Exam notes from Thad and Chuck

Perception

November 15, 2003

Thad and I have written up some of our thoughts about the exam question you wrote on last week,

In various ways, many of the films and texts we've studied so far (including Burr's, Herzog's, Dillard's, Classen and her co-authors', Truffaut's and Piaget's) are concerned with the relations between language and our immediate perceptual experience of the world. Pick four out of these six and compare and contrast their accounts of that relationship.

Thad's notes come first: he wrote and revised them as he worked through the exams.  There follows a long note I wrote about the question "Is seeing believing?" (written from a philosopher's point of view.)  Finally, I've added some thoughts that came to mind partly in response to Thadss comments and partly in response to what I read in the exams. 

 --- Chuck

I. Thad's notes:

Burr - Luca says smell is objective/ he's supposed to be able to describe it dead on - though only in the sense that when he says it, you say :That's it, exactly!" and that the smell becomes suddenly clearly and more sharply perceived when it's named. At the same time, Turin recognizes there are problems about fitting language to perception -- as when he keeps griping about how other researchers are consistently misdescribing the odors of things, or when he's trying to get people to accept his descriptions while doing research of talking to the Indian guy in the little shop at the end.

Piaget - language is not the same as understanding; you can count without conserving number or repeat phrases about how the seasons happen without understanding the concepts involved. Language can be merely a rote activity, or reflect a primitive sense of number - one to one matching but not conservation, or reflect a real grasp of the concept - ie the ability to conserve. Similarly, a verbal account doesn't produce understanding in the child - in sharp contrast with Burr's claim about Turin's descriptions.

Classen et al seem to assume that linguistic categories do correspond exactly to perception and to thinking. (This is a little strong, because they rely some on practices too - the Dassenetch young men do not merely say that cow dung smells good, they rub it all over themselves when they want to appeal to girls.) However, their strongest argument for the effects of culture on smell seems to rely on the way that cultures use the same category label for smells that we describe (and experience) as very different, like flowers and onions.

In Herzog, most people's language doesn't fit reality very well (see the guy making polite conversation on the square while Caspar stands there like an idiot). However, it's powerful socially; it's principally used as a tool of domination, an important part of the way most people in this world attempt to appropriate other people and try to use them. The little scribe is always writing things down, even when the people saying them don't understand what's happening or what they mean, as if somehow recorded official words were a guarantee of truth and reality. One of the last shots in the movie shows him slowly disappearing down the street the way the murderer does in the beginning, and suggests that this attitude of labeling and treating Kasper as a specimen is just as much a way of killing him as beating him to death.

Kaspar's acquirning language seems more complicatedÉ he never gets fluent, but the movie seems to want to say his language and vision is somehow truer than most of the other characters'. The basic problem is that only his parent/caretakers care about listening to him (maybe a reflection of Herzog's feelings about movie audiences?). Everybody else tries to get him to say what they need or want, or displays him as a curiosity for their own benefit like the carnival master and the aristocrat. In the end, the language of dreams and dream-like stories seems the only way he can realy communicate his experience of the world and it's un-homely-ness. (It's unheimlich for him - uncanny).

In Truffaut, language is a route to social connection and to knowledge of the world, Victor's first word is water - the essential of life and what he keeps returning to when he's free - running back from the carriage to drink in the river, dancing on his kness in the rain. Then comes milk - a way to get nurturance and love. In this world, language really does work, and mastering it is acquiring an identity, becoming a victor, even though it has costs.

Dillard's account is the most complex. On the one hand language is part of self-consciousness. It takes us from being puppies in direct unmediated contact with experience to verbalizing; and self-consciousness means losing the intensity and directness of the moment completely. However, since sheÕs writing all the time, it seems as if one has to assume that she thinks language used the right way can heighten and intensify perception - like drawing things to see them better, or like TurinÕs capacity of heighten Burr's awareness of smells by naming them precisely. She doesn't discuss this explicitly, as far as I know, but it seems connected with her idea that there's also something in between being a puppy and self-consciousness - heightened consciousness without self-consciousness. She thinks history and her endless reading are part of that and says they make us make us more conscious than the puppy without necessarily making us self-conscious, so maybe writing is like that.

II. My take on "Is seeing believing?"

What is "immediate" about our perceptual experience?  On the face of it, It's experience we don't have to "try for," experience that comes with being conscious, experience that comes with being sentient and awake.  At the very least, sentience and immediate experience assures some sort of responsiveness. But is there more to it?  Some would say so: Descartes, Locke, and others.  For these thinkers, immediate perceptual experience is an act of representation, a sentience of something as somehow "qualified."  The immediate experience of perceiving a red thing, or a squeaky thing, or a musky thing isn't simply a matter of being responsive to these items: it implies being aware of each item as red, or as squeaky or as musky.  As such, immediate perceptual experience, is "immediate experience of something as such and such" and implies a representing, a kind of thinking, a way of using a concept.  In this view, immediate perceptual experience is immediate knowing, a knowing of oneÕs experience as an experience of a certain kind -- although such knowings might not (yet) be something one can articulate. Such immediate knowings might not yet, in this view, employ "general concepts," and thus would not yet be knowings one can put into words.  In fact, at the heart of this view is the contention that our competence with language is built on this foundation of immediate, unlearned, given-at-birth "sapience:" or ability to-know (represent)-things-as-such-and-such.

An alternative view is that sentience is just that, and does not in any way imply the use of concepts, or proto-conceptual "forerunners," that sentience of a red thing, for example, does not imply awareness of the thing as red, and in fact cannot, since awareness-as requires having concepts, which sentience itself in no way guarantees.  One might hold, more specifically, that awareness of things as such-and-such depends on having concepts, and having concepts of any sort depends on having already learned language, at least with some degree of competence.  (Others might hold that learning language isnÕt sufficient for acquiring concepts.)  Of course this raises the difficult question of how one could ever learn a language, and the use of concepts, without first having some kind of awareness of things as qualified in some way or other.  How could mere sentience, without some sort of fundamental "sapience," be enough to ensure the capacity to learn language?  And if mere sentience is enough, then why couldnÕt any sentient creature become a language user? (Descartes worked around this by holding that non-human animals are not, in fact, sentient - that their apparent sentience was a simulation, that the behavior suggesting sentience would be explained by an adequate mechanics of animal behavior.)

So, I had these thoughts in the back of my mind as I read through the essay questions.  In considering "the relationships between immediate perceptual experience and language," I thought about whether or not the thinker or artist took implicitly or explicitly a Cartesian position: that sentience carries with it "sapience," that language rests thereby on such a Given conceptual foundation.

III. My further notes on what we've read:

Burr-Turin. Yes, Turin does seem to think of smell as "objective," that to smell something is to smell it as having a quality of some kind.  Language can contribute to a kind of secondary clarification and enable us to perceive more sharply an odor (make the smell idea more "clear and distinct," as Descartes might say), but what we smell, we smell.  Our likes and dislikes, however, might change with how we identify a smell: urine or honey "smell the same," but we might dislike the smell of urine and like that of honey. This, perhaps, isn't a matter of how the odor smells, which isn't changed by the description, but what we associate with the smell - a bodily function rather than a tasty treat.

Piaget. Yes, Thad is surely right: Piaget insists that "talking the talk" isn't the same as "walking the talk."  We have to know how to get around actively (physically and in our thinking and imagination) before we will understand number or length or horizontality etc.  Does gaining full command of the concept of length - knowing, for example, that length doesn't change with simple transformation of position - alter the immediate perceptual experience of length?  This isn't a matter of language but of seeing length "for what it is."  ItÕs about seeing something under particular "modalities," knowing how it might look if you did certain things to it.  Knowing how it must look when...  Seeing someone as one's mother, for example, isn't simply about the "perceptual qualities" of the person, but requires seeing her as someone who will behave in particular ways (imagined or actual).  This is conceptually complex and not Given with sentience but Gotten through activity and exploration.

Classen et al. These authors do seem content with the idea that language and understanding go hand in hand.  They seem to extend this to our perceptual experience: as culture and classifications change, so does our perception of the world.  We might learn that flowers smell like onions, were we to be enculturated in a new way.  They might hold - this seems consistent with their outlook - that in learning to speak a language we learn to see and otherwise perceive the world in a particular way: a position strongly contrary to Descartes'.  (Yes - maybe they could say that learning a language really is more than talk, that it includes where and when to rub on cow dung, for instance.  Perception might be said to "follow culture," then, and not just language - arguably closer to Piaget.)

Herzog. Some of you noticed that Kaspar, when pressed, speaks with uncommon sense, that his social naivete, especially his idiosyncratic language, allows him to preserve a kind of knowledge and wisdom.  Philosophers, priests and town officials fail to understand him, except as an object, which he becomes in the end - just a piece of meat. 

Truffaut. Language, and becoming a social person, does carry a loss.  Victor's new world, the one that he discovers through language, has lost the enchantment of the world he knew without language.  Experience unmediated by language is a kind of knowing, but not the kind that gives one power over objects or in social relations.

Dillard. Dillard is the clearest about the priority of language over perception.  She writes on p.33, " Seeing is of course very much a matter of verbalization.  Unless I call my attention to what passes before my eyes, I simply won't see it.  It is, as Ruskin says, 'not merely unnoticed, but in the full, clear sense of the word, unseen.'"  In other words, no language, then no sapience, and hence no sight.  What we see, at all, we must see as something-somehow, which we arrive at through "verbalization."  What interests Dillard, of course, is that what we see in one way, we can learn to see in another way: we can travel the world along the "positive path" or the "negative path."  It might even be hard to say, exactly, what it is that abides from the one seeing to the next: we can only juxtapose the two seeings. 

Suskind. (Not that you were asked!)  Grenouille is imagined at birth not only to have a superb nose.  His fabulous nose leads him into a profound, direct knowledge of concrete things in the world - knowledge without words - knowledge that can lead to emitting (vomiting, as Suskind puts it) words.  Recall the passage on pp. 24-25, when G. is sitting on the log, "drowning" in the aroma of the log, being infused by it "until he became wood himself."  This intimate, non-linguistic knowing becomes the basis of language... but he always has difficulty with "abstract ideas and the like."  Suskind has conjured up a wonderful image of "smelling as knowing."