Oh, I totally think that it is up for grabs whether I, or others, know my
intentions better than I, in any given situation.
This is part of why perceptive spouses and teenaged children make life so
difficult.
Nick
Nicholas S. Thompson
Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Ethology,
Clark University ([email protected])
http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
----- Original Message -----
From: Steve Smith
To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group
Sent: 6/22/2009 11:17:12 PM
Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Example and... a definition! - Re: Intentionality
ERIC P. CHARLES wrote:
Yay! Steve gave us an example to work with. I have a hunch that at least as
far as this example goes Ross would grant Steve his interpretation. Nick and
I would disagree. Steve said:
I'm not sure what you are agreeing/disagreeing with in my example. It is just
my experience as clearly as I can articulate my memory of it... I'm not sure
there is anything to agree or disagree with? I understand if you say that you
have or have not had this experience (or one similar enough for the purpose).
A simple but profound (to me) example, I have already given. Lying in
the grass on a lazy summer day "intending" to get up and not being able
to actually "act"on the up-getting until "I" (that ever-present illusion
of unique-selfness) quit "intending" and some other magical mechanism
kicked in and viola! I am UP!
To begin, I will state that Freuds major contribution to psychology was
convincing people that a trained professional could know a persons mind better
than its owner could. Freud thought that the trained professional could do this
by observing very large swaths of behavior.
I would grant that a "trained professional" might be able to "fit" a person's
actions/behavior to a generally agreed-upon model.
For example, at the dinner table you may tell me that you never get enough
food, and that your stealing food off your sisters plate merely represents
intention to eat more food. However, if I observe your behavior and find that
your food-stealing-behavior does not end after some amount is eaten, but rather
ends when your sister starts crying, I have authority to say Actually, your
real intention is to make your sister cry.
This might be why I don't spend any time with psychotherapists. I could agree
with an observation (sans any specific authority) that "your intentions might
include trying to make your sister cry". I would be more than a little
offended if I were told what my intentions are... and in fact, I am generally
offended when people tell me what my intentions are. If perchance the teller
succeeds in reflecting back to me things I might already know/suspect then I
might accept their "telling" with only a modest amount of irritation.
-- The entire notion of insight during psychotherapy is that you can come to
know your own intentions better than you knew them before. (I know see that my
striving for more money isnt about making me happy, its about making my long
dead mother happy, I now see that I seek out abusive relationships because my
father abused me and all I ever wanted was his affection, etc.) In other
words, by definition, to have an intention is to have your behavior oriented
towards a given goal (or set of goals). Tolman, or rat maze fame, phrased it
slightly differently, claiming that intentionality was a continuing until.
At least for myself, intentions can change as I "continue until"... even so
radically that I sometimes find myself a bit lost in the middle of my loop.
For example, I can start a post here with the intention of defending a point I
(or someone else has made) and find myself wanting to make a completely new and
different point.
With that in mind, I assert that at the start of Steves story, though he
professed that he intended to get up, and might have believed he intended to do
so (leaving aside exactly what that would mean), he clearly had no intention to
do so. If he had intended to do so, he would have, nothing was stopping him.
Nope... I went through this many times... with those kinds of (attempted)
insights in mind... I wondered quite deeply as to why the mere "intention" was
not enough. My "scare quotes" (beware recursion here) were for the
audience... to accept/acknowledge that *I might not know what intention really
is*.
In fact, he was even nice enough to put scare quotes around the word for us,
does this maybe indicate that he knew something was amiss in his verbal report?
As much as Steve would like to think that he intended to get up, observing his
own behavior (from that weird third-person perspective from which he watches
himself) he to could see that what he really intended to do was to continue
basking in the sun.
This is where the psychotherapist gets dumped. It is a perfectly reasonable
"accusation" to suggest that I "really just wanted to continue basking in the
sun", but it is not related to my intentions (overt or covert) at all. If I
had a covert intention, it was the one I am exposing here... my intention to
"get up" was somehow "trumped" by my intention to observe the mechanism of
moving from "intention" to "action", short-circuiting the very mechanism I was
looking for.
At some point, some combination of environmental and physiological changes
happened, Steves intention changed, and he stood up. From the weird
third-person perspective, it was like magic.
As reported (I think), the change was that I quit intending to *observe* the
transition from intention to action at which point the original intention to
get up played through and out.
If you grant that it is possible to not know your own intentions, and that some
third party watching you could know your intentions by observing your behavior,
and that said third party could point out to you how you are acting, and that
then you could see that your intentions were not what you thought they were
.
well, then we should all be in agreement.
I grant that it is possible to misunderstand or be unaware of my full
intentions. I grant that a third party watching me might see patterns in my
actions that suggest intentions I am unaware of or misunderstanding. If the
third party were to metaphorically "hold up a mirror for me" to my own actions
and how they (might) relate to my intentions, then I might very well come to a
new understanding which might or might not align with said third-party's
interpretation of my intentions. Given all my conditions here, I don't think
we are in agreement. I think there is a huge gulf between the "third person
expert" being adept at holding up a mirror and the same person actually "seeing
me more clearly than I see myself". More objectively perhaps, but not more
clearly.
As, I assert, all of us have been both first-person and third-person parties to
such interactions, we should all be in agreement.
I have *imagined* that I understood other's intentions better than they, but in
fact, I don't believe I understood them *better* but rather from a perspective
that they had a hard time obtaining themselves. My perspective (on a good
day) when offered to them, might very well improve their self-understanding,
but that is not the same as actually believing that I understood them better
than they did. I was simply privy to a POV that was not natural for them.
Among the things we should agree on: 1) There is nothing privileged about the
first-person position, except perhaps that you are around yourself more than
other people are around you.
I'm not there yet.
2) To accurately know what someone intends you need to see them do a lot, and
you need to know how they act in various circumstances.
Adding more data points to the fit of a model does not make the model a better
model, it just makes the fit better. One of the most common errors I see in
psychology (professional and popular) is "overfitting the model" to the point
that while the professed model (explanation of the subjects intentions) might
fit past data perfectly, it has no predictive, much less explanatory power to
speak of.
3) It is at least plausible that many, if not all, other so-called mental terms
are really macro-behavioral terms.
I agree that when I talk/think about anyone's intentions except my own, and
except what they profess to be their intentions, that I am restricted to
macro-behavioral (if I understand the term correctly) descriptions. But I am
quite attached to the first-person experience I have around my own intentions,
even though I have reported direct experience in short-circuiting said
intentions (lying in the grass).
4) Though say other things in strange conversations about what exactly
intentionality is, the definition suggested here is in complete agreement with
normal linguistic uses of the words that is, lay sentences make sense if we
define intentionality in this way.
For all purposes except understanding myself, I agree. I can use this
definition as a working definition for explaining other peoples intentions and
actions... but my own direct experience does not support it and by extension, I
suspect very few others find this to be an acceptable way to have *their*
intentions defined.
This may be colored by the fact that most of the time when anyone else has
tried to tell me what my *real intentions* were, they were not only dead wrong,
but generally I could ascribe *nefarious intentions of of their own* to them
for their mis-statement of *my* intentions. Blame is the most obvious case. I
find humans generally very quick to blame... and blame generally takes the form
of determining *for someone else* what their *real intentions* are. Another
obvious case is *force-fitting a model* which I suspect you of here. You
(might) have a model of "the way things work" here and you (might) be ascribing
intentions to me that fit that model, and thereby (if I am correct) you
validate your own model with your own *made up data*.
I believe the rest of Steves email largely demonstrates an agreement with the
above points. Steve argued, for example, that if the rest of the list knew the
larger context of his actions in various circumstances, they would not have
mistaken his talk of recursion as a criticism.
My intention in describing that was not to suggest that "if they only knew the
context" but rather the contrapositive of "realizing that they *don't* know the
context". The difference might be subtle, but the important features are that
A) I assumed that the context was obvious (until Nick responded in a way that
suggested it was not) and B) I realized that even with more context, the error
in understanding my intentions was still possible/likely. If anything, I
would say "If I had understood Nick's (and by extension other's) context (or
lack of it), I would have avoided the statement for fear of it being
misunderstood in this way".
He also seems implicitly to admit that under some circumstances the list
members observations could have lead him to see that he really was intending
criticism, even when he did not think that was his intention.
I admit that sometimes I have multiple intentions and mask some of them from
myself. Generally, however, my multiple intentions are a weighted vector and
"snarky" or "critical" components usually have a pretty low weight. I'm not
above these motives, but they are rarely my prime motive.
I could also caste the bones for the I Ching, or consult the Stars, or read the
Entrails of a Goat and get some parallax on my own intentions... and in fact, I
do occasionally use Oracles (I Ching being my preferred) for this purpose. I
don't need to believe that these Oracles know a single thing that I don't, I
only believe that in their infinite ignorance (but great wisdom?) they can
offer me a mirror, an opportunity to interpret my own intentions and actions
through a different lens than I normally do. Other people can be "smart
mirrors" offering (sometimes) more apt alternate perspectives, but I don't
really believe that even the most highly trained/skilled/practiced therapist
can do more than help you see things you might already know. They cannot, for
example, "know more about my intentions than I do", they can only (on a good
day) reflect back to me aspects of my intentions that I might be ignoring or
deliberately obscuring from myself. If I am *willfully ignorant* enough of my
own intentions, it might very well appear to them, to others and even (maybe)
to me that they have some magic juju in this regard.
Tonight I am not avoiding specific deadlines... I am instead avoiding thinking
of the several deadlines that will soon be looming!
- Steve
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