down in the premises. In contrast, induction, as we saw, can be seen as the pure opposition, but nevertheless does not have the simplicity and certainty of deduction. Within induction, the supposed rule is only a hypothesis. We have a case, or several cases and we have the assumption of the general rule. Induction, then, in the process of scientific investigation, tries to confirm an already existing hypothesis, seeking out more cases to which the supposed rule can be applied. Our third form, abduction, stands for the mental activity which creates the new hypothesis. Abduction generates a guess, a new – possible – explanation. It needs confirmation and for that, deduction and induction are implied. What makes it difficult is that Peirce did not always look at these questions from the same point of view. In his early writings, he was very firm in trying to establish a set of syllogisms that fits the abovementioned three forms of inferences: in later phases in his life, he was convinced that the three forms of inference follow each other within the process of investigation. He also reflected on how a successful investigator chooses between several possible hypothesis because, as he often repeated, there were thousands of possibilities for new hypotheses. Another intriguing insight of his concerns the fact that human guesses, compared with the magnitude of possible explanations in general, are astonishingly good. His considerations on guessing appear in his reference to the practice of detectives (cp. below), and in religious contexts. Peirce explained man’s wondrous »faculty of divining the ways of Nature« (5.173) with the shared quality of nature and reason, and finally with a presence of God in every place, material and mind. A man must be downright crazy to deny that science has made many true discoveries. But every single item of scientific theory which stands established today has been due to abduction. But how is it that all this truth has ever been lit up by a process in which there is no compulsiveness nor tendency toward compulsiveness? Is it by chance? Consider the multitude of theories that might have been suggested. A physicist comes across some new phenomenon in his laboratory. How does he know but the conjunctions of the planets have something to do with it or that it is not perhaps because the dowager empress of China has at that same time a year ago chanced to

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pronounce some word of mystical power or some invisible jinnee may be present. Think of what trillions of trillions of hypotheses might be made of which one only is true; and yet after two or three or at the very most a dozen guesses, the physicist hits pretty nearly on the correct hypothesis. By chance he would not have been likely to do so in the whole time that has elapsed since the earth was solidified. (CP 5.172, 1903)

Another preoccupation of Peirce’s was the economic aspect of investigation, therefore his concern of how investigators select the most promising hypothesis for their future inductive tests. McKaughan (2008) recently suggested the term »pursuitworthiness« of hypotheses for this direction of Peirce’s considerations. According to Peirce the successful investigator »breaks a hypothesis up into its smallest logical components, and only risks one of them at a time« (McKaughan 2008, 457; cp. CP 7.220).

New Ideas In my view still more fascinating is the question whether there is the possibility of absolutely new ideas at all. Peirce is not always clear about this. As shown above, he claimed a certain il lume naturale for man’s reason (cp. Nubiola 2004) and as a child of 19th century scientific optimism he is, up to a certain point, a naïve advocate of human progress. As to the question of whether there is the possibility of something new at all, I would like to remind the reader of what I said above concerning Peirce’s opening of the logical syllogisms to everyday thought and life, because, in my view, it is here, in the problem solving of everyday life, that new thoughts arise. It is crucial to understand that the new idea that emerges has its ground in another realm of knowledge and the act of abduction consists in applying what is known from another field to the now existing problem (cp. also McKaughan 2008, 450). Although Peirce – as far as I am aware – never pointed this out clearly, it can be seen as the consequence of the above mentioned opening up of logic to everyday thinking. It is also a consequence of Peirce’s extensive familiarity with the history of science, since this aspect of abductive thinking can be recognized in numerous episodes, think of Galen’s theory of blood flow which drew on the tides, or on today’s understanding of the function of the heart as a pump. It has to be added that the creation of new analogies often occurs in a manner hidden from the thinker himself, e. g. in the case 186 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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of August Kekulé who »discovered« the structure of benzene in a dream (Le Soldat 1992). Wirth lately (2005) expressed something similar in his comparison of Davidson’s ideas of understanding and Peirce’s abduction. He claims that the surprising fact that has to be explained in Peirce’s model of abduction is no any longer surprising if we become aware that what we do is changing the contextual frame. Hence, ›reasoning backwards‹ aims at discovering either a singular cause or a general rule, which has to be selected or invented. In this sense abduction is the process of ›context sensitive code-selection‹ (Wirth 2005, 203).

The transference of a known principle to another field as an essence of new thoughts was also stated and defended by the social anthropologist Stanley Tambiah (1974), who called this the analogic nature of thinking. It is not coincidental that a social anthropologist developed this thought early on. The relativity of human knowledge was obvious to anthropologists in dealing with other cultures and thus cultivating a serious preoccupation with this kind of relativity, long before relativism and post structuralism appeared on the scene. 4 A similar thought stemming from linguistics is set out by George Lakoff and his team (e. g. 1980). Massimo Bonfantini & Giampaolo Proni (1983) also emphasized the cultural source of »new ideas«. They suggest that the Peircean il lume naturale needs to be replaced with the idea of il lume culturale, as the first being »steeped in bad metaphysics [it] is too generic in that it explains everything and nothing« (143). Although I do not like the somewhat arrogant style of the statement of the two after-sixty-eight philosophers, I too would like to promote the idea of il lume culturale (cp. also Paavola 2011, 310/ 311). Despite an insinuation of the unscientific nature of il lume naturale today, I would advise adhering to a more neutral alert attitude! 5 In my view, the latter marginalized thoughtful considerations on the topic in a far too extensive move. 5 Peirce’s ideas of God, rsp. his idealism are not acknowledged by a majority of his followers (cp. Nubiola 2004, 91). I myself am not sure yet what my opinion is or will be with regard to this difficult question. Below I will quote Douglas Anderson, who explains that the abductive thinker must be receptive towards the new idea that is presenting itself. This is certainly an intricate idea, but I prefer it to the raging relativism, which also is present in some reputed Peircean texts, although in my view, Peirce is the antidote to it. As an example cp. »The important point is that since Firstness implies any and all possibilities, some of them must contradict one another: they are inconsistent. Generals as Thirdness were always there as possibilities of Firstness. 4

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Returning to Reichertz’s conclusions, there are several commentators, e. g. Wim Staat (1993) and Claudine Tiercelin (2005) who also considered abduction in correlation to the phases of Peirce’s intellectual development, coming to similar results. I quote Tiercelin: It [abduction] is no longer viewed as a mere evidencing or justification process aiming at certainty, but more and more as a methodological process involved in the context of inquiry […] and in particular, as N. Hanson has shown, in the discovery part of it (functioning as an original ›method of invention‹ in search of the ›method of methods‹ [CP 7.59, 2.107–2.108]). (Tiercelin 2005, 391).

The oscillation of the investigative mind between deduction, induction and abduction has been inspiringly termed »the abductive spiral« by John Deely, a term I also found in Felicia Kruse (1986). It seems that this coincides with what Reichertz states to be the most important aspect of abduction, that is, that abduction is not, as is often thought, a special form of relationship between thoughts, but that it stands for an attitude (2013, 17). This is the attitude of a human being that is able to have real doubts, to confront his own ignorance and to this extent make room for new thoughts. All measures designed to create favorable conditions for abductions, therefore, always aim at one thing: the achievement of an attitude of preparedness to abandon old convictions and to seek new ones (Reichertz 2010).

Similarly, Catherine Legg concludes her considerations on the Humean approach to natural wonders, comparing them with those of Peirce: The important difference between Hume and Peirce’s methods, then, is in their attitude to the baffling, that which contradicts our most well-confirmed beliefs about the world. For Hume the possibility of such a phenomenon is to be cast aside on principle. For all our evidence for the laws of nature is evident against the phenomenon. For Peirce such a phenomenon is potentially valuable as it presents an opportunity for inquiry, a chance to find out something new (Legg 2001, 309, emphasis by the author).

As possibilities, generals at one time and place and within one culture might be considered real, but at another time and place within another culture those same generals might be considered mere figments of the imagination. This is to say that any and all generals are to a greater or lesser extent incomplete, since there is the possibility that at some space-time juncture they may be discarded and replaced by some alternative or other« (Merrell & Queiroz 2010 170, emphasis of the authors).

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One of the qualitative investigators criticized by Reichertz was Matthias Kettner (Reichertz 1999, 47–48). Kettner (1991 & 1998) hoped to relieve psychoanalysis from Adolf Grünbaum’s charge of being unscientific by using Peirce’s form of inference. As I will show later on, my idea of the relationship between abduction and psychoanalysis is much broader. However, let me first mention another field in which abduction became relevant, even popular.

Peirce as detective Peirce’s abduction acquired a tinge of glamour with the publication of Umberto Eco’s and Thomas A. Sebeok’s famous book »The sign of three« (1983). The book consists of several texts in which Peirce’s abduction is compared to the methods used by detectives in current crime stories. As the two editors in the introduction point out, this book was published due to the sudden appearance of the topic at several American and European universities at the same time. The authors describe the unexpected interest in detective methods as metaphor for abduction as a strange and astonishing coincidence. Actually, abduction, popular culture and psychoanalysis as well were quite common topics in culture studies, a discipline that emerged exactly at this time. Therefore, the appearance of these topics was not particularly mysterious, in my view. In the core text of the book Sebeok and his wife Jean UmikerSebeok tell the story of Peirce as a detective. Peirce himself put this story to paper; he tells us how he was able to recover a golden watch, which had been stolen by a member of the crew of a ship he had traveled with as a passenger. Peirce considered his story a good example for the fact that guesses normally have a high percentage of proving true, much higher than probability calculation would allow. Peirce’s story was never published during his lifetime, but, interestingly, was printed 16 years after his death in a literary journal produced by Harvard undergraduates. The Sebeoks rediscovered the story and made it popular (cp. introduction of Max Fisch, in Sebeok 1999). The authors compare Peirce’s way of catching the thief with Sherlock Holmes’ methods described by Conan Doyle. For beginners in that matter it might seem weird that the article hardly mentions one striking difference between the two searchers of truth, namely that Holmes himself in his conversations with Watson used to praise 189 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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his method as deduction. Without paying any attention to Holmes’/ Doyle’s theory of logic, Sebeok/Umiker-Sebeok analyze and interpret the behavior of Holmes in imaginative style, following Doyle’s description. They find out several common factors between Holmes’ and Peirce’s methods: both begin their analyses soundly grounded in observation of every detail and in precise fact-finding. They try not to follow a ready-made theory, but look at the characteristics and facts with a neutral, alert attitude. Every characteristic is analyzed in its own right, that means, the facts are not unified in a precipitous form of »knowledge«, but, exactly following Peirce’s advice (cp. my remarks to Peirce above), every single fact is given its proper cause (cp. also Bonfantini/Proni 1983, 119 f.). This is what Holmes called »reasoning backward« (Sebeok/Umiker-Sebeok 1983, 39). Peirce himself, in a later working phase, also introduced the term of »retroduction« (e. g. in CP 6.475, 1908) to what he before named abduction. Abductive or retroductive thinking means to stay in a neutral alert state and scrutinize exactly what every facet of the lived experience is. I nevertheless would like to dedicate a moment to Doyle’s oftenrepeated statement that what Holmes does is deduction. I agree with the Sebeoks in that there are many similarities between abduction and Holmes’ approach. Nevertheless, the self-declared assessment the figure of Sherlock Holmes is endowed with could be defended in the following way: Holmes seems to have an inner list of causal effects certain activities or circumstances can leave on cloth, hair, skin, shoes or even bodily posture of the person under observation. If we take such a list-like knowledge as the precondition, we can regard the jump from case to rule easily as induction. We can imagine, that the detective, after having made the inductive inference of: »bronzed complexion« to »the person has been in a country with high solar radiation« can immediately proceed to the opposite, this time the deductive inference. This would sound like this: »Afghanistan is a hot country, British soldiers are fighting there«, ergo: »this man must be a British soldier recently back from Afghanistan«. Contemplating one single process of inference in detail therefore looks as if it could be any one of the three inferences. This is because our thinking is always back and forth, having an idea, checking, if it has a chance to be the right one and so on. The abductive moment is – in my view – only a momentary but significant flash. Without it, we cling to the already known, and no new knowledge would come into being. Once more, what is important is the attitude of the investigator 190 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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not to make a judgement immediately and follow this bias, merely looking for other proof, but to hold the range of details in mind, until a new gestalt– an abductive inference – comes into being. The alert observant attitude of his friend who is wide open for new perceptions and interpretations is what the figure of Watson, the fictive narrator of the stories, fills with astonishment, not to say awe. While accompanying Holmes to what will be their first common case, he articulates this: I had imagined that Sherlock Holmes would at once have hurried into the house and lunged into a study of mystery. Nothing appeared to be further from his intention. With an air of nonchalance which, under the circumstances, seemed to me to border upon affectation, he lunged up and down the fringe of the ground. (2006, 539)

Of utmost importance is not to stick to a pre-formed judgement. This attitude finds itself expressed when Doyle makes his master-detective say, »It is a capital mistake to theorize before you have all the evidence. It biases the judgment« (Doyle 2006, 51).

Guesses Peirce several times characterized abduction as solely guessing. Jaime Nubiola (2005, 122) quotes from an unpublished manuscript: Abduction is that kind of operation which suggests a statement in no wise contained in the data from which it sets out. There is a more familiar name for it than abduction; for it is neither more nor less than guessing (MS 692, 1901, emphasis of the author canceled, emphasis mine).

Abduction counts as the rehabilitation of creative guessing, characterizing these acts as inherent features of scientific investigation. 6 Therefore Sebeok/Umiker-Sebeok fictitiously argue with Sherlock Holmes, who once claimed that he never guesses, commenting: »What makes Sherlock Holmes so successful at detection is not that he never guesses but that he guesses so well« (1983, 22). Considering Peirce’s statements one might argue that there is a kind of tension between the two characterizations of abduction, on the one hand as a logical inference, on the other as pure guessing. Cp. Vasalli 2000. This author claims the re-discovery of guessing as a tool within the canon of scientific methods by Sigmund Freud.

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We therefore have to keep in mind that in Peirce’s view, logic comprehends the whole working of human mind as semiotic process. Vincent Colapietro explains: Peirce fully realized that an explanatory guess or ›abductive suggestion comes to us like a flash. It is an act of insight, although of extremely fallible insight‹ (CP 5.181; also EP 2, 227). The formal derivation of a necessary conclusion from explicitly formulated premises stands in marked contrast to the insight by which a ›theory‹ is put forward for our consideration. But this simply means that the logic of abduction is distinct from that of deduction, not that the generation of explanatory suggestions falls entirely outside the purview of logical inquiry (Colapietro 2005, 420, emphasis mine).

The slight change of meaning of the term »logic« which Colapietro hints at can be compared to the broadening of meaning of the term »rationality« in today’s discussions. We tend to speak of »emotional rationality« today, a description of reason that would have been contradictory 50 years ago, when thinking and feeling were seen as opposites. The outdated split of rationality on the one side and emotion on the other has increasingly diminished nowadays. However, inclusion of emotionality is not the sole aim of Peirce’s changed usage of the term logic. This is not even his explicit aim – rather he sees this enlargement of the field of logic in a renewal of logical thinking itself. As Tiercelin states, his (Pierce’s) semiotic project targeted a relational and semiotic understanding of logics. Such new ways are afforded by an enlarged definition of logic no longer viewed through the syllogistic prism but through the logic of relations and the semiotic framework, which, among other things, covers Critic but also Speculative Grammar, Rhetoric or Methodeutic and provides, beside symbols, such powerful tools as indices [CP 3.361–3.363] and icons. (Tiercelin 2005, 391)

In his time, Peirce was looking for a way to explain the working of the human mind as purely semiotic and continuous. It follows from this that he integrates human creativity and even emotional moves into the process of scientific investigation. The emergence of new ideas proves to be very important for it is impossible to grasp the process of ongoing evolution of thought without the continuous hope for new insights! Moreover, how could we come up with new ideas without this leap into the dark, which is called guessing? The famous title of a planned book »A guess at the riddle« (Peirce 2000, Textual apparatus, 595) indicates what central role he attributes 192 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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to guessing as well as his allusions to the antique figure of the Sphinx, who asked the human hero to solve the riddle of humankind.

Abduction goes along with an emotion As mentioned above, the shift of the term »rationality« increasingly embraces emotional aspects. After the far-reaching insights of Damasio, Edelman and others we tend to integrate emotion and self-interest of the thinker into the process of thinking. Peirce clearly was a forerunner of this paradigmatic change. He even characterizes the emotion that comes along with abduction as a central aspect of the latter. Carry W. Spinks mentions this (1983, 199) and Douglas Anderson (2005) emphasizes the abductive attitude as esthetic with an emotional quality. He quotes Peirce as follows: [E]very hypothetic inference involves the formation of such an emotion [an emotion such as that caused by listening to an orchestra D. A.]. We may say, therefore, that hypothesis produces the sensuous element of thought […] (CP 2.643, Anderson 2005, 14).

Anderson qualifies observation, imagination and receptivity as the three features that account for the elements of the esthetic attitude of abduction (same place, 20) and he continues: [I]t is important to think of them as being in continuous interplay and not as separable, isolable mechanical parts of an aggregate activity. Rather, they are integral and transactional, working together in enabling the possibility of better hypothesis development (at the same place).

In the following, I would like to deepen the second feature, imagination, which is a psychological capacity that can be seen as a shared prerequisite of psychoanalytic and Peircean understanding of thought processes.

Imagination Sebeok/Umiker-Sebeok’s inspiring approach not only examines Holmes’s method, as described by Conan Doyle, but they also point at one important similar trait in the figure of Holmes as well as in the personality of Peirce, which contradicts the ordinary picture of strictly logical thinkers: it is the imaginative state, which precedes 193 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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the »new idea«. According to Peirce’s self-description as well as in Doyle’s shaping of the personality »Holmes«, the visionary, resourceful moment implies a submersion in a meditative state, or a dissolution of every possible rational thought. Doyle/Watson compares Holmes with a fox-hound in moments when he becomes aware of a single fact, which produces new possible explanations. Men who had only known the quiet thinker and logician of Baker Street would have failed to recognize him [in these moments, V. S.]. His face flushed and darkened. His brows were drawn into two bard black lines, while his eyes shone out from beneath them with a steely glitter. His face was bent downward, his shoulders bowed, his lips compressed, and the veins stood out like whipcord in his long sinewy neck. His nostrils seemed to dilate with a purely animal lust for the chase, and his mind was so absolutely concentrated upon the matter before him that a question or remark fell unheeded upon his ears, or, at the most, only provoked a quick, impatient snarl in reply. (Doyle 2005, 121–122)

Sebeok/Umiker-Sebeok point out that Holmes transforms to the point where »he seems almost to have lost the power of speech and be reduced to expressing himself by sounds« (Nordon, P. 1966, Conan Doyle. London: John Murray. Quoted at Sebeok/Umiker-Sebeok 1983, 20). This driven, animalistic picture only forms one half of the ground where new thoughts arise. There is also this very different aspect of Sherlock Holmes’ personality where he seems to dive into the depth of his thinking, or better said, he plunges to the place where thoughts come from. Holmes was known to oscillate between the almost frenzied single-mindedness of the fox-hound on the trail of his quarry and a sort of lethargic reverie (Sebeok/Umiker-Sebeok 1983, 25/26).

The lethargic reverie was something Peirce also practiced. He described it in the following, poetic way: Enter your skiff of musement, push off into the lake of thought, and leave the breath of heaven to swell your sail. With your eyes open, awake to what is about or within you, and open conversation with yourself; for such is all meditation! It is, however, not a conversation in words alone, but is illustrated, like a lecture, with diagrams and with experiments. (CP 6.461)

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symbolic level (The Third). Abduction is a process on the iconic level (The First) (cp. Merrell & Queiroz 2010; Paavola 2011) where different forms, unburdened by any possible definite meaning, can be encountered. Anderson points to the level of First where imagination and percepts are unconsciously likened and prefabricated sense is suspended. The mind goes back to the level of the sensuous percepts, allowing undefined forms, patterns or rhythms pass before the inner eye. ›An imagination,‹ Peirce suggests, ›is an affection of consciousness which can be directly compared with a percept in some special feature, and be pronounced to accord or discord with it‹ [CP 2.148]. (Anderson 2005, 18)

Abduction, the emergence of new explanations and the process of perception, share this oscillating interchange of dreamlike presenting oneself with forms on the level of First, on the one hand, and understanding or naming it on the symbolic level of Third on the other. The iconic comparison of forms is lifted to the Third; the category of laws and explanations. Anderson emphasizes: On the other hand, there is an informal ability central to the strategy for abduction […]. The creation of new ideas or new combinations or arrangements of ideas to account for the surprising facts of observation requires that the inquirer employ a scientific imagination, which ›dreams of explanations and laws‹ [CP 1.48]. (Anderson 2005, 17)

We could consequently suggest that the part of mind that looks for an explanation, the scientific dreamer, receives the message from the similarity of dream and sensitive impression that emerges from the iconic level.

Freud as a detective This reference to a dreamy state, – reference to the iconic, that means, the level of First, – can be taken as a point of commonality between psychoanalysis and the detective’s work, operating as a metaphor for abduction. Interestingly enough, several texts exist in which the figure of the detective is for his part compared with Sigmund Freud! This metaphor has been in the air since the beginnings of psychoanalysis, because, as Alfred Lorenzer explains, detective stories and psychoanalysis were bred at about the same time, i. e. mid to end 19th century. They can be considered as possible answers to the same 195 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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socio-economic situation (Lorenzer 1985, 1). Nevertheless, at the very same time as the analogy between abduction and detective appeared on stage, the metaphor of analyst as a detective came to a new blossoming too. Actually, another of the articles in Eco/Sebeok’s book draws an analogy between Holmes and Freud (cp. Ginzburg 1983). Sherlock Holmes met Freud at the fictitious level in various literary works and movies. Till Bastian (2005) analyses four novels in which Freud’s encounter with Holmes is described. The first of these novels was Nicolas Meyer’s The Seven Percent Solution where Holmes’ pathologic character and cocaine addiction lead him to consult Freud. This subject was taken up and developed; it appears as a crucial element in the storyline of several movies and series. It even seems that the meeting of the two characters in popular media was evoked to the point that a misled American girl asked the blog-community if Freud and Holmes had met in reality (Büttner 2010)! One of the texts in which Freud’s methodology is compared with the detective’s work is the already mentioned text by Lorenzer (2005). Lorenzer coined the expression scenic understanding for behavior at the non-spoken level (cp. the same author 1970; Salling Olesen & Weber 2013). The analyst understands the patient at this non-verbal level and does not try to »deepen what one logically should expect«. Instead, in an unaccustomed manner, he is aware of the »uncommon, unusal« (2005, 6, emphasis of the author, translation V. S.). 7 Unconscious fantasies present themselves as non-verbal scenic arrangements. Lorenzer shows that therapeutic activity aims at reintegrating these unconscious concepts of behavior into language. While following the narrative of the patient, the therapeutic process adopts language’s peculiar power for change. Namely to transform the body’s roaming desire at first into narrative images and subsequently lift them up to the level of symbolic, verbal life scripts (2005, 10, translation V. S.) 8

7 … Wert und Nutzen des szenischen Verstehens: Es sucht seine Erfüllung nicht in der Vertiefung des logisch Erwartbaren, sondern in einer merkwürdigen Wendung zum Unüblich-Irrationalen hin. 8 Die therapeutische Arbeit zielt ja darauf, Unbewusstes bewusst zu machen, d. h. nicht-sprachliche Verhaltensentwürfe in Sprache einzuholen. Diese therapeutische Absicht macht sich gerade im Eingehen auf die Erzählungen die eigentümliche Verwandlungskraft der Sprache zu eigen. Nämlich das im Körper umtreibende Verlangen zunächst in erzählbare Bilder, dann aber auf die Höhe sprachsymbolisch benannter Lebensentwürfe zu heben.

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Although Lorenzer did not explicitly stress abductive thinking in the process, the analyst’s method strikingly resembles Holmes’ and Peirce’s procedure. The analyst’s ability to complete the patient’s fragmentary information is grounded in his own practical and biographically accumulated knowledge. Therapy for Lorenzer means making the bodily felt instinctual contents available for language. According to Lorenzer, instinctual nonlinguistic wishes and aims, always take the form of fantasy. To indicate the place of the other, which is implied in fantasies, is undoubtedly a merit of Lorenzer’s introduction of the metaphor of scenic arrangement. Although unconscious, fantasies are directed toward another person. Even if they are not understandable they are intrinsically social and they tend to express themselves in scenic arrangements. The analyst’s job is to understand the scenes embodied in the sessions. In addition, he understands them in a special way. As for the scene that cannot be imagined at a conscious level, the patient tends to assign the therapist a role within the scene, transforming him into a cast member. It depends on the capacity of the analyst to recognize his proper role within the patient’s private theater and to offer a symbolized formulation of the implicit sense to the patient. Only at the level of Third, at the level of symbolization, does the scene recover its full social meaning and can it be rejected, accepted or altered by the patient. Ginzburg (2005) draws on another analogy, this time between an art critique and Freud. He compares Freud’s method (and Holmes’) with an art historian of the mid 19th century, the famous Giovanni Morelli. This art critique was renowned for detecting forgery in art by paying attention to minor details. Following his theory, painters, like human beings in general, involuntarily leave traces, which serve the historian to assign works of arts to a specific artist. The clues for the correct attribution to a master are therefore unimportant, often unnoticed details of the painting, like hands or ears. Similarly, Freud detected characteristic details in the symptoms and narratives of his patients, which allowed him to reconstruct important details of their life histories. This brings about the aforementioned attention paid to every single fact by the detective. Another striking resemblance between the abductive attitude »as a passive and receptive state« (Peirce 1929, 281) and evenly suspended attention, which was recommended to the »physicians practicing psycho-analysis« (2012/1958) by Freud, may already have been noted by readers with a psychoanalytic background. 197 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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Bastian (2009), revisiting the detective metaphor in psychoanalysis, comes to a rather scathing conclusion. It has to be said however that his description of the detective’s work contrasts with the one given by the above-mentioned authors who emphasise abductive thinking. Bastian characterizes the detective’s work as focusing on the aim of finding a perpetrator who is to blame for his deeds. In his view, the analyst who identifies with the master detective cannot fulfill his therapeutic task because while disclosing the analysand’s secrets his feelings may be triumphant. Instead of entering into a supportive relationship with the patient, he concentrates on robbing the patient of his secrets and blaming him for his errors and faults. Bastian suggests that analysts identifying with the master detective fend off relational intricacies of their work. Although I do not agree with his conclusion, Bastian deserves the credit for drawing our attention to implications concerning the human relationship. It is obvious that the analogy of detective and analyst cannot be comprehensive for the whole situation; this metaphor, like any, has its limits. Whereas the detective is looking for clues to incriminate the guilty person, in psychoanalysis it is crucial not to condemn the patient’s fantasies and hidden thoughts that are only emerging at this very moment. Comparing the work of the detective and the therapeutic procedure with abduction we must keep in mind the different aims of the procedures and not project a sadistic attitude into the analyst. Nevertheless, the critique of Bastian is directed towards a tradition in psychoanalysis that places the therapeutic activity in the hands (or brains) of the analyst alone. In today’s psychoanalytical thinking, we are aware that it is primarily the patient who has to understand and to produce creative ideas; he has to be helped to free his abductive thinking. In that way the activity of interpretative (abductive) thinking has moved its emphasis from the analyst to the patient. Now let us try to compare the relational aspect in Freud’s work on the one hand and Peirce’s on the other. Beforehand, a note concerning the meaning of the term psychoanalytic: there is a wide field of possible meanings when one mentions psychoanalysis. Is one speaking of the person or personal work of Sigmund Freud? Is it the therapeutic practice that is meant or are we speaking of theoretical issues which combine or integrate parts of the Freudian thinking into a broader social or cultural theory? When we speak of therapeutic practice we have to make clear whether we are speaking of Freud’s time, of the psychiatric paradigm in the United States as was practiced 198 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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from 1930 to the 60ies or of the practice of other streams of psychoanalysis, for example Kleinian psychoanalysis in England or Lacanian in France. If we compare Peirce and Freud in respect of the relational aspect of their theories, it is crucial to bear in mind one big difference. Freud’s theory was meant to ground a practice, which is performed up until today, whereas Peirce’s thoughts, although their tremendous influence on the social theory of the Chicago School remains uncontested, 9 have not survived in practice today. It has to be admitted that psychoanalytical practice has not always been free of the mentioned sadistic triumphal attitude. Nevertheless, I would like to emphasize that, in general, today’s psychoanalysis is much more tender and altruistic than it was in its beginning. Whereas in the beginning the cunning of unreason (to quote the title of Ernest Gellner’s book) was conceptualized as active forces that had to be defeated, today what is meant by the unconscious in the Freudian sense resembles more and more what pragmatists and cognitivists mean by the implicit. Today’s analysts see themselves more as partners in the common venture to seek out aspects in the patient’s personality with which he has not yet been familiar. Analysts help patients to feel more at ease with their unconscious fantasies and ambitions, to take down their defenses and to help them get in contact with and shape the relation to their own animalistic nature more gently. Today’s therapists expend considerable effort to incite the patient’s interest and quite often – as a consequence of Kleinain-Bionian input, self- and relational psychoanalysis – engage in a motherly role, a mother who understands certain childish wishes and fantasies. The integration of the role of the analyst’s unconscious and unintended reactions into the therapist’s considerations and reflections figures as the turn from one-person-psychology to two person-psychology in psychoanalysis (Ferenczi quoted in Haynal 1993, 43). It implies a serious self-confrontation and scrutinizing of the feelings and conflicts a therapist might experience while working with one special patient. The therapist’s emotional reactions are addressed under the heading of counter-transference, one of the major topics in the last 50 years of psychoanalytic literature. The turn from one-person psychology to two-person-psychology acknowledges the sociality of

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Cp. my footnote 1 and Wiley 2006

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human selves, which also was heavily emphasized by pragmatism and semiotics, the two schools founded by Peirce.

Holmes’, Peirce’s and Freud’s musings We have seen that Peirce’s as well as Holmes’ abductive attitude are in an eminent relationship with the realm of First. Reichertz (2003a) calls attention to Peirce’s description of two possible occasions where the probability of abductions increases. They correspond exactly to the »fox-hound« and the »sort of lethargic reverie« in the above quotes describing Holmes. For Peirce, it is the situation of the stolen golden watch, a moment of fear and stress, in which rational thinking and planning is suspended. The second situation, according to Reichertz, is a kind of retreat into a meditative state. As explicated also by Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok, the literary figure Sherlock Holmes, as well as the real historic person Peirce, are predisposed with a certain meditative competence. Reichertz points out that both situations, the one of stress and the one of retreat, tend toward an exclusion of rational thinking on the one hand and habitualized behavior on the other (2003a, 82). Edgar Allan Poe, the father of crime story, allocated these conditions of abductive capacity to the traits of the detective’s personality, endowed with these twofold abilities. Habitualized or analytical thinking, according to Poe, must not cease, but the abductive thinker is a personality, which is gifted with the faculty of analytical and imaginative thinking at the same time. It will be found, in fact, that the ingenious are always fanciful, and the truly imaginative never otherwise than analytic. (Poe 2002, 9, cp. also Dahmer 1988, 420)

The moment of meditation or hyperactive acting out is not simply an ignoring of ratio and habit, but rather a loosening of habitualized meaning, giving iconic thought the freedom to look for other possible meaning. The whole treasure trove of experience therefore is not absent, not forgotten or ignored but floating, in unrest, in dynamic action. Floyd Merrell designates this as »Destabilizing what we think we know« (2005, 87). This coincides with what I said on the cultural origin of new thoughts: they are not absolutely new, but rely on known items or processes that are applied to new fields. 200 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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Now, where do we locate this meditative receptivity within psychoanalysis? In the very center of practice! This may seem an unexpected claim. We surely have to admit that one cannot decipher an especially meditative vein in Freud’s writing and one also has to take account of Freud’s remark that he did not know the »oceanic feelings« that Romain Rolland had mentioned in a letter (Freud 1930/1961 pp. 64 ff.). On the other hand, Freud’s therapy has developed into a relationship between therapist and patient, which resembles »a moment of shared meditation«, as Sudhir Kakhar, an Indian psychoanalyst once said, tongue-in-cheek, at a conference in Zurich. Freud’s style of accompanying the patient emphatically was more implicit. Only after many decades of analytical practice and theoretical deliberation has this point become an issue of theoretical introspection. In this respect, the psychoanalytic method resembles Focusing, the method of mutual support through deep listening by Eugene Gendlin. This American humanistic tradition in psychotherapy again is surely not imaginable without Peirce’s pragmatism, although this is seldomly explicated! Even though not all psychoanalysts might agree with the above, the following seems undisputed: the aim of psychoanalysis is to give patients the possibility to better self-reflection and this happens thanks to a more permissive attitude toward unconscious wishes. My claim here is that the faculty of self-reflection and creativity has to be seen as an intrinsic need of human beings and this not only in the therapeutic situation: it has to play an important role in every analysis of societal and/or cultural facts.

Abduction, Perception, Emotion Abduction, like perception, is rooted in what Peirce named the category of First, a realm of vague ideas and forms, where associations are made according to the rules of similarity and iconicity. Peirce therefore compared abduction and perception, stating that they are very similar, the unique distinction between them being the automatic, involuntary character of the latter (Tiercelin 2005, 391 ff.; Saller 2014). Based on his experimental work on the psychology of perception, 10 Peirce maintained that perceptual judgments are »the result of 10

Peirce conducted experimental studies at The Johns Hopkins University with the

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a process, although of a process not sufficiently conscious to be controlled, or, to state it more truly, not controllable and therefore not fully conscious« (5.181). The different elements of a hypothesis are in our minds before we are conscious of entertaining it, »but it is the idea of putting together what we had never before dreamed of putting together which flashes the new suggestion before our contemplation« (CP 5.181). The abductive aspect of perception reduces the awesome diversity of sensibility to a consistent judgment of experience: Hypothesis substitutes, for a complicated tangle of predicates attached to one subject, a single conception. Now, there is a peculiar sensation belonging to the act of thinking that each of these predicates inheres in the subject. In hypothetic inference this complicated feeling so produced is replaced by a single feeling of greater intensity, that belonging to the act of thinking the hypothetic conclusion. Now, when our nervous system is excited in a complicated way, there being a relation between the elements of the excitation, the result is a single harmonious disturbance which I call an emotion. Thus, the various sounds made by the instruments of an orchestra strike upon the ear, and the result is a peculiar musical emotion, quite distinct from the sounds themselves. This emotion is essentially, the same thing as in hypothetic inference, and every hypothetic inference involves the formation of such an emotion. (CP 2.643, emphasis V. S.)

Abduction, understanding, comes along with a pleasant bodily emotion. It unifies possible predicates to a single one. It is important to keep in mind that human thinking is rooted in an unspoken, prelinguistic field of meanings (cp. also Petitmengin in this volume). To transform this pre-symbolic, iconic meaning to the symbolic level is essential for our symbolic capacity on the one hand, but also for our emotional balance on the other. The importance of the symbolic level is also emphasized by ego-psychology: when the synthesizing effect of perception and abduction are missing, anxiety arises. Wilfred R. Bion made important contributions towards understanding this impact of the cognitive capacities by expanding Freudian basic instincts of love and hate with a third key — calling these basic emotional later well-known psychologist Joseph Jastrow (1863–1944), then his student (CP 7.21–48, cp. also Jastrow 1916, Brent 1993/1998, 127–130). It seems that Peirce, who had lectured at John Hopkins since 1879, had been the first scientist to conduct experimental psychological investigations in the US (1883). Nevertheless, it is Granville Stanley Hall, who is credited with this merit although he only entered John Hopkins in 1884 (cp. also Fuchs, Evans & Green 2007).

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principles —, namely knowledge. He gave these three types of tone the names of L, H and K (cp. 1962, 42–56). Psychoanalytic relationship, following Bion, must be a relationship in the key of Knowledge. The wish to know is fundamental, according to Bion. It is as important as Love. James Fisher (2011) concretizes the Bionian K as »the emotional experience of feeling curious« (43). It would be very exciting to scrutinize the importance of curiosity along these lines within Peircean thinking, e. g. in his early work »The fixation of belief«, where he states: Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief; while the latter is a calm and satisfactory state which we do not wish to avoid, or to change to a belief in anything else. On the contrary, we cling tenaciously, not merely to believing, but to believing just what we do believe. (CP 5.372)

This is not the place to elaborate the similarities and distinctions between Bion and Peirce more deeply. Let me however simply state the following: Both authors emphasize the crucial importance of the capacity to orientate oneself in the world. In Bion’s work, a neurotic or even psychotic state is characterized by the person’s incapacity to learn from experience. For Peirce, experience always has to do with Secondness: encountering something real and being aware of forces that oppose us. Peirce illustrates his category of Secondness as follows: I instance putting your shoulder against a door and trying to force it open against an unseen, silent, and unknown resistance. We have a two-sided consciousness of effort and resistance, which seems to me to come tolerably near to a pure sense of actuality. On the whole, I think we have here a mode of being of one thing which consists in how a second object is. I call that Secondness. (CP 1.24)

Confronted with an outer or inner reality that opposes us, we are forced to change our beliefs and unquestioned habits or iconic imaginations. We are perceiving something new, comparing unconsciously the force that opposes us with former experiences and recognizing – in an abductive move – a new fact. In the quote above Peirce characterizes the very moment of the emergent perceptual judgement as unifying a multitude of different sensations into one idea: »In hypothetic inference this complicated feeling so produced is replaced by a single feeling of greater intensity, that belonging to the act of thinking the hypothetic conclusion.« The continuous interaction with the 203 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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world produces strong feelings, feelings of the world and feelings of our own personality in communication with the world. We even interpret this »single feeling of greater intensity« that Peirce mentions as the very core of our selves. »Being aware« of and realizing our own interaction with the outer world – is that not what our conscious self is about? The strong feeling that we experience expresses our capacity to give meaning to experience. Consciousness then stands for an aggregation of human faculties, mainly semiotic ones that help us to orientate ourselves in our world. The abductive part of our experience is accompanied by good feelings, feelings that we also have while guessing and unraveling mysteries.

Conclusions The detective metaphor provides us with a number of fruitful insights. It calls to mind that the analyst’s work is abductive; at the same time the detective metaphor can also be used to shed light on the abductive nature of thinking in general. Therefore, it is not only the analyst who thinks abductively; and it is not his discoveries that count. It is the understanding and experience of the patient himself that brings the process forward. She is invited to let go of deductivistic rationalism, which is one of the characteristics of depression, in order to facilitate her abductive inferences, and to give credit to her own curiosity and creativity. Detective stories afford us good feelings of a successful guess 11 while cozily sitting on a sofa, without having to take any risks. Then again, what precisely is the mystery of the joy we experience reading these stories? Resolving conundrums seems to be one of the most crucial activities of human nature! 12 Obviously, abduction cannot be viewed as a secret weapon useful only in the struggle for scientific acknowledgement of the social sciences. It is something entirely ordinary, something that every human being is

As Jean-Martin Büttner (2010) disclosed, Freud himself in his youth read Doyle’s stories with pleasure and interest. 12 For a similar conclusion concerning movies cp. Saller 2013, 120. 11

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involved in. Creating new insights and ideas is one of the fundamental and ubiquitous faculties of humankind.

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Vera Saller Fuchs, A. H., Evans, R. B. & Green Ch. D. (2007). John Hopkin’s first professorship in philosophy: A critical pivot point in the history of American psychology. The American Journal of Psychology, 120 (2), 303–323. Gellner, E. (1985). The psychoanalytic movement or the cunning of unreason. London: Paladin. Ginzburg, C. (1983). Clues: Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes. U. Eco & Th. A. Sebeok (eds.), Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. The sign of three (pp. 125–179). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Glaser, B. & Strauss, A. (1974). Interaktion mit Sterbenden. Beobachtungen für Ärzte, Schwestern, Seelsorger und Angehörige. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. — (1967). The discovery of grounded theory: Strategies for qualitative research. Chicago: Aldine Publishing Company. Grünbaum, A. (1984). The foundations of psychoanalysis. Berkeley: University of California Press. Harrowitz, N. (1983). The body of the detective model: Charles S. Peirce and Edgar Allan Poe. U. Eco, & Th. A. Sebeok (eds.), Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. The sign of three (pp. 179–197). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Haynal, A. (1993). Veränderung durch Psychoanalyse. Beiträge zur Ideengeschichte der »Technik«. B. Grossmann-Garger & W. Parth (eds.), Heilt die Psychoanalyse? Wien: Orac. Houser, N. (1992). The fortunes and misfortunes of the Peirce Papers. Signs of humanity, 3, 1259–1268. Hoyningen-Huene, P. (1987). Context of discovery and context of justification. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 18(4), 501–515. Jastrow, J. (1916). Charles S. Peirce as a teacher. The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology, and Scientific Methods, XIII(26), 723–726. Kettner, M. (1998). Zur Semiotik der Deutungsarbeit: Freud und Peirce. Psyche – Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 52(7), 619–647. — (1991). Peirce’s notion of abduction and psychoanalytic interpretation. B. Litowitz, & P. S. Epstein (eds.), Semiotic perspectives on clinical theory and practice: Medicine, psychiatry and psychoanalysis (pp. 163–180). Berlin & New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Kruse, Felicia E. (1986). Indexiality and the abductive link. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 22(4), 435–337. Kuhn, Th. S. (2012). The structure of scientific revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 4th ed. Lakoff, G. & Johnson M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Legewie, H. (2006). Jörg Strübing (2004). Grounded Theory. Zur sozialtheoretischen und epistemologischen Fundierung des Verfahrens der empirisch begründeten Theoriebildung (Review). Forum: Qualitative Social Research, 7(2). http://www.qualitative-research.net/index.php/fqs/rt/printerFriendly/ 105/219. Accessed 2014–07–07 Legg, C. (2001). Naturalism and wonder: Peirce on the logic of Hume’s argument against miracles. Philosophia, 28(1–4), 297–318.

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The detective metaphor in abduction studies and psychoanalysis Le Soldat, J. (1992). Kekulés Traum. Ergänzende Bemerkungen zu Mischerlichs »Benzolring«. Psyche – Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 46, 180–201. Lorenzer, A. (1985). Der Analytiker als Detektiv, der Detektiv als Analytiker. Psyche – Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, 39(1), 1–11. — (1970). Sprachzerstörung und Rekonstruktion. Vorarbeiten zu einer Metatheorie der Psychoanalyse. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. McKaughan, D. J. (2008). From ugly duckling to swan: C. S. Peirce, abduction, and the pursuit of scientific theories. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 44(3), 446–468. Merrell, F. (2005). Shouldn’t we be surprised that we are not surprised when we should be surprised? Semiotica, 153(1–4), 162–178. Merrell, F. & Queiroz, J. (2010). Icons and abduction. Signs, 3, 162–178. Nubiola, J. (2004). Il lume naturale: Abduction and god. Semiotiche, I/2. 91–102. Poe, E. A. (2002). The murders in the Rue Morgue. Stuttgart: Reclam. Paavola, S. (2011). Diagrams, iconicity, and abductive discovery. Semiotica, 186 (1–4), 297–314. Peirce, Ch. S. (2000). Fisch, M. H. & Kloesel, Ch. J. (eds.). Writings of Charles S. Peirce: 1886–1890. Vol. 6. Indianapolis: Peirce Edition Project. — (1998). Peirce Edition Project (eds.). The Essential Peirce. Vol. 2 (1893–1913). Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. [Reference to the Essential Peirce will be designated by EP followed by page]. — (1958). Burks, A. W. (ed.). The Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. VII-VIII. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press — (1931–1935). Hartshorne, Ch. & Weiss, P. (eds.). The Collected papers of Charles Sanders Peirce. Vols. I-VI. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press [Reference to Peirce’s Collected papers will be designated CP followed by volume and paragraph number.]. — (1929). Guessing. The horn and the hound, 2, 267–282. — Unpublished manuscript. Quotes follow the numeration of Robin, R. S. (1967). Annotated Catalogue of the Papers of Charles S. Peirce. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press. Reichertz, J. (2013). Die Abduktion in der qualitativen Sozialforschung. Über die Entdeckung des Neuen. Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien. 2., aktualisierte Auflage. — (2010). Abduction: The logic of discovery of Grounded Theory. Forum Qualitative Research, 11, (1). 13 January 2010; http://www.qualitative-research. net/index.php/fqs/article/view/1412/2902 — (2003a). Die Abduktion in der qualitativen Sozialforschung. Opladen: Leske & Budrich. — (1999). Gültige Entdeckung des Neuen?: Zur Bedeutung der Abduktion in der qualitativen Sozialforschung. Österreichische Zeitschrift für Soziologie, 24(4), 47–64. http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:0168-ssoar-19536. 201408-22. — (1988): … Als hätte jemand den Deckel vom Leben abgehoben. Abduktives Schliessen bei Ch. S. Peirce und D. Hammett. Kodikas/Code, 11(3–4), 349– 361.

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Vera Saller Rosenthal, S. (2011). Interpretative Sozialforschung (Eine Einführung). Weinheim & München: Juventa. Saller, V. (2014). Perception, experience and unconscious in Peirce and Psychoanalysis. July 2014, Peirce Centennial. Lowell, MA. — (2013). Geschichten die heilen. Sur, Fernando Solanas, Argentinien 1988. Y. Frenzel & M. Fäh (eds.), Cinépassion. Eine psychoanalytische Filmrevue (pp. 113–120). Giessen: Psychosozial Verlag. Salling Olesen, H. & Weber, K. (2012). Socialization, language, and scenic understanding. Alfred Lorenzer’s contribution to a psycho-societal methodology. Forum Qualititaive Social Research. 13(3) (2012). URL: http://nbn-resolving. de/urn:nbn:de:0114-fqs1203229. Accessed 2014. 06. 13. Sebeok, Th. A. & Umiker-Sebeok, J. (1983). ›You know my method‹ : A juxtaposition of Sherlock Holmes and C. S. Peirce. U. Eco, & Th. A. Sebeok (eds.), Dupin, Holmes, Peirce. The Sign of three (pp. 11–54). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Spinks, C. W. (1983). Peirce’s demon abduction: Or how to charm the truth out of a quark. American Journal of Semiotics, 1–2, 195–208. Staat, W. (1993). On abduction, deduction, induction and the categories. Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society, 39(2), 225–237. Tambiah, St. (1973). Form and meaning of magical acts: A point of view. R. Horton & R. Finnegan (eds.), Modes of Thought: essays on thinking in Western and non-Western societies (pp. 199–230). London: Faber & Faber. Tiercelin, C. (2005). Abduction and the semiotics of perception. Semiotica, 153 (1–4), 389–412. Vasalli, G. (2001). The birth of psychoanalysis from the spirit of technique. International Journal of Psychoanalysis, 82(1), 3–26. Wiley, N. (2006). Peirce and the founding of American sociology. Journal of Classical Sociology, 6(1), 23–50. Wirth, U. (2005). Abductive reasoning and language philosophy: Peirce’s and Davidson’s account of interpretation. Semiotica, 153(1–4), 199–208. — (ed.) (2000). Die Welt als Zeichen und Hypothese. Frankfurt a. M.: Suhrkamp Taschenbuch Wissenschaft. — (1995). Abduktion und ihre Anwendungen. Zeitschrift für Semiotik, 17, 40– 425.

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Human Language and Subjective Experience: The symbolically extended »us« as a basis of human consciousness Steven C. Hayes

The purpose of this chapter is to examine the relationship between a first person perspective on subjective experience, and human language and cognition. Knowing, in a human sense, is intensely verbal, not in the sense of being vocal, but in the sense of being symbolically bound and intertwined with higher forms of human cognition. Whatever we know, sense, or remember is altered by our symbolic categories and systems, such as what we believe, what we expect, what we’ve been told, what we hope for, or what we fear. Human language and cognition thus fundamentally alters and shapes our subjective experience and the perspective from which we view it. It is almost too easy to make such points – once we slip by the question of what we mean by the terms we use to make them. We may not know in any kind of a precise psychological sense what we mean by cognition, language, symbols, or perspective-taking nor where these events come from, but common sense allows us to agree that whatever they mean they apply to things like beliefs, expectations, understandings, hopes, or fears. That is exactly what I did in the previous paragraph and few readers were likely to have raised flags of objection. Readers assumed they knew more than they actually did. In a word, readers were had. It gets worse from there. The same trick of mind makes it is easy to do actual research on how language and cognition shapes our subjective experience, still without really knowing what these categories mean. We may not know what a belief is, for example, but it is easy to give examples of beliefs, and from there it is easy to create measures of them. With measures in hand, it is easy to ask questions about beliefs and their impact on other experiences. We soon forget the discomforting fact that we did not start with a clear understanding of what a »belief« is either – nor of how it relates to the basic symbolic processes we are supposedly interested in. We started only with lay terms each of which led to an ability to give examples; examples led to 209 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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measures; measures led to research. Unfortunately the hole in knowledge we began with is not being filled in – it is being papered over. The ability to move ahead in this way exists with any lay term, without restriction. If we slow the whole process down it is a bit shocking how easy it is to slip by the absence of answers to fundamental questions. The results of this self-deception are answers that feel both imprecise and predictable. Commonsense is like that. It is both vague and, well, common. We need first to know what we take human language and cognition to be before we can ask important questions about its role in our subjective life. If the account is to be scientifically sensible it needs a substantial empirical base; if it is to fit within the life sciences generally it needs to be evolutionarily plausible. In what follows I will attempt to present such an account and explore its implications. I will argue that human language and cognition began as simple extension of human cooperation based on nonverbal perspective taking, but was then extended into problem solving and ultimately into verbal perspective-taking. In this view, a first person perspective is inherently social. It is less correct to say »I am aware of what I feel« than to say »we are aware of what we feel.« Superficially, the argument I am about to make will appear to be odd for a book of this kind, because it appears to be coming at the issue, from the very beginning, as an issue to be understood from without – from science based on a third person perspective. In other words it may appear that I have given the game away before it is played. That is not the case, but it is not quite the case for an unusual reason I will need first to explicate.

Functional Contextualism I am going to come at this issue from a contextual behavioral point of view, working within the assumptions of functional contextualism. Contextualism is Pepper’s (1942) term for pragmatism – the kind that embraces the centrality of the whole psychological event, understood in terms of its history and situational context. Functional contextualism one of the varieties of scientific contextualism (Hayes 1993). The core analytic unit of contextualism is the ongoing act in context: doing as it is being done, such as in going shopping, writing a lecture, or making love. Such acts are situated, historical, and pur210 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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posive. They cannot be adequately explained by an appeal to the parts of people: Legs (or brains!) do not go shopping, for example, people do. Going shopping implies a place to shop, a way of getting there, and a purpose for going. Remove any of these features and the whole event changes. The whole exists only as a totality of all of its features and participants. Thus the whole is primary and parts are derived. The »truth criterion« of contextualism emerges from this core analytic unit itself: successful working. Just as shopping is finished and successful when the goals of shopping have been accomplished, analysis is finished and successful when the goals of analysis are reached. This simple idea means that »truth« is bound to the goal of the analyst. Analytic goals themselves can only be owned and stated; they cannot ultimately be evaluated or justified – since they specify the criteria for evaluation. In principle this means that there can be as many forms of contextualism as there are sets of scientific goals, but in broad terms descriptive contextualists (Hayes 1993) seek a personal appreciation of the participants in the whole: Dramaturgy, hermeneutics, narrative psychology, feminist psychology, and social constructionism are examples. Descriptive contextualists examine closely the strands of contexts and action that together make up the whole; analysis is accomplished when a sense of the whole and its features is reached. Functional contextualists seek the prediction and influence of events, with precision, scope, and depth. Contextual behavioral science, and some forms of Marxism, psychobiology, and evolutionary perspectives are examples. The »whole act« of contextualism is not defined externally: It is defined by the analyst and is bound to the analyst’s purposes. If, while an analyst is examining a person »going to the store,« the texture of walking became of interest, the »whole« could change. It examined whole now might be taking a step, or lifting a foot, or glancing down the road. Conversely, if the purposive strands in which going to the store is embedded came to be of interest, the action of going to the store could slip away into the texture of a larger unit, such as »making dinner for one’s boss« or »developing one’s career«. Thus, the unit in contextualistic accounts is not fixed; there are no parts, or relations among parts, or forces assumed to be battering their way in, nor waiting to be discovered. Events can be constructed and reconstructed an infinite variety of ways. This is not idealism and it is not an invitation to intellectual 211 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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chaos. Relevant to an analytic goal, some forms of analysis may work better than others; some categories and divisions may be more useful than others. Workability does not say what exists apart from us – it simply orients us to what works for us, relative to our goals. Contextualists assume that the world is what it is. In that limited sense the perspective embraces a kind of realism. There is no difference that does not make a difference, and calling the one world »real« or »unreal« would make no difference. Nevertheless there is unwarranted dualism implied by the world; »unreal« if it is defined in opposition to realness. That is not necessarily true with the term »real« which can refer simply to »so-ness«. Thus, you might as well call the world »real« so long as you mean only that the one world is the one world. That being said, contextualism is not elemental realism either. There is no assumption of pre-existing parts, relations, and forces waiting to be modeled and discovered. Anything you say or do is said or done in and with the one world – you cannot truly step aside and describe it objectively. Descriptions are done in and with the world, and they are always in a sense subjective because they are made by people with a history. Truth is not a matter of modeling the world and then exploring the correspondence between concepts and events, because there is no independent access to events distinct from a knower of events. Truth is getting things done, relative to a goal. It is humble, and local. Epistemology is of interest, but nothing can be said about ontological questions. It is not so much that ontological questions cannot be answered – it is more that the questions themselves are incoherent. My point in exploring these matters with the reader in thumbnail form is merely to say that in one sense the present analysis begins and ends in the first person. I have a personal goal, which I declare so that reader who shares the same goal can orient, but I do not defend it. I am speaking to make a difference. The present analysis is true only to the degree that it informs an ability to predict and influence the topics in its domain: language, cognition, perspectives, and subjective experience. Readers with other purposes may find little of value here. I wish them well.

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The Tribal Primate Humans can be said to differ from other creatures in three conspicuous ways. Two are characteristic but not unique: we are cooperative and what we do is dominated by cultural practices that go beyond the lifetime of any one of us. The third may be unique. Humans speak and think using symbols. There have been various theories of these so-called »three C’s« – cooperation, culture, and cognition – but evolutionary biologists agree that all three need to be addressed as dominant human characteristics (Wilson 2007). Most theories that aim to be evolutionarily sensitive approach the topic with a concern about all three. B. F. Skinner’s account is an example. Skinner argued that: The human species presumably became much more social when its vocal musculature came under operant control. Cries of alarm, mating calls, aggressive threats, and other kinds of vocal behavior can be modified through operant conditioning, but apparently only with respect to the occasions upon which they occur or their rate of occurrence. The ability of the human species to acquire new forms through selection by consequences presumably resulted from the evolution of a special innervation of the vocal musculature, together with a supply of vocal behavior not strongly under the control of stimuli or releasers—the babbling of children from which verbal operants are selected. No new susceptibility to reinforcement was needed because the consequences of verbal behavior are distinguished only by the fact that they are mediated by other people. The development of environmental control over the vocal musculature greatly extended the help one person receives from others. By behaving verbally people cooperate more successfully in common ventures. (Skinner 1981, p. 502)

Skinner later in the same paper summed up his entire approach to complex human behavior, including verbal behavior, in terms that made his view of the three C’s (and their link to evolution) a bit more clear: In summary, then, human behavior is the joint product of (i) the contingencies of survival responsible for the natural selection of the species and (ii) the contingencies of reinforcement responsible for the repertoires acquired by its members, including (iii) the special contingencies maintained by an evolved social environment. (Ultimately, of course, it is all a matter of natural selection, since operant conditioning is an evolved process, of which cultural practices are special applications.) (Skinner, 1981, p. 502).

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In other words, when vocalization could come under operant control (due to contingencies of survival), cultural practices could take advantage of these flexible forms, and establish cultural practices that increase the likelihood of receiving help from others, which would maintain the actions of speakers via reinforcement and in turn would foster cooperation and success at the level of the group. If we express this sequence in the language of the three C’s it is cognition → culture → cooperation. It is not entirely clear why operant control over vocal musculature was thought to be so important. Deaf children can readily learn human language through hand motions, for example, and such motions are under operant control in many species (for example, Allen and Trixie Gardner relied on this fact when teaching sign language to cross fostered Chimpanzees; Gardner, Vancantfort, & Gardner 1992). Furthermore, Skinner never explained why a verbal community that would reinforce the actions of speakers would evolve, a particularly difficult problem because in Skinner’s account the behavior of the listener is not in any way verbal (Skinner 1957). But the biggest weakness of Skinner’s account was that it did not generate a progressive research program adequate to the challenge of human language and cognition (Hayes & Hayes 1992). The present account enters the three C’s in a difference place: human cooperation. We will begin with a small set of social features that are shared with primates, and some other animals (for a more extensive presentation of this account see Hayes & Long 2013; Hayes & Sanford 2014). Many animals use vocalizations to regulate the behavior of others, even in meaningful combinations (e. g., Schel, Tranquilli, & Zuberbühler 2009). Most of these vocalizations are bound to narrow circumstances (Slocombe & Zuberbühler 2007), and exist in fixed sets, linked to emotional situations, that are difficult to modify with training (Tomasello 2009). Some animals use social referencing – seeking information from others in order to know how to respond to an event (Russell, Bard, & Adamson 1997). They may also show joint attention or other »theory of mind« skills such as responding to the gaze or reaching of others in ways that show understanding of intentionality (Call & Tomasello 2008). Human infants are adept at both social referencing and joint attention (e. g., Adamson 1996; Woodward 2005). Humans clearly differentiate themselves from other primates in 214 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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their degree of cooperation (Jaeggi, Burkart & Van Schaik 2010; Nowak 2006). Humans evolved in the context of small competing groups, bands, and tribes (Chapais 2013). Multilevel selection theory (O’Gorman, Wilson, & Sheldon 2008) explains cooperation based on the idea that selection can act at different levels of organization (cells, individuals, groups) at the same time, but the balance can tip toward higher levels of organization when competition occurs at that level, cooperation promotes success at that level, and selfishness at lower levels of organization is restricted. Under these conditions experienced by human ancestors »[…] egalitarianism became sufficiently established, [and] genetic evolution started to reshape our minds and bodies to function as team players rather than competing against members of our own group« (Wilson 2007, p. 165). This multi-level explanation of cooperation has received much more attention and empirical support in recent years (Nowak, Tarnita, & Wilson 2010).

The Cooperative Core of Symbolic Meaning Symbols are said to »stand for« their referents: the very etymology of the word »symbol« implies that symbols and objects are thrown together (»bol« means »to throw«) as alike (the meaning of »sym«). If we assume high levels of cooperation within human groups, and high levels of joint attention, social referencing, and the use of vocalizations to regulate the behavior of others, it is not difficult to imagine how the early use of symbols might have evolved (Hayes & Sanford 2014). Imagine that a human speaker sees an object and emits a characteristic vocalization. Object → action relations are readily trained in any animal via operant condition – all that is needed is a response form. As Skinner suggested, operant regulation of vocalizations would have been helpful, but any form is sufficient for our example. Now imagine that while emitting that vocalization the speaker attempts to reach the object, and cannot do so. Because humans are highly cooperative, and possess joint attention and social referencing skills, listeners within arm’s reach would likely then provide the object to the speaker (for an empirical demonstration with human infants see Liebal, Behne, Carpenter, & Tomasello 2009; see also Schmidt & Sommerville 2011). Thus, at the social level, the speaker’s object → sound action and the listener’s sound → object action would 215 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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yield a bidirectional object ←→ sound relation. In other words, »in the context of high levels of cooperation, and adequate skills in joint attention, social referencing, and perspective taking, any characteristic vocalization in the presence of a desired object would likely lead to reinforced instances of symmetry or mutual entailment.« (Hayes & Sanford 2014, p. 122, italics in original). Even before this pattern led to the development of a verbal community, it would have conveyed advantages to the tribe using it, because cooperation itself would have been extended. Instead of reaching for a close object, the speaker might now shout to a listener across a canyon and expect to receive a report or the object. Using communication to obtain food or avoid predation would become part of a spatially extended cooperative act. In essence this is an extension of cooperation through perspective taking: the action of the speaker implies a mutually entailed action by the listener and vice versa. As these social roles became integrated within a single individual, learning either a new object → sound relation or a new sound → object relation, would imply a bidirectional object ←→ sound relation. Mutually entailed relations appeared to be a defining feature of human symbolic behavior. When a human infant learns a relation between two events, such as in matching to sample (e. g., A → B) the symmetrical relation (B → A) will be shown (Lipkens, Hayes, & Hayes 1993). If additional relations are added (e. g., B → C) all of the derived combinations will also be shown (e. g., C → A; Lipkens et al. 1993). This is what is known as »stimulus equivalence« (Sidman 1971). There is now a vast literature on stimulus equivalence and it is known that it is central to language performance. Indeed, humans who fail to display these derived relations do not develop normal human language (e. g., Devany, Hayes, & Nelson 1986). Conversely, after decades of effort there is still no systematic and replicable evidence of stimulus equivalence in nonhuman animals (Lionello-DeNolf 2009). Human infants require sufficient exemplars to acquire this skill, but they do so very rapidly (Luciano, Gómez-Becerra, & Rodríguez-Valverde 2007). Conversely, even with extensive training of all of the components of this performance, even so called »language trained« nonhuman primates have not shown stimulus equivalence (Dugdale & Lowe 2000). What appears to be going on here is that when humans learn the speaker’s role in this exchange they derive the listener’s role and vice 216 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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versa. Even before these derived relations are tested humans show characteristic neurobiological responses indicating that learning one relation implies the other (Wang & Dymond 2013; Yorio, Tabullo, Wainselboim, Barttfeld, & Segura 2008). Indeed, speaking with meaning and listening with understanding stimulates the same regions of the brain in verbally able humans (Menenti, Gierhan, Segaert & Hagoort 2011; Segaert, Menenti, Weber, Petersson, & Hagoort 2012). Nonhumans communicate in interlocking systems but »listeners acquire information from signalers who do not, in the human sense, intend to provide it« (Seyfarth & Cheney 2003, p. 168; see Tomasello 2008). That is decidedly not the case with humans. From the beginning, with the expression of the first word, both speaker and listener roles were integrated into the same symbolic system. We will see shortly how this core ability became extended in human language, but for the purpose of this chapter I am arguing that from the very beginning human awareness is social. In human cognition, a first person perspective is never singular – it is plural. We are aware of what we are aware of because we bring both speaker and listener roles to the table in order even to understand a single word. Cognitively, there is no »me,« there is only the symbolically extended »us.« Without the »us-ness« of human symbolic behavior, we would have no way to express or even, in a verbal and categorical sense, to know what we feel, think, sense, and remember.

The Cognitive Extension of Perspective-Taking and Sense of Self As the number of group members increased who could derive symbolic relations mutually and in combination, an initially only cooperative community became a verbal community. The mutual perspective of speakers and listeners becomes a kind of template for mutual and combinatorial relations of many kinds. The ability to show stimulus equivalence relations expanded to an ability to model and derive many different kinds relations even among arbitrary events, mutually and in combinations, with the functions of these events changing as a result. That is the core focus of Relational Frame Theory (RFT; Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche 2001) which views the capacity to derive a mutually entailed relation under arbitrary contextual control, that combines into networks, and changes the re217 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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sponse functions of related events as the defining feature of human language and higher cognition. RFT terms this core ability »relational framing« (see Roche & Dymond 2013 for a recent review). For example, young children learn that there are comparative relations among coins that are not dependent on physical size and as they do they can derive relations among novel and arbitrary comparative networks more generally (Berens & Hayes 2007; Gorham, Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, & Berens 2009). Non-human animals can readily learn a wide variety on non-arbitrary relationships but apparently only humans abstract these underlying relationships in a way that is structurally systematic and inferentially productive (Penn, Holyoak, & Povinelli 2008). These performances are a small step forward in being able to apply mutual perspective taking as a kind of template for derived relational responding. For example, just as early in language development humans learned that object → sign relations from the perspective of the speaker imply sign → object relations from the point of view of the listener, so to understanding that a dime is large from the point of view of a nickel, implies that a nickel is smaller from the point of view of the dime. In normal human development relational framing soon extends to perspective-taking itself. Relational frames that require verbal perspective taking are called »deictic« which means that they have to be taught by demonstration. An example is the deictic frame for place: HERE vs. THERE (I will capitalize references to frames in order to avoid confusion). Wherever a child is not is »there« but when the child goes there, there becomes here and here becomes there. By demonstration eventually the child learns that »here« and »there« mean with respect to a perspective or point of view. The three key deictic relations are I / YOU, HERE / THERE, and NOW / THEN. These three relations emerge in that order and gradually strengthen across childhood (McHugh, Barnes-Holmes, & Barnes-Holmes 2004). Deictic relations correlate with »Theory of Mind« skills (McHugh et al. 2004) such as understanding deception (McHugh, Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, Stewart, & Dymond 2007) or understanding that others can have false beliefs (McHugh, BarnesHolmes, Barnes-Holmes, & Stewart 2006; McHugh, Barnes-Holmes, Barnes-Holmes, Whelan, & Stewart 2007). Deictic relations are also notably weak in clinical populations with weak sense of self, such as children with autistic spectrum disorders (Rehfeldt, Dillen, Ziomek, & Kowalchuk 2007). Adults with »social anhedonia,« the inabil218 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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ity to experience pleasure from social interactions, also have difficulty with deictic framing (Villatte, Monestès, McHugh, Freixa i Baqué, & Loas 2008; 2010). Deictic framing can be trained (Rehfeldt & BarnesHolmes 2009; McHugh & Stewart 2012) and when it is there, there is normally some improvement in Theory of Mind skills, particularly when all three relations become integrated (Weil, Hayes, & Capurro 2011). As the three primary deictic relations become integrated, we develop a sense of conscious awareness itself as a content free locus or point of view. In a mature sense, a first person perspective involves being aware of events from an »I / Here / Now« perspective. RFT researchers have shown, however, that this integrated skill emerges in part from the flexibility of perspective taking (e. g., McHugh et al. 2004; McHugh & Stewart 2012). In order to assess deictic skills RFT researchers ask questions that require good contextual control such as »I have a box and you have a ball. If I were you and you were me, what would you have?« The questions get more complex as additional deictic relations are added, such as: »Today I have a box and you have a ball. Yesterday I had a pen and you had a cup. If I were you and you were me, and today was yesterday and yesterday was today, what do you have today?« It is contextual flexibility that predicts positive benefits of deictic skills and thus it is the whole relational frame, not just one of the polls of such a frame, that is key to its usefulness. This replicates and extends the point made earlier with non-verbal perspective taking when we suggested that even a single word involves »us,« not just »me.« Now at a fully verbal level (meaning as a level that requires relational framing skill more generally), I implies You, here implies there, and now implies then, in precisely the same way that up implies down or front implies back. I cannot be conscious in the sense of being aware that »I / here / now« am aware, unless I am also conscious that you, there, then are conscious. Human consciousness is social, and extends across the cognitive relations of time, place, and person. This suggests that once again it is not that I am aware, it is that we are aware. To that we need to add that this awareness is seemingly not a respecter of time or place. We are aware, always, everywhere. That helps explain the sense of transcendence or spirituality that is built into human consciousness itself (Hayes 1984; for a book length treatment of the research in this area see McHugh and Stewart 2012). I am not making the case that any of this is literally true as an 219 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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ontological reality. As I noted in the brief section on contextualism, I reject that as the mission of contextualistic science, ever. I am just speaking to make a difference. As one way to assess whether a difference has been made, we can return to the opening paragraph of this chapter and see if what was said is now understandable in a very different way: The purpose of this chapter is to examine the relationship between a first person perspective on subjective experience, and human language and cognition. Knowing, in a human sense, is intensely verbal, not in the sense of being vocal, but in the sense of being symbolically bound and intertwined with higher forms of human cognition. Whatever we know, sense, or remember is altered by our symbolic categories and systems, such as what we believe, what we expect, what we’ve been told, what we hope for, or what we fear. Human language and cognition thus fundamentally alters and shapes our subjective experience and the perspective from which we view it. In this chapter I have argued that awareness, consciousness, and subjective experience is deeply social due to the impact of human language and cognition. Human language penetrates »I« and »me« so thoroughly that subjective experience is indeed a matter of what we believe, what we expect, what we’ve been told, what we hope for, or what we fear. From a bottom up account, that paragraph appears now to mean something quite different than it did at the beginning.

Applying this Analysis If we are not to take any of this to be a description of reality, of what use is it? This analysis of perspective taking has been used successfully in assessing and targeting deficits in autistic children (Rehfeldt et al. 2007); accounting for social anhedonia (Vilardaga, Estévez, Levin, & Hayes 2012); and guiding the development of a well-known evidence-based psychotherapy method, Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT; Hayes, Strosahl, & Wilson 2012). As an example of the application of this perspective, I would like briefly to explore its implications for ACT and for the therapeutic relationship. From an ACT perspective, the goal of therapy is to increase psychological flexibility: the ability to come consciously into the present and to experience one’s own experience without needless 220 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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defense, so as to turn toward values-based action. There is a large literature showing that psychological flexibility predicts positive outcomes and is the primary process explaining the broad impact of ACT (Hayes, Luoma, Bond, Masuda, & Lillis 2006). The pivot point in psychological flexibility is a perspective-taking sense of self. The I / Here / Nowness of awareness is inherently open, aware, and actively engaged. This sense of self will hold a moment of pain and a moment of joy with equanimity; is a place that is not threatened by self-criticism or narrowed by the pull toward experiential avoidance. This insight was a starting point for both ACT and RFT. In an article entitled »Making Sense of Spirituality« (Hayes 1984) I argued that a transcendent sense of self was the core of human spirituality, which was necessary to move forward clinically and in the analysis of human cognition. As it applies to psychotherapy, this sense of self means that therapists can model open awareness by coming more fully into an interconnected sense of awareness with their clients – into a kind of spiritual relationship if you will. Therapists can be more effective by learning to see the world through their client’s eyes – a direct extension of deictic framing. Clients can learn to be more selfcompassionate by seeing themselves through the compassionate eyes of others. Consciousness and empathy are two aspects of this process, and when combined with great openness, it is then safe to see others and to be seen by others; to feel what others feel and to allow ones’ own feelings to be seen; and not to run away when all of that is difficult. Said in another way, the therapeutic relationship itself can become a model of a kind of interpersonal first person awareness. I have argued in this chapter that first person awareness is social. When both parties to a therapeutic relationship can step back and be aware of what is in the room between them, the relationship itself becomes a model for the mindful and symbolically extended »us« that is inside a first-person perspective. That in itself is healing in the etymological sense of allowing wholeness to surround what is painful and difficult. Pierson and Hayes (2007) note the linkage between these perspective-taking processes in therapists and the therapeutic relationship: The therapist can more easily be mindful of reactions as information about what is happening in session. Because the client’s behavior in session is

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likely similar to her behavior in other situations in her life, the therapist who is watching her reactions without attachment to them is in a better position to help the client with problematic interpersonal behavior. When the therapist is willing to let go of her attachment to her conceptualized self, she both models self-acceptance for the client and is more able to accept the client and her struggles. (p. 220).

Conclusion Human language and cognition is fundamentally based on human perspective taking, originally in the sense of a non-verbal but cooperative social system and then in the sense of a combination of perspective-taking verbal frames. These ideas alter how we view first person experience, and provide useful avenues to explore in improving the lives of those we serve.

References Adamson, L. B. (1996). Communication development during infancy. Madison, WI: Brown & Benchmark. Berens, N. M., & Hayes, S. C. (2007). Arbitrarily applicable comparative relations: Experimental evidence for a relational operant. Journal of Applied Behavior Analysis, 40, 45–71. Call, J., & Tomasello, M. (2008). Does the chimpanzee have a theory of mind? 30 years later. Trends in Cognitive Sciences 12, 187–192. DOI: 10.1016/j. tics.2008.02 Chapais, B. (2013). Monogamy, strongly bonded groups, and the evolution of human social structure. Evolutionary Anthropology, 22(2), 52–65. Devany, J. M., Hayes, S. C. & Nelson, R. O. (1986). Equivalence class formation in language-able and language-disabled children. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 46, 243–257. Dugdale, N., & Lowe, C. F. (2000). Testing for symmetry in the conditional discriminations of language-trained chimpanzees. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 73, 5–22. Gardner, R. A., Vancantfort, T. E., & Gardner, B. T. (1992). Categorical replies to categorical questions by cross-fostered chimpanzees. American Journal of Psychology 105(1), 27–57. Gorham, M., Barnes-Holmes, Y., Barnes-Holmes, D., & Berens, N. (2009). Derived comparative and transitive relations in young children with and without autism. Psychological Record, 59(2), 221–246.

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Human Language and Subjective Experience Hayes, S. C. (1993). Analytic goals and the varieties of scientific contextualism. In S. C. Hayes, L. J. Hayes, H. W. Reese, & T. R. Sarbin (eds.), Varieties of scientific contextualism (pp. 11–27). Reno, NV: Context Press. — (1984). Making sense of spirituality. Behaviorism, 12, 99–110. Hayes, S. C., Barnes-Holmes, D., & Roche, B. (2001). Relational Frame Theory: A Post-Skinnerian account of human language and cognition. New York: Plenum Press. Hayes, S. C., & Hayes, L. J. (1992). Verbal relations and the evolution of behavior analysis. American Psychologist, 47, 1383–1395. Hayes, S. C. & Long, D. (2013). Contextual behavioral science, evolution, and scientific epistemology. In B. Roche & S. Dymond (eds.), Advances in Relational Frame Theory: Research and application (pp. 5–26). Oakland, CA: New Harbinger/Context Press. Hayes, S. C., Luoma, J., Bond, F., Masuda, A., and Lillis, J. (2006). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: Model, processes, and outcomes. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44, 1–25. DOI: 10.1016/j.brat.2005.06.006 Hayes, S. C. & Sanford, B. (2014). Cooperation came first: Evolution and human cognition. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 101, 112–129. DOI: 10.1002/jeab.64 Hayes, S. C., Strosahl, K., & Wilson, K. G. (2012). Acceptance and Commitment Therapy: The process and practice of mindful change (2nd edition). New York: Guilford Press. Jaeggi, A. V., Burkart, J. M., & Van Schaik, C. P. (2010). On the psychology of cooperation in humans and other primates: Combining the natural history and experimental evidence of prosociality. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society: Biology, 365, 2723–2735. Liebal, K., Behne, T., Carpenter, M., & Tomasello, M. (2009). Infants use shared experience to interpret a pointing gesture. Developmental Science, 12, 264– 271. Lionello-DeNolf, K. M. (2009). The search for symmetry: 25 years in review. Learning & Behavior, 37(2), 188–203. Lipkens, G., Hayes, S. C., & Hayes, L. J. (1993). Longitudinal study of derived stimulus relations in an infant. Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 56, 201–239. Luciano, C., Gómez-Becerra, I., & Rodríguez-Valverde, M. (2007). The role of multiple-exemplar training and naming in establishing derived equivalence in an infant. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 87, 349–365. McHugh, L. & Stewart, I. (Eds.) (2012). The self and perspective taking: Contributions and applications from modern behavioral science. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger. McHugh, L., Barnes-Holmes, Y., & Barnes-Holmes, D. (2004). Perspective-taking as relational responding: A developmental profile. Psychological Record, 54, 115–144. McHugh, L., Barnes-Holmes, Y., Barnes-Holmes, D. & Stewart, I. (2006). Understanding false belief as generalized operant behaviour. The Psychological Record, 56, 341–364.

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Steven C. Hayes McHugh, L., Barnes-Holmes, Y., Barnes-Holmes, D., Stewart, I. & Dymond, S. (2007). Deictic relational complexity and the development of deception. The Psychological Record, 57, 517–531. McHugh, L., Barnes-Holmes, Y., Barnes-Holmes, D., Whelan, R. & Stewart, I. (2007). Knowing me, knowing you: Deictic complexity in false-belief understanding. The Psychological Record, 57, 533–542. Menenti, L., Gierhan, S. E., Segaert, K., & Hagoort, P. (2011). Shared language: Overlap and segregation of the neuronal infrastructure for speaking and listening revealed by functional MRI. Psychological Science, 22(9), 1173–1182. DOI:10.1177/0956797611418347 Nowak, M. A. (2006). Five rules for the evolution of cooperation. Science, 5905, 1560–1563. Nowak, M. A., Tarnita, C. E., & Wilson, E. O. (2010). The evolution of eusociality. Nature, 466, 1057–1062. O’Gorman, R., Wilson, D. S., & Sheldon, K. M. (2008). For the good of the group? Exploring group-level evolutionary adaptations using multilevel selection theory. Group Dynamics: Theory Research and Practice, 12(1), 17–26. Penn, D. C., Holyoak, K. J., & Povinelli, D. J. (2008). Darwin’s mistake: Explaining the discontinuity between human and nonhuman minds. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 31, 109–178. Pepper, S. C. (1942). World hypotheses: A study in evidence. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pierson, H. & Hayes, S. C. (2007). Using Acceptance and Commitment Therapy to empower the therapeutic relationship. Chapter in P. Gilbert & R. Leahy (eds.), The therapeutic relationship in cognitive behavior therapy (pp. 205– 228). London: Routledge. Rehfeldt, R. A. & Barnes-Holmes, Y. (2009). Derived relational responding: Applications for learners with autism and other developmental disabilities. CA: New Harbinger. Rehfeldt, R., Dillen, J. E., Ziomek, M. M., & Kowalchuk, R. K. (2007). Assessing relational learning deficits in perspective-taking in children with high-functioning Autism spectrum disorder. The Psychological Record, 57(1), 23–47. Roche, B., & Dymond, S. (2013). Advances in Relational Frame Theory: Research and application. Oakland, CA: New Harbinger/Context Press. Russell, C. L., Bard, K. A., & Adamson, L. B. (1997). Social referencing by young chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 111(2), 185–93. Schel, A. M., Tranquilli, S., & Zuberbühler, K. (2009). The alarm call system of two species of black-and-white colobus monkeys (Colobus polykomos and Colobus guereza). Journal of Comparative Psychology, 123, 136–150. Schmidt, M. F. H., & Sommerville, J. A. (2011). Fairness expectations and altruistic sharing in 15-month-old human infants. PLOSOne. Published: Oct 07, 2011. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0023223 Segaert, K., Menenti, L., Weber, K., Petersson, K., & Hagoort, P. (2012). Shared syntax in language production and language comprehension — An fMRI study. Cerebral Cortex, 22(7), 1662–1670. DOI:10.1093/cercor/bhr249 Seyfarth, R. M., & Cheney, D. L. (2003). Signalers and receivers in animal communication. Annual Review of Psychology, 54, 145–173.

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Human Language and Subjective Experience Sidman, M. (1971). Reading and auditory-visual equivalences. Journal of Speech and Hearing Research, 14, 5–13. Skinner, B. F. (1981). Selection by consequences. Science, 213, 501–504. — (1957). Verbal behavior. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Slocombe, K., & Zuberbühler, K. (2007). Chimpanzees modify recruitment screams as a function of audience composition. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 104(43), 17228–17233. Tomasello, M. (2009). Why we cooperate. Boston: MIT Press. — (2008). Origins of human communication. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Vilardaga, R., Estévez, A., Levin, M. E., & Hayes, S. C. (2012). Deictic relational responding, empathy, and experiential avoidance as predictors of social anhedonia: Further contributions from relational frame theory. The Psychological Record, 62(3), 409–432. Villatte, M., Monestès, J. L., McHugh, L., Freixa i Baqué, E. & Loas, G. (2010). Adopting the perspective of another in belief attribution: Contribution of Relational Frame Theory to the understanding of impairments in schizophrenia. Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 41, 125–134. — (2008). Assessing deictic relational responding in social anhedonia: A functional approach to the development of Theory of Mind impairments. International Journal of Behavioral Consultation and Therapy, 4(4), 360–373. Vitale, A., Campbell, C., Barnes-Holmes, Y., & Barnes-Holmes, D. (2012). Facilitating responding in accordance with the relational frame of comparison II: Methodological analysis. Psychological Record 62(4), 663–675. Wang, T., & Dymond, S. (2013). Event-related potential correlates of emergent inference in human arbitrary relational learning. Behavioural Brain Research, 236(1), 332–343. DOI:10.1016/j.bbr.2012.08.033 Weil, T. M., Hayes, S. C., & Capurro, P. (2011). Establishing a deictic relational repertoire in young children. The Psychological Record, 61, 371–390. Wilson, D. S. (2007). Evolution for everyone: How Darwin’s theory can change the way we think about our lives. New York, NY: Delta. Woodward, A. (2005). Infants’ understanding of the actions involved in joint attention. In N. Eilan, C. Hoerl, T. McCormack, & J. Roessler (Eds.), Joint attention: Communication and other minds (pp. 110–128). Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Yorio, A., Tabullo, A., Wainselboim, A., Barttfeld, P., & Segura, E. (2008). Event-related potential correlates of perceptual and functional categories: Comparison between stimuli matching by identity and equivalence. Neuroscience Letters, 443, 113–118.

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Towards living subjective experience Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch

Current sciences successfully develop objective, so called »third-person« methodologies to account for general mechanisms of the mind. However, psychoanalysis – a »weak« science indeed – as well as nonreductive philosophy of mind, which among its major agenda also investigates sciences, include subjective experience. Psychoanalysis and nonreductive philosophy of mind both consider »first-person« phenomena, i. e. subjective experience, as a distinctive component of the mind. Therefore, both are able to combine »first-« and »thirdperson« methods for investigating the mind. However, since Freud, psychoanalysis has not only been a theory of mind and a scientific methodology for investigating mental processes. In its third dimension, psychoanalysis is also a psychotherapy which has been developing its own practices and techniques. Here psychoanalysis could meet Buddhist tradition, but also possibly diverge from it. Psychoanalysis refers to its »first-person« practices not only as an investigative method but also as a worldly and curative therapy. Nevertheless, psychoanalysis as psychotherapy gives rise to a wide range of further effects, from self-knowledge to learning. Buddhist tradition develops »first-person« procedures in order to explore living subjective experience with the transcendent aim to reach higher states of consciousness, or contact with the divine. Therefore, it is worth addressing the respective main purpose of Western and Eastern approaches to subjective experience, since problems of mutual understanding could possibly arise. According to widespread objections to both psychoanalysis and philosophy of mind, they are considered to be theories of mind reductive in their account of subjectivity. In my contribution I will show them in a different light. Psychoanalysis as well as nonreductive philosophy of mind both consider »first-person« phenomena, namely living

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subjective experience, as a distinctive and therefore non-reducible component of the mind.

»Third-person« sciences such as neurobiology and cognitive science Current commitment to study consciousness has vigorously revived the mind/body question. Neurobiological and computational cognitive investigations are a timely example of how »consciousness studies« have become part of »third-person« sciences. Although »consciousness studies« is the term generally used, »consciousness« should be understood here – pars pro toto – as »mind«, because the above-mentioned investigations are actually about conscious, preconscious, and unconscious mind.

Nonreductive philosophy of mind Philosophy of mind investigates the mind in a physical world through systematic study of »third-person«, objective methods and findings in computational cognitive science and cognitive neurobiology. Due to its acknowledged competence in sciences as well as in their methodologies, the current focus of nonreductive philosophy of mind on living subjective experience is particularly reliable. The development of nonreductive physicalism signifies quite a turn within philosophy of mind, which was »hard core« physicalist at its beginning and continues to be in the case of some philosophers such as Pat Churchland and Dan Dennett. According to Jagwon Kim, nonreductive physicalism encompasses at least four tenets, which are also core assumptions of emergentism (Kim 1993, 344). We can, in addition, list a further one: 1. Physical monism: All concrete particulars are physical; 2. Nonreducibility of the mental: Mental properties (e. g., pain, desire, belief, thoughts …) are neither identical with nor reducible to physical properties; 3. The physical-realization assumption: all mental properties are physically realized, that is, the mind is embodied; 4. Mental realism (including downward causation): mental properties are »real« causal properties, they are not merely »epipheno227 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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5.

menal« (i. e., without causal power), but rather can be a cause for further mental properties and even for some physical properties (e. g., psychosomatic illness, neurotic suffering). Disunity and diversity of sciences (a theory of special sciences which are nonreducible to physics).

Similarly, also reductive physicalism refers to a number of tenets: 1. Physical monism: All concrete particulars are physical; 2. Reduction; 2. a. Identity thesis: Mental properties (e. g., pain) are empirically reducible to physical properties (e. g., neuron firing); 2. b. Eliminative materialism: so called »mental« properties (e. g., pain) are nothing more than physical properties (e. g., neuron firing); as well as many other sorts … 3. Bottom-up causation: Only physical properties can be a cause for both mental properties and physical properties; 4. Unity of science: higher-level theories (e. g., chemistry) can be explained by reducing them to lower-level theory (e. g., physics); in the example of biology, scientific ecology can be reduced to molecular biology (cf. Kim 1993, 344–349).

Emergence theories Within nonreductive physicalism, emergence theories play the role of the most significant critique of causal reductionism, namely that only physical properties can be a cause. According to emergence theories, in the words of the philosopher of mind Robert Van Gulick, »the whole is not any simple function of its parts, since the whole at least partially determines what contributions are made by its parts.« (Van Gulick 1995, 251). Special sciences (e. g., psychology) isolate objects (e. g., consciousness) which are composites of physical components (e. g., atoms, molecules, and neurons). The causal powers of such an object as consciousness are not determined merely by the physical properties of its constituents (e. g., atoms, molecules, and neurons) and the laws of physics. They are also determined by the organization of those constituents within the composite (i. e., consciousness). Therefore nonreductive accounts of the emergence of consciousness can be summarized as follows: In the case of consciousness neither atoms, nor molecules nor individual neurons are conscious. With an 228 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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organization of sufficient complexity as well as external inputs, systems of neurons can give rise to the mental property of consciousness. Consciousness cannot be explained in terms of the physical properties of the components of the systems (atoms, molecules, and neurons). Mental properties such as consciousness, which are not reducible, are referred to as emergent properties, since they arise by emergence out of more basic components (Van Gulick 1995, 251–252 & 2001; Harrison 2010, 13–14; Murphy 2010, 249–250).

Downward causation Recent studies about the efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy (that is to say, a shorter and simplified form of psychoanalysis) offer an insight into the meaning of downward causation. According to the article »Changes of brain activation pre- post short-term psychodynamic inpatient psychotherapy: An fMRI study of panic disorder patients«, mental changes (namely, mental improvement) due to psychotherapy may cause changes in brain activation (in other words, physical normalization) (Beutel, et al. 2010). Panic disorders are not merely defined by mental feelings of fear and discomfort but also by physical symptoms of palpitations, accelerated heart rate, sweating. The above-mentioned study shows that at the end of the psychotherapy, panic-related symptoms had improved and fronto-limbic activation patterns were normalized. The results indicate that »mental« psychodynamic psychotherapy leads to »physical« changes in fronto-limbic circuit (similar to previous findings on cognitive-behavioural treatments).

The »hard« and »easy« problems of consciousness The philosopher of mind David Chalmers divides the problems of consciousness into »hard« and »easy« problems. The easy problems are cognitive abilities and functions, which can be explained specifying a mechanism able to perform the function. Among the easy problems of consciousness, which can be explained in terms of computational or neural mechanisms by the standard methods of the »thirdperson« sciences of the cognitive field, Chalmers specifies and enlists following phenomena (Chalmers 2007, 225): 229 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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[O]ne sometime says that a mental state is conscious when it is verbally reportable, or when it is internally accessible. Sometimes a system is said to be conscious of some information when it has the ability to react on the basis of that information, or, more strongly, when it attends to that information, or when it can integrate that information and exploit it in the sophisticated control of behavior. We sometimes say that an action is conscious precisely when it is deliberate. Often, we say that an organism is conscious as another way of saying that it is awake.

»Consciousness« could be understood here as »mind«. From a psychoanalytic point of view the question arises whether the functions or abilities mentioned by Chalmers are performed consciously, preconsciously or unconsciously. However, Chalmers maintains that if these phenomena were the only questions of consciousness, then consciousness would not be a problem, because in the long run, an explanation can be provided by the standard methods of cognitive science and neurobiology. According to Chalmers, the hard problem of consciousness deals with intriguing questions such as why the performance of all these functions and abilities is accompanied by experience and why all this information-processing does not go on »in the dark« (Chalmers 2007, 225): How can we explain why there is something it’s like to entertain a mental image, or to experience an emotion? It is widely agreed that experience arises from a physical basis, but we have no good explanation of why and how it so arises. Why should physical processing give rise to a rich inner life at all?

Therefore Chalmers proposes to reserve the term consciousness for the living subjective experience.

The »explanatory gap« In the same vein the philosopher of mind Joseph Levine claims an »explanatory gap« between our question about living subjective experience and the answer in terms of mechanisms of the »third-person« sciences (Levine 2007, 376): [W]e have no idea how we could really explain – in the sense of making intelligible to ourselves – how it is that certain physical or functional configurations have conscious mental features.

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Buddhist tradition and psychoanalysis have practices and techniques As opposed to philosophy of mind, which in studying sciences and their methodologies mainly works theoretically, Buddhist traditions and psychoanalysis both have specific practices and techniques in an established setting. The body of knowledge of Buddhism depends on rational analysis as well as living »first-person« experience by generations of scholars and contemplatives over the past 2500 to 3000 years (cf. Wallace 2000, 103–118). A puzzling question arises concerning the proper understanding of its kind of knowledge. In the light of Western conceptual categories, the body of knowledge of Buddhism seems to combine three Western means of investigation: religion, science and philosophy (Wallace 2006, 24–26). However, it is the practical and living experience in Buddhist meditation which seems to me the entry point for a dialogue with psychoanalysis as a treatment. Indeed, such experience is told to cause change. Change due to experience is mediated by particular practices and techniques framed by a rigorous setting: here, Buddhist traditions and psychoanalysis diverge: while meditation requires an individually subjective »stand-alone« experience, in psychoanalytic treatment, experience is intended to occur intersubjectively between psychoanalysts and patients.

Buddhist practices and techniques Francisco J. Varela and Jonathan Shear maintain: Buddhist traditions have accumulated a vast amount of expertise in training the mind and cultivating its ability for reflection and introspection. It has done so over centuries, and expressed some of its observation in terms that are not too far removed from either introspective psychology or phenomenal psychology […] It would be a great mistake […] to deny such observations as data and their potential validity. (Varela & Shear 1999, 6)

The experience of living subjectivity of meditation happens in an individual subjective setting, which should culminate in a pure mental experience, in the experience of pure consciousness which, according to Shear, is the »complete absence of all sounds, tastes, thoughts, feel231 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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ings, images, and everything else that one can ever imagine.« (Shear 2007, 700) Although practices and techniques for achieving this experience may diverge dramatically, their common ground is the assumption that it is possible to eliminate any empirical content. The aim is to be able to overcome empirical subjectivity.

Problems of mutual understanding could possibly arise Since different kinds of meditation cause not merely mental but also physical changes, they can be misunderstood and even misused as a worldly and mundane improvement. For instance the sublime Buddhist »well-being« can be distorted in a sort of self-serving wellnessexperience. According to Alan Wallace eudaimonic well-being may be characterized as having three levels: social and environmental well-being stemming from ethical behaviour in relation to other living beings and the environment, psychological well-being stemming from mental balance, and spiritual well-being stemming from wisdom. These three elements – ethics, mental balance derived from the cultivation of focused attention, and wisdom – are the three ›higher trainings‹ that comprise the essence of the Buddhist path to awakening. (Wallace 2006, 28)

Psychoanalysis In contrast to philosophy of mind and similar to Buddhism, psychoanalysis since Freud has been not only a theory of mind and a scientific methodology for investigating mental processes. Psychoanalysis is also a therapy which has been developing its own practices and techniques for treating patients. Psychoanalysis acquainted us with the insight that something might occur to a subject, and in that sense be subjective and yet not be accessible to her or him. Psychoanalysis differentiates between conscious and non-conscious phenomena and justifies this distinction by maintaining that the subject is not aware of what happened to her or him. But although psychoanalysis questions the »first-person« perspective of patients, and of psychoanalysts too, this perspective nevertheless is absolutely necessary for it as treatment. 232 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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A common misunderstanding of the psychoanalytic practices and techniques compares them with the text-decoding linguistic work. Interpreting the spoken text of patients is really just a component of the whole of psychoanalytic work. Another misleading metaphor considers psychoanalytic work as archeology in search of the lived past of the patient. Indeed, the past becomes suddenly crucial every time a hidden, unwelcomed past is unconsciously repeated in the present, in the case of past »in vivo« without the awareness of the patient, as in the phenomena of transference. The focus of the analytic work of listening and observing, understanding and conceptualizing, as well as finally intervening-interpreting is devoted to the living subjectivity of the patient, including her or his pre-, para- and nonverbal expressions.

Psychoanalytic technique The experience of living subjectivity occurs in an inter-subjective situation, in the relationship between psychoanalysts and patients. The psychoanalytic experience is not just a mental one, but rather a psychophysical, embodied experience, which further allows re-establishing contact and continuity between one’s own mind and one’s own body. While the work of patients is basically to express their free associations, presenting their »first-person« subjectivity, psychoanalysts are in addition required to focus not only on the patient’s whole expression (meaning cognitive and emotional, conscious and unconscious, verbal and pre-, para- and nonverbal expressions) of her or his own experiences, but at the same time on their own holistic reaction to the patient, termed countertransfèrence. The countertransfèrence of the analyst is assumed to be the best way to reach the subjective experience of the patient. The concept of evenly-hovering, or free-floating, attention defines the psychoanalytic mode of listening, which, according to Joseph Sandler, is the »capacity to allow all sorts of thoughts, daydreams and associations to enter the analyst’s consciousness while he is at the same time listening to and observing the patient.« (Sandler 1976, 44) Concerning countertransference, long before Heinrich Racker (1948) in Buenos Aires and Paula Heimann (1950) in London recog233 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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nized it to not simply be interference but an important tool of the treatment, the pioneer Sándor Ferenczi had led the way in this direction (Ferenczi 1919; Giampieri-Deutsch 1995, 1996). In the same vein, Sandler outlines the free-floating responsiveness in countertransference (Sandler 1976, 44–45): The analyst is, of course, not a machine in absolute self-control, only experiencing on the one hand, and delivering interpretations on the other […] Among many other things he talks, he greets the patient, he makes arrangements about practical matters, he may joke and, to some degree, allow his responses to depart from the classical psychoanalytic norm. My contention is that the analyst’s overt reactions to the patient as well as in his thoughts and feelings what can be called his ›role responsivness‹ shows itself, not only in his feelings but also in his attitudes and behaviour, as a crucial element in his ›useful‹ countertransference.

Psychoanalysts gain the unique opportunity to take part in the living subjective experience of their patients. What patients cannot tell us, they will show us. This experience offered by patients in the analytic session may even be the instantiation in vivo of their very early preverbal past experience. Psychoanalytic clinical method provides a systematic exploration of living subjective experience and is a source of clinical data about the mind. In the clinical situation psychoanalysts know from the »firstperson« perspective through evenly-hovering attention and through the phenomena of countertransference. However, psychoanalysts also know from the »third-person« perspective on two different levels: to begin with, on the first weaker level in their everyday clinical work of interpretation, namely in the on-line situation of the setting, and then in clinical research by writing case histories. Further »third-person« practices involve participating in supervision, in intervision, or in case history seminars. There is also a second level of the »third-person« methodologies, the psychoanalytic empirical research, which claims more compelling »objectivity« (Giampieri-Deutsch 2002, 2005).

Integrating »first-« and »third-person« methodologies »Third-person« sciences increasingly show great interest in the body of knowledge of Buddhism, especially in its practices. Researchers are confident to provide them with empirical evidence. 234 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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Choosing amongst the impressive quantity of literature on the topic, let me quote some samples. According to Jonathan Shear’s report on research concerning change due to meditation, [the] central nervous system and psychological functioning associated with particular meditation procedures are often enhanced in a variety of ways (autonomic stability, EEG coherence, intelligence, creativity, self-actualization, reduced anxiety, etc.) Moreover, some of this research is specifically perception related (re decreased susceptibility to perceptual illusion, quicker reaction time, better mind-body coordination, etc.). (Shear 2007, p. 705)

Regarding psychoanalysis, in his article »Biology and the future of psychoanalysis«, published in 1999, Eric Kandel not only praised psychoanalysis as still being »the most coherent and intellectually satisfying view of the mind« (Kandel 2005, 64), but also complained of the »failure of psychoanalysis to provide objective evidence that it is effective as a therapy«, including the evidence that it works better than non-analytically oriented therapy (Kandel 2005, 97). However, the researchers from within the psychoanalytic community were rather well acquainted with Peter Fonagy’s seminal publication An open door review of outcome studies in psychoanalysis, which scholarly summarizes these efforts, but barely received any notice from outside the community (Fonagy 2002). In the meantime the situation has changed. A number of independent key-articles published in medical, psychiatric, and cognitive psychological – but not psychoanalytical – journals provide empirical evidence of the efficacy of psychodynamic therapy. Additionally, therapeutic gains were shown to be lasting and patients continued to improve after their treatment (Leichsenring et al. 2008; Leichsenring et al. 2009; Shedler 2010; Knekt et al. 2011). Even short psychodynamic therapies yield significant, large, and lasting improvements, just as cognitive-behavioral therapies do (Leichsenring et al. 2009; Gerber et al. 2011). Furthermore, non-psychodynamic therapies may be effective in part because the more effective therapists utilize techniques that have long been central to psychoanalytic theory and practice (Shedler 2010). In one of the most recent articles, the cognitive psychologist Jonathan Shedler concludes: »Presentations that equate psychoanalysis with dated concepts that last held currency in the psychoanalytic community in the early 20th century are […] misleading: they are at

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best uninformed and at worst disingenuous« (Shedler 2010, 106– 107).

References Beutel, M. E., Stark, R., Pan, H., Silbersweig, D. & Dietrich, S. (2010). Changes of brain activation pre- post short-term psychodynamic inpatient psychotherapy: An fMRI study of panic disorder patients. Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, 184, 96–104. Chalmers, D. (2007). The hard problem of consciousness. In The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, eds. M. Velmans & S. Schneider (pp. 225–235). Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell. Ferenczi, S. (1950/1919). On the technique of psycho-analysis. In Further Contributions to the Theory and Technique of Psycho-Analysis (pp. 177–189). New York: Basic Books. Gerber, A. J. et al. (2011). A quality-based review of randomized controlled trials of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Journal of Psychiatry, 168, 19– 28. Giampieri-Deutsch, P. (2005). Approaching contemporary psychoanalytic research. In Psychoanalysis as an empirical, interdisciplinary science. Collected Papers on Contemporary Psychoanalytic Research, ed. P. Giampieri-Deutsch (pp. 15–53). Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. — (2002). Die psychoanalytische Theorie des Mentalen und analytische Philosophie des Geistes. In Psychoanalyse im Dialog der Wissenschaften. Europäische Perspektiven. Vol. 1, ed. P. Giampieri-Deutsch (pp. 58–75). Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. — (1996). The influence of Ferenczi’s ideas on contemporary standard technique. In Ferenczi’s turn in psychoanalysis, eds. P. Rudnytsky, A. Bókay & P. Giampieri-Deutsch (pp. 224–247). New York & London: New York University Press, — (1995). Ferenczis Beitrag zur Theorie des psychoanalytischen Prozesses. In Zeitschrift für psychoanalytischen Theorie und Praxis, 10, 259–291. Harrison, P. (2010). Introduction. The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, ed. P. Harrison (pp. 1–17). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heimann, P. (1950). On countertransference. The International Journal of Psycho-Analysis, 31, 81–84. Kim, J. (1993). Supervenience and mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Knekt, P. et al. (2011). Quasi-experimental study on the effectiveness of psychoanalysis, long-term and short-term psychotherapy on psychiatric symptoms, work ability and functional capacity during a 5-year follow-up. Journal of Affective Disorders, 132, 37–47.

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Towards living subjective experience Leichsenring, F. et al. (2009). Short-term psychodynamic psychotherapy and cognitive-behavioral therapy in generalized anxiety disorder: a randomized, controlled trial. American Journal of Psychiatry, 166(8), 875–81. — (2008). Effectiveness of long-term psychodynamic psychotherapy: a metaanalysis. Journal of the American Medical Association, 300(13), 1551–1565. Levine, J. (2007). Anti-materialist arguments and influential replies. In The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, eds. M. Velmans and S. Schneider (pp. 371–380). Malden, Mass. & Oxford: Blackwell. Murphy, N. (2010). Divine action, emergence and scientific explanation. In The Cambridge Companion to Science and Religion, ed. P. Harrison (pp. 244– 259). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Racker, H. (1948). The countertransference neurosis. In Transference and Countertransference (pp. 105–126). London: Hogarth Press 1968. Sandler, J. (1976). Countertransference and role-responsivness. The International Review of Psycho-Analysis, 3, 43–47. Shear, J. (2007). Eastern methods for investigating mind and consciousness. In The Blackwell companion to consciousness, eds. M. Velmans & S. Schneider (pp. 697–710). Oxford: Blackwell. Shedler, J. (2010). The efficacy of psychodynamic psychotherapy. American Psychologist, 65, 98–109. Smit, Y. et al. (2012). The effectiveness of long-term psychoanalytic psychotherapy – a meta-analysis of randomized controlled trials. Clinical Psychology Review (accepted). Van Gulick, R. (2001). Reduction, emergence and other recent options on the mind/body problem. A philosophical overview. Journal of Consciousness Studies, 8(9–10), 1–34. — (1995). Who’s in charge here? And who’s doing all the work? In Mental causation, eds. J. Heil & A. Mele (pp. 233–256). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Varela, F. J. & Shear, J. (1999). First-person methodologies: what, why, how? Journal of Consciousness Studies, 6(2–3), 1–14. Wallace, B. A. (2006). Buddhism and science. In The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, eds. Ph. Clayton and Z. Simpson (pp. 24–40). Oxford: Oxford University Press. — (2000). The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Vincent Colapietro. Liberal Arts Research Professor in the Departments of Philosophy and African American Studies at Penn State University. One of his main areas of historical research is classical American pragmatism, with special emphasis on C. S. Peirce’s writings. One of the principal foci of his more strictly philosophical interests is the philosophy of mind. In his contribution to this volume, these two preoccupations are, yet again, brought together. While he has written on a wide range of topics (from music, in particular jazz, to cinema, from the philosophy of history to metaphysics, and from the philosophy of mind to metaethics), he is first and foremost a scholar of pragmatism devoted to showing in detail how the thought of Peirce especially can make an important contribution to contemporary thought. Terrence Deacon. His theoretical interests include the study of evolution-like processes at many levels, including their role in embryonic development, neural signal processing, language change, and social processes, and how these different processes interact and depend on each other. Currently, his theoretical interests have focused on the problem of explaining emergent phenomena, such as characterize apparently unprecedented transitions as t the origin of life, the evolution of language, and the generation of conscious experience by brains. This is fueled by a career-long interest in the ideas of the late 19th-century American philosopher, Charles Sanders Peirce and his theory of semiosis. Many of these interests are explored in his 1997 book, The Symbolic Species: The Coevolution of Language and the Brain. His new book, Incomplete Nature: How Mind Emerged from Matter, explores the relationship between thermodynamic, self-organizing, evolutionary and semiotic processes and provides a new tech-

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nical conception of information that explains both its representational and normative properties. Patrizia Giampieri-Deutsch. She is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Vienna, as well as Professor of Psychotherapy Research at the newly established Karl Landsteiner University of Health Sciences in Lower Austria. She works clinically as a psychoanalyst and is a full member as well as a training and supervising analyst of the Vienna Psychoanalytic Society and the International Psychoanalytical Association. Since 2000, she has been a Research Fellow and member of the College of Research Fellows of the International Psychoanalytical Association. Among her numerous publications in history and philosophy of sciences, ethics as well as psychodynamic anthropology, she is the editor of (2002) Psychoanalyse im Dialog der Wissenschaften. She is the co-editor of (1993-2000) The Correspondence of Sigmund Freud and Sándor Ferenczi which appeared in 6 languages; (1996, 2000) Ferenczi’s Turn in Psychoanalysis; (2012) Sensory Perception. Mind and Matter. Eugene T. Gendlin. Philosopher and psychotherapist who developed ways of thinking about and working with living process, the bodily felt sense and the 'philosophy of the implicit'. Gendlin received his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1958 from the University of Chicago where he became an Associate Professor in the departments of Philosophy and Psychology. He taught there from 1964 until 1995, and published many books and articles. Some of them were translated in up to 17 languages. He is best known for Focusing and for Thinking at the Edge, two procedures for thinking with more than patterns and concepts. Four times he was awarded by the American Psychological Association. He received the Viktor-Frankl-Price by the City of Vienna and in this year his lifework was honoured by the World Association of Person-Centered and Experiential Psychotherapy. Steven C. Hayes . He is Nevada Foundation Professor at the Department of Psychology at the University of Nevada. An author of 41 books and over 575 scientific articles, his career has focused on an analysis of the nature of human language and cognition and the application of this to the understanding and alleviation of human suffering. He is the developer of Relational Frame Theory, an account of 239 https://doi.org/10.5771/9783495828205 .

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human higher cognition, and has guided its extension to Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), a popular evidence-based form of psychotherapy that uses mindfulness, acceptance, and values-based methods. His work has been recognized by several awards including the Exemplary Contributions to Basic Behavioral Research and Its Applications from Division 25 of APA, the Impact of Science on Application award from the Society for the Advancement of Behavior Analysis, and the Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association for Behavioral and Cognitive Therapy. Claire Petitmengin. After studies in Buddhist philosophy, and then ten years of consulting and research in information systems design, she completed a thesis under the direction of Francisco Varela at the Ecole Polytechnique in Paris, on the subject of the lived experience which accompanies the emergence of an intuition. She is currently Professor at the Institut Mines-Télécom and member of the Archives Husserl (Ecole Normale Supérieure) in Paris. Her research focuses on the usually unrecognized micro-dynamics of lived experience and «first-person” methods enabling us to become aware of it and describe it. She studies the epistemological conditions of these methods as well as their educational, therapeutic, artistic and technological applications. Susan Stuart. Her research is primarily in the area of hermeneutic philosophy with strong links to the phenomenological method. Her work centres on developing the notion of enkinaesthesia: the reciprocally affective neuro-muscular dynamical flows and muscle tensions that are felt and enfolded between co-participating agents, and felt, though not reciprocated, in our engagement with non-agential things. She recommends a revision of metaphysics in light of this transcendental condition, enkinaesthesia, because it provides a nonindividuating means for interpreting our being in the world and doing science; thus, instead of using science to explain the world, the enkinaesthetic field of living experience can be used to explain science and situate, that is, naturalise the grounds of our moral discourse.

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