Portrait Gallery of Sketches and Echo Chambers III
Intervals and Respites to Complement
The Subjective Self: A Portrait inside Logical Space
Harwood Fisher
Section 6. For Chapter 12: Paradox Lost: Music to Hear at the End of Chapter 12
Section 7. For Chapter 14: Sketch. A Diagram of Bracketing as Regress
Section 8. For Chapter 13: The Trouble with the Objective Self if it has no Subjective Space
Notes
Portrait Gallery Illustrations
Diagrams
Plates
MusicParadox Lost: Music to Hear at the End of Chapter 12
Metaphorizing Your Mood for My Thoughts.
You should now be near the end of the book's Chapter 12. Before going on to the next chapter and its further sculpting of the holographic portrait, it’d be good to relax. Allow yourself to isolate what is problematic; to feel what bothers you; to allow the oppositions of idea and sense to clash; to allow and sustain the yearning for the integrity of thought. In fact, I'm going to return to Piaget’s statement about the limits of growth and change within a living form. Of course, this is a depressing topic; so, to face the experience, I guess that you’d need to be in a moment, which is relaxing enough to open your sense of the tensions of unresolved issues to the excited feelings of reaching for synthesis.
Growth and Entropy in Logical Space.
What I’d like you to do is to select—by as unconscious a choice as possible—the second movement of Beethoven’s third symphony, the third movement of the ninth symphony, or the third movement of the fifth symphony. The selection from the fifth would be my choice here, but don’t let that influence you! Play it before reading what’s below.
I assume you've now played the selection; so I think that what now stays with you as you read is a mood. I think of this mood as the metaphoric rhythm relations between your sensibilities and the thoughts that you and I share here.1
Here are my thoughts. If the final circle or rung of the self can neither be built from within, because it’s unique; nor superseded by a next higher class—within the logic system—then we run up against ultimate bounds or limits. In the patrimony of the French psychiatrist, Pierre Janet, I visualize that constraints and containment motivate regulations, directed toward cognition, and executed as cognitive operations. The outcome, as it would be in the case of a closed system, is that internal processes of construction are generated (See Piaget, 1954/1981).
Imprisoned, as I am in my body, my intellect seeks to soar or re-create its own birth in new forms. So, the self is a generative set; since its limits serve as containment of and impetus for inner movements toward stable and stabilizing categories. This movement can be seen as growth of hierarchy of categories to the point of abstract logical representations that are reversible groupings. But, as is the case in a closed system, the movement is also toward entropy. Meaning and ontological uniqueness keep getting squeezed out, leaving the empty shells of categories and dead metaphors.
I’m tempted to say that the biological facts of life and death of individuality manifested in the self, having become parameters for the mind of the individual, help to make sense of dead metaphors once originated by the self. The artist in the child can ask, as did my three-year-old grandson confronted with the fact that his sister was born five years earlier than he; "Then, where was I?" His metaphor of the ‘I’ and place is very different from mine at age 66 if I ask, "Where will my consciousness be when I die?" If my metaphor of the ‘I’ and place comes alive, it’s a function of my life history and my biological state of affairs. But the metaphor comes alive in a different way, perhaps subsumed under another metaphor. So, instead of asking, Where?, I can ask, In what form?, or, In what category of meaning?
From within these parameters of the biological life status of the individual, you can plumb the history of an individual’s "fossil categories," on one hand, and, on the other, find the structures and processes by which to produce a new generation of living metaphors. Can you communicate only by "fossil categories" and "dead metaphors"? Is exchange of living metaphors doomed to parallel play? Is creativity only possible as an individual act? Is the subjective self, in essence, not communicable—not something you can seek; but, instead, is it simply, justly or unjustly, as T. S. Eliot (1909-1935/1950; p. 127) intones? "You must go by a way wherein there is no ecstasy."
When Negation Operates in Semantic Space.
The model I propose opens a number of problems not dealt with in Chapter 12 of the book. They are the sort that may lead some to an "I told you so" position about a natural logic approach. But, as I see it, we are left with a series of problems to explore; since the natural logic legacy is one that leaves us with a tradeoff. Suffer the tensions; anticipate the resolutions. We are stuck with uncomfortable dynamics—Piaget describes the state of affairs of our logical pictures and their transformations as leaving incomplete negation compensations. We can’t reverse the negation of the self. The tradeoff is that while natural logic is not always a system of replicable objects, there is progression by dialectical resolutions, such as metaphoric re-organizations and categorial re-ordering. (The scientist and philosopher are given bait to accept the tradeoff and work with the concept of natural logic. In cognitive science, cognitive psychology, and related enterprises, elements of the tradeoff are described, rather than eschewed and exiled from the creativity of mind and thought.) So, let’s face them as they arise in the next chapter, and see how they look from the vantagepoints of our portrait. Here, is a sketch of what to expect. Hear these as challenges; then, again, put the book down and rest and feel and think before going on.
Challenge One. When negation is an independent operator, you can open up complementary classes at different levels of meaning. Sometimes my wife will say something like "There’s no fruit in the house"; yet I will ask her "Do you have an apple?" The answer could be surprisingly, "Yes, it’s in the lower refrigerator door shelf to the left." You can be committed to the classification of "apples," expressed in the proposition that "Fruit" includes "apples." Yet, oddly, your classification can co-exist with a named category, "Apples," which, on your own lower refrigerator door shelf to the left are not classified as "fruit." So, the different levels of meaning at which there can be complementary classes allow for cuts to be made in space, dividing sub-units in such as way, that there are impossible intersects.2 Can and should frames resolve impossibilities?
Challenge Two. When negations are applied to non-reversible negated meanings, they do not bring them back to life a la de Morgan transformations. So, not only do we have hybrid logic within our own subjective space, but also we can see how problems in applying logic to empirical scientific thinking arise.
One such problem is in relation to falsification, as a logical strategy to insure empirical testing of a theoretical proposition. It's a story of hybrid logic again, because falsification of a theory is another application of negation to non-reversible meanings and events. This is because the theory is always on some level supervenient upon the facts it has to represent and be verified against. The theory can sport abstractions, which are contradicted by negations; and thus, some negation of the theory can be a purely logical operation. But, if the verification of the facts is a testing of what happens on the referent level; then you are dealing with a different kettle of fish--non-reversible events and meanings. Well, it looks like you can say that if a medicine A does not cure disease B; the theory that it should is falsified. That's still not clear, though; since the theory could be based on multiple referents, such as chemical interactions. These interactions can be several steps removed from bodily progressions. The problem here is that even if you knew all the intervening steps in detail; certain changes in the bodily progressions and their interactions with a total environmental context would be irreversible. So, not only is the falsification not a simple logical affair; but also, you can't go backwards to test out the falsification.
Well, another logical problem emerges, too. I can't pursue it at any length here, but I'll state it this way. Falsification of a falsification is unreliable. If, for example, severe child training sometimes turns out a well-adjusted child, you may have evidence to falsify the idea that severity leads to maladjustment. However, if the well-adjusted child turns out to become a behavior problem; then you haven't really cancelled out the original falsification.
Again, while I state the problem here as one of hybrid logic, an advantage of extending the model of subjective space, with its picture of intersecting categorial and schematic processes and structures, is that the statement can be made explicitly, and hence problems in disconfirmation can be better identified. But this is a claim I’m not going to argue in this book. This leaves us with the problem of hybrid logic in science. You might simply accept the idea that there is a poetics to the selection of a theoretical posit or framework. But then, I can ask, Is a methodology of verification no more than a continuation of this process? Is it poetics AND probability; or is it poetics VERSUS probability?
Challenge Three. Metaphors and analogies are beginnings of more articulated propositions. How do the categorial transformations help to explicate hypothesis generation and the analytic and synthetic strategies in it and in hypothesis testing? Work to be done. If I begin this in the next book chapter; then have heart. This challenge, to find integrity in the relation of hypothesis generation and verification, may answer the questions of Challenge Two.
Challenge Four. The skip of identity—is, as if, a skip over the "fence" of the brackets—so that the "I" is outside the brackets, in a rung with structures transcending bracketing. This skip is a necessary topic, if we are to describe the "outsidedness" of self. However, when the identity of the individual remains inside the logical space of the subjective self, yet outside its primary structures, old problems arise.
What’s conscious? Is it the active construction, which is not specified within the schematic of propositions with bracketing provisions for the different linguistic representations and logical orders of the ‘I’?
What’s unconscious? Is this a passive construction? If so, does it require supervenience of the articulated propositional structure on agent-patient de-differentiation and de-identification?
Does this happen by metaphoric comparisons? If so, does a description of the formal transformations serve to advance a reductionism that takes us back inside a circle that excludes the outsidedness of the "I"?
When the moment of this mood is over, and, when you pick up the book again, I begin the expanded description of bracketing. Then, I see how far I can get with the picture of identity and with the acts of metaphoric comparisons. I do this by attempts at "breaking out of the brackets." Oh, that this too solid flesh would melt," is Hamlet’s invocation of the impossible, by which to resolve contraries of the self and the perils of opposing decisions. If you are, as I am, returned here to T. S. Eliot’s " . . . way wherein there is no ecstasy"; then, replay, in your mind, Beethoven's laments and recoveries.
Sketch for Chapter 14
A Diagram of Bracketing as Regress
Schematizing the Operator outside an Action.
A passive thought or percept is made conscious by action. You play out your thought, so that its syncretic relations are teased apart, schematically separated, and organized in a space. Such an organization is neither unlike what is usually described for schema theory, nor unlike computer scientist Marvin Minsky’s frames—at least, as I have depicted them to be "schemata writ large." When you can't look at the thought, it is passively there. When you can reflectively look at the thought or percept; it is something framed or schematized. And this must happen either by the act of looking at it or somehow before it. So, the issue of consciousness does not easily match with the act of framing or schematizing. You can also say that the thought or percept you view is activated, but you can't point to the moment of consciousness, at which that occurred.
If you were to act impulsively, without looking at the thought impelling the act; then we could say that the thought was passive. In contrast, an active thought requires a second level awareness, which frames the thought in view; so that it is syntactically articulated. Let's now talk about forms and processes that accommodate syntactically articulated thoughts.
A proposition is a thought in which terms are assigned case roles relative to some form of predicate and/or predicate action. (Thus, the verb can be transitive, copulative, etc.). Brackets set the boundaries of propositions and set off the terms within them. By setting the propositional bounds, bracketing constructs action possibilities within and outside the brackets; since inside are propositions and/or terms, and outside are operators. And, of course, both are within a schematic. Well, in fact, this is an easy vocabulary. It's the vocabulary and the conceptions for origins and for the passive thoughts, which are the "hard" issues. This is because they cannot be described without the description, itself, transforming them.
How do you wend your way to the passive core, from which you build the syntactic platforms on which you'd have to stand to re-view the originating thoughts? This question opens to what I'd describe as a Husserlian regress. The philosopher Edmund Husserl tried to do this sort of re-viewing. It's a regress in that you get there by progressively deconstructing the action structures, by which you can locate agents as objects and outcomes as products. The deconstruction process is an unfolding of schematized observables. The purpose is to categorize the passive, unschematized, sources of thoughts, by depicting the Platonic structure behind the presentation of action.
In the holographic sketch I'd now like to present, there's an inner core. You can see it; but not quite see what might be at its very center. That which reaches out from this core, extending toward the viewer, is a space, made by its own schematic lines.
What you see is an image of thought moving from its origin within the individual, and going in the direction of action and interrelation with various environments. The individual's thought has a subjective point of origin, but that's deep within a core that you see moving toward you, as the viewer. The movement I've depicted is a function of the core, but it's also highly dependent on the creation of the schematic space that expresses and extends that core. The subjective point of origin is an affective load. It may be leveraged toward growth and expression, or it may be leveraged toward survival. I call it affective, because a subjective point of origin is an awareness of the unique sensibilities of the self. This awareness of awareness utilizes and is utilized by the organism's sensory motor intracommunication capabilities and patterns. But, the intracommunication system is more than a transmission device.
At the point of subjective origin, a complex of sensed tension is directed or intended; hence, there is subjective commitment to what will become a thought or a percept. It's that commitment I'm calling "affective." When, as it relates to the meaningful content of the individual's developing thought, it is folded out into a propositional format, it is a belief. What you should conclude from this image, is that by transacting from the medium, provided by the core, across to the space, built by schematization, an operator presents action, but behind the action is an affectively loaded proposition—a belief. These are not easy statements; because operators may be outside brackets, and they may be inside them. Also, an operator (A), outside brackets (B), can unfold from a simple affective direction to a commitment (Ac). It may then take the form of a guiding proposition (Ap) for that which is inside brackets (B).
Thus, let A be "hunger"; and B be "(I will eat large quantities and fill myself at the Diner.)
Let (Ac) be "Boy, am I hungry!" and let (Ap) be "I must go to the diner at all due speed to deal with my hunger."
Now, the formalization reads,
[B] is equivalent to (Ac) [(B)]; but (Ac) [B] ------> (Ap) [B].
Put the sentences that I used for examples in the place of the A, B, C symbols I've used, and you'll see that ideas can become operators, which can become propositions, that, themselves become operators for other propositions.
With a Husserlian regress, you're in danger of looking for the unseeable. However, by now, you see that I've employed two vocabularies. One, that of categorizations, allows you to have an empty set; so that you can conceptualize when and what you cannot see. In this sense, you can have an abstract operator as something that exists outside the brackets of a schematized space. Two, that of the schema, and of the operations of action on objects and events within an action space. This "vocabulary of the schema" allows you to tie the operator to an operation; and so it's something or some event within the schema. Thus, you can allow that operators are outside the brackets. But you can also describe the operator, from another perspective, by using the vocabulary of the schema. Thus, when you regard operators (like Ac) that are outside brackets (B) as beliefs (Ap), you can transact from the medium of the core to the schematic. An operator, (A) when pictured as a special kind of belief, (Ap), gives us the picture of beliefs, which have action possibilities, governing what is within the brackets. Still, what's inside the brackets are propositions (like B), which also may have a belief aspect.
To be sure, all this parsing of beliefs and operators is going to be difficult.
To do this, we have to make an image of events and objects in non-schematic and in schematic terms. It sounds contradictory; but a better way to consider this is as a mixing of metaphors. At various points in the book, I describe how and when, in the course of the development of thoughts and icons, the mixing of metaphors is part of a logic of relations. So, here, I'll just present the image I'm creating of the generative core, as if I'm painting with terms from a palette of Husserlian speculations. These terms are placed on the surface of the icon as shapes. But I picture my placing them with some degree of passivity of thought, as if they represent percepts close to the intuitive movements of the body. They're in a pattern, as if determined by a process like Jackson Pollack's swinging of paint droplets, and they're formed at a center core nucleus.
Surrounding this space in a hologram, extending outward, are lines and nodes, which are descriptions of schematic action possibilities. The plumbing of the unseen originating sites, where thought and emotion are compressed--as if in a nucleus--is an exploration that's rarely made. Husserl's brand of psychology requires a philosopher with imagination and with an interest in logical forms. So, here, and in the book, I've also looked to artists, who can visually depict the generative and the categorial. On the other hand, a description of action schematics is often best handled within the province of objective psychology. For that, I now go to social psychologists Eagly and Chaiken’s terms (1993).
A proposition has a value component and, therefore, it has an element of belief—with a confirmatory tendency. So, what is outside the brackets is a belief about the belief—a reflective act or state in comparison to the dead text of the proposition.
I'll now include for our hologram, lines and nodes. I visualize a node as a point at which you can place the structures I'm about to describe. Lines can represent vectors by which the structures at the nodes are elaborated. The vectors can move inward and/or they can spiral outward.
Within propositions, you can see terms. Terms have passive (default, as Minsky would have it) and marked organizations of definitions (some terms have several definitions), connotational range, and range of contextual applicability. Call such a term structure, ST. It is influenced by its logical or propositional context. For example, the features of a term may be influenced by the functions of negation, as they constrain a proposition in relation to others (see Horn, 1989). Call propositional structure, SL. And finally, operators outside the brackets influence ST. Refer to the functions of such operators as SO. To complete the terminology, I suppose we can think of SO as a function structure.
The rules governing ST, SL, and SO—individually and in interaction—make up the rules of a conventional implicature, which might be described better as the rules of presupposition. These rules are those of a mental space, which is, as if an object, being projected indefinitely by bracketing. So, these rules are emanating from the nucleus that I've pictured, and the rules serve to determine the lines and nodes of the expanding schematizations. The notion of operators as beliefs about beliefs is a use of terminology that is a good holding action for the difficulties of parsing that I described. We can visualize this. As long as the parsing descriptions, themselves, tell us about structures elaborated by movements and vectors from within a schematized space, and as long as belief is not seen in a space outside the schematic and as a function of a believer (self), the regress in this terminology keeps working.
Once the self is portrayed, the very act of portrayal moves like the hologram--outward toward the viewer and into the schematic lines that expand and bound its space. Bracketing appears to affect first person propositions, not only by an indefinite period of projecting bracketing, but also by a continuing expansion of the subspace to which the brackets are projected. I discuss this point more fully in the book's final chapter. And, I portray the various "appearances" of the ‘I’ of such propositions—out of, and in, brackets—in terms of self-regulation, on one hand, and awareness on the other.
The Trouble with the Objective Self, if it’s got no Subjective Space
Shifts of Self-as-Self and Self-as-Other.
Figure-ground shifting and metaphorizing. Hume didn’t think you could picture the subjective self. He did face the question; but he felt it was too complex to describe. Not impossible. For Hume and many others, describing events that relate contiguously and sequentially, in terms of efficient cause is a comfortable way to cast explanations of actions and outcomes. This focus cuts down the other three of Aristotle's four causes, and it brings to the fore observations of targeted objectives and their outcomes. Although this approach has captured both empirical and pragmatic views of psychological events, there have been those who continued to look for ways to reintroduce the role of the person as maker of his own destiny. Hume's sentiment "fights the fight" of objective analysis versus the recognition and pursuit of the subjective. Yet, ironically, the very popularity of his view serves to keep focus on Aristotle's identification of the different kinds of causes. The eschewing of Aristotle's formal and final causes, although leading to progress in psychology as a science, left aside the issues of individual purpose, intention, and agency. So, I'll also follow along with this terminology; since it's my aim too to re-establish linkage of self and causality.
A champion of Aristotle's ideas about causality, psychologist Joseph Rychlak (1998) recently reiterated his own argument, put forward in the 1970s, that a focus on efficient cause leaves out final cause. His plea is that human beings do things "for the sake of" something.
I agree, but there are two issues blocking me from going further with final rather than with formal cause. The first is that a psychology of origins is as limited as the source of its own representations. I don't mean to be cryptic here. I think about this in terms of two concepts necessary to explain origins. One, form. Two, sources. An example of form would be my description of "points," when I depict a vector extending to circumscribe a schema. The idea that an origin is a form is connected to the idea that a point is a closed system. It is a closed system in that its internal context is ultimately limited. However, by its very bounds, we can identify its external context. The "point" is influenced by this context that does have describable bounds, but these are not limited. Thus, there are sources that emanate from the internal context of the point; however, there are also sources beyond the point's describable confines.
In cosmic terms, an analogue of this description of the relations of sources from the internal and external contexts of a form is the idea of the Black Hole. But when you're examining the cosmic confines, the sources beyond the Black Holes are inaccessible. In social terms, an individual may flourish in a given family or cultural environment, which opens at its confines to influences from a variety of physical systems. And when you're examining the self and its social environment, the sources of the physical systems influence are outside the system of inquiry.
How do you best picture the self as an originating source? Depicting the forms of the self’s points and the transformations of the self’s projected movements is more justifiable than the presumption of sources that would go beyond our limits.1 Perhaps, a convincing example of this is the disconnect between human thinking experiences and the assumption that they are motivated by neurological electro-chemical exchanges. While you are within the throes of your thinking, you do not have a direct access, by which you'd be experiencing, cognitively, the neurological events. Secondly, the specific phenomenology of a subjective self requires, and includes within it, that other selves and social articulation of meanings mediate an individual’s judgment of veridicality. "I paint what I see," said Rivera. There's the subjective ‘I,’ who paints. But the subjective ‘I’ can also view what's painted—even if that’s the artist, himself. So, an ‘I’ paints; and a ‘You’ makes the judgment. You can view the painting and the object the painter selects. You can also view the painter and what you see his view of the object and of the painting to be. Do you see what you see Rivera to see? Is it easier to answer the question, "who," than to answer "what the sake of" something is? I've been arguing that the "who" question is one of formal cause, especially in relation to the issue of origins.
For all of these reasons, and because of these concerns, looking deeply into the systems beyond the closed system of the self is a search for purpose that I do not shun. However, I also do not agree that origins and purpose cannot be found within the self. Therefore, in the pursuit of visualizing a logical space, my argument is more a matter of formal than one of final cause. But, since the logic of the portrait, by way of metaphorical leverage, is a picture of the conquest of the impossible, I had better make room for checks and balances of myself as Rivera!
That’s why I appeal to the Mobius band twist. If you consult my analysis (See this Portrait Gallery; Section 1, note 2) and in the book, you'll see that what's involved is an inversion of reciprocal relations. When the self and Other are involved as relations that you, yourself, subjectively contemplate, you can shift (invert) perspective. Sometimes you see you from the perspective of the other person; sometimes, you see the other person from your perspective. The two are co-dependent; since they are both from your own subjective point of view.
(To have a better idea of how the Mobius band depicts these matters, I'll ask you to consult the book's discussion and the diagrams. In the book, see Figure 7, which will help to visualize what I am going to formalize below. But you can also just plough ahead here. Try the formalization, simply keeping in mind that I am start with the metaphor as the form accommodating the basic relations I want to focus. But to show how these relations change, I extend the form of metaphor.)
Look at the relations of self and Other as metaphorical; their genus species ordering is exchangeable. This is a proto-categorial organization for the subjective self; and, of course, since the perspective is a subjective one, the self, as category, is a phenomenological entity. I mean here that I'm not describing an empirical observation of you by me or me by you. The phenomenological category of the subjective self self-corrects in the way that Lacan suggests—by the inversion of the relations of genus and species in the metaphorical confrontations of self and Other. His point is that we, as selves, are ultimately embodied; and that therefore, our relation to others is limited to
(Self) as (Self sees self)
(Self) as (Self sees that Others see Self).
What I mean by "limited" here, is that the Other (for an individual) is a subjective representation. Call (Self) S and (Self sees Self) S1. Call (Self sees that Others see Self) Os. One end of the Mobius band of Figure 7, is
S : S1.
The other end is
O : S.
The form of metaphor is A : B, and typically, the B slot is the categorization of/by the metaphor; call it the genus slot. In the way I understand Lacan, the metaphoric exchangeability is in that neither the O term nor the S1 term is the category of self. Instead, each of these terms denotes viewing points—points of perspective. The self’s two points of perspective are interchanged as occupants of the genus slot of the metaphor. The exchange of perspectives on genus is an equivalent of figure-ground shifting, since the shift is predicated on viewing point.2
In sum, in a visual space for mind and self, there are viewing point dilemmas. Who is viewing action or movement can be outside or within. A space that I imagine and portray has me inside and outside—almost in relation to the two aspects of the Cogito. I can depict all of this, but once I do, I’ve represented an object. ‘I’ am then outside of it. When ‘I’ view my self as an object, I also enter into a metaphorical shifting procedure—as I did in the example of ‘I’ as decider and ‘I’ as role-taker. In a sense, this visual shifting of the ‘I’ as genus is related to the problems of regress and recursion that limit reason and logic as closed systems.
You and I reason by transformations, and the transformations are predicated on the rule of identity. So, when you reason about Socrates being mortal, since he’s a man and all men are mortal; it’s the same Socrates in the conclusion as in the premises. But the very generation of representations and construction of their relationships impugns stability and durability. Since, we’re back to the problems of limits; I’ll summarize how and why I look at the problems of transformation and identity the way I think that Lacan does.
Uniqueness is possible if there is a closed system. The metaphoric process is predicated on rules of equivalence and the self-regulatory nature of the system. If the ‘I’ is awareness, and this is penultimately outside any categorization; then by way of its categorizations, the ‘I’ can reach for perfection and make the approximations of veridicality by the figure-ground shifting. The limits of logic and reason are subject to the metaphorical shifts of the ‘I’ itself—into the closed subsystems of reasoning and their syntactic patterns, and out again.
Thus, your categorizations are transformations that play out different forms of perspective. It’s just as a playwright has her characters take different points of view to turn the facets of a theme inside out to reveal more and more basic forms and feelings. It’s just as an artist like Leonardo can ply the Mona Lisa with figure-ground shifts from his viewing the real to his imagining the ideal woman, and from each of these presentations of the woman to the representations of himself, Leonardo, and of you, the viewer. But these transformations, by dint of whatever durability and stability securing the closed system and its identity rule, would not be possible if the set of transformations that make up the group-like structure of your identity as an individual were not self-regulatory.
Incongruities of direction. If we stay with the idea of the subjective self as our prime phenomenological category, our perspective may be so far from the development of our interchanges with our social and physical environments, that we run the risk of a too-solipsistic encapsulation. So, it's valuable to focus our subcategories of self and Other, and begin a viewing of the self by considering these subcategories as perspectives, in their own right. If we do this, we can look at traffic patterns, and ask a question about vectors that seem to go in opposite directions. So, from what would technically be subsumed within the broader category of the self, I'd like to see how the causal arrows go back to the source. How do the incongruities of direction, the opposing vectors of self and Other, affect our view of the self.
Keep in mind that the whole issue of direction is not only relative to your own point of view—from which you see your self, but it's also relative to the way you focus how others focus you. I can say that I see my self as self-fulfilling; while my wife can say that she sees me as selfish. I see what she means!
A basic distinction involving the direction of your viewpoint is whether you’re attempting to look from within yourself or as if from without—Are you 'you' as you experience you; or are you you, as the observable? What I want to compare here, as regards the problem of incongruities of direction, is not meant to resolve the antinomy of self-as-subject versus self-as-object. However, incongruity of direction is a problem for the self—no matter now you slice the subjective versus objective self. The problem produces obvious confusion for strict models of the self as objective; because the subjective perspective is not available--except as a regress to the observations of others. Correspondingly, for a subjective view of the self, that which I've argued is self-corrective about metaphorical exchanges of genus and species can also be seen as an instability of identity. So, I'll have to go further than just to cite that depicting the self, from a subjective standpoint, offers the metaphorical exchangeability coordinated with rules of self-regulation.
In the objective sense, the self is observable on a stage that can be filled with many actors. When the quizmaster asks, "Will the real you please stand up," lots of selves crowd for center stage. In cognitive linguist George Lakoff’s terms, they are all actors within their own schematics of agents, actions, and outcomes. In cognitive psychologist Ulrich Neisser’s terms, all actors represent those cognitive tasks and strategies of the person's adaptations that are developmentally congruent with schematics, which frame different stage or time periods in an individual's life span.3
But, in these views, all these schematics, their actors, and their selves are all within the same embodiment. So, we have a cross wiring of schematics. Within some schematics are actors, reflecting thought and mind—with all due supervenience upon the sensorium and its patterns. Hamlet can look inward to thoughts and feelings. Within other schematics, are observers—an audience—assigning perspective to information they observe and contribute. Macbeth, as an actor within the character, Macbeth, can also look at the world as a stage and its players like actors. Many artists like Chagall and Calder, not only create their own work; but they also design scenery for plays and dramas; in which others, as agents, act and look at their own actions. The designs are as if preliminary constructions—the observers' schematics—to envision how, where and when agency is played out. The artist, who develops a portrait, zeros in, exploring the other's agency at close range and in depth. When a portrait shows the relation of a person to his own body or to others, we get a different sort of schematic. The journey articulated is within the depicted self. How all that cross-wiring of the different kinds of schematics is characterized as self is linguistically a descriptive matter, looking a lot like the networks of cognitive linguistics, and psychologically, a social psychology of attributions.
Still, my concern here is, in fact, not this kind of tracking of how the lines of schematics can cross; because this pursuit, by itself, leaves too many unanswered questions about the stability of an individual's identity as a self. Yet, I can return to my quest for the subjective self, by simply appealing to yours. From your own subjective point of reference, you too might note that all these cross wirings of cognitive schematics yield incongruities of direction. Look at the points of departure you might take off from, were I to ask you "who" you are. It's true that you can come at this linguistically by pointing to how your agency is played out in different situations. You're then an observer of yourself, and you can see that you are an actor in various schematics. But from what direction do you look at and perhaps construct the schematics? Here's a sketch, posing this question as four coordinates by which to depict the choice of direction.
From what role; from what time; from what mood; from what mode by which you see yourself—active or passive?
Role. Here are some examples of how role, as a point of departure, determines the direction from which you see yourself. Remember you can see yourself, as if from the point of view of the Other and/or as if from the point of view of yourself as someone in a role relationship with the Other. Take the courtroom roles a person may play. If you’re the prosecutor you’re allowed to "trick" the accused. If you’re the accused, you must not "lie." A lie in court is an absolute lie; a lie out of court is a matter of mores. If you are you looking at yourself, as if you're within a schematic, playing your role; you might have your "own" view of what's a "lie;" while you might also have a view on what the Other thinks of you--relative to her role and yours.
When I ask, "According to whom, do you see your agency the way you do?" you can say how you'd feel, and direct your inquiry to deeply held values. Still, you'd be driven to social sources of the information. The "brave soul" fights the traffic ticket; but your idea that this is a brave act by a brave soul is culturally derived. You can attribute the social source to Uncle Henry, who taught you how to fight the ticket. At another time, you could meet a Traffic Court Judge, who would see bravery in not fighting the ticket.
Time. From Neisser’s point of view, the self and its nature may be developmentally assigned. Retirees are seen as having time to fight traffic tickets; so it can be a toss up—it’s brave or foolish, depending on a host of attributions that may be stage-of-life related. The problem that confounds these time frames as points of departure is that you can step astride these schemes, and direct your query to your own attitude toward time and toward the different stages of your life. Cross wiring, again.
Mood. We certainly have incongruities of direction when the self is seen subjectively. Just return to the two-tiered referencing of your ‘I.’ Tier 1) I feel sluggish. Tier 2) Today, I feel depressed; so my sluggishness may be a symptom of that. Yesterday, I felt bored; so my sluggishness may come from that. Now, I feel in tune with my sluggishness, and I believe it is causing my boredom and my depression. Here we see that, when I invoke your subjective self, and ask you your views on your own agency, if you focus schematics, you can sling causal arrows in a rondo of oppositional directions. The stability comes in stepping out of the schematic, which I can only describe as category-making.
Mode. From your point of view, the ‘I,’ at any given point of conscious perspective, projects in vectors that move in different directions, which, may be incongruous or wildly divergent as parameters defining the self. This results in the cross-wiring of schematization; and, therefore, it all sounds quite compatible with Neisser's description of constituent selves or with the contextual selves of Lakoff (1996).3 (I briefly describe some things about Neisser's and Lakoff's views in the notes for this section; but I review these theorists' ideas more systematically in the book.)
For example, when you define yourself, you begin with a proto-proposition. "I am . . . " Your semantic vectors move from the self to the categorial framing of self-behaviors, attributes of self, and self-concept4 as objects of the mind. Although these framings depend on collections of schematics, they also go on to form terms that have meaning. Consider what's in Italics in the following as a "term."
I am . . . a person, who shows angry behavior in frustrating situations.
This term, for short, can be "person with angry behavior." I'll express it as an idea with a subscript (f) indicating "frustrating situation":
person with angry behaviorf
These contingencies, by which the "person" is accompanied by an emotional marker and by a type of situation, are as if remnants of schematizations. Still, the term has now encapsulated elements it has drawn from the schematization's features and modes; and; therefore, the term has taken on a form something like that of a concept category. You'll recall (and, of course, I make a big deal of this, in the book) that Lakoff's "concept-category" is an amalgam of meanings, which, in the first place, has been derived from action schemata. Now to go further with the process, once formed as a sort of category or categorial structure; the term can be inserted into a proposition. For instance,
I, a person with angry behaviorf , am likely to respond in kind to a surly waiter.
But, now, with the proposition, you're working within a syntactic schematization, and the action moves from you, as agent, to an outcome.
You might look back at this sketch and say, "Well, not bad. By all this linguistic analysis, we have tracked through the question of direction, and we've shown how it's possible to hold steady to an affectively loaded intention as it finds its way to a proposition and possible action. However, now look at what you've done with the question of "who you are." You now have to go backwards from the outcome to the "I" of the proto-proposition in order to say who you are. So, there's this problem of incongruous directions again!
As I say, though, all this is compatible with schematization views; and so, with such views, you have a self--but it's from many different directions. Thus, if, as Lakoff suggests, this self-from-many-directions is situation bound; then you can be brave when fighting a traffic ticket; cowardly when the stock market goes down; aggressive in paddle ball; a passive person when your children ask you to sign over your rights, and so on. Typically, in views permitting the person multiple selves, like Neisser’s constituent selves, as the self is assigned places as objects of the mind, the result is a post-modern fragmented self.
Where am ‘I,’ if my surrogate selves are in all these schematic places? How do you and I show each other and ourselves unity of identity? Well, that the surrogate and multiple selves views beg this question is a major critique, by which I claim that there has to be a better way to deal with the questions of logical and psychological identity. I suggest that there are two questions. One asks, Where is all this action, these directions of role and value, and these versions of me? The second asks, Where is subjective experience? So, I do not substitute; instead, I juxtapose to views like those of Neisser and Lakoff, the subjective view that personal experience of the self provides the unity of self.
By reviewing many aspects of the views of the self as schema, I enter into an extensive argument in the book All of this argument takes various turns en route, as I weave in my own sentiments, and then offer my direction. In this concluding section of the Portrait Gallery, I can, however, mention only a few concepts and their adherents. And, of course, my purpose is to point you in the direction of my sentiments. Contrary to what you might think, given my arguments against mechanism and over-reliance on schematization, I do not go all the way toward a dichotomy. In fact, I conclude that the traditions that bring together principles of the organization and limits of the organism as a self-regulatory system do not make for a stereotypical split of objective and subjective viewpoints.
Instead, I see a long-time focus on self-regulation as organismic; which I think feeds into the major argument I’ve advanced that the objective and subjective have to be interrelated. Examples of such traditions are those introducing the twentieth century and perhaps dominating at least its first quarter. Thus, there are Ribot and Janet syntheses of psychological and physiological balance and hierarchical organization, the Claparede and Piaget self-regulation tradition, and the psychobiological traditions of Gardner Murphy and Adolf Meyer. In fact, though, I see a starker dichotomy than that of the organismic view contrasting with the purely schematicized approach. The contrasting view takes another form—a non-organismic one. The "rational" nature of persons is a philosophical commitment to the "person" as category in the traditions of philosopher Borden P. Bowne (1882) and psychologist Edgar Brightman’s psychology of personalism. This tradition reappears in present-day focus on awareness as the experience of the self that has unifying consequences relative to viewing the self in its various guises, roles, and characterizations. (In the book, I've looked at the recent ideas of psycho-analyst, A. J. Deikman.)
What I am arguing against is certainly not the whole of the self-as-object story; no matter how much it has been fostered by reductionist sentiment, and no matter how virulently it has emboldened reductionist sentiment. Yet, I am concerned that there's a good deal of mainstream overdependency on evolutionary constructionism, which seems to have dominated the last quarter of the twentieth century. At the risk of creating a "whipping boy," I’ll finish out this mini-analysis of what to avoid, lest it serve to aggravate the incongruities of direction, exaggerating instead of resolving, a problem in depicting the self. At the least, I now want to look at just what can be missing. Look this over before you look at how I draw my final touches in the book. That's when I formalize what should go into a portrait, and conclude why a portrait may give us a better view of self than an observation that denies its subjective experiences.
Incongruities of direction, attribution, and the unification of self. Objective-minded psychologists try to find ways to observe what people think about themselves and others. In addition, they like to look at the individual as an observer, too. The individual, just like the scientist studying her, observes her own and others' behavior and attitudes in conjunction with events that seem to trigger the behavior and/or attitudes. In brief, the individual learns to interpret her own and other's behavior and attitudes, and on the basis of observations makes attributions. So, it's possible that these attributions, as directed toward the self have a certain consistency; but it can also be the case that this or that behavior, trait, or attitude is situation related. You can view the person's total set of attributions of what she thinks about herself and what others think about her as some sort of unified view of the self. Alas, it should be easy to see that when attribution theory is juxtaposed to concepts of the self as something unifying, the argument is basically problematic. The person is her entire history of her own interpretations of her actions and her schematic representations of herself in a variety of situations.
I'd claim this. When attributions of self are accepted as a state of affairs in search of unification, the outcome is the confusion, presently characterizing social psychological accounts. The reasons seem inherent in my brief explication. The idea of "self interpreting schemata" would become a regress, if you could not step outside the schema. The interpretation, itself, would simply be another schematic, as would the self. We'd be off to the races chasing down a regress to other observers! Moreover, if we describe a person as becoming a self by way of the collection of schemata; we are right back in the ballpark of our times, describing how things play out and lead to self and self construction--all by way of construction.
So, once again, we enter the mainstream of my critiques and concerns about cognitive science and cognitive linguistics, even though the considerations of attribution theory come from a combination of earlier traditions of behavior and of information theory. Evolutionary construction is the common thread, and either working from traditional models in cognitive psychology or more recent models in either anthropological linguistics or robotology, a constituent model of the self is built in the fashion of the constructions of evolution.
Let's go a step further. As a pyramid of phenomena, the construction of cognitive operations and capabilities is built in an upward direction, with the functions of the self-concept of the individual appearing at the apex.
This sort of construction is provided by neuroscientist, Gerald Edelman (1989), when he describes simple behaviors, like the actions and outcomes of a creature being succeeded by the pre-syntax of relating object and action. Action and outcome concepts are possible to process if the syntax affords a fixed sequence. Edelman is concerned with concepts and syntactical patterns that map onto neurologically and sensorium-grounded sequences and structures. Anthropological linguist, Derek Bickerton, focusing on behavior, arrives at the similar idea that in another eon, by a means of a syntax representing sentience, some order of agency in a schematic of agent-action-outcome is the explanatory basis for advances to consciousness. So, common to the approaches in neuroscience, to biological approaches to evolutionary constructionism, and to cognitive linguistics, is the idea that cognitive operations and representations move upward toward a conceptual and decision-making set of synthesizing and unifying functions.
Thus, in a componential account of self as cognitive processing by actions and operations, self-behaviors (SB), attributions of self (AS), and self-concept (SC) are built successively, one upon the other. At a lower level of the pyramid, I am sentient—perhaps, merely proprioceptively—that I am doing this or that. So, my self-referable behaviors form the pyramid’s base. Developmentally, each level is more self-reflective than the previous. When I can become aware of a series of things I do (SB's); I can make attributions to myself, like "I hunt intensely." The accent here is on "intensely," and so, I get to the point of attributing not only the behavior to myself, but also the characteristic of being "intense." That’s more abstract than the instances of intense behavior it entails. Along with the increase in the levels of reflexivity of the self—what we are these days unashamedly calling "awareness"—categorially, each level of the pyramid is, in turn, more abstract than the previous one.
We have a situation that I tried to describe some moments ago. Schemata are collected, and grouped as meanings that can be put to work in new schemata (I described this as constructing terms that can be fit into new propositions.) But the groupings and their hierarchization toward more elegant and generalizable status move in such a way that it's a mixed blessing. On one hand, they move toward more executive control, so that we can get schemata of self-construction. These might be propositions and rules, permitting evaluation of feedback, and they might set in motion corrective and self-regulatory operations. All that is the "good news."
Now for the "bad news." We have a pyramid leading to the schematized power of executive actions. But who is in charge? Moreover, at the same time, in order to become more responsive to the problems of executive oversight, handy abstractions and idealizations characterize the ascent in awareness. On the other hand, if the nature of the self is in its multiple versions, what sort of traffic can be regulated among the different possible selves?
Let me describe the construction of the self in terms of class inclusion. Assumed here is the considerable influence of Piaget's ideas on construction--although the applications to self-regulation are still being worked out. In terms of class inclusion, I am assuming that the construction of the components of a self resembles this pyramidal structure,
SB < SA < SC
But the more inclusive classes are at the apex of the pyramid; since by what Piaget calls "reflective abstraction," each new genus is more elegant and abstract. From a great array of possible behaviors are abstracted features, such as summary traits, attitudes, and temperament. These are concept-categories of the self. In turn, from an array of these features, values, ideals, and the like are abstracted. These—in their etiology, are also concept-categories; albeit more idealizable ones. However, as the pyramid, in its upward surge, collapses its membership of particulars, the data "base" may not be adequately represented. Types, like extrovert and introvert, could present one-side of a person or worse a stereotype. Normative descriptions reflect the observer’s concerns and apperceptions; and not necessarily those of the observed person.
In fact, in this spirit, Neisser (1988) points to the inadequacy of the representations of the conceptual in comparison to those of the perceptually based ecological self. (Please see the book for a summary list of Neisser's "selves," in an order constructed over time and showing the adaptational perspectives, suited to what faces the individual at different stages of growth and learning.) But I can't go too far into this web of multiple selves to try to see if your former self is available to you, when you need it. It should be something like regression in service of the ego--but that would assume what is not present in the multiple selves view, namely, a center for executive control, like Freud's concept of the ego. So, the idea would be a regression in service of the pragmatics of the moment.
Can you evoke the self of your childhood, when a childish approach would be the best one to give insight into a problem, or to offset too rigid an intellectual or social framework? Does a constructionist approach allow that what was at a lower level of self reflectiveness become instrumental to better self-regulation than a more stable set of logical structures or a more mature self, for that matter? I think these questions can lead you in circles, if you go the route of construction of self-construction and its regresses. You can reason (or is it a matter of taking it by faith?) that, as Piaget (1968/1970) points out, the "windowless" monad of Leibniz is well equipped. When the window is opened, adaptation is optimized, because the monad’s "operators" have a lot in common with those of the objects outside it. Well, if true, that might explain veridicality of perception and the heuristic value of the concept-categories of nature. And of the self; since whatever the organism views at a given moment would properly engage the most adaptive version of the self. In theory, maybe; but it does sound too facile. Meantime, does this happy state of affairs say that adaptation is optimized by and for what you and I attribute to each other? And, do these attributions ultimately substitute for--or become--you and me?
There are a dizzying series of matches attempted in the Mobius band twists and metaphorical shifts, by which you and I try to attribute selves to each other, and to know each other and our selves by collecting and correlating attributions. If we think in terms of the assumptions of attribution theory, we'd need that "entire history" of the individual to follow collections of the schemata on which the attributions are based. We'd need this objectively to characterize either others or ourselves. But we can try to pull things together in terms of what the individual's adaptation is to whatever time the individual "is at." Right? Let's see.
Saying "No" to everyone in sight might be adaptive, when you are in some childhood stage that psycho-analyst Erik Erikson described as critical to the establishment of "autonomy." But can it work as an adult when you're establishing a career? If you read a biography of Groucho Marx, the question can be answered "Yes," for his comedy, and maybe "No" for his social life.
So, as in Neisser’s view, there are all sorts of pathways from one version of the self to another; and, as in Bernard Baars's neurophysiological model of consciousness, a workspace is "spotlighted." The "real self" does not stand up; but the one that takes center stage, is the right guy for the right job, at the right time. Except when you’re not your self. Are you your best self, every day? Well, who’s perfect?
We could say that Groucho should have better selected the right self at the right time. However, no matter which self came to the fore, there was an individual named "Groucho," and therefore, we can identify the person, if not the self put forward by him or attributed to him by others. However, to say that a person is an individual, but has different selves, is to beg the question of the stability of identity by inferring that it's really not psychological at all. Identity would be the body, the name, and other identifying sociological markers--in the manner that sociologist Erving Goffman might describe.
I don't want to seem to gloat here; but perhaps by allowing some fun, you and I can jog out of the traps that make us jump this way and that away from our own subjective point of experience. Perhaps, then we can feel our way to legitimize our own subjectivity. So, I'll share with you. I admit that these exceptions I've listed--of "the self that's not the best self " and of "the self that's not really the self"--bring me the sort of absolute joy that the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein seemed to have had in lampooning Candide. A personal epic, starring the best of all your possible selves, is just about as possible as would be the personal scenarios, featuring the events that face you as if they all represented the "best of all possible worlds."
Write a few scenarios like this, starring yourself in this manner, and the humor should outweigh any failures of even a perfect choice of selves in the face of unpredictable events. O’ how many times I’d want my conceptual self to step forward to be the lead actor in a mini-drama between my wife and myself centered on how best to return rancid food in a restaurant! But the guy that steps forward for me is one that in some proto-historical time is ecologically motivated to protect himself and his mate from the extreme danger of camouflage by whoever would serve up something that’s not what it’s dressed up to look like. Maybe that's best.
The component selves as cognitive processors, at all these levels that Neisser describes, and in all these possible situations that Lakoff describes, are products of the self. There they are, after having been projected into mental space. They are now seen by spotlights, which are aimed in directions that diverge and that are sometimes opposing. Spotlight! Front stage center is the self, who’s going to stand up and play out a given role at a given time, and the bag of attributes on which he and you are going to be able to agree.
What attributes of a self are not seen, and are just outside the spotlight? What are the attributes of understudies, who’d be likely to jump to the center? Such factors are so variable within an individual, and from person to person, that I can no more know what you’re going to do or why, than I can know what I am going to do and why. Maybe I know what I'm going to do in a prototypical restaurant, but it's a far cry from the prototype to every possible restaurant or even to a highly specific one. You and I can attribute conceptual "types" to ourselves and to each other. Under broad summary "types," such as introvert and extrovert, for a given individual, some behavior can pile up under each. Still, a summary type can be terribly misleading; especially if you buy into the idea that selves are dependent on the specific concatenations of time and events within schematizations.
In fact, what happens in post-modern views is that the idea of the self is situational, leading to a concept of the self with no logical identity. The picture in views such as Lakoff's, is of mind—a product of the organism and its neurophysiology. The product, a series of cognitive processing operations is anchored to sensorium-based schematizations; yet it's abstracted from them. Self is reduced to the terms of these operations of the self-reflexive abstractions that negotiate attributions and the situation-bound packets of these attributes, which take on the various roles of the self.
Remember that I began the sketch of the pyramid of construction with the idea that there was good new and bad news? What is confusing in the blend of construction with ideas of epigenesis is does involve the central question of the identity of the self. But when we look more squarely at the cognitive operations and structures put into play, such as the resolution of self by attributions; then the front and center problem is the relation of schematization and category summation.
Schematization moves in the direction of complexity and the collection of details that are fit into specific arrangements. However, concept formation and categorial form moves away from the detail toward a collation of specifics. Thus, the categorial structuring is of self-behaviors, attributes, and concepts, formed as objects of the mind in a construction moving vertically upward in pyramid fashion. Correspondingly, the schematization process grows into complexities. The self, as a propositional structure relating beliefs to subject-predicate sequences of cause and effect, moves in diachronic spaces. This movement is horizontal and sequential, as in bracketing. So, if we allow that the self remain within schematizations, there are propositions on each level of the pyramid; but the terms of the propositions permit the space within the layer to shrink as the pyramid proceeds upwards.
However, bracketing has more to it than what's inside the brackets. In the model of the self that I have been portraying, the self, as awareness, keeps moving out of brackets; and therefore, at the higher levels of self, the space for propositions expands. If we look at the model I am advocating, it includes the 'I' (or subjectivity of the self). Therefore, there are not only schemata "piling up,' but there are also bracketing expansions. Moreover, while the schematizations of an individual tend to be summarized as she matures, the bracketings expand more greatly, as new levels of awareness are taking place at upper more abstract levels. It appears that the bracketing as a construction device does not do too much better than a constructionist explanation of multiple selves. Let's see how the pyramid works within a developmental construction of self like Neisser’s. How "wide"can the propositions of the conceptual self get without toppling the pyramid? Remember, the conceptual forms tend toward subtraction of specifics; but the schematizations move toward complexities and accumulations.
These queries threaten the shape and workability of the construction pyramid. A quick answer is that the model of self would not work—unless the self was reduced to mind. The quick answer helps the Neisser and the Lakoff type models. We get the regress to the self-constructing schematizations, which serves to save the idea of self, although it fragments it; so that it can occur in schematized forms. This way, what's constructed as you move higher up the pyramid is the more idealized schematic as a collation of the features of what would best work in self-corrective and regulatory operations. Thus, since the self is a series of these schematics that survive heuristically and pragmatically, and if the higher levels are thereby no more than mere schematizations and products; then, the pyramid can stay intact. But, it’s not surprising that the selves of Neisser and the selves of Lakoff do not have the unifying 'I.' So, assume some regress to a self that selects the right self for the right job. Even so, the reduction of space by chasing all agents into the schematizations is more than counterbalanced by the propagation of schemata. The other side of the coin is not so pretty either. If the ‘I’ continues to have categorial capability, and bracketings are continuous; then we do not sustain the pyramidal form for an ‘I.’
One of the points I made is that like it or not, the construction models include both collection and collation patterns. So, you can say that at each level of the pyramid, the resolution of the two trends has to be re-established. In Neisser's model, this takes place by the self that's appropriate to the stage becoming the prepotent self of the individual at that stage of the game. With my explanation, if, as I do, you assume that the self is predicated on a unified and unifying identity; you'd have continued and continuing expansion of the 'I' by way of bracketing out.
With the bracketing description in the form of a construction device, you get top-heavy layers of a pyramid, and there appears an imbalance between the tendency for a more and more abstract level to the 'I' and the profusion of its orders of awareness. However, there's another imbalance too. It's between the over-development of a particular layer of the self-as-organism and the structures "beneath," which are, by comparison, less developed. Thus, if I can be at the level of Depak Chopra's awareness of the self; it'd be hard to have a simple selfish desire or outlook emerge from some former self, even if my life depended on it. Sainthood would weigh down temptations. Well, maybe this is also for the best. The top-heavy expansions would simply force a buckling of the subsystems, for which we'd hope that we'd outgrown the need.
But all this is to say that the objective construction view loses as does the subjective view if all is cast in forms of construction that skirt away from sources and forms of origin. With either the constructionist view of many selves or with a view of the self as subjective, but limited to schematics, there remains a basic dilemma. That which should be tending toward the more abstract, more elegant, more economical, is becoming top-heavy, because, and in spite of, the evolutionary forces toward stability.
The self should be evolving toward a unity and a wholeness of grouping. But, instead, movement to establish identity that would organize and stabilize its layers of past experience and orders of phenomena produces non-equivalent components. Mature and immature selves succeed each other in the developmental models and co-exist, side-by-side, in contextualist models. There are the highly self-corrective and self regulatory versus the passive self, where the subjective self is known by the bracketing process that never quite catches up to that elusive subjective experience. With all this non-equivalence and variation, unity and wholeness of grouping would seem to call for a categorial organization that would have, if not some source of, a form accounting for origin. This kind of form, because of the need to separate it from what is easily cast as schematizations, would imply abstract groups or ideals. I should say here that an idealized schema is something like an action plan. It may even be as abstract as a set of syntactic nodes. But agents assigned to any such plan, no matter how abstract, cannot step outside and view the very plan. An idealized self is bothersome, in that its high degree of abstraction makes it hard to portray. In contrast, in the models of multiple selves that I've described, the forms are slavish to context and construction. The picture is of self operations running in various opposed directions toward meaningful contexts, which are the schematized domains. These directions of the different selves and these locations of the different domains entail, but do not transcend, the contraries and the oppositions that make the structure one of incongruities and imbalances.
It's not enough for me to describe your bracketing and you as "bracketed out." I will have to enter points of origin, as if they're nuclei with powerful relators closed within them. These relators are metaphorical forms, and they can unwind into lines and patterns of analogy that can organize time and form as a portrait of the 'I.' Now on to and back to the book.
S0 Sketch as Prolegomena
1 Philosopher, Michael Lockwood (1989/1992), describes such a space for physical movements and dynamics.
2 Artist Paul Klee’s description of the movement of a spiral in terms of its "life and death" [1953/1964; p. 53) is evocative.
3 I stay with Mitchell’s use of the term tectonic. You could view a tree as a partial or incomplete (open) grid. You could also look at a network with a grid structure that does have asymmetries. Yet, perhaps, an overall symmetry can be mapped either from a higher or lower level of abstraction.
Footnote 28 of the book's introduction reads mostly as follows.
Karl Popper's subjective "World 2" --a "world of subjective experiences," includes "consciousness of self and death" and "sentience." Popper notes the latter as "animal consciousness" (Popper and Eccles, 1981; p. 16). "World 1" is the world of physical objects, like stars, baseballs, cows, and the variety of things responding to the sensorium. "World 3" is that of cognitive objects, like words and symbols; since they also have an order of physical reality. The social constructionists simply stay with language as pragmatics--language as a "World 1 and World 3 only" universe of physical and of cultural objects. (Cf. Semiotician Marcel Danesi's analysis, 1993.)
The neurophysiologists, like Bernard Baars, can, for a while, abide the insults of World 3. It's not really physical stuff we talk about when we talk about consciousness--unless . . . The sentiment is that World 3 should ultimately be explained by the physical theory that accounts for neural patterns. "Embodiment" makes the dualities of subjective vs. objective and of conscious meaning vs. neural assemblies impossible to demarcate. Even if this were possible, by the same reasoning, there'd be irreversibility of the experiences of the self and irreducibility of the feedback effects of a conscious self in relation to the physical organism that houses it.
4 In terms of Piaget’s idea of the coordination of schemata, a child’s schema for navigating a room may consist of kinesthetic perception and motor signals in relation to movement and the objects of the room. A separate schema may consist of ocular and visual explorations and images of objects relative to movement and distance from the child. These separate schematics are coordinated with the task of finding a doll and carrying it away.
5 Picture a hierarchy of cognitive acts this way,
Hierarchy of cognitive acts
Level of recombination:
Shift of categorical ordering
Level of argument:
Schematizations of categories of schematizations
a b
In this picture, the argument level could be this. Argument a. You can have categories as the result of a piling up of schematizations, which are then subsumed as their objects—something like the members of a category. Also, though, the subsumption can be flipped around—so, you get Argument b. All schematization is something that takes place only after bounds are set for any object, any event, and any chaining together of objects and events. The schematization is then within a more primary capability for categorization. But, as the hierarchical chart shows, in order to have both these possibilities, there is a shift in the ordering. This shift, itself, although on a higher level of action and organization, is categorial.
6 The direction of movement within a schema and the direction of movement within a space are different considerations. Direction of movement within a schema is always observed from a sort of outside perspective, even if what is within the schema is an observer or a self. One way to say this is in terms offered by Marc de Mey (1982/1992; and personal communication, 1997), namely, that the ‘I’ can reflect on the self. But another way is to objectify the schema, and thus make it like an "object-mind"—somewhat in the tradition of the phenomenological objects of Popper’s (1983) World 3.
Now, a space, at least a logical space of self as I’ve conceived it, is phenomenological in the way that Husserl would make the distinction between phenomenology and ‘psychology’ as an objectifying discipline. Accordingly, the outside perspectives possible from the point of view of an observer are included within the categorial bounds of the self. Of course, this way of thinking about things is very similar to the life space idea of Kurt Lewin, except for the "everting" of observations, behavior, and ultimately perspective, as pointed out by Floyd Allport (1955).
The result is that when thinking about consciousness and the self from an objective point of view, direction of movement is circumscribed within the bounds of a schema comprehensible only as a pattern viewed from the outside. Within the schema, as seen by Piaget (1974/1976) movement of consciousness is centripetal—whether the consciousness is of the objects of the self or of the self as an object. But Piaget is "observing" the consciousness, as if it were movement within a schema. Consciousness within a schema is an object of observation and therefore leaves open the question of the ‘I.’ However, within the schema, a movement inward toward the central features of the object is what you would objectively observe. Accordingly, movement can be seen as cognitive operations—and again, these are World 3 type phenomena.
In contrast, the view I present of the self as a logical space presents its bounds as those of the self as a category. Therefore, centripetal movement inward is from the objects, which are the products of self as an origin. But, since the self is an origin, I picture at its core, or center, the beginning point from which schemata are spun outward centrifugally. I depict this OP movement as cycling elliptically in a direction toward the outer boundary, and penultimately coming to a point of perspective (PP) at the moment of present time in the history of the self.
7 The metaphor allows traffic both ways—quite compatibly with the view that the subsuming of schemata by categories can shift into reverse, as the chart, Hierarchy of cognitive acts, (Note 5, this section) shows.
8 Cf. Danesi’s (1993) account of Vico’s idea of the generative nature of metaphor.
9 Haley (1988) unpacks the conceptual and organizational differences among these three categories. But bear in mind that there is some lack of technical articulation about the relation of metaphor to analogy.
10 The picture here is of movement and construction in dialectical forms patterned by the growth of self and orchestrated by the projections from the self as PP to the OP—cast here as the originating categories of the self. This picture has a logic to it. However, I compare the logic of the self as origin point and as particle point to the logic of its products or objects.
The comparison, in fact, is made by the psychologist, Rudolph Arnheim (1988; p. 4-5); however, stated in visual terms only. The terms are, of course, consonant with the gestalt formulations of Arnheim’s approach to the psychology of art. In the present context, one notes the applicability of Arnheim’s analysis of artistic compositions with the creativity of the subjective self, which is a central theme of this paper. His terms: the origin of a vector is a centric composition; while a "second system" is an eccentric composition. My comparison is mainly in relation to categorial features—in short, the relation of sets to subordinate subsets and the implications for stability and reproducibility of structure. The self, despite its irreversibility, is also a logical structure. It too has identity and is subject to the law of contradiction.
The reflexive nature of the self, which linguistically shows itself as a "shifter," permits different viewing points. The space of the self as an origin point is closed, and the movement spiral of the self as particle point is limited. It ends. So, from whatever viewing position, the logical complement of self does not extend outside of it—to a next higher set. Hence, the logical complement for the self is 0. The logic of the self’s products is a different affair—one that objectivists can see as having an autonomy, but one that I argue is a part of the total picture of self. (Later in the book I suggest that this part can be called "mind" in contradistinction to "self.")
In all, in contrast with the logic of the self, since the objects of the self are subset to the self, within an inner space, which contains the self’s objects, a category (subcategory), (A), representing such objects has as its logical complement (~A). This sort of complement reflects that the objects of self can be expressed in categories with negations that have manifest existential possibilities. Thus, the difference between such a complement that makes negated reference to the objects of the self, and the logical complement of the self, is that the latter is a null case—one that is an empty set. Under ordinary circumstances, the null set would be a subset of the self as a set. Since, the null is the complement of the self; we have a particular case of the self, having its complement as its subset.
11 Thus, I picture the logical space as an outer circle of inclusion within which is an origin point that, when entered, shows a series of concentric circles. The outer circle is most inclusive, but within its centric composition is an eccentric one. However to start the ball rolling, begin from the inner circle of concentric originating categories, and unwind outward, eccentrically to depict the growth of the self and its readiness to consciously (sentiently) regard and represent encounters with the environment. It is from this perspective of outward bound movement that the self encounters its own structures of metaphor and analogy, directing them inward toward the concentric circles (categories) of the inner self. In the process, the stable objects of thought are constructed after their metaphoric invention.
12 See Arnheim (1988, p. 7); Lockwood (1989/1992); Peacocke (1992/1995).
13 Picture bracketing as acting to keep the form of the total sentence; while setting off a phrase or term. Example. From the statement j1,
j1. John hits the ball,
"John" is bracketed out in j2,
j2. (John) hits the ball.
"(John)" is now a particular variable. The bracketing portends that its demarcated operator functions are transferable to another particular. So "(Mary)" would have the same logical and syntactic operator functions. The bracketing gives extra life to a term: "John" is only an embedded element in the sentence; while "(John)" is that and more. The brackets not only give class membership to John, Mary, and whomever, but also change the embedded functions in j1 to those of spatial position in the linear causal time of statement j2. Agency becomes a power tool. Bracket the other way:
j3. John (hit the ball).
Now the brackets keep "John" as a singleton—uniquely in the agent slot. But agency is expanded for the particular agent. The brackets serve to show the breadth of agentive scope, considering "John" as an operator on "hit the ball" and/or on whatever else may appear within or be substituted into the brackets.
A term bracketed in front of a phrase typically identifies operator functions, thus expanding functions of the terms. Like ‘John’ in sentence j3, the ‘I’ in the "I think" of the Cogito can be bracketed out. Let’s bracket out the whole sentence "I think," like this:
I think (therefore, I am).
What is within the brackets, of course, now can be changed or substituted for; and therefore, the agency in the unbracketed "I think" is considerably expanded. But consider bracketing the whole Cogito; so that the "I think" within the brackets becomes part of the scope of what the agent can affect. Thus,
I think that (I think; therefore, I am).
All of this is syntactic diagramming. Logically, the last "I" or "I think" bracketed out and shunted over to the left in
I think that (‘I’ think; therefore, I am)
is the identified next lower set to the conscious ‘I.’ But it is also the next higher set for the ‘I’ within the brackets. Thus, insofar as agency is elevated to a next higher set, it remains within logical space, while also syntactically bracketed and/or bracketable.
So, some answer to the question of an impossible form appears in this visual space. An inner and outer spatial structure like a coil has been created. When the subject of the sentence is the ‘I,’ the agency and particularity issues are hyper-expanded—to the ultimate limits of the self. Negation can operate upon bracketed elements or phrases. Thus, objects within sentences that are causal statements can achieve a stable role in terms of logical and syntactic status—or can be excluded from that role by negation operations determining their syntactic relation to other statement elements.
14 In terms of the picture of self, the frame funnels inward for justification with its subsuming categories. However, as indicated in footnote 2, where groups and groupings are briefly outlined, while there are categorial considerations, such as rules of inclusion; but there are also ordering considerations. Thus, in the picture of self, the organization of categories, when considered as a ladder of abstraction can be ordered either bottom up from particulars or top down to subsume them. When bottom up, as is typical of poetic metaphors, the universal is subsumed within the particular. When done top down, idealizations, as in philosophy and science, subsume particulars within universals. This is not to deny "abstract" metaphors, but instead to apply these ideas of genus and species to metaphors as World 3 objects.
S1 A Play within the Play: Hamlet’s Conscience as Mobius Twist
1 I credit Bernard Grebanier, who taught playwrighting and literature, and hammered home the proposition as a central structure of any play. Following the work of drama critic W. T. Price (1892), Grebanier (1979) felt that the proposition at the center of the plot led syllogistically to an outcome. My points here are heavily indebted to this idea—and to the way Grebanier asked his students to "find" the proposition and relate it to the main dramatic character, whose dramatic action spearheads the course of events.
2 Discussion of the Mobius band is in various forms in the book. For present purposes, conceive of a structure accommodating exchanges of reciprocal terms as those determining the vectors of a category.
S2 Incidental Music for Chapter 10: The Third Man Theme
1 See the treatment of the relation of the logical and linguistic functions of negation by linguist Lawrence Horn (1989).
S3 Pocket Guide Map of the Three Determinants of Structuring
1 These passions and their pitfalls are described by philosopher Thomas Nagel (1986) and by cognitive scientist Francisco Varela, et al. (1991/1993).
2 I argue here that all this logic within subjective space includes mind as an object. This is compatible with my saying there may be some disjunction of the ontology of mind in relation to brain. The statement is cozily non-specific. But, experience, such as consciousness reaches its own levels of function—which have ontological reality.
3 Biologist Tyler Volk (1995) compares natural hierarchies—superordinations—to the nested organizations Arthur Koestler (1978) described as holarchies. Here is a description of this kind of organization. I give it here; so that you can look at the holarchical organization in relation to genus-species exchangability. I repeat this description below in the present section of the Portrait Gallery; so that the desciption can serve a different purpose; namely to see how it sheds light on how metaphorical versus categorial framing set the different direction of organizational patterns:
A holarchy is an organization, in which the inclusion relations are pictured as concentric circles. This makes for a salvaging of the specifics of subunits; since they are merely nested within the more encompassing ones. In contrast, there's the subsuming of these units in a hierarchy of classification orders. In a holarchy, the ordering is proto-categorial; and not classificatory. In a hierarchy, a categorial ordering emerges, because the logical categories and their classificatory orders are merged.
4 I’ve called this a quasi-agency, meaning what fills a syntactic slot as an agent can be imbued with certain transformative potentialities; but still, psychological agency requires an outsidedness, which bracketing depicts—to some degree.
S4 Sentience and Opposition: A Synaesthetic Sketch
1 See S6, note 2.
S5 An Exercise on Partitioning Wholes and the Continuities of Cognitive Action in Bracketing
1 You can never fully stop the regress in a causal account unless by assumption or by faith that there is a first cause. Thus, you ask, is there an unboundable entity within the organism? An example is an "out of time" experience of the ‘I,’ as James would describe it—prior to any category. The limited answer in this work is that I assume the ‘I,’ while unboundable by its own objects, such as the ‘me,’ is limited by its mortality inherent in its inextricable relation to its individual life.
2 I repeat the book's Chapter 13, note 5 here:
An example of a category that selects is a term of a proposition like "Socrates is a man." It's easy to juxtapose any opposite meaning of the term "man" by relating it to this proposition. A "woman" is not a man; a "bird" is not a man; a "ship" is not a man, and so on. The substituting of any of these terms in the original proposition makes it false. An example of a category with the organizational function is an inclusive term that subclassifies. If you assign a taxonomic category--birds--genus and species are set in motion, organizing the space, dividing it into subcategories--swans, ducks, finches, etc. You might even set up an organization that calls for an infinite regress inward; so that the space would contain an infinite number of inner spaces.
S6 Paradox Lost: Music to Hear at the End of Chapter 12
1 See New York Times music critic Edward Rothstein’s (1995) book Emblems of mind.
2 See Arnheim’s (1954/1971) argument for the themes that are subordinated to a frame in an artistic rendering.
S8 The Trouble with the Objective Self, if it’s got no Subjective Space
1 I take this position, as a humanist devoted to science and art, but it also is a conscious decision not to tread on any issues that are theologically based. Even a portrait of the subjective, however subjectively experienced, is a representation that lags behind any present moment of time or reality of event or object—even if we call that object or event a felt experience.
2 Figure-ground shifting is a perceptual organization phenomenon, and I assume here that organization is categorial in that any order of icon is categorial, whether the icon is concrete and tied to sensory motor experiences, or abstracted from them in some conceptual way. Ultimately, what neurological structures and sensorium architecture may account differentially for perceptual and for conceptual organizational shifts is fabulously interesting but not central to the investigation of the book.
3 I’ll try to be careful not to stereotype the objective viewpoint. After all, views like those of Neisser are descriptions of self as cognitive operations. And Lakoff’s view is that the self, expressed linguistically as agent in this or that domain, reflects the deeper actions of the organism in patterns of activity compatible with cognitive representations supervenient upon the explorations processed and recorded in the patterns of the sensorium. In both cases, the self when objectified, becomes a description of the patterns of mind. There are operations, and there are domains of activity and display, but no psychological identity and no logical identity. Hence—no interaction of identity and negation either as subjective phenomena of self-classification or logical parameters of self-definition.
4 E. g., Neisser (1988; 1992; 1995); and other social-cognitive models like cognitive social psychologist Alfred Bandura’s.
Portrait Gallery Illustrations
Diagrams 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 5a, 5b, 5c
(Diagrams 1 through 3 are drawn especially for the Gallery. They do not appear in the book. Portrait Gallery diagrams 4, 5, 5a, 5b, 5c appear in the book as figures, numbered 16, 17, 17a, 17b, 18. Also note that diagram 5c, as figure 18 in the book, is labeled 'Synchronicity of metaphoric framing.')
Escher, (1958; Path of Life II) Plate 19. (1961/1967) Tr. J. E. Brigham.
Escher (1938) Day and Night Plate 11. (1961/1967) Tr. J. E. Brigham
(For these citations and for other illustrations cited in the Gallery, see the book.)
Third Man Theme. Following Section 2
Choice of three selections. For Section 6:
The second movement of Beethoven’s Third Symphony
The third movement of the Ninth Symphony
The third movement of the Fifth symphony
Portrait Gallery Index
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