Beyond the Brain: Difficult Metaphors

Continuing coverage of Beyond the Brain, by Loise Barrett. The first part of the extended blog review is here, there is a succinct published review in PsychCritiques.
 
Chris asked me a question over at Manchester Psychiatry and I realized three important things: 1) I have written a lot about Beyond the Brain, 7 posts. 2) I still have a few more posts to write. 3) I better do that soon. 


This post is the most "asking for help" of the things I have left to write. It is about metaphor. I love a good metaphor, and most of the metaphors in Barrett's book were good. However, there are two pairs of metaphors that just aren't working for me, and they are somewhat common metaphors in the complexity/dynamics systems literature. In particular, I found the ‘short leash’ vs. ‘long leash’ analogy weird, similarly the ‘loose coupling’ and ‘soft assembly’ analogies have never quite gelled for me. I would appreciate some help figuring out why these labels make sense.

Beyond the Brain: Review out

I still owe two more posts on Barrett's book, but I have more pressing matters, including the start of the semester and preparing a conference presentation due this weekend. While gathering material for my presentation, I was excited to see that my much more concise review of the book was just published! I am never too sure about how many people read these things, but hopefully it will inspire a few more people to check out the book. Here is the basic info:

Beyond the Brain: Anti-Anthropomorphism

As luck would have it, my semester is wrapping up, and my philosophy colleague just returned my copy of  Beyond the Brain. He agreed it was excellent and has ordered his own copy. I have two or three more topics I wanted to write about in my extended review of Louise Barrett's excellent book. The first two chapters of the book deal with the problem of anthropomorphizing the behavior of animals, and the topic reappears several times in the later chapters. Barrett is convincing that anthropomorphism causes serious trouble when we try to explain behavior (even human behavior) and she advocates a system in which anthropomorphic terms are acceptable when they refer to evolutionary processes rather than immediate happenings. This is all good, but I think psychology can push further, and use mental terms in a way that refers to immediate happenings, while still avoiding the pitfalls of naive anthropomorphism.

Some quick diversions

I have a few more posts about Beyond the Brain left to do, but I want to take a quick break to post about some other things. In part, I'm looking for a change of pace for a little bit, in part I have some other ideas percolating to the fore, and in part I promised to loan the book to a philosophy-professor friend and he is getting testy. Topics I hope to cover in the next few weeks:

• How Holt suggested we think about brain functions (work for the chapter I am preparing with Andrew and Sabrina)
• Why we need to be suspicious of physiological "explanations" of behavior
• How the problem of "illusion" goes to the core of psychophysics, social psych, and comparative psychology.

Topics still coming from Beyond the Brain:

• The interesting discussion about Anthropomorphism
• Some instances where the ideas were great, but I didn't quite get the metaphors that were supposed to simply/clarify the ideas. 
• How far should the "extended cognition" idea should be taken? 

A Final Thought

Just so this post isn't a complete wash, content wise, let me add the line in Barrett's book that most made me stop in shock - unsure if I had just read crazyness or brilliant insight. It is a quote from Peter Hacker (on p. 103) that appears in the middle of the discussion of Gibson's system vs. the alternatives, and as cool as the line is just sitting here, it is even better in context. Hacker states:

To argue that since we can see nothing without having a retinal image therefore what we see is the retinal image is like arguing that since we can buy nothing without money what we buy is money.

Having read the sentence several more times, I'm still not sure if it is crazy, brilliant, or maybe even both.

Beyond the Brain: Ecological Psychology

Continuing coverage of Beyond the Brain, by Loise Barrett. 

Barrett dedicates an entire chapter of her book to Ecological Psychology, the study of perception originating from the work of James and Eleanor Gibson, and ideas compatible with the ecological approach fill the book. The coverage is excellent, but shares some of the strangeness of what I might call the "standard presentation" of Gibson's approach. To get an idea how intellectually fun the chapter is, it opens with a quote from John Dewey, goes briefly into Alva Noe's work, then has quotes from James Gibson and Maurice Merleau-Ponty all in the first two pages!

Beyond the Brain: Embodied Minds and Descriptive Mentalism

Continuing coverage of Beyond the Brain, by Loise Barrett.


William James and John Dewey claim that "things are what you experience when you experience those things". Pretty similarly, a basic way of explaining Charles Sanders Peirce's Pragmatism was that "things are what things do" (e.g., to be a 'vector' is to do what vectors do, to be a 'bigot' is to do what bigots do). Both of these ideas were alive and well during the berthing years of Behaviorism, and at least a few of the early behaviorists 'got it' (though notably not Watson). In more modern terms, you could call the resulting synthesis Descriptive Mentalism.The thirty-second version is: A descriptive mentalist asserts that mental terms are, first and foremost, descriptions of behavior, not explanations for behavior. For example, to say an animal intends to do X is to describe something about the way the animal is acting. To connect this approach more explicitly with W. James and Dewey (and Gibson)... If we can identify the things that we experience—the things that we are attuned to—when we experience an animal as "intending", then we have identified what "intention" is.  

While there will be several posts on this blog trying to explain descriptive mentalism better, here I hope to show how adopting such a view could have helped Barrett.  


Embodied Minds


As I mentioned previously, Barrett does not give the most hardline presentation of embodiment you can find, and overall that is a strength, making the book much more accessible. However, it is still worth noting a few places where Barrett struggles, and a more aggressive view on embodiment could help.

Beyond the Brain: Embodied Minds

Continuing coverage of Beyond the Brain, by Loise Barrett. The book presents much of its material in a way that will push the average reader's comfort zone, but not smash their cherished ideas head on. This is a reasonable stylistic choice and, overall, a great strength. The next two posts will talk about the book's presentation of embodied cognition, hopefully giving fair balance to the places where the book did a solid job, and where it could have hit a little harder.

Embodiment

"Embodied" has become a bit of a buzz word recently. Most people who use the term seem well intentioned, but seem to have little clue about the full implications of their thoughts. Those who use the term lightly seem merely to mean that they do not believe in a non-corporeal soul or mind-independent-of-the-body. What they do not seem to understand (and what I mean when I say they use the term 'lightly') are the radical implications of such statements for reshaping psychology.

Beyond the Brain: Intro

Beyond the Brain: How Body and Environment Shape Animal and Human Minds, by Louise Barrett was released earlier this year. I just finished writing a review of it for PsycCritiques (The American Psychological Association online journal that used to be the printed Contemporary Psychology). So, first things first: Highly recommended.