I don't want that focus to overshadow the general agreement, however. I could have written a post 3 times this long amplifying and extending all the things I agreed with, but I didn't think that was what's needed right now, at least on this list.
SnitgrrRl wrote:
> Emotions aren't merely physical responses located
> in the thalamus or wherever. Emotions are
> socially constructed responses to experiences,
> which is to say--we learn how to feel love, hate,
> guilt, shame, sadness, happiness, whatever in
> certain sorts of ways
I agree with this POV, and I'm trying to get at what this means in terms of how we think. Doyle posits an absolute disjunction of reason and emotion -- I reject that. I believe that real human emotions almost invariably have cognitive content, and of course that cognitive content is in large measure socially constructed.
> There may be a humanly
> shared physical basis to those emotions, but
> people have 'cutlure' -- frames of interpretation
> through which we come to understand what those
> physical sensations are, how and whether to
> respond and give meaning to them.
Absolutely.
> Yes, that would be because SnitgrrRl doesn't buy
> into the behavioral psychology lark, nor do I
> think that neurophysiology and neuropsychology are
> adequate bases upon which to construct an
> understanding of how society, and people in
> society, operates. It's all stimulus and
> response.
> Scary.
Yes, but completely ignoring what happens on the level of neurophysiology is uwise for several reasons.
(1) It concedes too much to the reductionists, and the conservative political uses to which reductionism is so easily put.
(2) It overlooks the possibility of not just countering conservative/reductionist interpretations, but discovering new points of departure for radical left analysis.
(3) The neurophysiology of cognition/emotion connects deeply to issues of science (evolution, most notably) which STILL drive many conservatives completely round the bend. Pure instinct says don't walk away from such site of strategic advantage, instead check it out carefully to see what more can be gained.
(4) The neurophysiology of cognition/emotion supports a dialectical, as opposed to a bourgoise conception of science. The divide between bourgoise and dialectical science can be construed in terms of positivism vs. pragmatism (objectivism vs. constructivism). The former defines self-reflexive critical inquiry as nonscience and even (most obviously in logical positivism) as nonsense, while the latter accepts such inquiry as a pluralistically valid purpose.
As far back as *Metaphors We Live By* (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) there's been an explicit argument against positivism/objectivism based on an empirical study of cognition. Lakoff and Johnson weren't dealing with physiology, but their work is indicative of the kind of consequences that can come from critically examining human cognition in ways that most leftists would unfortunately dismiss, or not even consider in the first place.
> ...<best damn fish story I've heard since Moby Dick excised here>...
>
> You've attributed something to me above that's
> just not the case: that I think it all 'feeling'
> and then have assumed that I buy into some
> neuro-pysch explanation of feelings that are
> somehow outside of society and in some physical
> place in the body dominated by brain functions
> outside of our control. Not the case.
I agree with this objection completely, but...
> Worse, you
> think that neuropsych is the only way to explain
> feelings and the capacity for reason. Not the
> case, for me.
..I want to caution against throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Doyle's attempt (not his formulation, which I challenge) should be fully acceptable.
Neuropsych should be expceted to provide an explanation which any radical leftist theories should be compatible with. Such biologically-based explanations should NOT be expected to fully explain or determine what requires a cultural/historical/economic level of analysis, and if they attempt to do so, this should be taken as prima facia evidence that such explanations are invalid.
> >We in fact have no idea if guilt and shame refer
> to two different >states of feeling within the
> brain
>
> Shame and guilt don't reside within the brain.
> Physical responses may occur there --and how
> exactly do you *really* know what you're studying
> in neuropsych research anyway Doyle. But anyway,
> feeling/emotion doesn't reside in the brain or any
> other part of the physical body. They are
> culturally defined responses that are "learned"
This is the kind of false dichotomy I want to warn against. It's not either/or, it's both/and. Feeling/emotion/cognition both resides in the brain (although this locution involving the container metaphor is problematic to say the least, we can let it pass for now) AND is culturally defined and learned. Any approach which does not embrace that duality is inherently flawed.
Later SnitgrrRl writes:
> A couple of reasons, aside from the marxist
> objections, why I think the
> neuropscyh/sociobiology argument is a problem:
>
> Firstly, feelings/emotions don't reside w/in the
> brain exclusively.
"exclusively" is the key word here. When it's dropped, we're headed for trouble.
> (Again the cultural frame of
> interpretation is required in order to give
> physical sensations meaning.) If feelings resided
> exclusively w/in the brain, then we'd see shame
> and guilt exhibited by three year olds in this
> society.
I agree with the point you're making here, but the argument here is a good hueristic, but a flawed logical argument. I actually CAN'T conceive of emotions being entirely divorced from the world (and don't think this is what Doyle believes either, BTW), but logically if they were, it would be quite possible for them to appear developmentally regardless of the outside world.
This may seem like a tiny niggling point, and it is. But it's precisely in such little points that whole systems of underlying assumptions reveal themselves.
Bottom line: I think EVERYONE knows that feelings as well as thoughts are socially constructed. The only real questions are how and to what extent.
But of course there IS a persistent fantasy that denies this. I just don't think that anyone who articulates this fantasy wholly believes it, instead they manage to dissociate their theory-building in order to maintain it.
We need to be very clear about not buying into this dissociated fantasy unawares, even to try to argue our way out of it.
> Secondly, perhaps a 'scientific' study will be
> helpful, since these seem to be the terms upon
> which you prefer to evaluate the worthiness of
> theoretical understandings of the social; I don't
> generally agree b/c so much marxist and feminist
> work has shown that 'science' --as the folks who
> do neuropsych understand it--is bound up w/ and
> works in tandem w/ capitalism. Rationalist
> science, in other words, is ideology.)
But see my points above -- that cognitive science generally (including, but not limited to nueropsych) supports the dialectical critical project and the challenge to bourgoise rationalism. This is not to say that the practitioners necesasarily agree with me, it's a claim about what's emerging -- validating many important insights that go back at least as far as William James.
> > Arithmetic rules and mathematical expression
> have no comparable moral meaning >(though it is
> >clear that mathematicians can feel deeply about
> math),
>
> But Doyle they do. If someone were to run around
> completely violating mathematical rules on a daily
> basis, I would eventually be sent to an asylym.
> Say, if I were to buy groceries tomorrow and I
> didn't follow mathematical rules and followed
> those of another system altogether and tried to
> say that my thirty dollar basket of groceries was
> worth a buck, the cashier would get pissed, angry,
> upset, sad, annoyed, happy, digusted --who knows??
> She might feel sad that I'm probably crazy and
> she's learned to feel sad toward crazy people
> rather than anger. Now, if I tried to give her
> $100 bucks for those same groceries, she'd feel
> shock, concern, pleasure, or maybe anger that I
> didn't understand the mathematical rules that she
> utterly takes for granted as the 'way things are'
All this is quite true, but...
> Arithmetic rules aren't natural.
That's false. They are BOTH natural and socially constructed.
> They are
> socially constructed and depend on socially shared
> norms and ideas about how to count and measure and
> they are by no means universal to all societies.
> Some societies, for example, have no notion of
> time in the way we count seconds, minutes, hours,
> days, weeks, etc.
Time is not the same as arithmetic. Nor do different ways of measuring time negate its objective existence. The moon was orbiting the Earth, going through its phases long before our ancient ancestors struggled out of the primal ooze.
> They don't know how old someone
> is or when something happened in their past,
> though the story of that past is extremely
> important to them, the rest of it doesn't matter
> to them. So this math stuff has to go.
> Mathematical rules about counting and measuring
> are contingent on a certain kind of
> socio-historical formation that encourages
> (prescribes) people to follow them and punishes
> (proscribes) people when they don't.
You are confusing two different things here. The practice is most certainly contingent, but the rules are not.
Ursula K. LeGuin has a marvelous story about this which I haven't read in about 10 years, but now have a strong urge to reread. Mathematics--in LeGuin's story it's just simple addition (or multiplication, I forget which)--has a NECESSARY structure, it is something that the individual can know for themselves with absolute certainty. It thus can serve as a (NOT *the*) foundation for resisting social coercion, wiuhtout which there is no possibility of sustained critical resistence.
Of course mathematics alone, and the individual alone are entirely insufficient. But the discovery of necessary truth is inherently empowering, as the discovery of logic and the recognition of logical fallacies are empowering against the hold of unfounded dogmatic belief.
> Even Western Europeans only a few centuries ago
> had no set, reliable system of measures. Seems
> pretty damn illogical on our view.
Not to me. I'm a dyed-in-the-wool pragmatist. And I learned to cook from my grandmother, whose "recipies" never had an exact measurement in them -- not even the number of eggs, it depended how big they were, you could always add another one if the batter didn't look right, etc. My mom, on the other hand, had recipies with exact measures for everything and was a TERRIBLE cook.
But none of that had ANYTHING to do with mathematics per se. It had to do with USES or non-uses of mathematics. And you can bet your booties that my grandmother had an EXCELLENT mathematical sense, as well as memory, which she used without thinking because she was a master.
As I said in the beginning, I agree with (and thoroughly enjoyed) the vast majority of SnitgrrRl's post. I'm much closer to her than to Doyle in outlook, at least at this point in my understanding.
But I think that Doyle is quite right to be raising the issues he is, and should not be dismissed based on the assumption that anything having to do with nuerobiology or even individual cognition is "sociobiology", reductionist or reactionary. In fact, the more that's learned about human cognition, the more the old models prove their inadequacy.
Finally, I'd like to point out that this is NOT totally irrelevent to the subject matter of LBO. The basic laws of neoclassical economics are based on assumptions about human nature, which are in part cognitive assumptions. Those assumptions have been tested and found wanting, with virtually no notice being taken of the fact. I believe that leftist ought to be paying a whole lot more attention to such matters. The embeddedness of the social in the biological is NOT, as conservatives has always supposed, an open-and-shut argument in their favor. It only looks that way if you don't bother to check out the facts.
-- Paul Rosenberg Reason and Democracy rad at gte.net
"Let's put the information BACK into the information age!"