More Than I Appear

TACIT INFERENCE: THE KNOWLEDGE OF OTHER MINDS

“When it does allow its counter to show, it chooses the right partner to know.” The Gates Will Always Be Open For You

The central question, of course, is just how will the right partner know? Since she has not explicitly told him of her intentions, how will he know her “counter” when she allows it to show? In other words, how will he be able to “read her mind?” The knowledge of “other minds” is an interesting problem in philosophical psychology, one in relation to which I myself have considerable knowledge. Let me share it with you.

We have already seen that in formal logic knowledge claims may be based on either deductive inference (“All men are mortal; Socrates is a man; Therefore Socrates is mortal”) and inductive inference, knowledge through “constant conjunction” (I know that the sun will rise tomorrow morning since it has done so countless times in the past). But clearly, such feats of formal logic are defeated by – indeed are irrelevant to – the present case, that of the knowledge of other minds. But where to start?

You are now reading this comment, attempting to understand its meaning. You do not focus on the words themselves but – and this is central – you attend “away” from the words themselves to focus on the meaning they are intended to convey. Put in epistemological terms, there is a from-to structure involved in your attempt to acquire knowledge of the meaning of this comment. But what is the nature of this structure?

It is the bi-polar structure of subsidiary-focal awareness. Your subsidiary awareness is not itself explicit. Indeed, if you directed your focal attention on the words themselves all meaning would be destroyed in the same way that the pianist’s performance would be destroyed if he directed his focal attention on the position of his fingers on the keyboard. In the same way that his focal attention is directed on the performance, yours is directed on the meaning of this comment. What is this structure of knowing called? It is called “tacit inference” and its structure functions in all noetic acts, including the knowledge of other minds. But what are the characteristics of such tacit inference?

We saw, as with the pianist, that focal attention can never be directed on the subsidiaries of subsidiary focal awareness without destroying “the tacit integration.” Put in general terms, this means that tacit inference is unspecifiable. One can never specify the particulars of a tacit integration. In the same way, all tacit integrations are irreversible – one can never attend from the focal object of tacit inference back towards its subsidiary particulars. The pianist can never attend from his performance back to the position of his fingers on the keyboard. Finally, being unspecifiable and irreversible, tacit inference, unlike deductive and inductive inference, can never be the formulated of in impersonal rules. It is what has been called “personal knowledge.” But, and this is important, it is not relativistic. Such personal knowledge is proclaimed with universal intent and never simply as idiosyncratic knowledge, some personal idiosyncracy of the knower.

So now we know. When the poster has chosen to show her counter to the right partner, he will know. He will know because, in an act of tacit inference, he relied subsidiarily on her actions of showing her counter while focusing on her intentions. In so doing he will have gained knowledge of her mind, in this case that of the poster whose gates will always be open for him.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

A pleasure as always.

Cheerio!

MY “CRYSTAL PALACE IN MONTREAL,” OR: THE BIG QUESTION

RSVP Klyde (05/08, 7:05PM)

“But you sitting in your crystal palace in Montreal, you only know that our words are without substance, value or meaning.”

Since my “crystal palace in Montreal” was invoked to demonstrate my misconceiving the genuine quality of your interactions with all the bitchers in the past as well as Monstercock and Ivan the Terrible, it deserves a moment of closer scrutiny. What, exactly, is to be understood by that “crystal palace”?

Based of necessity only on your written words and lacking thereby a fully-rounded appreciation of your face-to-face interactions with the other bitchers, I interpret the “crystal palace” to mean my necessarily thin, attenuated and even possibly overly-cerebral interpretation of those interactions. There can be no doubt that this is the case but, as I previously pointed
out, passing on the quality of your interactions, genuine or otherwise, was never my point. What was my point?

It was philosophical, an investigation of the nature of tacit inference in connection with the knowledge of other minds. In view of the fact that formal inference (whether deductive or inductive) on the the hand and direct, unmediated and unerring intuition on the other, tacit inference appears to be the only coherent contender for the manner in which knowledge of other minds is possible. But even tacit inference, with its tacit-focal components, has itself a further tacit dimension. But can that tacit foundation underlying the tacit-focal structure of tacit inference possibly be?

It is the nature of consciousness itself. But then this raises the question of the nature of consciousness itself. What is the thing or, for that matter, is it a “thing” at all? In philosophy this has always been “the big question.” How has a non-material mind emerged from its material basis in the brain? Attempts by neurophysiology to explain the phenomenon have failed for the simple reason that, being a study of material brain-states, it can never engage either the genesis or the activity of the non-material mind. So of necessity it falls to philosophy, that study pre-eminently concerned with the activity of the mind, to engage the question of consciousness itself. But how is this to be done?

Recall that on a previous bitch I made a comment entitled “The Centrality of Structure.” To understand consciousness, in other words, required that it be structured in some fashion. But by “consciousness” is not to be understood some undifferentiated, passive state of simple awareness. On the contrary, to be conscious means – yes means – that one is conscious of something and not of something else. Consciousness is therefore selective, intentional and vectorial. It is aimed at understanding something. It is not random. But how is such intentionality to be structured?

Yes, that’s right! It is to be structured in terms of subsidiary-focal awareness! We are never just conscious of something “simpliciter”. We are conscious of something as being of a particular sort of thing and the sort of thing it is is dependent on our subsidiary or background awareness of what that thing is. In other words, consciousness involves seeing something under an aspect, of conceptualizing it. There can be no consciousness without such conceptualization. This true of all conscious acts. So this was my tacit point underlying my account of the tacit inference required in the act of acquiring knowledge of other minds.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Go Habs Go!

A pleasure as always.

Cheerio!