Commentary on "Encoding of Meaning" Osborne P. Wiggins1 and Michael Alan Schwartz2 Department of Philosophy, University of Louisville, Louisville, KY 40292 Department of Psychiatry, 11100 Euclid Avenue, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH 44106-5000 Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 4.4 (1997) 277-282 Derek Bolton seeks to "deconstruct" a number of traditional dichotomies. Among these are the dichotomies delineated by Karl Jaspers and other early writers in the Geisteswissenschaften between meaningful and causal connections, and the correlative methodological dichotomy between hermeneutic interpretation and causal explanation. Bolton attempts to surmount these traditional dichotomies by attributing a causal role to meaning: meaning, as encoded in the brain, causes various behaviors; in particular it causes intentional or goal-directed behaviors. Bolton contends that, when fully explicated, the notion of a neuro-causal role for meaning gives rise to a new research program that he calls "cognitive-behavioral semantics." This research program can provide the theoretical basis for the science of psychopathology as well as for other psychological and social sciences. Bolton's cognitive-behavioral semantics may prove to be a fruitful research program. Like all research programs, the proof will lie in its capacity to guide scientific investigations that do in fact make new discoveries. We wonder, however, why Bolton thinks it necessary to view his program as somehow "deflating" previous distinctions among conceptual and methodological approaches. We can discern no reason to believe that the causal properties of meaning, if there are such, are the only properties of meaning: meaning may have other properties as well, properties that can be characterized only by taking conceptual approaches quite different from Bolton's. Or, expressed slightly differently, there is no reason to assume that the neurological role of meaning in causing human behavior is the sole role of meaning in human life. Consequently, Bolton's cognitive-behavioral semantics can provide only one approach to the reality of meaning, one approach among others. We see no reason to follow Bolton in his attempt to "deconstruct" other, non-causal approaches to meaning. Indeed, we think this would be a serious mistake: it would blind us to properties of meaning that could be illuminated only from those other perspectives. By reasoning in this way we are, of course, simply endorsing Jaspers' multiperspectivalism (Jaspers 1963a, 555-62; 1965, 464-70; 1956, 149-239; McHugh et al., 1986; Schwartz et al., 1988). Jaspers thought that there were many different, valid points of view on human reality. Each point of view, by providing the methodological and conceptual framework it does, gives us access to certain aspects of human reality. It also limits our access, however, by disregarding other aspects of that same reality: each particular method and mode of reasoning is necessarily one-sided. A scientific perspective that, for instance, searches for causal connections and sets up prediction as a methodological requirement ignores other features of the same entity. Each point of view serves a scientific purpose by guiding and informing empirical inquiries into specific components of the reality. Jaspers thus thought of scientific perspectives as akin to Kantian "Ideas" (Ideen) (Jaspers 1971, 462-86; 1963a, 560; 1965, 468). "Ideas" serve a purely regulatory function: they conceptually predelineate and focus scientific investigation. As exclusively regulatory, the "truth" of a perspective turns out to be a heuristic truth: does the perspective in fact help us to uncover otherwise inaccessible facts? Because different perspectives help us to unearth facts not accessible from other perspectives, multiple perspectives are equally "true." Jaspers realized, moreover, that as science advanced, perspectives would undergo change. New ones would arise, and old ones would be subjected to transformation. Witness, for example, the modifications in the field of hermeneutics that have emerged since Jaspers. Moreover, novel perspectives may envision a combining of items which earlier perspectives had posited as separate. But this constant conceptual and methodological innovation, according to Jaspers, would not diminish the need for a variety of different perspectives on human reality (Jaspers 1956, 85-211; 1971, 463-86). Bolton's new cognitive-behavioral semantic perspective may prove to be an important contribution to this fluid scientific process. By using it, scientists may uncover hitherto unsuspected ties between meaning and causality. We see no reason, however, why this should prompt us to set aside other still helpful, but different, perspectives. We would like to add that attempts to integrate hitherto separate investigative domains had better be sure just what it is they seek to integrate. In other words, those different domains must have been investigated fully enough in their own right and according to their own methods before any attempt at integration can generate an impressive payoff. Questions of integration can be posed prematurely, i.e., prior to possessing sufficient knowledge of each separate domain to know what it is we desire to integrate. We suggest that in employing hermeneutic and descriptive methods, we need first to develop a rather sophisticated phenomenology of meaning if we are to understand its nature and functioning sufficiently to relate it, with any degree of specificity, to neurological structures (Schwartz et al., 1997). Jaspers himself warned against the attraction of single perspectives that claimed to encompass the whole of human reality. Such perspectives, he thought, were blind to their inherent one-sidedness. They thus remained blind to their own need to be supplemented by other perspectives. It is quite common, however, for proponents of one perspective to champion it as the "most basic" or as the "master" perspective which, through its comprehensiveness, incorporates all others within itself. A single perspective, when it is accorded such a privileged status, becomes totalizing: its exponents assure us that, with proper systematization and refinement, it can be seen as accounting for the totality of things. Accordingly, hermeneuticians who are possessed of the totalizing urge might claim that everything should be seen as an "interpretation": science, religion, morality, etc.--everything is merely what it is interpreted or "configured" to be. And perhaps everything can in fact be viewed as an interpretation. It would be a fatal mistake to conclude from this, however, that the hermeneutical perspective is the sole fruitful viewpoint on reality. Other perspectives could disclose still other, equally valid, aspects of reality. Or, to take another example, a causal perspective might be given privileged status: every relation, we are assured in this case, can "ultimately" be conceived as a causal relation. In science it has certainly proven profitable to follow the maxim "nothing happens without sufficient causation." But this in no way abrogates the need to investigate reality using other (non-causal) concepts and other (non-explanatory) methods. No perspective, then, can provide the "master," all-embracing theory of human reality. New perspectives may arise which successfully combine items that have not previously been combined. But such innovative perspectives must be content to exist side by side with other perspectives (Jaspers 1956, 85-211; 1963a, 556-62; 1965, 465-70; 1971, 463-86). Let us illustrate this Jaspersian point with an example. In Psychiatric polarities: Methodology and practice, Phillip R. Slavney and Paul R. McHugh have shown how Virginia Woolf's mental illness could be hermeneutically interpreted as issuing from a sequence of events in her personal life history (Slavney et al., 1987, 29-44). Understanding the meaningful connections among these successive events in her life, we may believe that we see how these events, being what they were, must have inevitably "produced" her mental illness. But Slavney and McHugh also demonstrate the basic mistake in such a one-sided approach. Her manic-depressive illness should also be causally, non-meaningfully explained in terms of brain processes. Each perspective, the perspective of hermeneutic interpretation and the perspective of causal explanation, omits something that the other perspective includes: each perspective is partial and one-sided. Consequently, both perspectives are needed if we are to understand how Woolf's mental illness arose and how it affected her art and life. Slavney and McHugh thus illustrate our main point: it is possible to view a single perspective as "accounting for everything," but this would be a mistake. In order to clarify these Jaspersian reservations regarding Bolton's "deconstructionism," we shall recall a few of the reasons that Jaspers, along with other writers in the Geisteswissenschaften tradition, advanced in order to advocate a hermeneutical perspective as one fruitful approach among others in the psychological, social, and historical sciences (Dilthey 1976, 1977; Simmel 1977; Weber 1978). These thinkers contended that certain features of human meaning could be unearthed only by employing understanding (Verstehen) and interpretation (Auslegung or Deutung) as scientific methods. We shall henceforth use the term "hermeneuticians" to refer to this early group of writers. When I encounter another person and see him smiling, I perceive his smile as expressing an emotion, in most cases the emotion of happiness, amusement, or satisfaction. The observable smile thus performs an expressive function: when I perceive it, I assume the existence of something unperceivable, namely, a particular psychological state of the other person. It is this fact that an observable aspect of a person can express an unobservable aspect of that person that led hermeneuticians to speak of "meaningful behavior." If I know more about this other person, I may even assume that I know what he is smiling about. When I see him smiling, I may assume that he is happy about his new job. But how did I learn this "more" about him? This too I must have learned through encountering other aspects of his meaningful behavior. I may have overheard him tell his wife about his new job, and the tone of his voice and his animated gestures may have expressed his happiness about it. Thus his smile has the meaning it has for me because other aspects of his behavior have had the meaning they had. Meanings then acquire their specific significance from the overall context of meaning within which I encounter them. Hermeneuticians speak, accordingly, of the wider "context, connectedness, or nexus of meaning" (Sinnzusammenhang) which one must comprehend in order to stand a chance of construing a particular meaning accurately. Meanings depend upon one another. Hence if I see a person smiling broadly, but when he speaks his tone of voice evinces depression, I may perceive his smile as forced or feigned, as not expressing happiness after all (Jaspers 1963a, 302-63; 1965, 251-302; 1974, 81-93; Dilthey, 1976, 218-31; 1977, 121-44; Weber 1978, 3-24). The way in which I make sense of the meaningful behavior of another person, hermeneuticians called "understanding" (Verstehen). Understanding, as thus defined, is a pervasive constituent of everyday life. Indeed, it is the very marrow of interpersonal relationships. But understanding can also become a scientific method. By becoming more critical, more exacting, and more firmly based on evidence, understanding can serve as a method for interpreting all manifestations of human life as expressing complex varieties of human intentions, experiences, and choices. Tools, for example, must be interpreted if we are to know why they were made, the practical contexts within which they were used, and possibly their symbolic significance beyond their mere practicality (Jaspers 1963, 316-18; 1986, 362-68; Dilthey, 1976, 218-31; 1977, 121-44; Simmel 1977, 63-76). Accordingly, understanding plays both prescientific and scientific roles. Moreover, understanding as a scientific method presupposes understanding as a prescientific process in ordinary intersubjectivity. The psychologist, psychiatrist, or social scientist can make sense of a subject's behavior only because he or she is already familiar with the manifold ways in which human behavior ordinarily makes sense in everyday life. The prescientific "contexts of meaning" that the human scientist has learned by virtue of participating in ordinary social life provides the basis for the more complicated and explicit contexts of meaning that she or he will construct at the scientific level. Jaspers was also convinced that the psychiatrist could diagnose and treat a patient only by constantly interpreting the meaning of the patient's bodily expressions, gestures, and linguistic utterances. Clinical psychiatry, in other words, always moves within the hermeneutic circle in which the therapist takes what the patient is doing and seeks to discern the experiences (Erlebnisse) expressed by it. But why, we may ask, should the term "meaning" be used to designate these expressive aspects of human behavior? The term meaning should be used because expressive behavior has many characteristics we associate with language. What is directly given (a facial expression, the sound of a word, a bodily gesture or posture) expresses something else, something not directly given (a mood, an intention, an idea). And this relation of the given to the non-given is not a relation of cause to effect. It is rather a relation of indication: the directly given indicates what is not directly given. It is only by means of what is directly given that, thanks to the indicative relation, I become aware of what is not directly given. Moreover, what is indicated makes sense only within a larger context of other indicated items. Meanings must be interpreted: the sense they do make can be properly construed only by discerning their meaningful connections with other indicated items (Dilthey, 1976, 218-31; 1977, 121-44). In order to render this conception of "meaning" as clear as possible, we shall now list its three basic constituents: (1) The subjective (psychological) experience of the subject; the mental process of the experiencing subject. In our example above, the person's happiness. (2) The expression of that experience; the "medium" through which the experience is overtly expressed, e.g., language, facial expression, and bodily gesture. In our example above, the person's smile. (3) That which the subject is experiencing; the phenomenal "object" of the subject's experience. In our example, his new job. When I understand another person's behavior, the other person's expressions (item 2) are directly given to me. On the basis of directly encountering these expressions, I also attain an awareness of the other person's experiences (item 1) and, in some cases, that which he or she is experiencing (item 3). Occasionally I must thoughtfully weigh many aspects of the person's behavior in order to arrive at a recognition of the meaning of it. "Interpretation" is such thoughtful weighing (Jaspers 1963, 314-28; 1968; Dilthey 1976, 218-31; 1977, 121-44). With specific reference to Bolton's concerns with semantics, goal-directed activities, and causation, we would like to emphasize two points. (a) Meaning as conceived by the hermeneuticians includes discourse or language as well as intentions or goal-directed actions, but it also includes much more than these. Every cultural object or activity is meaningful. Every cultural object refers to the mental states of the people who create, experience, and use it, and every cultural activity expresses the experiences of the people performing it. Also, as we have already maintained, many non-linguistic and unintentional expressions and gestures are meaningful. (b) Understanding and interpretation are not searches for causes. They are rather attempts to fit items together in such a way that they make coherent sense. If the person's depressed tone of voice makes it impossible to interpret his smile as expressing happiness, it is more natural to say that his tone of voice "contradicts" his smile than to use some sort of causal vocabulary. Of course, we may conclude that this person's smile really does express happiness because we know that his tone of voice habitually sounds depressed even when he is not. That, we may say because we know him well, is just his normal tone of voice. But in this case what we are doing is making his various behaviors, past and present, "cohere" with one another. It cannot be said that the relation between happiness, a subjective state, and a smile, a facial expression, is causal. Both happiness and a smile do, of course, have underlying neurophysiological causes--nothing happens without sufficient causation. But the feeling of happiness does not cause the smile; the smile rather expresses the happiness. Hermeneuticians such as Jaspers thought it imperative to develop precise and detailed conceptualizations of the experiences of their subjects. They thought it was possible to come to develop these concepts, however, only through interpreting the various ways in which the subjects expressed themselves. Understanding and interpretation thereby become necessary components of any science of human experience (Jaspers 1963, 314-28; 1968). Once we have much better descriptions of what patients are experiencing, we shall have a more reliable way to relate those experiences to causal processes in the brain. Indefinite and imprecise conceptions of patients' experiences cannot provide the basis for establishing precise connections between mental processes and brain processes. Hermeneutic interpretation, therefore, cannot be replaced by causal explanation. Hermeneutic interpretation and causal explanation need one another although they remain two distinct methods. At least some of the dichotomies which Bolton seeks to "deconstruct" are better retained, we think. They perhaps need to be reconstructed, but any attempt to reduce their differences may render them incapable of helping us detect genuine differences in reality. 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