Transcript Philosophical Aspects of Multimedia Communication Towards

Philosophical Aspects of Multimedia
Communication:
Towards a New Rationality
Zsuzsanna Kondor
Institute for Philosophical Research of the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences
Presentation given at the London Knowledge Lab
10-10-2007
Some preliminary remarks
• The title
• The evolution of the idea
– Language
– Communication
– Representation
– Cognition
– Back to philosophy (epistemological
relevance)
Thesis
• Communications technology has a much
more far-reaching effect on our thought
than we used to suppose.
• Multimodality provides the basis of a
common conceptual background.
• This possibility opens up the way for a
new rationality.
Questions
• Why recently?
• How is it possible?
• What does this mean as regards
philosophical considerations?
• Does it have any practical relevance at
all?
Why recently?
• István Hajnal and the Toronto Circle
• Beyond verbal representation (pictorial vs.
verbal representation)
• Secondary literacy – Ubiquitous
multimedia
István Hajnal and the Toronto Circle
•
•
•
•
Objectification
Primary orality
Literacy
Secondary orality
Objectification
Alphabetical writing as the technical basis of
rationality
– “With the appearance of literacy, we know that what had been
happening instinctively to this point in a human being's inner and outer
life, now starts to become conscious. This sphere of life becomes
objectified and abstracted; the human being projects this sphere in front
of himself and examines it consciously and from the outside. There
arises the possibility for methodical purposefulness, for the conscious
handling of concepts and for combinational and complicated work.” (I.
Hajnal, „Európai kultúrtörténet – írástörténet” (1932), in: F. Glatz (ed.), Technika, művelődés,
Budapest 1993, p. 18 )
– ”Movements and sounds do disappear, still, humans can use them and
their matter-relatedness to produce something that is objective,
something that functions as an extrinsic intermediator for inner life.” (I.
Hajnal, „Történelem és szociológia”, (1939), in: Glatz (ed.) op. cit. p. 203)
Objectification
Objectification induces over-mechanisation
– “Letters produced letters, writing produced
writing. Purely speculative thinking was highly
refined, even in the smallest of tasks, and
more perfectly so since the more one-sidedly
it functioned, the more it divided the
professions into mechanical details, the more
it exempted them from sensing the heavy
material of life.” (Hajnal, „Évforduló” (1948), in: Glatz (ed.) op.
cit. p. 449)
Orality
•
A primary oral culture is one which does not possess any knowledge of writing.
•
•
•
conservative and traditional.
“storage language” (usage of rhyme and rhythm, formulaic.)
special technology to weave ideas together, and to transmit awareness of the new
facts of life:
The way of expression was
•
–
–
–
•
additive
redundant, and
the expressions and words used were very closely embedded in concrete situations.
Intercourse was
–
–
–
empathetic
participatory and
agonistic.
Literacy
• The age of written records
• transmission of ideas was liberated from certain restrictions
• only text could provide context
• potential to create concepts free of emotions, distanced from the
human life-world and
• possibility of the systematic analysis of ideas,
• possibility of regarding events as linearly structured in time and
thereby
• possibility to recognize the eternally human.
• ideas became remarkably easier to handle and to elaborate.
• replacing the live situation with mute words required considerable
intellectual effort, and caused plenty of difficulties.
Secondary orality
• Secondary orality set in with telephone, radio, television,
and the various kinds of sound tapes and similar
electronic technologies.
• “This new orality”, as Ong puts it, “has striking
resemblances to the old in its participatory mystique, its
fostering of communal sense, its concentration on the
present moment, and even in its formulas. But it is
essentially a more deliberate and self-conscious orality
based permanently on the use of writing and print, which
are essential for the manufacture and operation of the
equipment and for its use as well.” (Walter J. Ong, Orality and
Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, London: Methuen, 1982, p. 136)
Pictorial vs. verbal representation from the
point of view of a scholar
• Verbal representation
– Linearly ordered
– High degree of
generality (far from
experience)
– distancing
• Pictorial representation
– Holistic
– Close to mundane
experience
– (immersive)
William M. Ivins Jr., Prints and Visual Communication,
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press
1953
“Plato’s Ideas and Aristotle’s forms, essences, and
definitions, are specimens of this transference of reality
from the object to the exactly repeatable and therefore
seemingly permanent verbal formula. An essence, in
fact, is not part of the object but part of the definition.
Also, I believe, the well-known notions of substance and
attributable qualities can be derived from this operational
dependence upon exactly repeatable verbal descriptions
and definitions – for the very linear order in which words
have to be used results in a syntactical time order
analysis of qualities that actually are simultaneous and
so intermingled and interrelated that no quality can be
removed from one of the bundles of qualities we call
objects without changing both it and all the other
qualities.“ (p. 63)
Comparing ancient Egyptian and
Western metaphysics
• Ancient Egyptian
– Holistic
– Complementary logic
– Cyclic comprehension
of reality
– Creating –
writing/drawing –
seeing/grasping
• Western
–
–
–
–
Analytic
Dualistic logic
Linearity
Disruption of the unity
of creation and
description of the
world
Secondary literacy
• Multimedia
• Handheld devices
• Secondary literacy is an epoch which is
characterized by the rationality of literacy
but due to the changes in communications
technology allows for multimodal
enhancement
How is it possible?
• Cognitive background
– Cognitive processing of visual percepts
– Conceptual processing of perceptual
information
– Main differences between imagery and verbal
processing from cognitive point of view
• George Lakoff,
Women, Fire,
and Dangerous
Things. What
Categories
Reveal about
the Mind,
Chicago and
London: The
University of
Chicago Press,
(1987) 1990
• Pierre Jacob
and Marc
Jeannerod,
Ways of
seeing: The
scope and
limits of
visual
cognition,
Oxford:
Oxford Univ.
Press (2003)
2004
Cognitive processing of visual percepts
• Visual percepts serve as input to higher
human cognitive processes, including
memory, categorization, conceptual
thought, and reasoning
• Visuomotor representation is at the service
of human action.
Cognitive processing of visual percepts
• Conceptual transformation means a loss
of some details (The content of visual
perceptual representations is “both more
fine-grained and informationally richer than
the conceptual content of thoughts.” (Jacob
et al. 22))
Excursion
“In order to describe experience more fully language
must be less precise. But greater imprecision brings
more effectively into play the powers of inarticulate
judgement required to resolve the ensuing indeterminacy
of speech. So it is our personal participation that governs
the richness of concrete experience to which our speech
can refer. Only by the aid of this tacit coefficient could we
ever say anything at all about experience – a conclusion
I have reached already by showing that the process of
denotation is itself unformalizable.”
(M. Polanyi, Personal Knowledge - Towards a Post-Critical
Philosophy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962, pp. 86f.)
Cognitive processing of visual percepts
• “Now once the visual percept has been turned
into a thought by a process involving a selective
elimination of information, further conceptual
processing can yield a still more complex
thought involving, not a two-place relation
between pairs of objects, but a three-place
relation between a pair of objects and an
egocentric perspective.” (Jacob et al. 31)
Cognitive processing of visual percepts
• Visuomotor representations are also
egocentric, but in a strictly functional
sense: the spatial reference is the actor’s
body.
• Verbal or conceptual transformation is
egocentric, but this means a reflexive
relation in accordance with some general
goals.
Forerunning
• “As perspectivally based cognitive representations,
then, linguistic symbols are based not on the
recording of direct sensory or motor experiences, as
are the cognitive representations of other animal
species and human infants, but rather on the ways
individuals choose to construe things out of a
number of other ways they might have construed
them, as embodied in the other available linguistic
symbols that they might have chosen, but did not.”
(Michael Tomasello, The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition,
Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999, p. 9)
Excursion
• Social brain hypothesis (Robin Dunbar)
• Cognitive evolution (Merlin Donald)
Conceptual processing of perceptual
information
• “conceptual structure is meaningful
because it is embodied, that is, it arises
from and is tied to, our preconceptual
bodily experiences. In short, conceptual
structure exists and is understood
because preconceptual structures exist
and are understood.” (Lakoff, Ibid. p. 267)
Conceptual processing of perceptual
information
• the preconceptual level is determined by kinesthetic image
schematic structures (They originate from everyday bodily
experiences and mean certain, relatively simple spatial relations
such as: containers, paths (movement in space with a starting and
ending point including direction), links (regarding security and its
source), forces, balance, different kinds of orientation (up-down,
front-back, part-whole, center-periphery, etc. )
• and basic-level categories which
– do not overload memory capacity
– are closely bound to motor activity.
– emerge as gestalt (they emerge in overall general forms and at the
same time their structures are identifiable as well)
Conceptual processing of perceptual
information
Our conceptualizing capacity consists of:
The ability to form symbolic structures that correlate with preconceptual
structures in our everyday experience. Such symbolic structures are basiclevel and image-schematic concepts. (That is, we can speak about basiclevel categories in a twofold sense: categories that emerge out of the
network of motor activities, and categories that are in accordance with the
former and refer to concepts in linguistic form.)
The ability to project metaphorically from structures in the physical domain
to structures in abstract domains, constrained by other structural
correlations between the physical and the abstract domains. This accounts
for our capacity to reason about abstract domains such as quantity and
purpose.
The ability to form complex concepts and general categories using image
schemas as structuring devices. This allows us to construct complex event
structures and taxonomies with superordinate categories. (George Lakoff, Ibid. p.
281)
• image schemas are crucially important
since they play “two roles: They are
concepts that have directly understood
structures of their own, and they are used
metaphorically to structure other complex
concepts.” (Lakoff, Ibid. p. 283)
Idealised cognitive models
• Image-schematic
– Bodily experiences
– Spatial relations
• Metaphoric (describes ways of mapping )
• Metonymic (describes ways of mapping )
• Propositional
– no use of imaginative devices as in the previous models
– elements are basic-level and concepts characterized by
cognitive models of other types
• Symbolic
– linguistic elements are associated with conceptual elements in
ICM
• “Propositional models have an
objectivist flavour, since they contain
entities, with their properties and the
relations holding among them. … It seems
to me that when we understand our
experience by projecting propositional
models onto it, we are imposing an
objectivist structure on it.” (Lakoff, Ibid. p. 285)
Main differences between imagery and
verbal processing from a cognitive point of
view
• Verbal processing
• Imagery
– closely related to
motor activity
– rich in iconic content
– not as closely related
to motor activity
– narrower domain
– propositional
– linear
“Systems of thought emerge from this reflective
activity [i.e., representational redescription]
because self-observation employs all of the
categorization and analytic skills that are
employed in perceiving, understanding, and
categorizing the outside world – in effect the
subject perceives, understands, and categorizes
her own cognition facilitated by the fact that it is
expressed externally in language.”(Tomasello, Ibid.
p. 195)
Summing up I.
• Language inherently has a distancing
effect
• and tendentious character.
• Written language radicalizes these
features.
• Imagery has strong immersive potential.
Summing up II.
• using multimedia means a nearly direct
access to others’ experiences
• decreasing dominance of verbal
processing
• access to mundane particularities
• the conceptual background is changing
due to ubiquitous multimodality
What does this mean as regards
philosophical considerations?
• The birth and evolution of atomistic
individualism/objectivism
• A turning-point in the fields of ontology,
epistemology, philosophy of language, and
even in metaphysics
• Convergence of long-established opposed
traditions
The birth and evolution of atomistic
individualism/objectivism
• Heraclitus
• Plato
• Descartes
A turn in the fields of ontology,
epistemology, philosophy of language,
and even in metaphysics
•
•
•
•
Bergson
Dewey
Heidegger
Wittgenstein
Bergson
• ”The mistake of ordinary dualism is that it starts from the spatial
point of view: it puts, on the one hand, matter with its modifications,
in space; on the other hand, it places unextended sensations in
consciousness. Hence the impossibility of understanding how the
spirit acts upon the body or the body upon the spirit. … But hence
also the impossibility of constituting either a psychology of memory
or a metaphysic of matter.” (Henri Bergson, Matter and Memory, New York:
Zone Books, (First published in French, 1896) 1991 p. 220)
• “The reality of matter consists in the totality of its elements and their
actions of every kind. Our representation of matter is the measure of
our possible action upon bodies.” (Ibid. p. 38)
Dewey
•
“All of these separations culminate in one between knowing and doing,
theory and practice, between mind as the end and spirit of action and the
body as its organ and means.” (J. Dewey, Democracy and Education. The Middle Works
of John Dewey 1899-1924. Vol. 9, Carbondale and Edwardsville : Southern Illinois Univ. Press
1985. p. 346)
•
Relying on the findings of physiology and psychology, Dewey concludes
that “[n]o one who has realized the full force of the facts of the connection of
knowing with the nervous system and of the nervous system with the
readjusting of activity continuously to meet new conditions, will doubt that
knowing has to do with reorganizing activity, instead of being something
isolated from all activity, complete on its own account”.(Ibid. p. 347)
•
Considering the results of biology and contemplating the “doctrine of
evolution”, Dewey claims that “the living creature is a part of the world”,
which implies a new comprehension of knowledge. “If the living,
experiencing being is an intimate participant in the activities in the world to
which it belongs, then knowledge is a mode of participation, valuable in the
degree in which it is effective. It cannot be the idle view of an unconcerned
spectator.” (Ibid.)
Heidegger
• Being-in-the-world
• Ready-at-hand vs. present-at-hand
• Referential totality
Wittgenstein
•
“[O]ur language is tempting us to draw some misleading analogy. This
should remind us of the case when the popular scientist appeared to have
shown us that the floor which we stand on is not really solid because it is
made up of electrons”. (Ludwig Wittgenstein, The Blue and Brown Books.
Preliminary Studies for the Philosophical Investigations, Oxford: Basil Blackwell
(1958) 1984, p. 48) – different language games
•
“The problem may seem simple, but its extreme difficulty is due to the
fascination which the analogy between two similar structures in our
language can exert on us.” (Ibid. p. 26) – analogy
•
„There are the sounds of the words, and all sorts of bodily sensations
connected with gesture and intonation. Where we are liable to go wrong is
in supposing that sensations connected with words are somehow ‘in the
mind’. The phrase ‘in the mind’ has caused more confusion than almost any
other in philosophy.” (Ludwig Wittgenstein, Wittgenstein’s Lectures. Cambridge,
1932-1935 Oxford: Basil Blackwell (1979), p. 114) – one painful example
Summing up the differences
• Atomistic individualism
– dualism of mind and body
– focus on abstract
reasoning
– the human mind works as a
machine which
manipulates symbols
– symbols are internal
representations of external
reality (correspondence)
• Towards a new rationality
– embeddedness
– focus on action and
perception
– emphasis on the activity of
the brain
– language in a new light
– the importance of imagery
Does it have any practical
relevance at all?
• Conceptual framework
• Institutional setting, especially education
Conceptual framework
Think of the question of reality in the mobile age.
Is there any reason to distinguish virtual and real
in the case of a location-sensitive and at the
same time location-independent device? What
should be considered real, the given
circumstances and the concomitant tasks, or
those engendered by the mediated-from-afar via
mobile devices? Is there any relevance to the
distinction between real and virtual when
considering function and effect?
Conceptual framework
The intuitive idea of so-called local realism (which Einstein shares
as well) suggests that “a particle cannot be instantly influenced by a
distant event, and that its properties exist independently of any
measurements”. (M. Brooks, ”Reality Check”, in: New Scientist 23 June 2007, p.
31) Although the implications of quantum physics suggest that “[t]he
world could not be local and real”, poses the question of whether it is
either local or real. The various experiments supporting quantum
theory led to the conviction that it is possible that “there is nothing
inherently real about the properties of an object that we measure. In
other words, measuring those properties is what brings them into
existence. …So does the universe exist independently of
measurements?” (Ibid. pp. 32)
”We need to rethink and radically revised our basic physical
concepts before we make the next big breakthrough in physics” (Ibid.
p. 32)
Institutional setting, especially
education
• “[E]verywhere the school system has the same
structure, and everywhere its hidden curriculum
has the same effect. …]This identity of the
school system forces us to recognize the
profound world-wide identity of myth, mode of
production, and method of social control, despite
the great variety of mythologies in which the
myth finds expression.” (Ivan lllich, Deschooling Society,
Marion Boyars, London, (1971) 1978 p. 74) That is, the
influence of literacy is recognisable everywhere
in the world.
Taming vs. integrating new technology
• “instead of the computer cutting across the
disciplines in the subjects, the computer is now
confined to a computer room and it is a subject
of its own, taken out of the mainstream of the
learning environment. There’s now a specialized
computer teacher. There’s a curriculum even for
the study of the computer. It has been
normalized by the system; it has been tamed.
That’s not the only way in which it can be
tamed.” (Papert, S. 1998 Child Power: Keys to the New Learning
of the Digital Century.
http://www.connectedfamily.com/main_alt.html)
Thanks for your attention
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