LANGUAGE, CULTURE & MIND CONFERENCE – LCM2 2006
Participants in a conversation are more than
resonating brains[1].
Jean-Luc Petit
Université Strasbourg II & LPPA, Collège de France
(oral
presentation)
1. A new
‘social neurocience’ is beginning to emerge today. It will not be limited to a
naturalization of the human spirit in the mental and individual sense of that
term but will also seek to naturalize objective or social ‘spirit’ (the
humanities), including thereunder the institution of language and the meaning
constructs of culture. This ambitious project depends essentially upon the
bringing to light of a diversity of ‘resonant systems’ by means of modern
techniques employed to register cerebral activity. The functioning of such
systems tend to correlate not just distinct regions of the brain of one and the
same individual but homological regions of the brains of different individuals.
To be sure, the context in which these correlations across the brain activities
of different individuals have been established are for the most part non
linguistic : pain suffered and observed, emotion experienced and
recognised, action accomplished and comprehended. But it is tempting for these
researchers to extrapolate on the basis of these non-linguistic contexts in the
direction of a general theory of the communication of mental-cerebral states
inclusive of communication by language.
2. But in
order to carry through the programme of establishing not merely casual
correlations between brains but genuinely social links (depending upon the
competent use of language) on the basis of resonant phenomena located in the
brains of participants, a logico-empirical gap has to be bridged. This gap
opens up between 1) the apriori, formal structure of social acts, and 2) the
empirical data on resonant systems. We gain access to 1) typically in a
reflective mode through logical analysis of the meaning constraints upon
‘speech acts’ in conversation. But our only access to 2) is observational and
inductive, through the registering of activation patterns in brain tissue. The
incompatibility between these two modes of approach seems at first insuperable.
Is it even possible for the sponsors of a ‘unified view of the basis of social
cognition’ to bridge such a gap?
3. Mimetic
contagion does not stand in need of language : for example, watching
someone yawn makes one want to yawn. On the other hand, an order can be
understood without there needing to be any affinity with the one who issued it.
A difference of this order would be enough to convince anyone who was not
already committed to the naturalization of the mind. But naturalistic ideology
has difficulty in accepting any gaps in the description of the natural world.
Provisionally suspending their model of the mind as a representational and computational
cognitive system, the cognitive sciences have begun to exploit the ambiguities
of a conceptual language which is more fluid, and which, for this reason, has
the advantage of overlooking the logico-empirical gap. How otherwise can one
account for the re-appearance of concepts formerly regarded as suspect :
imitation, simulation, empathy, resonance, mirroring, echo, etc. And as if the
imprecision of these concepts were not enough, the present trend tends to push
it further still since, in the absence of any explicitly bodily movement of the
agent, one has to presuppose a purely internal imitation, etc. In order to
re-establish the unity of the theory, phenomena of resonance have been subsumed
under the category of action, notably by employing a new neuronal version of
the old ‘motor theory’ of speeech. But will such move be sufficient ?
4. If we
are prepared to construe Vittorio Gallese’s ‘embodied simulation’ as a revival
of Theodor Lipps’ ‘Einfühlung
oder innere Nachahmung’ theory, and so to go back to some version of a
pre-World War 1 empathy theory, phenomenology might even be adopted as a way of
clarifying matters. We hardly need to be reminded of the fact that
neuroscientists are on the verge of an explanatory theory of empathy on the
basis of a brain substrate for which there was no philosophical equivalent at
the beginning of the last century. However, pointing at neural correlates does
not bring the questions to an end : what is empathy ? what can empathy
do ? Nor do the available explanations prevent us from repeating,
unknowingly, old answers to these questions, without the benefit of the
critical examination to which they were long ago submitted. Did the
introduction by Theodor Lipps (in 1903) of an ‘Einfühlung’ instinct succeed in coping with all those resonant
forms of behaviour for which mirror systems presumably now provide the neural basis ?
5. We would
like to say : beware of going the wrong way ! Better to fall back on
Adolf Reinach’s strategy of trying to uncover the “a priori structure of social acts” on the
basis of such acts as promising, the meaning structure of which is presupposed
in any positive system of civil law. What is so typical of sociality in
promising ? Evidently, the fact that, in promising, for example, to give
somebody an object in your possession, you create by this very act a new entity
in the (social and not only physical) world : a normative link that never
existed before and that will cease to exist at some definite time when the
promise has been redeemed. Far from displaying a simple, symmetrical,
instantaneous behavioural resonance, it generates an agreement that extends
beyond the present face-to-face of the partners, an agreement through which you
oblige yourself in giving, and the other obtains a right to demand the object
in question. Note that your actual accomplishment of this act is only part of a
whole, the other part of which is situated in a future time, at a date itself
perfectly determined by the structure of the same act. In such cases, we have to
deal with what is truly essential in social acts : their being structured
by a norm that any participant is necessarily aware of.
6. Our
suggestion is to bet on the chances of a converging trend, both in recent
neuroscience and in advanced conversational logic, toward a multi-agent theory
of action, a trend motivated by the recognition of the fact (astonishingly
overlooked up to now) that social acts no less than resonant behaviours are
contingent on the existence of a plurality of agents. In the context of his
conjoined theory of illocutionary acts, Daniel Vanderveken has reinterpreted
the rules constitutive of Searle’s speech acts in terms of the formal
constraints of language games, games that determine the initiation, the
progression or the conclusion of a dialogue. The actions in question are not
limited to muscular movements nor to motor intentions but bear upon the
strategies to be pursued in a social game. In this way we move in the direction
of a naturalization of the formal rules of dialogue, while still remaining
respectful of the interactive character of the latter. This theory improves the
speech act theory of Austin-Grice-Searle, to the extent that these acts are no
reducible to the sum of individual actions. Linking the logic of action with that
of illocutionary acts, Vanderveken, together with Raimo Tuomela, works at the
analysis of the dynamic of language games such as negotiations and
consultations, language games which are played out over a certain stretch of
time. The interlocutors have to co-operate with a view to attaining common
goals. For that they have to be able to recognise each other’s intentions on
the basis of each other’s actions, whether verbal or not and, as we know, this
kind of recognition presupposes, and makes use of, the resonant systems of the
brain. In this way, it becomes as legitimate in discourse pragmatics as it does
in neuroscience to talk of a ‘natural transition’ between the (rather special)
act of understanding an alien action one is capable of undertaking onseself and
the far more habitual acts of promising (ordering, forbidding, refusing, etc.)
to do something in the course of our everyday interaction.
7. Whatever agreement the philosopher may be
able to discern as between divergent bodies of research, whatever his success
in convincing others of its effectiveness, he does also ideally like to try and
place the latter in a speculative framework. As a phenomenologist, I find
myself confronted with the thinking of later Husserl. For Husserl, my Einfühlung
of the other is not enough. Communication also requires a life world lived out
in common, for which the active contribution of the other party has as
important a role to play as my own. In the constitution of the very possibility
of communication, the intersubjectivity that goes along with action is the very
first element to be taken into consideration.