__The Folk Psychology of Intellectuals and my Great-Grandmother: Or (almost) two cheers for Ravi__ On 10/2/06, ravi <<a href="mailto:gadfly@exitleft.org" target="_blank" onclick="return top.js.OpenExtLink(window,event,this)"> gadfly@exitleft.org</a>> wrote: > I do not of course hate science (what I understand as science). I do not > even hate the scientistic. What worries me greatly is systems of elite > power. > > My aunt died last year at the age of about 83 (I am not sure we know her > exact age). She lost her husband to cancer when she was in her early 30s > and with a little help from her family and a lot of hard work she raised > her two daughters quite successfully. She was a strong woman who played > a vital role in raising the majority of us (her sisters' sons and > daughters), to the point where some of my cousins referred to her as > "mother". She knew all sorts of little things... how to give a bath to a > baby. What to do when he won't stop crying in the middle of the night. > What little concoction might relieve some annoying ailment. Stories > short enough to keep our attention but full of mystery and virtue. She > died with hardly a dollar in her possession and without any luxuries of > retirement. __My Great-Grandmother's Dream Interpreter_ My Great-Grandmother in the old Italian neighborhood in Schenectady, NY, would take me in hand we would walk down the block and drag me up two flights so that she could talk to her "gypsy."  I remember occasionally my Great-Grandmother would tell the "gypsy" her dreams and the two would discuss the dream and go over the images and meaning.  I think all of this cost her $5.00.  My Great-Grandfather was mild amused and completely skeptical about all of this but he also thought it did Great-Grandma some good.  _My Dream Interpreter__  When I was in my mid-twenties I went once a week to a neo-Freudian shrink.  Occasionally, I would talk about my dreams and she would ask more or less probing questions.  At the time I was keeping a dream journal along with my half dozen other journals.  It seemed that I remembered my dreams every night.  After I would discuss my dreams with my Upper West Side shrink I would go home and write my particular "interpretation" of my dream and often this would lead --- somehow, I don't know how, it's a mystery --- to a short story or a poem or both.  It was the most creative time of my life.  Now I think psychoanalysis is a pseudo-science, so I don't think that this process would any longer work for me.  But for that creative period of a completed and half-decent poem or two everyday, of a short story every week, of two lousy novels completed in a year and a half -- I would gladly confound myself with self-deception.  Looking back I fail to see much difference between the neo-Freudian mumbo-jumbo that I believed in and my Great-Grandmother's "gypsy". If anything the "gypsy" was more honest and forthright about the fact that what she was doing was mostly a confidence game.  She had long term clients and she only took them for the money that they wanted to be taken for.  But I am sure that if she had clients who wanted to go whole hog she would have taken them for more.  And I also think (now this maybe the haze of childhood memory) that my Great-Grandmother's dream interpreter was rather good at what she did.  _The Astrology of Fictional Characters_ A novelist friend of mine used to draw up extensive astrological charts for each of the characters in the novels as he wrote.  He would constantly revise the charts at each stage of the novel.  This was part of his "characterological" analysis.  How is this substantially different than the great influence that pop-Freudian psychoanalysis had on great Hollywood movies, such as Hitchcock's "Vertigo" or "The Birds."  Both of these movies are great works of art as far as I am concerned.  _The Necessary Delusion of Art - is its (non)"truth-value"_ For some reason, not only is art a compound of "illusion" and "reality," but it is also a necessarily a compound of delusion and self-deception.  My belief is that great stories are not only possible "realities," but also necessary "delusions."  The combination of illusion, disillusion, and delusion can be found in all great literature.  The very fact that a piece of writing is a cohesive narrative makes it in some sense an illusion and perhaps always a delusion.  That's why I find what Michael C. calls the "truth-value" of art so delusional.  The truth value of art may only be that it reveals something about us and our culture but that it creates patterns where there are no patterns, because we need patterns, stories, unities, explanations just to live from day to day.  It does not matter whether those patterns are "true" or "false".... all that they have to be is "adequate" for survival for a certain amount of (human) time.  Plato believed that the poet was a liar who fostered delusions, as well as disillusions, and thus the poet should be banned from his Republic.  I believe that the poet is a liar and fosters delusions, as well as disillusions, and that is her value (though it would be a little bit perverse to call this a "truth-value"). My deeper guess is that the very fact that we pattern and make narratives is not a reflection of any particular "truth" that those patterns or narratives reveal, but rather a product of pre-existing patterns in the mind-brain that helps us to organize experience.  We know very little about this whole process and even though you find a hint of "literary Darwinism" in the above hypothesis, as far as I am concerned the evolutionary psychologists who try to apply biological theory to narrative are simply pretending that they have knowledge when all that they have are (more, probably less) educated guesses.  _Admission of our lack of knowledge_ One of the things that motivates me in these threads is a hatred of a pretense to certainty or knowledge where there is none.  The term "folk psychology" is a product of an elitist philosophical culture that attributes to common sense some combination of popular illusion and guesses about belief, desire, hunger, pain, so-forth.  In method the study of folk psychology is the study of something that we all partake in, but in any actual given article the pretense is that all of those "unthinking" common folks are the ones who make the usual mistakes of folk psychology.  I think that the very concept of "folk psychology" is a concept that exhibits the peculiar "folk psychology" of intellectuals, who can't see that most of their theories of mind are as implausible as the common folks theories of mind.  Astrology is a superstition.  But so was Freudian psychology.  I think at one time astrology was a "fruitful" superstition and it rarely is today.  It also may have led to some fruitful observations of the cosmos. Astrology probably also did a lot of harm. Freudian psychology, in the middle decades of the last century was a fruitful superstition in the arts, especially in the narrative arts. It also may have led us to some fruitful questions on the way to a theory of the mind/brain...  Freudian psychology probably also did a lot of harm.  I don't think that this is a "relativistic" view but rather an historical view.  Only in a very few theoretical constructs (called science) do we reach a narrow amount of certainty about life.  Also in a few tautological systems we can actually define "truth-value".  But life, narrative, and natural language cannot be made to fit into Fregean definitions.  I see that Andy F. below quotes Chomsky's discussion of science.  I want to say that I agree with Chomsky's view of science and the limits of knowledge.  One of my long term goals is to sketch a pragmatics of science from a Chomskyian p.o.v.  But one of his primary concerns is the limits of theoretical knowledge and the boundaries of human knowledge.  I want to emphasize again, that it is useless to pretend that we have knowledge where there is no knowledge.  And it is useless to pretend we can reach certainty over questions that we may think are true, but over which we can only exercise are basic senses, including our rationality and "common sense."  In many cases "folk psychology" is about as good as "theoretical" psychology, especially in the realms of judging human actions, choices, experience, and history. Jerry Monaco > > My father passed away 10 years ago. Even in his time, he was an > anachronism. A devoted Gandhian, he not only participated in the > movement, but adhered to its principles to the last day (only briefly > considering wearing western clothes in order to visit me). He went to > work at around the age of 17 and worked till a few years before his > death. He put his older brothers through college and his younger > brothers through school, helped build a house for the family of which he > was later denied his share. He did not have the money or the time to go > to college, yet his large library of books introduced me to Koestler, > Isherwood, Dickens, Orwell, Tagore, Huxley, Shakespeare, even Homer. He > managed the finances of my mothers' sisters but never cared for his own > much. >