On not learning about the mind from lite
Not learning (quite as much as you might
hope) about the mind from literature
April 2011
Getting it right
•
•
•
•
Focus on the content of the story
Does that content convey truths?
Does it aid verisimilar imaginings?
Does it develop skills that assist our
flourishing?
• Does whatever is seriously conveyed
comport well with our best scientific
theories?
Learning that does not
depend on literature getting
it right
• Learning what people (the author,
some group, everyone) think about
these things
• Learning about the creative mind and
its processes
Learning that does not
depend on getting the
details right
• Learning from the activation
of basic empathic responses
—Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Children’s learning of basic
moral principles/folk
psychology
Learning that does so
depend
• The interplay of character and
circumstance
• The likely effects of jealousy, hatred,
forgiveness...
• The temptations of power
• What it was like to be part of the Updike
generation
• The troubles of kingship
• The mechanisms and experiences of
oppressive relations
• How to be a person “on whom nothing is
Values that might survive scepticism
about this kind of learning
• Literature might:
1. serve in uniting people with a false
but sustaining picture of moral
psychology (might promote
ineffectual policies and behaviour)
2. make a rich range of ideas available
(it might confuse us).
3. be an impetus to independent
thought (might be a barrier)
The thesis?
• No one says we can always learn
from all fictional literature
• I don’t say we can never learn from
any literature
• We should be cautious in our claims to learn
–
–
–
–
we are prone to over-estimate our learning
fiction is a poor learning environment
reasons not to trust the authority of great authors
tests of such claims are required if we are to be
responsible epistemic agents (the claims of literature are
not self-validating)
– rarely sought and hard to find
The plan
1. The varieties of epistemic fictive
communication
2. The pitfalls of epistemic fictive
communication
3. Non-epistemic fictive
communication
Two kinds of learning from
fiction
•
•
•
•
Trust-based
the layout of Elizabethan houses.
an imaginary house would do.
We trust the author’s reliable opinion,
assuming
–
–
–
–
the accessibility of the knowledge,
the reputation of the publisher
likelihood that errors will be denounced.
Low stakes
Is this testimony?
Testimony as Gricean telling
• I get testimony that P only when
• you intend me to recognise your
intention to get me to believe P.
• Authors sometimes provide
testimony (explicit or implicit)
Non-testimonial
transmission
• I manifest my belief that it is raining by
putting on rain gear.
• an author manifests her belief that
character is inherited (Zola)
• We could talk about expressing here...
• The writer does not express the view
• Her writing is expressive of the view.
• NB: states other than beliefs can be
manifested: from emotions to character
traits (important later)
Manifesting may be
deliberate or not, believed
or
not
• Manifesting
•
Deliberate
deliberate
Non-
•
• Agent believes ~believe
~believe
believes
• In these cases (all?) we have (possible) learning
from fiction
• Later we will see more sub-Gricean kinds of
Learning what is false?
• Don’t set the bar too high.
• willing to conform to a generous sense of
“learning”.
• Learning, if the result is doxastic
improvement
– Knowledge
– reliable opinion
– move closer to truth
Communication through manifestation less reliable
than through testimony
The speaker
stakes her reputation;
The costs to the testifier are high
The hearer
audiences sensitive to indicators of unreliability in
testimony
less likely to be vigilant where an opinion is
merely manifested.
Further...
• Manifesting is deniable:
1. May have been manifested by a
non-authorial voice—the narrator,
who may be unreliable
2. May be intended as part of fictional
content and a deliberate breach of
real world truth
Manifestation: common way
to “learn” from fiction, but...
• those who value great literature
don’t focus on this;
• emphasise understanding the
human heart.
• they don’t think of this as
testimonial or manifestationbased learning.
the imagination-based model
• Wanting to learn about NYC, you ask a
long-time resident to tell you about it;
• tedious, but possible, to learn by noting
what opinions she manifests;
• a better way: she takes you on a tour,
exercising knowledge and taste to show
you interesting parts;
• You rely on her expertise, not her
testimony;
• (there might be testimony as
commentary).
This model suggested by
the humanistic tradition...
• Leavis, Trilling, Nussbaum,
Robinson;
• Literature can show us heroic
moral decision making, as well
as deception, selfishness, cruelty.
• ...guided by the sensitive,
informed author.
They are not confused
about reality!
• they think it enough for the characters to
be “realistic” in a not very clear sense.
• They accept that these are encounters “in
the imagination”.
• Something like a thought experiment
Reconfiguration (MachGendler)
• “We have stores of unarticulated
knowledge of the world which is not
organized under any theoretical
framework. Argument will not give us
access to that knowledge, because the
knowledge is not propositionally available.
Framed properly, however, a thought
experiment can tap into it, and--much like
an ordinary experiment--allow us to make
use of information about the world which
was, in some sense, there all along, if only
we had known how to systematize it into
The imagination recruits
other things...
• Imagining draws on real world belief,
• as well as on unconceptualised
capacities (e.g. imagining performing
various actions
• The imagination, suitably constrained
by a literary representation, draws
together, exercises, “retunes” these
beliefs and capacities.
skills
• learning from fiction is not like taking
psychology 101
• to some extent a matter of gaining knowhow.
• imagined encounters with various
situations help with skills:
– nurses get better at giving injections by
imagining giving them
– people’s effective muscular strength
increases if they imagine lifting weights.
The Nussbaum/James ideal
• we get better at social interaction through fiction:
– more attuned to the needs and desires of
others,
– better at dealing with moral conflicts and
dilemmas:
• more like the Jamesian person on whom
“nothing is lost” in the interpersonal world.
Imagination must be constrained in the
right way!
• Nurses get better at giving injections only
if they imagine giving them in the right
way
• Readers of novels celebrating passion less
likely to use condoms
– Hence (perhaps) becoming les interpersonally
skilful
• (the direction of causation in this research
may be questioned).
What constrains the reader’s
imagination?
• The author’s imagination.
• The author creates scenarios in
which people do, see and feel things,
guided by her imagining of what one
would do, see or feel.
How reliable is the
imagination?
• Not always reliable:
• Imagining and inertial motion
• Imagining the temperature of the
bath
• But the imagination may be a good
guide to how we would feel in certain
circumstances, and hence to how we
would behave
How good?
• does not work well below a coarse grain
• People are bad at imagining how they
would feel in future circumstances,
significantly over-estimating how
happy/sad they would be (Gilbert &
Wilson, Prospect theory)
• Imagination has no access to the
mechanisms which determine how people
will actually feel (they feel less happy with
outcomes the more control they have over
the outcome).
Authors may be particularly insensitive
to how people really would feel in
certain circumstances
• Prevalence of psychopathy with
tendency to
– warp interpersonal understanding
– to over-attribute meaningfulness to
events
• Lack of interest/experience in
interpersonal relations.
Psychopathy
• Post’s study of creative people: 49/50 in
the literary group suffered some
psychiatric disorder in the
schizotypic/bipolar range
• Schizotypy associated with
– poor grasp of others’ mental states
– over-attribution of meaningfulness
• Bipolar patients subject to cycles of
emotional distortion likely to make their
errors in estimating emotional effects
Lack of interest and understanding
• “[T]he creator rarely cares much for
others”(Howard Gardner).
• It is striking that we credit people prone to overinterpretation and to emotional disruption with a
deep insight into human nature and conduct
• not discouraged that many have little experience
of or interest in the corresponding reality
Literature selects for
illusions of meaning
• Not surprising that such psychopathies are
over-represented among literary folk, since
their job is to fill their stories with
meaning:
• Literature works (roughly) on the principle
that anything that happens in the story is
relevant to the theme, and very often is a
key to motive.
• The world is not like that
The Golden Bowl
• Adam , Maggie and the sea-creature
• Nussbaum: lesson here about what works and
what doesn’t when it comes to “being a person
on whom nothing is lost”.
• is this project of image-making really of much
help when it comes to orienting us to the good?
• Nussbaum presents no evidence, nor thinks,
apparently, that any is needed.
• Is there any evidence about what does work to
help us choose well?
Some
• mere exposure to the names of your friends
primes the goal of helping.
• hold a cup of hot coffee in your hand; you will
probably judge people to have “warmer”
personalities that way.
• repeating the order word-for-word leads to bigger
tips. (In general, imitating people will do a lot for
your popularity).
• Try imagining “a professor” for five minutes; you
will do better on a test; imagining a soccer
hooligan will make you perform worse.
This is not what we find in
Henry James
• ordinary experience, on which writers heavily
rely, does not reveal these weird instances of
cause and effect.
• By contrast, the idea of searching for the right
image seems so right in a literary context; a
visual metaphor has meaning.
• hard to find meaning in a process that starts with
hearing names of your friends and ends with you
helping someone,
• or starts with you imitating someone’s
movements and end with their liking you better.
• We are so oriented to phenomena we think of as
meaningful, so willing to believe in conspiracies,
luck, fate, Gods and all those things that replace
meaningless accidents with meaningful outcomes
• we are naturally delighted by the idea that a
visual metaphor can shift Adam Verver into a
higher moral gear.
• very likely the world isn’t like that.
• Saying that we are learning from a case like this
is like saying that we are learning about witches
from Macbeth.
Non-epistemic relations
• Suspicion: we often talk of
learning when it is other relations
which are in play.
• These other relations deeply
embedded in our social
interactions and the associated
emotions
Deceptive signalling
• obscuring tendencies to anger,
selfishness and unfaithfulness;
• No good telling someone you are free
of these traits.
• Temporary resort to unselfish
behaviour
• Such behaviour expressive of
unselfishness(returning to an earlier
point).
More positive: co-operation
and shared point of view
• People want to co-operate: rear
children, move a heavy stone.
• This can be done in a cerebral way.
• there is a suite of barely conscious,
sometimes unconscious,
mechanisms that operate to make
fluent cooperative action possible.
• They contribute to the sense of
shared point of view.
Affectively charged mechanisms for promoting
convergent and, ultimately, joint actions.
• rhythmic co-ordination in baby-carer interactions.
• Rocking chairs with different frequencies
• Tapping in time increases liking, and effectiveness
of co-operation
• shifting visual attention in phase makes for better
communication (Sebanz)
• Early infant imitation
• Mere imagining can make us think in the way
others think (soccer hooligans).
What has this to do with
readers and authors?
• Readers and authors rarely get
together.
• But writing is well suited to express the
author’s personality, attitudes,
competencies, ways of seeing and ways of
feeling.
– Recall: we don’t need to be standing next to
the soccer hooligan to be influenced by his
(imagined) behaviour or characteristics.
– Recall: we are good at manifesting false
personalities—put to good use by authors who
create “implied authors” that reader’s like
Expression of personality
through literature
• Telling a well crafted and extended story
gives opportunities to manifest states
which attract the liking of others.
• Readers may be especially willing to
engage in a kind of sharing crucial to
literary fiction: sharing of point of view,
• the reader comes, temporarily, to see and
respond to events of the story as the
author does
The illusion of knowledge
• This kind of sharing makes it tempting to
think we are learning something
• when our relation may be much less
cognitive, much less information-based.
hope) about the mind from literature
April 2011
Getting it right
•
•
•
•
Focus on the content of the story
Does that content convey truths?
Does it aid verisimilar imaginings?
Does it develop skills that assist our
flourishing?
• Does whatever is seriously conveyed
comport well with our best scientific
theories?
Learning that does not
depend on literature getting
it right
• Learning what people (the author,
some group, everyone) think about
these things
• Learning about the creative mind and
its processes
Learning that does not
depend on getting the
details right
• Learning from the activation
of basic empathic responses
—Uncle Tom’s Cabin
• Children’s learning of basic
moral principles/folk
psychology
Learning that does so
depend
• The interplay of character and
circumstance
• The likely effects of jealousy, hatred,
forgiveness...
• The temptations of power
• What it was like to be part of the Updike
generation
• The troubles of kingship
• The mechanisms and experiences of
oppressive relations
• How to be a person “on whom nothing is
Values that might survive scepticism
about this kind of learning
• Literature might:
1. serve in uniting people with a false
but sustaining picture of moral
psychology (might promote
ineffectual policies and behaviour)
2. make a rich range of ideas available
(it might confuse us).
3. be an impetus to independent
thought (might be a barrier)
The thesis?
• No one says we can always learn
from all fictional literature
• I don’t say we can never learn from
any literature
• We should be cautious in our claims to learn
–
–
–
–
we are prone to over-estimate our learning
fiction is a poor learning environment
reasons not to trust the authority of great authors
tests of such claims are required if we are to be
responsible epistemic agents (the claims of literature are
not self-validating)
– rarely sought and hard to find
The plan
1. The varieties of epistemic fictive
communication
2. The pitfalls of epistemic fictive
communication
3. Non-epistemic fictive
communication
Two kinds of learning from
fiction
•
•
•
•
Trust-based
the layout of Elizabethan houses.
an imaginary house would do.
We trust the author’s reliable opinion,
assuming
–
–
–
–
the accessibility of the knowledge,
the reputation of the publisher
likelihood that errors will be denounced.
Low stakes
Is this testimony?
Testimony as Gricean telling
• I get testimony that P only when
• you intend me to recognise your
intention to get me to believe P.
• Authors sometimes provide
testimony (explicit or implicit)
Non-testimonial
transmission
• I manifest my belief that it is raining by
putting on rain gear.
• an author manifests her belief that
character is inherited (Zola)
• We could talk about expressing here...
• The writer does not express the view
• Her writing is expressive of the view.
• NB: states other than beliefs can be
manifested: from emotions to character
traits (important later)
Manifesting may be
deliberate or not, believed
or
not
• Manifesting
•
Deliberate
deliberate
Non-
•
• Agent believes ~believe
~believe
believes
• In these cases (all?) we have (possible) learning
from fiction
• Later we will see more sub-Gricean kinds of
Learning what is false?
• Don’t set the bar too high.
• willing to conform to a generous sense of
“learning”.
• Learning, if the result is doxastic
improvement
– Knowledge
– reliable opinion
– move closer to truth
Communication through manifestation less reliable
than through testimony
The speaker
stakes her reputation;
The costs to the testifier are high
The hearer
audiences sensitive to indicators of unreliability in
testimony
less likely to be vigilant where an opinion is
merely manifested.
Further...
• Manifesting is deniable:
1. May have been manifested by a
non-authorial voice—the narrator,
who may be unreliable
2. May be intended as part of fictional
content and a deliberate breach of
real world truth
Manifestation: common way
to “learn” from fiction, but...
• those who value great literature
don’t focus on this;
• emphasise understanding the
human heart.
• they don’t think of this as
testimonial or manifestationbased learning.
the imagination-based model
• Wanting to learn about NYC, you ask a
long-time resident to tell you about it;
• tedious, but possible, to learn by noting
what opinions she manifests;
• a better way: she takes you on a tour,
exercising knowledge and taste to show
you interesting parts;
• You rely on her expertise, not her
testimony;
• (there might be testimony as
commentary).
This model suggested by
the humanistic tradition...
• Leavis, Trilling, Nussbaum,
Robinson;
• Literature can show us heroic
moral decision making, as well
as deception, selfishness, cruelty.
• ...guided by the sensitive,
informed author.
They are not confused
about reality!
• they think it enough for the characters to
be “realistic” in a not very clear sense.
• They accept that these are encounters “in
the imagination”.
• Something like a thought experiment
Reconfiguration (MachGendler)
• “We have stores of unarticulated
knowledge of the world which is not
organized under any theoretical
framework. Argument will not give us
access to that knowledge, because the
knowledge is not propositionally available.
Framed properly, however, a thought
experiment can tap into it, and--much like
an ordinary experiment--allow us to make
use of information about the world which
was, in some sense, there all along, if only
we had known how to systematize it into
The imagination recruits
other things...
• Imagining draws on real world belief,
• as well as on unconceptualised
capacities (e.g. imagining performing
various actions
• The imagination, suitably constrained
by a literary representation, draws
together, exercises, “retunes” these
beliefs and capacities.
skills
• learning from fiction is not like taking
psychology 101
• to some extent a matter of gaining knowhow.
• imagined encounters with various
situations help with skills:
– nurses get better at giving injections by
imagining giving them
– people’s effective muscular strength
increases if they imagine lifting weights.
The Nussbaum/James ideal
• we get better at social interaction through fiction:
– more attuned to the needs and desires of
others,
– better at dealing with moral conflicts and
dilemmas:
• more like the Jamesian person on whom
“nothing is lost” in the interpersonal world.
Imagination must be constrained in the
right way!
• Nurses get better at giving injections only
if they imagine giving them in the right
way
• Readers of novels celebrating passion less
likely to use condoms
– Hence (perhaps) becoming les interpersonally
skilful
• (the direction of causation in this research
may be questioned).
What constrains the reader’s
imagination?
• The author’s imagination.
• The author creates scenarios in
which people do, see and feel things,
guided by her imagining of what one
would do, see or feel.
How reliable is the
imagination?
• Not always reliable:
• Imagining and inertial motion
• Imagining the temperature of the
bath
• But the imagination may be a good
guide to how we would feel in certain
circumstances, and hence to how we
would behave
How good?
• does not work well below a coarse grain
• People are bad at imagining how they
would feel in future circumstances,
significantly over-estimating how
happy/sad they would be (Gilbert &
Wilson, Prospect theory)
• Imagination has no access to the
mechanisms which determine how people
will actually feel (they feel less happy with
outcomes the more control they have over
the outcome).
Authors may be particularly insensitive
to how people really would feel in
certain circumstances
• Prevalence of psychopathy with
tendency to
– warp interpersonal understanding
– to over-attribute meaningfulness to
events
• Lack of interest/experience in
interpersonal relations.
Psychopathy
• Post’s study of creative people: 49/50 in
the literary group suffered some
psychiatric disorder in the
schizotypic/bipolar range
• Schizotypy associated with
– poor grasp of others’ mental states
– over-attribution of meaningfulness
• Bipolar patients subject to cycles of
emotional distortion likely to make their
errors in estimating emotional effects
Lack of interest and understanding
• “[T]he creator rarely cares much for
others”(Howard Gardner).
• It is striking that we credit people prone to overinterpretation and to emotional disruption with a
deep insight into human nature and conduct
• not discouraged that many have little experience
of or interest in the corresponding reality
Literature selects for
illusions of meaning
• Not surprising that such psychopathies are
over-represented among literary folk, since
their job is to fill their stories with
meaning:
• Literature works (roughly) on the principle
that anything that happens in the story is
relevant to the theme, and very often is a
key to motive.
• The world is not like that
The Golden Bowl
• Adam , Maggie and the sea-creature
• Nussbaum: lesson here about what works and
what doesn’t when it comes to “being a person
on whom nothing is lost”.
• is this project of image-making really of much
help when it comes to orienting us to the good?
• Nussbaum presents no evidence, nor thinks,
apparently, that any is needed.
• Is there any evidence about what does work to
help us choose well?
Some
• mere exposure to the names of your friends
primes the goal of helping.
• hold a cup of hot coffee in your hand; you will
probably judge people to have “warmer”
personalities that way.
• repeating the order word-for-word leads to bigger
tips. (In general, imitating people will do a lot for
your popularity).
• Try imagining “a professor” for five minutes; you
will do better on a test; imagining a soccer
hooligan will make you perform worse.
This is not what we find in
Henry James
• ordinary experience, on which writers heavily
rely, does not reveal these weird instances of
cause and effect.
• By contrast, the idea of searching for the right
image seems so right in a literary context; a
visual metaphor has meaning.
• hard to find meaning in a process that starts with
hearing names of your friends and ends with you
helping someone,
• or starts with you imitating someone’s
movements and end with their liking you better.
• We are so oriented to phenomena we think of as
meaningful, so willing to believe in conspiracies,
luck, fate, Gods and all those things that replace
meaningless accidents with meaningful outcomes
• we are naturally delighted by the idea that a
visual metaphor can shift Adam Verver into a
higher moral gear.
• very likely the world isn’t like that.
• Saying that we are learning from a case like this
is like saying that we are learning about witches
from Macbeth.
Non-epistemic relations
• Suspicion: we often talk of
learning when it is other relations
which are in play.
• These other relations deeply
embedded in our social
interactions and the associated
emotions
Deceptive signalling
• obscuring tendencies to anger,
selfishness and unfaithfulness;
• No good telling someone you are free
of these traits.
• Temporary resort to unselfish
behaviour
• Such behaviour expressive of
unselfishness(returning to an earlier
point).
More positive: co-operation
and shared point of view
• People want to co-operate: rear
children, move a heavy stone.
• This can be done in a cerebral way.
• there is a suite of barely conscious,
sometimes unconscious,
mechanisms that operate to make
fluent cooperative action possible.
• They contribute to the sense of
shared point of view.
Affectively charged mechanisms for promoting
convergent and, ultimately, joint actions.
• rhythmic co-ordination in baby-carer interactions.
• Rocking chairs with different frequencies
• Tapping in time increases liking, and effectiveness
of co-operation
• shifting visual attention in phase makes for better
communication (Sebanz)
• Early infant imitation
• Mere imagining can make us think in the way
others think (soccer hooligans).
What has this to do with
readers and authors?
• Readers and authors rarely get
together.
• But writing is well suited to express the
author’s personality, attitudes,
competencies, ways of seeing and ways of
feeling.
– Recall: we don’t need to be standing next to
the soccer hooligan to be influenced by his
(imagined) behaviour or characteristics.
– Recall: we are good at manifesting false
personalities—put to good use by authors who
create “implied authors” that reader’s like
Expression of personality
through literature
• Telling a well crafted and extended story
gives opportunities to manifest states
which attract the liking of others.
• Readers may be especially willing to
engage in a kind of sharing crucial to
literary fiction: sharing of point of view,
• the reader comes, temporarily, to see and
respond to events of the story as the
author does
The illusion of knowledge
• This kind of sharing makes it tempting to
think we are learning something
• when our relation may be much less
cognitive, much less information-based.