Stories, Meaning, and Experience

Narrativity and Enaction

Yanna B. Popova

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781134738526
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Lingue e linguistica
• Categoría: Linguistica

This is a book about the human propensity to think about and experience the world through stories. 'Why do we have stories?', 'How do stories create meaning for us?', and 'How is storytelling distinct from other forms of meaning-making?' are some of the questions that this book seeks to answer. Although these and other related problems have preoccupied linguists, philosophers, sociologists, narratologists, and cognitive scientists for centuries, in Stories, Meaning, and Experience, Yanna Popova takes an original interdisciplinary approach, situating the study of stories within an enactive understanding of human cognition. Enactive approaches to consciousness and cognition foreground the role of interaction in explanations of social understanding, which includes the human practices of telling and reading stories. Such an understanding of narrative makes a decisive break with both text-centred approaches that have dominated structuralist and early cognitivist views of narrative meaning, as well as pragmatic ones that view narrative understanding as a form of linguistic implicature. The intersubjective experience that each narrative both affords and necessitates, the author argues, serves to highlight the active, yet cooperative and communal, nature of human sociality, expressed in the numerous forms of human interaction, of which storytelling is one.

Part One

1 Perceptual Causality and Narrative Causality

DOI: 10.4324/9781315880488-2

1 Introduction: Causality, Agency, Intentionality

Much of what human beings do, or imagine doing, originates in perception and culminates in action. Part of what I will be arguing for in this book is that human mental life, even in its most sophisticated conceptual and linguistic manifestations, is inseparable from both. Though it is believed by many that a lot of computational/propositional processing happens in our brains between perceptual input and motor output, I will argue that in the majority of instances such beliefs are not substantiated. Take the following examples. A child is quietly playing in a room, then suddenly gets up and starts running and calling for her mother. Is the child suddenly upset, bored, or scared because of something that just took place and was unavailable to us as observers? A character in a film receives a letter and, upon opening it, goes pale and starts trembling, before rushing out of the room. Has he received some bad news, or maybe some good, long-awaited, ones? These are simple human actions that confront us all the time, whether in real or imagined worlds. How do we understand these and other similar actions? Philosophers and psychologists believe that we do so by attributing intentions to the agents involved. We are agents with specific beliefs and goals, so we assume others to be agents too. Agency is not understood here as the simple ability to act in the world, however. What those philosophers have traditionally assumed is that there are beliefs, desires, and intentions (propositional attitudes) that we have in respect to other people, and they are available to us as a result of inference (Davidson, 1980). Are perceptual states always giving rise to beliefs, and are propositional attitudes always giving rise to actions?

Importantly, our judgements about what is going on depend also on the timing of the events we perceive. Particular temporal sequences invariably give rise to causal perceptions, as in the two examples above. Hence, we often make certain connections based on the actions we observe and establish causal links between them in order to explain behavior. Attributing causality (a necessary connection) in this way is a basic mechanism of interpreting other people’s actions: it is a form of construal of meaning such that agents and their actions become more transparent and meaningful to the outside observer. On a propositional account, this happens because we make a judgement about a particular chain of events, but causality is more basic, as I will argue, than a propositional attitude. Causality is a key concept for human thought and action, and causal thought is so pervasive in everyday life that its significance can hardly be exaggerated. Everything that occurs does so through something else, each event being caused by others, and each, in turn, causing still other events. We search for causes in order to understand why things around us are the way they are, or why people behave in certain ways. Our interest in causes can be explained by a pragmatic need to change and improve our worlds. We are pragmatic beings, and causality offers us reasons for understanding our actions, as well as the actions of others. While the centrality of causality in our intellectual and practical life is perhaps undisputed, very little is agreed upon when it comes to the question of what causality is. Among philosophers there is a distinction between epistemological theories, which specify the nature of people’s knowledge of causality, and metaphysical theories, which describe causation as a property of the nature of reality.¹ Psychological theories of causality have followed that general distinction and view causation as either a property of the world (regularity), or a product of human causal inference. In what follows I will use the following definitional distinction: causation will be used to describe the basic physical property of one event causing another. Causality, on the other hand, will describe the attribution by a mind of an event to a cause. The notion of perceptual causality will be the topic of the next section, while later in this chapter I will elaborate on the notion of narrative causality as derivative of perceptual causality. Causality, I propose, is a necessary condition of narrativity, but in attributing causality to a series of events, we are enacting a specific narratorial point of view. Much of our pragmatic and imaginative activities (both in life, and in imaginary recreations of it, such as fiction) revolve around the all-important question of how we attribute causality, or how we link the perceptual world to the world of action.

2 Perceptual Causality

The distinction between causation in the world and the human perception of causality was first discussed by Hume (1739/1978). Hume thought that people’s ordinary notions of causality could not be found directly in perceptual experience and hence had no basis in reality. He stated that when people thought they observed a causal relationship, they actually only saw a spatial-temporal contiguity, or a succession, or a simple regularity, but not that which is the most crucial aspect of people’s concept of causality: namely, a necessary connection. Thus, the particular question that interested Hume is not merely epistemological (what is causation) but psychological (what constitutes the source of our causal judgements). In relation to this question, Hume assumed that there is no necessary connection between distinct observed events and that causality is therefore always invisible: a matter of belief or inference. British empiricist philosophy had indeed long claimed that many apparent properties of the world cannot be perceived directly and are in fact products of the perceivers’ minds, that is, products of inference, or propositional attitudes. Albert Michotte’s work (1946/1963) is an experimental attempt to demonstrate that Hume was wrong and that causal interaction can be directly perceived by the mind in the same sense as that in which we perceive shape or movement, that is, as a low-level perceptual event. In a number of innovative experiments, he showed that direct perception is indeed the very source of our causal concepts. Michotte’s groundbreaking work on perceptual causality should be seen in relation to his primary claim that meaning is intrinsic to perceptual experience.²

In a first set of Michotte’s “launching effect” experiments, one shape (a billiard ball) moves toward another stationary one, which in turn starts moving upon contact. Adults report that they see the second shape as being “launched” by the first one. In another experiment, the first ball continues to move upon reaching the second, and they both continue at the same speed and in the same direction. Here, the observers report that the first ball is carrying the second one with it. Importantly, when subjects are asked to describe these launching events they invariably describe more than mere specifications of motion: in billiard-ball collisions, subjects do not just report that two balls are moving, but that one ball is causing the movement of another. This report by observers of causal effect occurs only under certain stimulus conditions; if there is sufficient time delay before the second shape starts to move, perceivers report two independent events. However, with appropriate stimulus conditions (e.g., speed and configurations of space) there is always a strong causal perception, which serves as the perception-based foundation for our ideas of causality. What we see are two distinguishable movements (events), that of an agent and that of a patient, but we also see them as belonging together, to the extent that if the cause had not occurred, the effect would not have occurred either. Michotte’s experimental results suggest that we directly perceive, rather than infer, causality in particular motion configurations. More recently it has been claimed that babies as young as seven months are sensitive to such perception of causality (Leslie, 1988; Leslie and Keeble, 1987). In the experiments reported by Michotte and in other investigations (e.g., Heider and Simmel, 1944), the observers attribute not only causal relations to particular events but also, importantly, motivations (intentions) and emotions to the two or more moving shapes. The attribution of intention is not in any way affected by the fact that the agents are mere geometrical shapes. Apparently meaningless physical movements are assigned meaning by attributing intentionality (deliberateness) and causality to the moving figures. In further experiments, Michotte showed that even in situations contradicting real-world conditions, as when the objects involved are not real physical objects but mere spots of light or shadows, people still perceive causality (1946/1963, pp. 84–85). The ingenuity of these experiments consists in making visible causal events that have been traditionally assumed to be based on inference, that is, to be “invisible”. As Michotte has put it:

I quoted various examples in this connection, e.g. that of a hammer driving a nail into a plank, and that of a knife cutting a slice of bread. The question that arises is this: when we observe these operations, is our perception limited to the impression of two movements spatially and temporally coordinated, such as the advance of the knife and the cutting of the bread? Or rather do we directly perceive the action as such—do we actually see the knife cut the bread? The answer does not seem to me to admit of any doubt (Michotte, 1946/1963, p. 15).

As Michotte has demonstrated, the impression of purposeful intentional relations is thus surprisingly easy to obtain. In his experiments, the subjects often described the animated shapes that they saw by attributing intentions and emotions to the shapes and their movements. In another “launching” experiment, when a red ball approached and touched a blue ball, and the blue one started moving, people reported that the red ball “hit” the blue one.³ Similarly, Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel (1944) presented to subjects a short animated cartoon in which various geometrical shapes (a big triangle, a small triangle, and a circle) were moving inside a square, one side of which was at times left open. They asked their subjects to describe what they saw. Most observers developed elaborate stories about the shapes in which the attribution of intention was essential for interpreting the chain of events involving the respective shapes, but this intention was not the propositional attitude of analytic philosophy. They used descriptions such as “chase” and “capture”, which suggests that they saw intentional actions like pursuit, escape, and planning. In this sense it can be said again that the descriptions given are not at any point mere descriptions of physical movements; in the very perception of them as intentional actions, certain existential aspects of experience are already subsumed.⁴ Behavior is not mere movement, and we readily perceive it as a meaningful action, which means an intentional action, available to us not propositionally but perceptually.⁵ Importantly, actions are already invested with an evaluative judgement by the person observing or describing them. All this can be interpreted to suggest that both physical and psychological (intentional) causality can be directly perceived by the mind. How this relates to our understanding of other people’s actions and so-called “theory of mind” or “simulation” theories will be part of the discussion about construing and enacting narrative consciousness in Chapter Two. How this relates directly to narrative causality is discussed below.

Before I move on to describing the nature of event perception in the next section, I will briefly address some issues relating to alternative theories that have attempted to address the notion of cause and its significance for thought and language. More recent approaches, based on a premise of direct perception in visual processing that can be seen to present a kind of continuation of Michotte’s work, have been developed by Sverker Runesson and colleagues (Runesson and Frykholm, 1983).They do not, however, explore its implications for cognition, much less for narrative construal, which is my purpose in this chapter. A related view about the significance of the concept of cause is introduced by Talmy (1988), in which he examines cause in terms of patterns of forces and names the process “force dynamics”. Talmy identifies a comparable concept of force in distinct linguistic expressions, pertaining respectively to physical and other (psychological, social) kinds of forces, such as (1) The ball kept rolling despite the mud and (2) He must obey the rules. He also distinguishes in language what he describes as “force dynamic” and “force dynamic neutral” expressions, as in (3) She took part in the celebrations and (4) She refrained from taking part in the celebrations. Talmy’s influence on the study of the linguistic representation of events is significant, although it needs to be stressed that in his theory of “force dynamics” he gives priority to physical causation, on which other nonphysical (social, psychological) forms of causation are assumed to depend, and are therefore taken to be secondary. In that sense, Talmy’s is a physicalist theory of causation (as expressed in language), in which a basic physical causation, based on observed interactions of real physical objects, is then taken to serve as the model for less basic, secondary, in his view, varieties of causation (causality, in my terminology), such as social or psychological ones. This has developmental implications in that the ability to perceive physical causation is assumed to happen earlier in development than the ability to perceive psychological causation (or intentionality). This claim is also supported by Leslie (1994), who has proposed a “Theory of Bodies” that is responsible for understanding physical causation and predates a child’s “Theory of Mind”. On that view, and it is also the view of Talmy (1988), intention is a metaphorically understood physical force with causal powers. Michotte’s claims, on the other hand, go much further than that in describing human psychological propensities. Given a certain arrangement, a particular configuration in time and space, two events will always be seen as causally connected, and their interaction is best described as a meaningful action, even if the “agents” involved are simple inanimate objects. The most important point for our purposes here is Michotte’s position that causality is something we experience directly and that we find meaning in doing. We live our daily lives by finding connections between the objects and events we encounter, and we rarely, if ever, see the world as a succession of mere singularities or unrelated facts. As I will argue below, this constitutes a fundamental (albeit still rather basic) premise for the explanation of what narrative is and does for human thought and expression.

Unfortunately, Michotte never tested his results on children, and little can be said about how his proposal plays out in the early stages of development. I consider Michotte’s work on perceptually causality as fundamentally underlying some of Talmy’s later work on event representation and force dynamics. Moreover, Michotte’s work is specifically relevant in relation to broader notions of intentionality and causality, especially understood non-linguistically, whereas Talmy’s work remains largely language based. This is particularly significant, as Talmy’s work is currently more widely known in certain areas of cognitive science than Michotte’s. Importantly, as demonstrated in Michotte’s experiments, the impression of purposeful, intentional relations is automatic and firmly established between physical objects as well as between human agents. It can be argued, therefore, that psychological causality is not secondary to physical causality, particularly if our default way of being in the world is characterized by practical action. This is particularly true in relation to explanations of our own actions and the actions of others, as I will argue later in this chapter and in Chapter Two. As already noted, specifically in analytic philosophy, many have held it as obvious that our actions are caused by the beliefs and desires that motivate them (Davidson, 1980). Thus, the causal theory of actions explains an agent’s actions by revealing her hidden reasons (intentions) for those actions. Such a view derives from a Humean understanding of causality as an inferential hidden mental process and differs greatly from the non-mediated understanding of causality proposed by Michotte. This is because, as phenomenologists have argued, there is a basic level of intentionality at play here, namely, the intentionality of the human body itself (Gallagher and Zahavi, 2008).⁶ The felt deliberateness (intentionality) of human action has a direct link to volitional movement achieved through the body, so that actions can be performed, seen, and tuned to those of other people, giving rise to shared understanding and shared meaning. Along similar lines, it has been recently proposed by Gardenfors (2007) that a first-person experience of not only physical but also social and emotional force is more appropriately understood as power, and not as force, as suggested by Talmy. This is because first-person powers are directly experienced, and hence embodied, as opposed to third-person forces which are merely observed at a distance. Human agency is bodily-based and starts in awareness of the body as a power that can be intentionally directed and is therefore capable of intentional causality. In view of the primacy I ascribe to social cognition, as discussed in the introduction, and as espoused throughout this book, I consider the psychological (intentional) aspect of cause as experientially and therefore also as semantically prior to the physical. In most of what we do we are not guided by beliefs and propositional attitudes but by an embodied and intersubjectively constituted experience of agency. This comes as a consequence of Michotte’s experimental results and provides the foundation for my own understanding of narrative causality that will be developed further in this book.

In the context of the most recent views in cognitive science regarding the so-called embodied-embedded nature of the mind, it is intuitively sound to see causality and causal attribution, in the sense I have described, as fundamental organizational principles interfacing human perception, action, and even higher-order human reasoning.⁷ It is of crucial importance to understand that the perception of causality and the attribution of intentionality are of such importance for the mind because they are the invariants by which it can be seen to operate in distinct situations and contexts. Causality, the fact that causes and effects, ends and means, are understood as events that the human mind cannot help but link, is a prime example of one such invariant. If causal dependencies were not to some extent predictable and expected when observing and performing actions, if causality was not “directly lived”, as Michotte would put it, there would be no possibility for thought and action. My proposal, developed below, is that there would be no stories for people to tell either.

What the discussion so far has shown is that perceiving causal relationships can be understood as low-level perceptual processing, intrinsically meaningful and similar to gestalt-like perceptual organization. Importantly, it has shown that the attribution of intention is itself an automatic process of understanding the relation between events, when they are the result of real or assumed human action. To come back to the example mentioned earlier, the running child is calling for her mother because we cannot fail to perceive that she needs her urgently for a particular reason. In order to understand the action, we attribute intentionality to it, so that when a particular outcome follows, there is a causal link between intention, action, and outcome, that is, we have witnessed a particular causal interaction. Yet, contrary to much current opinion in psychology and cognitive science, such attribution of intention is probably not a top-down inferentially driven process but rather a direct perceptually generated one. As we have seen from Michotte’s experiments, given certain conditions, the perception of causality is automatic, unavoidable, and compelling. Human experience (both our own, and that of others) is meaningful because physical actions and movement reveal directly to an observer an underlying and intrinsic social dynamic which is not an end in itself but is then taken to connect to the next and subsequent meaningful action. By attributing agency (or, even, just animacy) and intentionality to the participants in any social exchange, the perception of causality is thus the link that gives meaning to social interactions.⁸ This is also what ...