Bonding and meaning revisited
To expand on that post about feelings and meaning and science can’t from a few days ago. Another counter-example occurred to me – one that was touched on by people who mentioned postpartum depression, but not (that I saw, or at least recall) in detail.
Suppose the perinatal hormones hadn’t worked, or had worked the opposite way. Suppose Scott had felt a surge of not love and protectiveness but disgust and loathing. I think it’s fair to say we know what she would have done; she would have 1) done something to ensure her infant’s safety and well-being and 2) tried to fix her own response, via drugs or counseling. Why? Because of scientific knowledge about infancy. Because of Harry Harlow, for one thing. She would have second-guessed the apparent meaning of what she felt, and tried hard not to act on it. She would have used what she knew to counteract a felt “meaning.”
And if that’s right, then it’s also the case that scientific knowledge was part of the “meaning” of the bonding. She knew it was a good healthy useful emotion, so she knew to embrace it and go with it and act on it as opposed to the opposite.
I think this is a better criticism than the one in the last post.
In the former post, you argued that people think that people think of “reversal of fortune” cases are only called meaningful narratives when they involve feelings that are worth valorizing. But that argument didn’t work because, as a matter of fact, everybody has been exposed to plenty of negative stories that they hold close to their hearts. For example, there’s nothing to valorize in the Kitty Genovese case, but it’s still a (true) story, and there’s a lot that we rightfully resent about what happened to her.
In this post, you’re pointing out that sometimes our passions fight with our theories about what’s going on, and hence we end up with muddled and meaningless stories. If our theories had no role, then the stories would be unaffected — but they are affected, so they must be. I think that’s a really good point and I wish I’d thought of it.
[…] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Skeptic South Africa, Ophelia Benson. Ophelia Benson said: Bonding and meaning revisited http://dlvr.it/9B4wD […]
Did we really need the morally contemptible Harry Harlow and his sadistic experiements (‘the pit of despair’) to learn that deprivation in infancy produces deeply disturbed young animals? Sorry, but I don’t think HH deserves much respect.
At the time we (or they) did, Tim, because of the hold of behaviorism. I don’t understand how behaviorism could have had such a hold, but it did.
I know the experiments are horrible. I hate them. But they did show something that a lot of people really did doubt.
Ben
Hmm…I don’t think that first part is quite right. The feeling we have about the Kitty Genovese story is horror or repulsion – and we do valorize that feeling. I just mentioned the reversal of fortune aspect because it was part of Scott’s story, but it’s not really crucial. I don’t think I was arguing that we don’t valorize bad feelings – I meant to argue that we don’t valorize wrong feelings, whether up ones or down ones, welcoming or rejecting. I agree that we valorize and value aversive feelings. Hell yes. In fact we feel guilty if they’re absent or weak. Or we scowl if they’re absent or weak in others.
While writing my comment in the related thread:
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2010/nothing-more-than-feelings/#comment-64252
I came to the realisation that meaning and truth were separate things. That meaning relates to understanding, how knowledge or information makes sense, whereas truth is determined by how it corresponds to reality.
Words have meanings but words are not real objects. Words that correspond to objects can be said to be true. Theories have meanings, numbers have meanings, works of fiction have meanings, emotions have meanings, dreams have meanings and religion has meanings. None of these abstractions or emotions have any truth value unless they correspond to reality.
And so what is meaningful can very much be entirely fictional and false. Hamlet’s ghost does not exist but gives meaning to the story. Harry Potter gives meaning to millions of children. Myths have meaning, religion has meaning but not truth value.
Emotions may give meaning to people, but emotions are not existential existing objects or real, they’re creations of the subconscious that give meaning to conscious experiences or to fictional experiences.
If you have ever felt anything while watching a movie, a play or listened to music on a radio, then you would say that it gave meaning to the experience, but that is not the same as the experiences being real or true.
Oph, ah I see. I may have misunderstood you then. Still, if that’s what you were saying, then it’s like saying that we don’t valorize baseness, which is either trivially true or something like it. (If we valorize the base, then it isn’t base.) Or have I gotten you wrong again?
@6 – I have a horrible habit of being more affected by well-constructed fictional representations of emotional crises than by actual ones – a disconnect between understood factual reality and felt emotional resonance that I quite dislike, but which comes as a somatic reaction I can’t control.
[Or, in shorter words, I’m a cynical bastard who cries at sad movies]
So, yeah, ‘meaning’ and truth are way apart.
I am sorry, Ophelia, but I really do not accept that. I think behaviourism (was it science, incidentally, or an ideology built on an superficial positivism? – on what did it depend in empirical terms?) would have collapsed anyway because of its falsity – people like Winnicot and Bowlby in England (the latter seems to have inspired Harlow – not, I think, that he would have wanted to) were doing good work that undermined it. The whole story of behaviourism and Harlow (and John Money) is a sorry one and shows that science is not always quite so innocent an enterprise as it is often bruited to be. And to say that is not to tar with the same brush such as Darwin or von Frisch.
Ben – right, it is exactly like that, but that was why I thought Scott was stacking the deck by picking that particular kind of example – one that the audience at a Secular Humanism shindig would approve of. She chose a Good kind of elation rather than a Bad kind – such as Eichmann’s famous “elation.”
Oph, ah, I see. I guess I have a hard time reading Scott as making a trivial or uninformative claim, to the effect that we valorize valor and cannot valorize the base. Those sorts of tautologies don’t lend any support to what I took to be her main argument — which is, in effect, that sentimental story-telling is different from scientific theory.
Anyway. I’m nitpicking. Tut tut.
Nitpicking is fine (except when it isn’t – Bad nitpicking – which brings us back where we started) – I want to know if I have Scott’s argument wrong.
I think she was arguing more than that. I think she was arguing that…powerful emotions are meaningful in a way that science can’t augment.
She’s not saying “what is important is the nature of sentimental story-telling”; she’s saying what is important is how she feels about X. My point in the first post was that that would sound very different if the story in question were of a feeling of, say, homophobic rage.
It has occurred to me that Nell Nodding tells a similar story in a book called, I think, Mothering – about coming home to find her teenage daughter asleep on the couch after basketball, and her feelings toward that daughter, and how separate from reason they were and how right that was. I know this because Martha Nussbaum somewhere cites this story and says Nodding is wrong: actually she was depending on all sorts of background knowledge and rational inference and that she had to; her daughter could after all have been ill or dead or drugged.
I may have posted about that here at some point…
Yup. Nearly seven years ago – on much the same subject. God I’m boring.
http://www.butterfliesandwheels.org/2004/not-only-where-but-also-what/
Complete with “religion is more like love” claim from someone I don’t remember, and with participation by Phil Mole, who hasn’t commented here in years. I have to go to Facebook now to chat with Phil.
Right — so here’s my problem. Scott is talking about maternal stories that she has valorious feelings about, and then saying something about how her feelings are distinct from scientific explanation of the event. Her argument is that there’s a difference between thoughts and feelings, and in order to show that difference, she has to start with a case that will invoke valorious feelings of a certain kind for the sake of illustration.
In other words, on my reading, her argument is a conditional one. You might paraphrase it as something like, “supposing we have these cases where we have certain feelings that we valorize; it follows that those feelings are separate from the ways we explain them scientifically”. So cases of homophobic rage and lacklustre Nazis aren’t going to be relevant, just because they don’t involve valorizable feelings. Shorter: you can’t refute “if a then b” by saying “sometimes a is false” — you can only refute it by saying “sometimes a is true but b isn’t”.
That’s my interpretation of what Scott is up to, at any rate. I might be wrong. I just wanted to make it totally clear why I rejected the previous post but accept this one. (I also like that old post and Naussbaum’s critique of Noddings! You had a very different style back in The Day.)
Gotcha. I didn’t understand her claim as conditional. She seemed to mean feelings in general, feelings as such.
I did?! I thought my style was very samey.
And you like the old one better?? sob sob sob sob
Yeah — just my reading of ‘er. Results may vary.
About the different styles… I think you flow the same way as you did then. For someone as hoidy-toidy as me, your sentences often seem like they come to an abrupt stop. Like Hemingway. But that’s good, because I’m addicted to bombast, and hence I abuse punctuation and pronouns.
Still, now you’re even terser than you were then. For instance, I can’t imagine you writing that whole bit about coming in from the rain in a contemporary post.
I think now you’re even more economical because there’s now a greater likelihood that you’ll be misread by cretins. So you have to mete it out in bursts.
Oh, but religion provides all sorts of wonderful meanings for such situations! The child is cursed or possessed, the mother is cursed or possessed,… Just look at all of the meaning attached to the stillbirth of an enencephalous baby:
http://saltycurrent.blogspot.com/2009/09/puritan-monster.html
Abrupt stop. Yes – well I think I alternate between the abrupt and the run-on. I do some machine-gun stuff mixed with some more extended stuff. Increasing terseness may have to do with an increase over time of a lurking sense of potential boredom in audience. A kind of “oh god I’m going on and on and on, who do I think I am.” The fact that I’ve been doing it for 8 years sort of adds to that…as if I’d locked a lot of unfortunate people in here and harangued them from then to now. Which is quite funny, given how voluntary it all is, but there you go.