Perceiving colors and shapes

Daniel Stern aimed to describe infant development and early interaction within the framework of cognitive psychology in his book The interpersonal world of the infant that was published in 1985. Some years later he wrote a charming book from the baby's point of view. I cite a passage from the second chapter of Diary of a baby. It is a vivid illustration of the Aristotelian theory of sense perception in a modern guise.
"At six weeks of age, he [the baby] can see quite well, though not perfectly. He is already aware of different colors, shapes, and intensities. And he has been born with strong preferences about what he wants to look at, about what pleases him. Among these preferences, intensity and contrast top the list. They are the most important elements in this scene. A baby’s nervous system is prepared to evaluate immediately the intensity of a light, a sound, a touch - of anything accessible to one of his senses. (Daniel Stern (1990), Diary of a baby, p. 18)"

Receiving form without matter

What happens when an adult male – because women did not philosophize in ancient Greece – begins to reflect over the conditions of his existence and his way of being in the world? He will begin with what is immediately present and obvious. I see, hear, smell, taste, and sense the things and events in the world that is external to me. I also perceive events that happen internally like my thoughts and feelings. All the internal events seem to be immaterial and private in the sense that they are only accessible to me. They belong to my soul.

The conception of a soul that inhabits the material body was of course available and widely adopted before Aristotle began his studies on it. His great innovation was to apply a rigorous logical analysis to the soul. He proceeded by singling out phenomena and by defining their distinguishing properties he attempted to separate their general nature from their accidental variation. Making discriminations and looking at the relationships between properties thus established is still the basis of abstraction in sciences. That was not the problem. The problem arose by his choice of departure for the analysis, i.e., sense perception.

This seems simple and self-evident. Our current textbooks on cognitive psychology almost invariably begin  with sense perception. This is however a perilous path. It generates all the dichotomies that have plagued psychology for centuries. They can be readily recognized in Aristotle’s analysis of the soul.

First, he had to answer how the senses relate to the external objects. What do the eyes see, when they spot a boat on the shore or perceive a colour? The boat does not enter the eye, nor does the eye jelly get coloured. Aristotle’s solution was consistent with his general approach to understand nature. Everything in the world is a unity of matter and form, and what enters the sense is the form of the external thing. “The generalization we should make about all perception is that a sense is what is capable of receiving sensible forms without matter, as wax receives the marking of the ring without the iron or gold…” (Aristotle: On the Soul, II, 12)

This was the very first dualist split in Aristotle’s monistic view of the world. A number of vexing problems ensued that brought in place other dichotomies. How can material objects transfer their form to the senses? What happens to the form when it enters the sensitive soul? What is the mode by which it is retained in the soul? Starting from perception created a rift between the external and the internal. It also petrified the distinction between body and soul, which we still have with us in the mind-body problem.

More problems were soon underway. According to his classificatory mode of analysis, Aristotle postulated that each sense has the potential for receiving only a certain kind of impressions. The defining property for each sense was framed in a pair of opposites. Thus, seeing was discriminating between light and darkness, hearing between high and low tones, smelling between bitter and sweet odour, and tasting discriminated bitter and sweet liquids. Touching was problematic, because more than one contrasts had to be allowed, such as warm vs. cold, dry vs. wet, and coarse vs. smooth.  Nevertheless, the unitary form of external things (pragmata) necessarily appeared to split up into distinct sense impressions.

If each sense makes up its own faculty that handles the sense data proper to its nature, what accounts for the fact that we do not just perceive colours, smells, surfaces or sounds? “What is it that allows us to go beyond mere sensations of red, fragrant, and smooth and to recognise an apple for an apple?” (Kaukua & Kukkonen, 2007) To account for this problem, Aristotle had to postulate two cognitive faculties. The common sense (koinē dunamis) is an internal sense that brings the specific aspects of the form together. By employing a set of general categories, such as movement, rest, number, shape, and size, the common sense creates a unified perception of the external thing (aisthema).

The common sense could, however, only account for the synthesis of immediate sense impressions. That they might be presented as thought objects for the intellect, they had to be freed from the immediacy of sense perception. (Frede, 2001). More internal faculties had to be postulated. Aristotle defined Phantasia as the faculty that retains the perceptibles as phantasmata and presents them to the faculty of intellect for further abstraction and thought operations.  Does this not sound familiar? Modern conceptions in cognitive science carry distinct echoes of these ancient solutions. In my next post I will give some illustrations.

From "of" to "or"

When publishing my post yesterday I noticed a spelling error in the blog title. Representation of reference does not make sense, so I corrected the error. On a second thought, in the Aristotelian framework, we might think about a referential event in the world (a pragmata) that is represented in the soul. For instance, we perceive a footprint of a horse on the muddy path and an image of the horse comes in mind. So the referential event causes a mental representation. This way of understanding representation and reference is, however, precisely what I try to leave behind. It seems that I have gradually become an eliminativist who would like the term “representation” to be erased from psychology.  Future will show, if such a radical position is fruitful or not. For the time being, it seems to be safest to retain the term and explore, if there are other ways of using it in psychological analysis than the Aristotelian one that makes representation the primary "affection of the soul".

The basic fault

The theme of my blog requires explanation. Throughout a process of many years, I have begun to understand that there is an endemic confusion between the concepts of representation and reference in present-day psychology. It seems to be regularly overlooked in the philosophy of mind as well. Semantic-referential and cognitively modular aspects of the mind are happily mixed. Reference and representation are frequently used as synonyms. Complications and confusions are multiplied, because the meaning of these terms have changed during a development in epistemology, semantics, and philosophy of mind that covers over two millennia.

I entered this domain of this conceptual problem quite innocently from the vantage point of psychotherapy research.  Psychotherapy is a laboratory that demonstrates, incessantly, the relationships between intra-psychic processes and how they get expressed in the joint interchange between clients and therapists. Every utterance of the client refers to something.  Usually, it is about something else than about the immediate interaction in the consulting room. Clients’ life events, memories, fantasies, dreams, fears, and hopes enter into the therapeutic dialogue. Both partners try to make sense of these expressions and find new ways of understanding the client’s predicament. Psychotherapists cannot escape the issue of client intrapsychic processes and their expression in the therapeutic dialogue.

When clients speak about something, what do they do? Do they convey their mind’s content, which is built up as a complex repertoire of mental representations?  This looks obvious. Communication is a vehicle that gives an external form to mental contents. We are happy with this idea and do not recognise the problems that stem from philosophical assertions made over 2300 years ago. Aristotle can be regarded as one influential source of the confusion between reference and representation. In the first paragraph of De Interpretatione he wrote:

Now spoken words [ta en te phone] are symbols [symbola] of affections in the soul [pathemata], and written marks symbols of spoken sounds. And just as written marks are not the same for all men, neither are spoken sounds. But what these are in the first place signs [semeia] of—affections of the soul—are the same for all; and what these affections are likenesses [omoiomata] of—actual things [pragmata]—are also the same. (Translated by J.L. Ackrill)

Ackrill’s translation is regarded as the most accurate in conveying the meaning of the Greek terms that Aristotle used in the formulation. We still hear echoes of them in “phonemes”, “pathology”, and “pragmatics”. The important point here is a division between expression as a semiotic phenomenon and the affections of the soul as representative phenomena. The leap is actually staggering. What mental process can account for transforming mental likenesses of things into symbolic expressions? Aristotle did not give an answer to it. In the meantime, the theory of mental likenesses underwent some changes, especially in the writings of Descartes and Kant. But behind these transformations we still can recognise Aristotle’s original formulation. The gap between the representational mind and the referential expressions remains firm. To explore the problems it has caused for psychological theories of infant development, language acquisition, and psychopathology will be my main aim in the forthcoming posts.