Stephen Yablo, Aboutness (Princeton University Press, 2014)

I have been thinking about ‘aboutness’ for a while. I bring it up when discussing students’ essays. (My point is usually that there are lots of ways in which literature can be ‘about’ things, and they need careful handling.) It is partially broached in one of this blog’s earliest forays, and it is pivotal here, where I consider the ways in which poems might encounter, and/or reveal, what they are really about.
      I had been looking forward to reading Yablo’s book, because I hoped a head-on approach to the idea might help. I think the difficulty of describing ‘What Literature Knows About Your Brain’ lies mostly in the problem of ‘knowledge’ but partly in the problem of ‘about’. The book was helpful and interesting, perhaps mostly in revealing the differences between my way of thinking, and that of a philosopher of language whose goal is to assess how much subject matter is part of the truthfulness of statements.

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Let’s take three illustrative examples of the kind of thing Yablo wants to deal with. He wants to deal with sentences such as ‘Maine is Prosperous’, where as well as being about Maine, and true of Maine, the sentence is also about New England, and true at least about a part of New England. He wants to deal with sentences like ‘I watched her drift slowly out to sea, until she became a dot on the horizon’ (an example taken from Saul Kripke), which ‘taken at face value, seems incomprehensible’, but nevertheless has some truth, and some aboutness. He also wants to deal with hypothetical scenarios, like one posited by Nelson Goodman and Joseph Ullian, in which testimony in court is (i) about the defendant, and (ii) false, but which (the lawyer claimed) (iii) was not false about the defendant.
      In all these cases, and many others, Yablo develops an account of how subject-matter, ‘aboutness’, is connected to the truth contained in sentences. It took me a little while to realise (this is how naïve I am in the face of philosophical rigour) how insistently Yablo was attending to the sentences in themselves, and not to what hearers or readers might make of them. He helpfully pointed this out, distinguishing himself from , where the emphasis is on how a communication is received, processed, understood. It seemed to me that understanding literature tends to, and perhaps needs to, incorporate the reception of words, and their strange lives in the world, as well as their inherent meaningfulness, truthfulness, and/or aboutness.

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The three examples cited above can help me illustrate what I mean, and I would like to suggest ways in which they open up (very slightly) possible ways of getting at ‘What Literature Knows About Your Brain’. These offer a partial response to some of the fascinating and challenging issues Emily Troscianko brought up in her recent post. The scepticism she encourages in relation to some claims about the benefits of reading literature is important and necessary. But here I am going to suggest that it may have an affinity with an emphasis on the inherent meaningfulness and aboutness of literary works, that parallels Yablo’s way of thinking. So, with that in mind, here are some other ways of looking at Yablo’s examples.

(i) The testimony which is false, and about the defendant, but not false about the defendant.
It is not difficult to think of circumstances in which this could work. A witness offers a mistaken and mendacious account of events in which a bit-part played by the defendant happens to be true; or, a witness tells an untrue story that nevertheless conveys the truth about the defendant (that he is a thief, for example). What catches my attention here, more than it would Yablo I think, is the allowance that the truth might emerge indirectly. Literature, after all, is false in its own way, and yet can be about real things, and can tell the truth about real things. Like the mind, perhaps.
      I have been mulling over this formula, with uncertain results. Waiting for Godot, for example, is not a truthful representation of anything, and it is not about the society we live in, and yet it might be true about the world we live in. King Lear is not about the psychology of the aging brain, nor is it a true story, and yet it may have truth to tell about the psychology of the aging brain. I find the of these statements suggestive, but I am not sure what to do with it.

(ii) I watched her drift slowly out to sea, until she became a dot on the horizon.
As we saw above, Yablo, following Kripke, invites us to recognise that this is incomprehensible at literal face value. How could she become a dot? I have no quarrel with this within the realm of logic, but I think the ‘face value’ scenario is an unreal one. In reality, nearly anyone encountering this sentence would find it perfectly transparent, to the extent that its figurative components are a kind of ‘face value’. We are good at not taking ‘became’ to mean ‘literally turned into’, and ‘dot’ to mean ‘a dot’ rather than ‘the vanishing point state of any distant or receding object’. It’s interesting, I think, to keep track of where the Oxford English Dictionary determines that a figurative use has become a usage accepted enough to earn its place. In the case of ‘become’ and ‘dot’ there isn’t anything along the lines I am suggesting, but (especially in the case of ‘dot’) there could be. Here too the interest might be in the lucidity of misdirection, the intuitive ease with which logic-challenging sentences can be navigated.

(iii) Maine is prosperous.
The dryness of the broadened meanings brought in by Yablo made me think of further things this statement could be about. I was drawn towards the sort of scenarios written by Relevance Theorists, in which processes of inference put statements into contexts that give them meaning. For some reason it took cinematic form.

Exterior: a smart, neat, small, shop, the sign saying ‘Murdoch’s Wine Shop, Bringing The Best To The People Of Vermont, Est. 2007’. In the window, a hand-written sign saying ‘Reduced: Zind-Humbrecht Gewurztraminer ONLY $29.95’. There is one car outside. Things seem quiet.
Interior: a couple behind the counter. The man is earnest, calm. The woman is tense. A customer comes in, checks several price tags, exits.
WOMAN: Maine is prosperous.
The man sighs.

The point is that we might infer that the woman’s statement is really about the economic fortunes of the wine shop, which might be improved by a move, or a recognition that Vermont is not the place for it. We take it that the man knows exactly what she means. Nothing in the sentence itself conveys this, of course, and this case I have outlined is far beyond the allowance that the statement could also be ‘about’ New England. My point is again that outside the logician’s severe restrictions, it proves possible to discover aboutness and truth in contingent, emergent ways.

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I think this is in some way a response to scepticism in and preceding Emily Troscianko’s post. It is also a concession (a predictable one) in relation to ‘What Literature Knows About Your Brain’. The ‘aboutness’ and the ‘truth’ are not always or often going to arise at the explicit level, in the kind of sentences Yablo is concerned with. They will arise at moments where (for example) something is untrue in general but true about something particular; where something that offers no truth at the literal level nevertheless strikes us all as true; where something becomes meaningful in a context that has to be supplied from somewhere else. The outcome may be quite compelling but it will certainly be hard to summarise; it might resonate widely but it will not readily take the form of a general rule. This does not disallow the possibility that a work of literature may tell the truth about what it is about, but it broadens some possibilities.

There are, no doubt, many places in the philosophy of literature where I could refine my thinking about these issues. In the end I don’t think I have the philosophical training or temperament to do Aboutness justice. But it proved very suggestive.

In this post and the next I will be revisiting the definitions of both ‘know’ and ‘about’ in this blog’s title. This week’s thought arose unexpectedly in the course of some other reading.

I am one of the editors of The Cambridge Quarterly. Founded in 1965, it is soon going to reach its 50th birthday. Ahead of this, I have been reading dozens of past articles, in order to get a sense of where we came from, and what this might suggest about where to go next. One of the pieces I read was an interview with Jerome McGann, author of, amongst other things, . The article is a transcript of McGann’s conversation with Steven Earnshaw and Philip Shaw, and it comes with an introduction by my fellow editor Geoff Ward. One of the questions Earnshaw asks is, ‘what distinguishes, in your view, literary knowledge from other types of knowledge?’. McGann’s reply struck a chord.

Scientific knowledge is committed to conceptualisation. Its paradigm form for us is the replicatable experiment. That means that it’s at once very abstract as a form of knowledge, and highly concrete as a form of replicated activity. Poetry in a certain sense is the opposite of this. To me, it has to be physical, poetry is – even if you don’t speak it out loud – something that you get in your ears, your mouth, lips, and it’s best, it seems to me, if you, as a teacher of poetry, get people to recite it, and physicalise the language. That’s ‘the aesthetic’ of poetry, literally physical or sensory, sensible. So knowledge in poetry is always coming through at the level of experience rather than at the level of concept. Insofar as concepts are in poetry they are there in highly concrete forms. (‘An Interview with Jerome McGann’, Cambridge Quarterly, 22 (1993), 355-369)

This neatly captures something I’ve been fumbling towards. What particularly attracts me is a kind of in the way McGann contrasts, but also brings together, science and literature. Where one pursues an abstract form of knowledge by asking concrete questions, the other pursues a concrete form of knowledge by asking abstract questions; or, one poses a set of concrete questions in order to acquire knowledge in an abstract form, while the other poses a set of abstract questions in order to acquire knowledge in a concrete form.
      I don’t think this chiastic way of setting it out works perfectly. What is meant by ‘concrete’ and ‘abstract’ isn’t consistent enough. Also, a possible reversal like this doesn’t mean that any two approaches, or the kinds of knowledge they enable, are equivalent in any way at all. Nevertheless, when it comes to the mind, I think the chiasmus works pretty well. Both the abstract and the concrete have their advantages and their drawbacks, as processes and outcomes. We get something from both. I also think that the affinity that follows from this intimate, tightly-turned contrast, is real. In literature and in science there is a need to work with particulars and with the principles we might extract from them.

GUEST CONTRIBUTOR
This post is by Emily Troscianko.
Emily is a Junior Research Fellow in Modern Languages at St John’s College, Oxford. She works on ‘cognitive realism’ in French and German Realist and Modernist literature, and has recently started to move in the direction of the medical humanities, with a project on eating disorders and literature. Her monograph Kafka’s Cognitive Realism came out with Routledge this spring.

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On 15 May Patricia Waugh gave a lecture at the British Academy entitled ‘Fiction as Therapy: Towards a Neo-Phenomenological Theory of the Novel’. Her argument was that prose may be Prozac – especially for people who are, at least figuratively, on Prozac. Waugh’s work on literature, science, and philosophy has taken in explorations of empathy and other emotions in the literary context, on the body in Modernism and Postmodernism, and on the self and dualism. She has recently also published specifically on (mainly Damasio) so this talk was a natural development of her emerging cognitive interests.
      The argument was sitting, if you like, on a three-legged stool, and all three legs seemed to me a bit rickety.
      The first necessary premise was that readers engage with fiction – or at least are able to engage, though by the end of the talk this had slipped more into ought to engage – with a willingness to let their normal ways of cognitive storytelling be challenged. The idea is that when we read we’re able to switch off the usual comforting cacophony of cognitive biases, and let ourselves be therapeutically dislocated and disturbed.
      The second plank was that fiction is an effective prompt for this kind of self-unsettlement and its potential culmination in some kind of enlightenment.
      And thirdly, fiction is a better prompt for self-questioning and hence insight (into self and others) than actual therapy.

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So that’s the basic idea; but what was the proposed mechanism? It boiled down to getting over transparency. Assuming transparency where it isn’t is (for Waugh) a Cartesian mistake. Descartes was wrong to think that the self looks into itself, sees / understands itself first, and only then looks out and understands other things. That, says Waugh, is what we’re doing when we have therapy and think we can transparently introspect. And it’s what fiction can show us the error of our ways about. If we read with a dual focus on the content and the form; if we read – and writers write – at once naively and sentimentally, then fiction can be a form of therapy. A meta-therapy: a therapy for all the therapies that tell us to look within if we want to find ourselves, one that allows us to discover the fact that the transparency / opacity distinction we normally make in relation to our access to self / others is false.
      Language, then, and specifically the language of fiction, has the power to direct our attention on to the stories we normally tell ourselves, hence honing our emotional intelligence and providing a ‘rigorous workout for the mind’. It doesn’t matter that the authors in question have almost never read the relevant psychology that would allow them to set up these kinds of effects deliberately, because they manage to ‘get it right’ before science cottons on.
      Some of these elements are familiar. Martha Nussbaum has resolutely fought the self-improvement corner (see the piece by Heather McRobie here); Lisa Zunshine has the mental-workout claim; Jonah Lehrer has argued the Proust was a Neuroscientist angle; and criticising Descartes is pretty much the cognitive literary dress code. However, the way Waugh put the various elements together causes serious problems.

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As with Nussbaum’s optimistic proclamations about literature as a source of improvement, the first one is idealism. What evidence do we actually have that 1) readers approach the act of reading with an open-minded readiness to let their assumptions be challenged, and that 2) if they do, fiction is good at doing the challenging? There’s a distinct lack of empirical research on the subject of readers’ reasons for reading, or attitudes towards reading, but two major reasons to read are likely to be for escapism and for relaxation, neither of which at all fits the bill here.
      There is evidence, though, that in terms of Americans’ current reading preferences, genre fiction beats ‘literary’ fiction hands down – and much genre fiction is all about satisfying reader expectations. As for fictional effects, certainly the evidence that fiction does in fact bring about changes in how we think or engage with others is patchy (you can read Greg Currie on this here), and tends at most to be indicative of a temporary improvement in, say, some aspect of social cognition. Pertinent papers include and ; the issue has been broached on this blog here.
      Even anecdotally, I don’t think it’s particularly intuitive to say that readers read mostly to be challenged. Maybe as literary scholars we just really want fiction to be good for something, because we think (wrongly) that that’s the only thing that could justify our career choices.
      In addition to this assumption about attitudes and effects, there’s the other one about textual features. This one doesn’t need careful experiments on readers’ attitudes to be established; we ‘just’ need to assess an appropriate number and range of fictional texts for their correspondence to or divergence from Cartesian transparency. So how true is it really that fiction actually constitutes a challenge to folk-psychological intuitions about introspective privilege? Waugh’s examples from Beckett and Joyce work reasonably well here, but the vast majority of the fiction people read, written by people who are, even if they’re good writers, also human beings laden with the usual folk-psychological apparatus, usually offer us a good deal fewer opportunities for error detection than they do for confirmation – even when what’s being confirmed are errors.
      As Greg Currie has said, they don’t tell us some privileged truth about how the mind works. And as I , even writers as formidable as Proust carefully balance the cognitive challenges they present with confirmations of our (incorrect) preconceptions. And the trouble even with Waugh’s examples from someone as resolutely unpopulist as Woolf – that she’s parodying the dualist model of mind by evoking its absurd extensions into metaphors of thoughts such as bats flying out of darkness, or clothes emerging from the dirty washing basket – is that they needn’t be read as parody. The fiction people read most of – popular genre fiction – probably goes overwhelmingly with folk-psychological confirmation, whereas texts that people rate as more literary are those that deviate (minimally) from our standard folk models. (Some work in preparation by James Carney, Rafael Wlodarski, and Robin Dunbar, all found here, will shed light on this.)

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Thirdly, the argument depends on an assumption about what (non-fictional) therapy is. Here Waugh really did seem to be in straw-man territory. I imagine her remarks were directed mainly at the psychoanalytic end of the therapeutic spectrum, though she also mentioned self-help books in general, but unfortunately it simply isn’t true that the most evidence-driven and hence well-funded therapies in use today are based on the illusion of introspection. The whole point of cognitive behavioural therapy, one of the most popular and demonstrably effective forms of therapy today, is that it understands cognition (including emotion) as part of continuous feedback loop with physiology and behaviour.
      More recent incarnations of it explicitly embrace mindfulness principles too. This is as anti-Cartesian as it gets, and in an awful lot of cases it really works. The idea that people who engage in this kind of therapy would need rescuing from it by more ontologically sophisticated fictions is as irresponsible as it is implausible.

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It’s always encouraging when mainstream literary studies – and what could be more mainstream than the inaugural ‘Lecture on the Novel in English’ at the British Academy? – is enthusiastic about cognitive approaches. However, I share Waugh’s gladness that the gap between academic and ordinary readers is narrowing, and it was nice to hear about recent research on readers’ experience of voice as inner speech or projections of characters’ own voices. It must also be true that reading draws on interpersonal skills on a continuum with the real world, and that given minds evolved to be social, the analytical starting point therefore shouldn’t be (and isn’t) isolation.
      This paper’s approach was marked by a few too many symptoms of cog lit-lite: the standard paragraph on mirror neurons, the nod to the now weirdly trendy Reverend Bayes to pretty up the theory with something ‘harder’, the unexplored invocation of mental ‘modelling’ of fictional worlds, the reversion to neuroscience alone when discussing cognitive science (despite acknowledging some of its problems).
      More care is needed in all these respects if we’re to keep cognitive literary studies on the right track. Specifically, we really do need to tread carefully when we make claims about textual features and reader-text interactions at a global level – and even more so when these claims are linked to, let alone set against, ones about real-world therapy. Mental illness is serious stuff, and it’s our responsibility to inform ourselves thoroughly about the issues before we wade in and start suggesting that Beckett may work better than fluoxetine.

Nicholas Shea, Annika Boldt, Dan Bang, Nick Yeung, Cecilia Heyes, and Chris D. Frith, ‘Supra-Personal Cognitive Control and Metacognition’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 189-96.

By ‘cognitive control’, the authors mean the mind’s capacity to ‘adapt its own operation in pursuit of its agenda’. This can entail simple, unconscious, ‘implicit’ interactions and prioritisations among sensory and motor processes – run, don’t think! It can also entail the way we represent our cognition explicitly, when we think, or say, ‘I’m sure’ or ‘I’m doubtful’. Related to this is ‘metacognition’, cognition about cognition, something that may be unique to humans.
      Shea et al. consider this uniqueness, but devote most of the paper to the reasons why explicit cognitive control might have evolved, and what special things it might do for us. Their suggestion is that it has developed in order to enable ‘supra-personal’, social decision-making. The capacity to consider one’s own certainty, as well as the capacity to articulate the outcome, help us achieve better things together. They propose further experiments, on humans and indeed on other species, ants and bees for example, to test the idea.

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This poses, I think, an interesting question for literature. There are many forms of introspection in fiction, and these could be prized as an attempt to understand the individual, to explore each person’s island. However, if this paper is right, and its argument is quite compelling, then many forms of ‘inwardness’ are inextricable from our social existences. Take the case of a Shakespearean soliloquy. I have already posted about Hamlet’s ‘to be or not to be’ speech here, but again it’s a perfect example. It seems quite apt to think of a soliloquy as a form in which the combination of introspection and interaction is natural, not artificial, a materialisation of what was true about this kind of metacognition all along.
      Of course, Shakespeare doesn’t make it easy. Hamlet may be being overheard during the speech, and he may – this seems unlikely to me, but not impossible – be speaking in full awareness of this, with an intention to deceive. The listeners do not know what he is being metacognitive about, though they have their theories. The audience is also listening, but it cannot quite feel that it is being spoken to, or asked to participate in the exploration of doubt. But even if this is not a simple case of explicit cognitive control being used to facilitate group decision-making (it could hardly be further from that) something of the quality of a soliloquy like this may be revealed by this paper’s social theory of introspective thinking.
      Not for the first time in this blog, the theatre proves a productive place to think about cognition. I think an audience must be a web of metacognition, with unconscious and conscious processes constantly managing our reactions to a play in relation to others. When a joke is made it is sometimes, I think, palpable that the audience is unsure how funny it is. The uncertainty communicates itself through shifts of body and breath, and it can go either way – towards a collective silence, a cascade of laughter, or somewhere in between. It seems very likely that the inward question ‘do I find this funny?’ is really looking for an answer from the group.

Marius V. Peelen and Sabine Kastner, ‘Attention in the Real World: Toward Understanding its Neural Basis’, Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 18 (2014), 242-50.

The problem identified in this paper is important, and versions of it have already appeared in this blog. Peelen and Kastner argue that many experiments on visual attention and perception use artificial arrays in the laboratory. The data that result from tests with shapes and colours on plain backgrounds tell us a lot about human perception, but may well obscure the ways we have evolved to see things in the real world. In this paper the authors present evidence of special characteristics of the ways attention operates in our usual cluttered visual fields, and proposals for further study.

I’ve come across this issue in other forms. In an essay about how ‘’, my colleague Greg Davis and his collaborators devised what they call ‘an elaborate deception procedure’. They wanted to test participants with the same stimulus each time, but ideally they wanted them to respond as if the person they were watching was live and present. Thus they told the participants that they were watching a video link from an adjoining room. This was a way of achieving a balance between live-action presence and the need for consistency in the experiment.
      Peelen and Kastner propose that our experience in dealing with familiar situations gives us ‘templates’ with which to navigate the visual world. The task of identifying a person in a complex picture is different – and proves easier – than picking out a particular abstract shape. Their idea is that we have these templates, which quickly limit our attention, so as to ensure we do not miss the most important things. These ‘what-templates’ and ‘where-templates’ direct us to locations and shapes that are likely to reveal the things we need to see. Further research is necessary, they say, to reveal more about this real-world performance.

The general point – that the narrowing and abstraction probably obliged by the need for experimental clarity risk obscuring things about how cognition operates – is valuable. Specifically, it made me think about stage directions. These are one indication of how the visual array presented by a play will work. Many great plays have very few stage directions, and leave a great deal for directors and designers to do. However, many others suggest meticulous attention to how the human beings involved will stand out against the environment, and how objects in that environment will become meaningful for us. They are rarely realistic in the sense that Peelen and Kastner are exploring, but they engage our real-time responses to human figures and the things around them.
      Beckett’s Waiting for Godot starts with a spare description of the scene in general, and a couple of very specific points:

A country road. A tree.
Evening.
Estragon, sitting on a low mound, is trying to take off his boot. He pulls at it with both hands, panting.

One thing to note about stage directions is that they are rarely just plain instructions to follow. To say this is a ‘country road’ may be a description of the first performances, or an outline for all future performances, but it leaves open the question of how a country road it to be realised. With some trees on the background? Perhaps, but this would compromise the significance of the one tree mentioned. With a road sign showing a cow or a tractor? Clearly not. Perhaps the important thing is that the actors know it’s a country road and inflect their performances accordingly. There is more information in Act 2:

Next day. Same time.
Same place.
Estragon’s boots front center, heels together, toes splayed.
Lucky’s hat at same place.
The tree has four or five leaves.
Enter Vladimir agitatedly. He halts and looks long at the tree, then suddenly begins to move feverishly about the stage. He halts before the boots, picks one up, examines it, sniffs it, manifests disgust, puts it back carefully. Comes and goes. Halts extreme right and gazes into distance off, shading his eyes with his hand. Comes and goes. Halts extreme left, as before. Comes and goes. Halts suddenly and begins to sing loudly.

It would be hard to argue that this scene has been composed thoughtlessly. Characters and objects are disposed in a way that affects how things are perceived and attended to. It is not easy to say what the effect would actually be; indeed, in the case of Waiting for Godot the search for some sort of packaged, meaningful effect may be futile.

There are many modern dramatists whose stage directions are far more elaborate than this, constructing scenes with realistic qualities and a great deal of managed significance. Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller would be good examples. Lengthy descriptions in novels might well be open to similar scrutiny, although it’s not straightforward that we translate them into pictures and attend to them using anything like the visual systems discussed by Peelen and Kastner. Still, when we are interested in how the human emerges from the environment, as they are, then the way that fields or factories are described will interact with our capacity – our need – to find the human and account for it. Paintings, too, could be thought of in the same way. Bruegel’s complex scenes, with the significant figures sometimes hard to find, come to mind.
      I tend to think that drama might work a bit like the ‘deception procedure’ described above, hitting a compromise by enabling control and consistency in what experimental subjects see, while also ensuring that there is something like a live-action impression. This means I think that it might be possible for a play might be considered as a kind of data for explorations of perception and attention. However, I think it’s important to recognise that a play (or a novel or a painting) interacts actively with the questions the scientists are asking, about how we see things in the real world. Literature is based on experience, knowledge, and theories, of how we perceive and attend, and I don’t see why it can’t offer valuable ideas of its own.