Persons and Their Minds

Front matter

CULTURAL DYNAMICS OF SOCIAL REPRESENTATION

Persons and their Minds

Towards an Integrative Theory of the Mediated Mind

Contents

Introduction 1 The concepts of mind and person 2 The mind and the brain 3 The mind and the body 4 The mind and society 5 The mind and things 6 The mind between the brain and culture

References Index

Vil

Foreword

In a certain sense, this book has an almost impossible ambition: To articulate a general theory about persons and their minds in a single book. There are so many classical and modern ideas about what the human mind is that a full explanation and discussion could fill countless books. A book about the mind is therefore always a partial contribution to the existing corpus of ideas that needs to be understood in the historical and cultural context in which it is written. There is so much disagreement about what the mind is, how it should be studied and whether it even exists that you would end up with a very fragmented book on the subject if you did not find a specific perspective from which to analyze it. In this book I present just such a perspective; it does not, therefore, represent a neutral introduction to the subject. The book only indirectly provides an overview of theories and studies of the mind, and is, in a more direct sense, a specific theory of the mind, which also seeks to synthesize many diverse theories under the umbrella term of cultural psychology. One of the book’s ambitions is to show that many of these theories can coexist.

A first edition of the book was published in Danish in 2009, entitled The mind — between synapses and society, by Aarhus University Press. The manuscript has been thoroughly revised and expanded for the English-language version. I wish to thank Aarhus University Press for giving me full permission to develop the Danish manuscript into a longer and more comprehensive book in English, and Asher Ariel for help with translations. I would also like to thank Cecilie Eriksen, Jacob Klitmøller, Casper Larsen and anonymous reviewers for many helpful and relevant comments on the original manuscript. I am particularly grateful to Jaan Valsiner for inviting me to write a volume for the book series on the Cultural Dynamics of Social Representation. In recent years, Jaan has been an incredible source of inspiration for me as a scholar and colleague. As always, my greatest thank you goes to my family — Signe, Jens, Karl and Ellen — for coping so well with me through the years.

Taylor & Francis Taylor & Francis Group http://taylorandfrancis.com

Introduction

This book is about a phenomenon that on the surface seems like the most obvious and relevant thing for people, while at the same time it is perceived by many as one of the most mysterious and inaccessible to us — and this in spite of recent advances in modern science: the mind. On the one hand, the fact that we have a mind (whatever that means, which is the central question of this book), or that we are psychological beings, is a matter of course for us since we, as long as we are alive, have a mental life: We think, feel, act and dream, along with a host of other things that would reasonably be regarded as psychological processes. The fact that my limbs can move in specific ways is an expression of my physiological and anatomical characteristics, but the fact that they are moving because I want to achieve a specific objective with that movement (like writing a book by moving my fingers on the keyboard) is the expression of specific psychological capacities within me. Everything we do falls within the field of psychology (although not exclusively within this field, since neighbouring disciplines like sociology and anthropology are also relevant when studying human action), and the fact that we can do things intentionally is what justifies the assertion that we have a mind. That is why the mind, at first glance, is entirely obvious and continuously present for us.

On closer inspection, however, the mind has proven extremely difficult to examine scientifically, and the sciences that deal with the mind (psychology and psychiatry in particular) are full of controversial views that certainly are not obvious, including the notion that the mind does not even exist (as argued by eliminative materialists), that it can be reduced to processes in the brain (according to some neuroscientific theories), that it can be dissolved into social relations in its entirety (as some social constructionists have claimed), or that individuals do not have any privileged insight into their own mental and psychological lives (as the behaviourists say). In the book we will see examples of these and many other challenging, controversial and hopefully exciting ideas about the mind, which — if it exists — can reasonably be said to be the most complex phenomenon in the universe.

People are greatly interested in theories of the mind around the world. Psychology is one of the university subjects with the most applicants in many countries, and psychological knowledge is used almost everywhere in society where people are involved: in education, parenting, business, marketing, politics and many other fields (Brinkmann, 2008a). Popular science books on all sorts of psychological phenomena, from self-esteem to psychopathy, are being read like never before, and self-help books that encourage the use of psychological techniques like coaching, self-improvement and therapy, are among the best-sellers (Brinkmann, 2017). Much of the current discourse on the mind is marked by almost religious language, which recommends that you “find yourself’ and “develop yourself”, but, almost paradoxically, nearly as much of the discourse is marked by a scientific way of thinking. Books about brain research and the effects of genetics on behaviour are read with great interest today and they stand side by side on bookstore shelves with New Age-inspired self-improvement literature. We have many different conceptions of the mind these days, which are all far from compatible, but which affect the way we understand ourselves to varying degrees. This book seeks to create a language of the mind that enables the integration of some of the actual portrayals of the mind that can and should be integrated, but which at the same time allows for rejection of the numerous portrayals that are unproductive, distorted or patently wrong.

One false portrayal depicts the mind as a disembodied object, which is based in, or which can be directly identified with, the human “inner world”. This portrayal plays a major role, for example, when we imagine that we each possess an “inner self” or an “inner potential” that can and should be realized both at work and in our private lives. Whereas this portrayal is associated with some semi-religious conceptions, where psychology acts as a kind of secularized religion and where the Christian notion of a disembodied soul is merely replaced by a psychological notion of a disembodied self, another equally false portrayal is more often associated with modern science. This is the portrayal of the mind as simply an aspect of the brain. In recent years, confidence levels in the results of brain research and their importance for psychology and psychiatry have been extreme (see Chapter 2). This book in no way rejects modern brain research, but raises serious doubts about the current imperialistic colonization of brain research that we are witnessing today in the fields of psychology, psychiatry, culture, science and even ethics and theology. One goal of this book is to put brain research in its rightful place among the many types of research that are needed to understand the mind. But it belongs in only one place among the many.

This book is about the human mind as a product of nature/biology and culture/ society, respectively. My own scientific background is in philosophy and psychology, which literally means the science (logos) of the mind (psyche). There has been a distinct ideological conflict between perspectives from biology and society — or between the brain and culture — in scientific psychology in recent years. The central message of the book is that there is no contradiction between the biological investigation of the neural basis for the mind (brain) and the societal imprinting of the mind (culture and social practices). Consequently, I try to develop a comprehensive and coherent understanding of the mind that is explicitly multidisciplinary, and which implies that neuroscientists and cultural anthropologists, for example — or scientists and humanists more generally — should not be regarded as being in opposition to one another, but should instead be seen as each having a grasp on the two sides of the hybrid phenomenon that we call the mind (this is argued in Brinkmann, 2011b; 2012, which together comprise some of the background research for this book). Although my point of view is broad, inclusive and pluralistic, the book is not neutral in its position — far from it. The book attempts to show that two approaches to the mind in particular are flawed: The first is the mentalistic approach, which says that the mind is a world in its own right and that it can be studied independently from the brain, body and culture. Mentalism is the view that there are self-contained mental states (e.g. beliefs or emotions) that underlie human actions — that there is a dualism between the mind and the world, and that there is an external relation between mental states and observable actions, such that private mental states cause the actions that other people can see.

Mentalism can be traced back to the philosopher René Descartes (1596—1650), who believed that the mind was a thinking thing — an independently existing metaphysical realm — which was connected to a living organism almost only by chance. For Descartes the mind was a substance, a kind of medium for the metaphysical soul. Although there are practically no psychologists and philosophers who adhere to Descartes’ form of mentalism today, mentalism has nevertheless survived in many newer guises and it is often seen, paradoxically enough, among researchers who explicitly criticize Descartes — certain materialists, for example, who believe that everything in existence must be understood in terms of physical matter. Some of them can be criticized for being “neural Cartesians”, since they may well have killed Descartes’ idea of the mind as an independent metaphysical realm, but at the same time they have retained his idea that the psychological realm is an inner, private world, which is now merely believed to exist in the brain and not as a substance of the soul (Coulter & Sharrock, 2007, p. 11). Other psychological researchers in the cognitive science tradition (Gardner, 1987) also perpetuate mentalism by operating with a theory of the mind as inner, mental representations that are sought to be understood in separation from the world they represent.

The second overarching approach that this book is critical of is the impending reductionism that we have seen in recent years in psychology, where brain research in particular is experiencing rapid growth. In very general terms, the reductionist approach argues that “A is nothing but B”. Reductionism may well be a legitimate approach in certain fields. For example, I think it is reasonable to make the following reduction: “Crystal healing is nothing but an activity that exploits the placebo effect”. But when it comes to the relationship between the brain and the mind in general, I think it is a misguided approach. I would argue, for example, that one would be mistaken to say that “psychological processes are nothing but electricity in a pattern of synapses,” although I do not doubt that neural activity is a necessary condition for the existence of psychological processes as such.

My pluralistic and anti-reductionist perspective has not simply been conjured up out of thin air, but is mainly based on the thinking about the mind that has developed in the wake of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s (1889-1951) philosophy. Wittgenstein, who was undoubtedly among the most important thinkers of the twentieth century, dealt intensively with the philosophy of psychology and was highly critical of the psychology of his day because he did not think that its experiments answered the basic conceptual problems that plagued the science. This book is not a thorough interpretation of Wittgenstein’s philosophy, nor of the specific part of his philosophy that relates to the mind, but is instead based more on the insights that some of Wittgenstein’s more recent successors have developed in the fundamental thinking about the mind.! I would highlight three researchers in particular that are crucial to the perspective developed in this book: Peter Hacker, Rom Harré and Jeff Coulter.2 They come from a philosophical, psychological and sociological research environment, respectively, which is completely in line with the multidisciplinary approach of this book. In recent years, all three of them have used Wittgenstein’s thinking as a springboard, in part to criticize mentalism and mind-brain reductionism, but also to develop more constructive suggestions for what modern thinking about the mind should look like. Harré and Coulter have also been involved in empirical research, and Harré in particular has been constructive and not just critical; he has developed what he calls a “hybrid psychology”, which, like this book, seeks to integrate the neural and the cultural in an understanding of the mind that does not end in a case of reductionism (Harré & Moghaddam, 2012).

In addition, the American pragmatist John Dewey (1859-1952) and the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky (1896—1934) are important sources of inspiration for this book’s arguments, and the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908-1961) also plays a certain role. The book, like its sources of inspiration, is multidisciplinary and the reader should therefore not expect a book about psychology in the traditional sense. The book is more precisely about the mind, where a psychological angle is just one of many, and where philosophy in particular is also brought into play. I give many examples from psychology throughout the book, but the book is not intended as an introduction to psychology’s many areas, such as clinical psychology and personality psychology. Rather, it is an attempt to define what the mind is, and it thus represents a philosophically inspired general psychology, closely aligned with cultural psychology, which I see as the most sophisticated and philosophically mature version of contemporary psychology (Valsiner, 2014). I share with many cultural psychologists a distrust of a reification of the mind and also a wish to put the concept of the person at centre stage in the discipline of psychology. The book is thus called Persons and their Minds to underline the fact that minds are skills and dispositions of persons, the latter being psychologically fundamental (Harré, 2016).

The book’s basic idea, to which I continually return and reveal the implications of, is that the mind as a concept refers to a range of abilities and dispositions of living human beings and not to any particular “thing” attached to persons. A widespread metaphysical preconception is that what something “is” is identical to what it is “made of” (Coulter & Sharrock, 2007, p. ix). This may apply when we talk about phenomena like water, which we all know is “made of” water molecules, each of which consists of two hydrogen atoms and one oxygen atom. But if we transfer this metaphysical concept to the mind, we can easily end up saying strange things such as “the mind is the brain.” If the mind, however, is not a thing but rather a range of abilities and dispositions (to think, feel and act), then we avoid this conclusion because these abilities cannot be attributed to the brain in a meaningful way. The brain does not think, nor does it feel or act. Only human persons, or creatures that act like humans in required ways such as some non-human animals, can meaningfully be said to think, feel and act. Naturally, they could not do so without their brains, but that does not mean that their brains are performing these activities. Similarly, you cannot drive a car without an engine, but that does not mean that it is the engine that is driving. The book attempts to describe some consequences of this insight, which seems so simple at first glance.

The idea of this book is that we need a number of very different levels of analysis in order to understand our abilities and dispositions — and thereby understand our mind. I highlight the brain, the body, society’s social practices and things/ technologies as being relevant analytical dimensions for understanding the human mind. None of these levels can stand alone, and, in principle, none of them can be dispensed with either. If you imagine an everyday phenomenon such as a group of schoolchildren building a bridge in order to learn practical mathematics, there is a huge amount of psychological processes involved. The most important among them is that the children have the intention to build the bridge. But they can have such an intention only provided that they have brains that function in certain ways. They also have to have bodies with which to act in the physical world and realize their intentions. They also have to be able to work together, so that when one of them acts, the others respond accordingly in a social context. The children are also standing on the shoulders of the traditions of mathematics, education, building bridges and cooperation, whether they are conscious of it or not. And, finally, the children are also in a world of things; these are in part physical things, including the materials that the bridge will be built from, with all of the possibilities and limitations that these things entail for the children’s realization of their goal, but also things that have semantic content, such as the books that the children can consult to get ideas for the construction of the bridge. At first glance it seems to be a simple psychological event — wanting to build a bridge — but it turns out that it depends on a wide variety of conditions such as brains, bodies, social relationships and culture as well as physical objects. That is the main thesis of this book: that this complexity applies to the mind in its own right as well as to all mental phenomena.

The book begins with a chapter that provides some background knowledge about the key concepts of the person and especially the mind. In this context, I also touch on some of the history behind the ideas that underlie the contemporary investigation of the mind. This is probably the most difficult chapter, since it describes lengthy and complicated historical developments in a very condensed format. The reader may want to skip this chapter initially and then return to it after having read the remaining chapters. Next, I focus on the four analytical levels, which consist of the brain, the body, society’s social practices and things and which also constitute the book’s four central chapters (2, 3, 4 and 5). In Chapter 2, which discusses the brain, I work from the premise that the brain is a necessary organ for a psychological life to exist, but I argue at the same time that the mind cannot be said to end at the skull — and that the mind’s location therefore cannot be restricted to the brain. Chapter 3 expands the boundaries of the mind, so that the psychological realm can also be said to include the body as a central component. In recent years, this has been investigated in particular by phenomenologists of the body, based on the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. But not even the body’s skin forms the boundary for where the mind ends, because a complex psychological life also requires certain social practices and relations, certain forms of human sociality — or society in the literal sense (“society” comes from Latin societas “fellowship, association, alliance, union, or community,” from socius “companion” — which contributes to shaping the abilities and dispositions that constitute the mind. Social practices, including family and community life, are the subject of Chapter 4, which is based in particular on current theories in cultural psychology. Next, in Chapter 5, I argue that not even a pure, intersubjective sociality (“society”) marks the boundaries of the mind, because to fully understand the mind we also have to include the things and technologies that surround us. Most mental abilities and dispositions are possible only because we as people avail ourselves of tools, artefacts and other material objects (everything from reading glasses and alphabets to personal computers), which therefore become essential for the sophisticated forms of mental life that we humans have developed. The book’s perspective in this regard comes close to the point of view of modern theoretical psychology called externalism — which means that the mind, in a certain sense, is something “external” and does not exist solely inside people’s heads (Noé, 2009). Man is a tool- and technology-using species, so the notion that we are cyborgs, whose lives depend on things and technologies, is not just a distant vision of the future. We have been this way since the Stone Age.

The argument, then, is that we should not look for a “boundary” within which the mind can be confined (not the skull, skin, community or material objects) because the mind — as a range of abilities and dispositions — is understandable only if we include every level: the brain, the body, society and things. The mind is “spread out” over all of these levels. A metaphor for the mind could be an onion that you can peel without ever finding the core. We cannot find the mind as a “thing” by peeling away analytical layers and, for example, ending up looking into the brain, because the mind is simply not a thing. But neither is it nothing, which is also an important point for the book’s rejection of reductionism. The concept of the person emerges as the necessary connection point between the different layers. Mental phenomena belong irreducibly to persons and not to any of the layers or tools that persons use in living their lives. Chapter 6 summarizes the arguments that back this up and outlines a “hybrid psychology” with inspiration from Harré in particular, which, as a science, is intended to involve the brain, the body, society and things when the mind is investigated. The final Chapter 7 applies the theory to mental disorders and develops a way of thinking about the psychological problems that humans face from time to time in their lives.

Notes

1 For works that specifically deal with Wittgenstein’s philosophical psychology, reference can be made to Budd (1989) and Harré and Tissaw (2005).

2 See (Bennett & Hacker, 2003; Coulter, 1979; 1989; Coulter & Sharrock, 2007; Hacker, 2007; Harré, 1998; 2002).

Chapter |

When we reflect on the psychological concepts in our language, ordinary language should have, if not the last word, then at least the first word, as the philosopher John Austin said. In this context, it is interesting that the word “mind” is actually not very commonly used in ordinary language. When the term is used, it is often in a context where we are talking about people’s difficulties. We can talk about people having “psychological problems” and we understand what is meant by “a fragile mind” (and of course “a strong mind” as well), but only rarely do we talk about the fact that “thinking is a mental process” or that “the mind can be confined to the brain”. In that sense, both “mind” and “mental” are scientific and semi-technical words. In this book’s perspective, this means that we should be wary when theorizing or constructing scientific models of “the mind”. What is it exactly that we are theorizing about and constructing models of? This is particularly important when dealing with the sciences that examine human experiences and actions, because if the results produced by these sciences cannot be traced back to something that is literally meaning ful for the people who are the subject of the research, then there is reason to doubt the legitimacy and validity of the research altogether.

This differs from the natural sciences, where there is no requirement that theories about quarks and superstrings need to mean something to so-called “ordinary people”. But if psychologists tell people that they (psychologists) have discovered that feelings are something completely different than what we thought they were, then there is good reason to doubt that it is actually feelings that these psychologists have discovered something about. Again, as mentioned in the introduction: the psychological realm is something that is “close” to us and something we are all familiar with, so there is a limit to how ground-breaking the “discoveries” made by the sciences that study the mind can actually be. That is not to say that you cannot discover anything new about the mind, but even Freud’s (1856—1939) psychoanalysis, which was very revolutionary and shocking to many people’s understanding of the self, had to draw upon terms taken from ordinary language (“feeling”, “sexuality”, “dream”, etc.) in order to be formulated, and psychoanalysts have to use such terms extensively in the same way as the terms are used in everyday language for the theory to be at all meaningful. This is an absolutely fundamental point, and it means that the sciences of the mind and psychology must always have a perspective from “within” human existence — at least in part. There are limits to how far the sciences of the mind can be from recognizable and everyday matters (from what is sometimes referred to as “folk psychology”) before these sciences are no longer about what they intended to be about at the outset. For example, it is perfectly legitimate and necessary to study the importance of the brain for the mind, but if this leads to psychological concepts and explanations from everyday life being replaced by more “scientific” neurological concepts and explanations, then you quickly end up in a situation where you are no longer talking about something psychological. As we shall see in the next chapter, this is the problem with what is known as “eliminative materialism’, a philosophical position which, among other things, aims to replace our vocabulary from “folk psychology” with a more “scientific” vocabulary. The achievement of this aim would mean that, for example, instead of saying “it hurts” we should say “my C-fibres are stimulated”. One of the problems with this is the fact that it is not interesting for the person who was hurt that his C-fibres are stimulated as such — rather, what is interesting is that his finger was hit by a hammer and it hurts!

However, terms like “mind” and “consciousness” are more common in everyday language than “psyche”. The latter term is older and virtually synonymous with the term “mind” and I will use them interchangeably throughout the book. “Psychological state” can be translated into “state of mind”, and the slightly outdated “sentiment” translates into “emotion”, which is a more modern psychological term for what we call feelings in everyday language. The term “consciousness” is a bit different. “Consciousness” is probably more widespread in ordinary language than “mind” (for example in questions such as “is he conscious?”). There is a branch of philosophy that we call “philosophy of mind” in English, and this term is often translated into other languages as “philosophy of consciousness”. In Danish it is thus “bevidsthedsfilosofi”. The philosophy of consciousness has become a major and important area in international philosophy, and there is also great interest in consciousness research within the fields of psychology and neuroscience. But even though the concept of consciousness is closely related to the concept of the mind, it cannot replace it. The most obvious reason is that not all psychological phenomena are conscious, although there may be grounds for considering that they must potentially be conscious in order for us to be able to correctly classify them as psychological. All phenomena of consciousness are psychological, but not all mental phenomena are conscious, which means that the concept of the mind is broader than the concept of consciousness. The human ability to solve complex problems, for example, is an ability that can be said to belong to the mind (and thus rightfully studied by psychology), and this is true regardless of whether problem solving is done consciously or not. Not all forms of problem solving are conscious in the sense of involving experiences of certain qualities (or qualia), and the concept of problem solving is not an experiential concept, but a normative concept in that it is about solving problems correctly. Consciousness is not, however, a normative concept, but an experiential concept; it is about what we experience and what we are aware of. The distinction between the normative and the experiential disciplines of psychology is elaborated in further detail below. For the time being we can say that the term “consciousness” refers specifically to our awareness and our ability to perceive the world, whereas the term “mind” also refers to all sorts of other ways of being in the world that are not necessarily directly related to perception and experience, but which instead have to do with acting or thinking, for example.

A third term that I have already used, which is related to “mind” and “consciousness”, is the “mental”. One can talk about “the mental realm” as akin to “the mind”. In principle, this book could have used this term in its title, but it is not as flexible, linguistically speaking, since it does not work very well as a noun (it is reasonable to speak of “the mind”, but “mentality” doesn’t really work all too well). That is why I ended up using the term “mind”, which has the disadvantage of being somewhat abstract and technical, but which in turn is broad enough to capture what this book is really about.

Like so many other words, the term “mind” has a predecessor in the ancient Greek in the form of psyche. In Greek mythology, Psyche (from the Greek psukhé meaning soul or breath of life) is a goddess who is married to the probably more well-known god of love, Eros. The goddess Psyche personifies the soul and is depicted as a woman with butterfly wings. Psyche and Eros had a daughter together named Hedone, who is the goddess of pleasure. We have an interesting Greek family of gods representing the soul, love and pleasure, and the first-mentioned lent her name to the human mind or psyche. It is thought-provoking that pleasure is an offspring of the soul and love: It is love that gives rise to pleasure and not the other way round. Incidentally, however, Psyche was not born a goddess, but was a princess whose beauty could compare with Aphrodite’s (the goddess of beauty).