MyInsights

All emotions are intelligent and understandable

Because emotions involve an evaluation of importance, they involve sophisticated judgments based upon (often remotely) past experiences and decisions. The decision-making required is complex and unconscious, making emotions more difficult to understand than any other mental process. Indeed, in psychology and philosophy, emotions are the least understood of all cognitive processes (with the exception, possibly, of ESP).

Emotions (including anger and emotional desires) address issues of overriding importance, making them pivotal for adaptation and other forms of intelligent behavior. They are never, never caused by some kind of character flaw or some form of innate mechanism or instinct.

Theories of Emotion: Ronald de Sousa

Ronald de Sousa (2003) published "Emotion" on the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (http://plato.standford.edu/entries/emotion/).

This is a comprehensive review of the philosophy of emotion because it takes into account relevant and recent developments in philosophy and psychology. While de Sousa does not discuss topics directly relevant to contemporary psychotherapy such as the relationship between emotion and intersubjectivity, the notion of emotional expression, and how the development of interpersonal (attachment) emotions occurs, he touches upon many topics relevant to such a discussion.

1. Emotions as Intelligent

Emotions get a lot of bad press because they can be so disruptive. But Ronald de Sousa quotes Rosalind Picard as pointing out that, if the brain has computer-like (decision-making) properties, then emotions, especially interpersonal emotions, must be intelligent. This is obviously true because it takes a great deal of intelligence to perceive and take into account the mental states and future responses of other people. A theory of intelligent emotions would be part of a general theory of intelligent performance or intelligent cognitive processes.

2. The Piecemeal Approach

Ronald de Sousa quotes Amelie Rorty as recommending a pluralistic and piecemeal approach to understanding emotions. When we consider whether or not the smile (frown, call, wave, or grimace) of a six-week-old infant constitutes a feeling, emotion, emotional expression, or act of communication (as Trevarthen (1979) did), we look to empirical evidence rather than a normative theory of emotion for the answer (primary because a normative theory applies primarily to adult behavior). We want to know about the social contexts in which such smiles occur and we want more evidence about the possible and likely significance and value they have for infants. As parents, psychologists, and psychotherapists, we want to know how secure and insecure attachment emotions are developed and how they can be promoted or avoided, respectively. While an integrated theory of emotion may indeed be possible, we cannot formulate one until we know more about interpersonal emotions and their development.

3. The Frame Problem

One of the obvious considerations that require us to view human behavior (including emotions) as intelligent is what Ronald de Sousa calls the "Frame Problem." As an organism, a person is capable of a multitude of "basic actions" (Alvin Goldman (1970) in A Theory of Human Action) or acts of omission that are capable of generating an even greater multitude of consequences or outcomes. But we do not have time to consider the full range of our capacities for action or emotion either consciously or unconsciously. Nor is our actual behavior understandable in such terms. Instead, what people do and how they feel makes sense to us when we know what a person perceives, believes, and wants and what the person believes to be important under the circumstances. People are understandable to us because we believe they "select" actions, feelings, perceptions, and emotions from a relatively small range of possible behaviors. Interpersonal experience verifies this belief over and over again. There is a need to explain this understandability of human actions and emotions. One explanation is that the range of possible actions or emotions is somehow reduced in advance to the decision-making that generates actions and emotions. In other words, the situation is already "framed" when a conscious or unconscious response is considered. Sometimes are emotions or feelings frame a situation and define the range of relevant actions to be performed. But most actions are selected without reference to emotions or feelings. One answer (not discussed by de Sousa) is that a person is constantly assessing what is most important under the circumstances and actively perceives, feels, acts, and has emotions accordingly.

4. The Mind-to-World or World-to-Mind Fit

One way of viewing all cognitive processes as being intelligent is to view them as having both (1) a "mind-to-world" fit and (2) a "world-to-mind" fit. The mind-to-world fit would take the form of an optimal (best, most desirable, most practical) outcome or purpose. The world-to-mind fit would take the form of being as well-informed as possible given the beliefs, past experiences, and perceived circumstances of the subject. To some extent, these relationships between the mind and the world are covered off by the notions that emotions are directed at "intentional objects" and involve "evaluation," as discussed by de Sousa (see below). But even mental attitudes (events, states) that are not propositional are optimal and well-informed.

We know, for example, that visual sensation is generated by only small patches on the retinas of our eyes that are sensitive to detail and color. Our eyes rapidly and continuously scan the visual field in optimal and well-informed ways in order to capture the most relevant data and organize it into a single visual image that is experienced. Hence, we automatically scan the eyes and mouth of another person in order to capture his or her emotional expression. Depending upon the language we know, we scan written text in very specific ways.

5. Emotion as Affect

Ronald de Sousa argues effectively against the notion that feelings are merely caused by feelings (physiological changes in the body). This view has been enshrined in the Freudian concept of "affect" (not discussed by de Sousa). Just as a sensation is said to have no propositional content whereas a perception does, so also is an affect said to have no propositional content whereas a feeling or emotion does. From a psychodynamic (Freudian) point of view, affects dominate our feeling and emotional lives.

The concept of affect still plays a central role in psychotherapy. Even though commonsense acknowledges feelings and emotions to have propositional content and to be based upon evaluation, psychotherapists view emotions as subject to control but not change. The net result is that we are viewed as having a right to have (but not act upon) unethical emotions because we cannot change them. An in-depth understanding of the notions of feeling, propositional attitude, and emotional evaluation should resolve the problem. But such an understanding has not been developed.

6. Emotions and Intentional Objects

Ronald de Sousa contributes substantially to our understanding of emotions by proposing they can be related to objects in four different ways. Some emotions have objects in the form of propositions or beliefs. Hence, we can be angry with someone because we believe he performed or is about to perform an injustice. Yet love does not seem to have a propositional object. Some emotions are directed towards a particular object or "target." Hence love has a target whereas sadness does not. Some emotions motivate attentional focus on something. And some emotions (called moods, such as depression or elation) lack all three objects. Nonetheless, "every emotion has a formal object if it has any object."

Attachment emotions can include love, sadness, depression, elation, and indifference and all are presumed to have had a specific kind of intersubjective history. A taxonomy of attachment emotions would include a clarification of their object relations. There is gold in those hills!

7. Emotional Evaluation

Ronald de Sousa states that, in additional to having objects, emotions also involve evaluation or "appraisal," where appraisal is "the process through which the significance of a situation for an individual is determined." Scherer, Schorr, and Johnstone claim that emotions can be understood in terms of eighteen or more "dimensions of appraisal." More gold!

8. The Contribution of Emotions to Strategic Choices

"Ronald de Sousa (1987) argued that emotions are not reducible to beliefs, desires, or combinations of the two, but represent a logically and functionally separate category of capacities. They contribute essentially to the strategic choices of human deliberation, and they are themselves assessable as rational or irrational in accord with criteria which overlap but are not identical with those in terms of which we judge moral and esthetic value." Much more gold!

9. Mining the Gold

Ronald de Sousa states, "To date cognitive science does not seem to have provided any crucial tests to decide between competing models of the mind." Howard Gardner talked about the "cognitive sciences" as consisting of philosophy, psychology, linguistics, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and anthropology (Gardner, 1985, page 37). Gardner left out psychotherapy. Psychotherapy is to psychology as technology is to physics and chemistry. We can speculate why psychotherapists and philosophers do not refer to one another in their writings, but there can be no doubt that any talk about emotion is profoundly relevant to both.

Bibliography

Ronald de Sousa (1987). The Rationality of Emotion. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Howard Gardner (1985). The Mind’s New Science: A History of the Cognitive Revolution. NY: Basic Books.

Alvin Goldman (1970). A Theory of Human Action. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

Rosalind Picard (1997). Affective Computing. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

AmÈlie Rorty (1980). "Explaining Emotions." Explaining Emotions edited by AmÈlie Rorty. Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Klaus Scherer, Angela Schorr, and Tom Johnstone (eds) (2001). Appraisal Processes in Emotion: Theory, Methods, Research. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Colwyn Trevarthen (1979). "Communication and cooperation in early infancy: a description of primary intersubjectivity." In Before Speech: The Beginning of Interpersonal Communication, edited by Margaret Bullowa. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

The Problem with Certainty

The Problem with Certainty

A fundamental insight into the nature of the mind is to know that we are all equal when it comes to acquiring new knowledge: (1) Discovering empirical truth or fact is always difficult. (2) Except in logical and trivial matters, certainty cannot be achieved. This most emphatically true when it comes to understanding a person, including oneself.

In my experience, certainty is not an intelligent state of mind (with trivial exceptions). Instead, people who suffer from certainty have a need to feel certain based, possibly, on a need to feel superior to or to have power over some people. This due to the fact that being certain gives a person a political advantage in social situations because it challenges another person to prove it is mistaken. The problem is that certainty generally indicates an impaired intelligence. Hence, the person who is certain may be almost incapable of recognizing his error because the need to be right is so great.

In my perception, certainty is very common, often with tragic consequences. Unwarranted certainty supports selfishness, anger, hatred, and unethical behavior. Most important, certainty undermines intelligence where we need it the most, in interpersonal matters. We all have false beliefs but if we engage them with certainty, then we forfeit the opportunity to revise them. Many religious beliefs and psychological theories suffer from this defect. Indeed, it is formidably difficult to formulate a spiritual perspective or psychological theory that avoids the defect.

The only kind of psychological theory that can avoid undermining the intelligence of the psychologist is a theory that takes intelligence into account. So far, such a theory has yet to be formulated. My theory of cognitive processes is a step in the right direction.

How Certainty Makes People Stupid

In my experience, ignorance is by far the greatest cause of very poor judgment or stupidity. But unwarranted certainty is a close second. False beliefs and lack of relevant experience come in third and fourth. All four undermine intelligent decision-making, performance, and action. But unwarranted certainty stands out as the most foolish.

Of course, there are many things we can be certain about. They are often scientific, logical, or trivial in nature. When it comes to understanding complexity such as people, uncertainty is a valuable ally because it allows us to consider a wider range of possibilities.

The kind of certainty that undermines intelligence the most has to be the kind that comes from an emotional need to be certain in relation to other people. This kind of certainty is related to the capacity to hate or be resentful because prolonged anger depends upon the ability to be unreasonably certain. Such certainty requires conceit because it must override the more reasonable beliefs of other people. Indeed, the need to be certain may be based upon the need to feel superior to others.

I suspect that the need to be certain comes from having parents that were obviously wrong or unfair, giving their children no choice but to assert their own views with certainty.

Once unwarranted certainty has been acquired, overwhelming evidence to the contrary is required to revise or correct it. Without an intelligent sense of uncertainty, there is little hope for revision.

Intersubjectivity: An Extended Definition

Since Trevarthen coined the term "intersubjectivity" to talk about young infants understanding the motives of mothers, research has subsequently expanded use of the term to include other forms of intersubjectivity, thus requiring an extended definition of the term.

In offering an extended definition, I refer to the notion that cognitive processes such as perception, doing, believing, wishing, feeling, listening, speaking, thinking, or any other propositional attitude can take into account facts or probable facts about the propositional attitudes of another person. One could say that the former attitudes are well-informed or naturally informed about the latter attitudes. We are well-informed about the attitudes of another person when our beliefs can be articulated at least in principle. Our feelings, body language, or behavior can be naturally informed when such articulation is very difficult or not possible or when our responses are subliminal or unconscious. Some responses may be viewed as physiological or reflexive and therefore naturally informed. For example, animal behavior is naturally informed in many ways. Even when we take the view that consciousness is a mere side-effect of brain processes, we observe behavior that is intelligent, optimal, well-informed, and understandable under the circumstances.

Such intelligence is characteristic of all social interaction. The term "intersubjective," however, is reserved for more or less face-to-face interaction, primary relationships, and infant-parent exchanges. While the term "intersubjective" is new, the description and explanation of interpersonal behavior has always been problematic. In fact, the only thing new about research on intersubjectivity is that it attempts to take into account a multitude of new observations.

Only Freud explicitly denied the possibility of any form of intersubjectivity in infants for a priori reasons. He presumed very young infants to be in a state of primary identification in which the infant was unable to distinguish between himself and his mother.

Other psychologists such as John Bowlby denied that young infants had a conscious knowledge of other persons but developed an elaborate set of hypothetical and innate "behavioral systems" that caused other forms of intersubjectivity.

The Evidence for Early Intersubjectivity: Daniel N. Stern

In his book, The Interpersonal World of the Infant: A View from Psychoanalysis and Developmental Psychology (Basic Books, 1985), Daniel Stern talks about evidence for intersubjectivity. Stern takes a unique approach to child development. He proposes a description of the development of a sense of self.

In offering this proposal, he states the following qualifiers: “Because we cannot know the subjective world that infants inhabit, we must invent it, so as to have a starting place for hypothesis-making. This book is such an invention. It is a working hypothesis about infants’ subjective experience of their own social life” (page 4). “While no one can agree on exactly what the self is, as adults we still have a very real sense of self that permeates daily social experience” (page 5).

As part of his working hypothesis, Stern makes some basic assumptions: “It is a basic assumption of this book that some senses of the self do exist long prior to self-awareness and language. These include the senses of agency, of physical cohesion, of continuity in time, of having intentions in mind, and other such experiences we will soon discuss” (page 6).

Stern provides a description of the earliest actions of an infant: “The newborn does not have good control of his or her head and cannot hold it aloft in the upright position. But when lying on their backs so that their heads are supported, newborns do have adequate control to turn the head to the left or right. Head-turning became the answer to the following question: can infants tell the smell of their own mothers’ milk? MacFarlane (1975) placed three-day-old infants on their backs and then placed breast pads taken from their nursing mothers on one side of their heads. On the other side, he placed breast pads taken from other nursing women. The newborns reliably turned their heads toward their own mothers’ pads, regardless of which side the pads were placed on. The head-turning answered MacFarland’s question in the affirmative: infants are able to discriminate the smell of their own mothers’ milk” (page 39, note that Stern provides two spellings for MacFarlane).

Head-turning also seems to be an early example of intentional behavior that takes into account the correct location of the mother’s breast pad. If the infant were to perform some action that similarly took into account the mental state of his or her mother, then intersubjectivity could be shown to occur. This is the claim that Trevarthen makes when he talks about “primary intersubjectivity.” Yet Stern dismisses the possibility of primary intersubjectivity in the following footnote: “In fact, what we are calling intersubjectivity Trevarthen calls ‘secondary intersubjectivity’ (Trevarthen and Hubley 1978), the later differentiation of a uniquely human intersubjective function. Intersubjectivity does seem to be an emergent human capacity. However, it is not meaningful to speak of primary intersubjectivity at three or four months of age, as Trevarthen does (1979). This can only refer to protoforms that lack the essential ingredients for being called intersubjectivity. Only Trevarthen’s secondary stage is true intersubjectivity” (footnote 4, pages 134 and 135).

Clearly, primary intersubjectivity has no place in Stern’s working hypothesis, but not for empirical reasons. While in 1985 Stern claims that “Trevarthen (1974, 1978) has stood relatively alone in maintaining that intersubjectivity is an innate, emergent human capacity” (page 134), this claim is not substantiated by writers since 1985. Subsequent research seems to support Trevarthen and not Stern.

The Evidence for Early Intersubjectivity: J. Gavin Bremner

In his book, Infancy (Second Edition, Blackwell Publishers, 1994), J. Gavin Bremner talks about evidence for intersubjectivity.

Bremner discusses in some depth the various attempts to empirically determine whether or not primary intersubjectivity (Trevarthen, 1979) occurs. He concludes that Trevarthen’s conclusions still stand in spite of more recent studies by researchers who disagree with Trevarthen (pages 234 to 241). For example, some researchers doubt the "rich" interpretation provided by Trevarthen regarding emotions. "The problem for future study is to determine the actual level of emotional awareness possessed by young infants, a tricky empirical problem" (page 241). He continues:

"This points us to a general problem with the literature in this area, namely that accounts based on very similar data differ widely in the degree to which they attribute social awareness to young infants. It is not clear how to provide a direct empirical test that would provide a choice between ‘richer’ interpretations like Trevarthen’s and more cautious ones like Schaffer’s. However, maybe a strong preoccupation with identifying the infant’s ability leads us away from the central issue. Many workers argue that we should concentrate on the dyad rather than on the infant as the developing unit. From this point of view, it matters less whether or not there are social intentions behind the infant’s acts; the crucial point is that parents treat these acts as if they were intentional. Workers like Lock (1980) and Newson (1979) adopt the philosophical stance of Macmurray (1961) to argue that it is this parental predisposition to treat their offspring as intentional beings that leads eventually to their becoming intentional beings" (page 241).

Trevarthen reported that all of the mothers in his infant-mother videos believed their infants were persons or "intentional beings." While Trevarthen believed they were correct in their beliefs, the logical possibility remains that all such beliefs are false. But there is no a priori reason for viewing these beliefs as false. Hence, while the development of the dyad is undoubtedly a fruitful approach to experimental design, the dyad as a natural phenomenon cannot predetermine the truth-value of beliefs held by the dyad’s participants.

There is probably no "direct empirical test that would provide a choice between ‘richer’ interpretation" and "more cautious ones." Intersubjectivity occurs when one person has true and reliable beliefs about the beliefs (and other propositional attitudes) of another person. Such beliefs constitute an intersubjective knowledge about the mental states of another person. In a scientific experiment on intersubjectivity, we know the propositional attitude of a subject from what he or she does or says. Hence, if a person jumps away from a snake in fear, we are reasonably certain that he was afraid of being bitten by the snake (provided he was not deaf and blind and does not randomly jump away from anything). If we are to know whether or not an infant has a particular belief, then we must observe the infant in situations in which the belief would be true and conduct observations or experiments that show the belief occurs for understandable and nonrandom reasons. While Trevarthen’s observations provided anecdotal reasons for concluding that infants can have intersubjective knowledge. A more systematic study would require a belief-by-belief demonstration of such knowledge.

Evidence for Early Intersubjectivity: Jerome Bruner

In his book, Actual Minds, Possible Worlds (Harvard University Press, 1986), Jerome Bruner talks about evidence for intersubjectivity.

"One knows intuitively as a psychologist (or simply as a human being) that the easy access we have into each other’s minds, not so much in the particulars of what we are thinking but in general about what minds are like, cannot be explained away by invoking singular concepts like ‘empathy’" (page 57).

Bruner developed the term "transactional process" in order to talk about early intersubjectivity as a precursor of language. He talked about the problem of creating a model of understanding the process.

"My first brush with it [the problem] was in studying the development of exchange games in infancy, when I was struck with how quickly and easily a child, once having mastered the manipulation of objects, could enter into ‘handing back and forth,’ handing objects around a circle, exchanging objects for each other. The competence seemed there, as if ab ovum; the performance was what needed some smoothing out. Very young children had something clearly in mind about what others had in mind, and organized their actions accordingly. I thought of it as the child achieving mastery of one of the precursors of language use: a sense of mutuality of action" (page 59).

In this context, "ab ovo" means from the egg or from the beginning.

In this way, Bruner provides anecdotal evidence for intersubjectivity in "very young children," At the same time, he provides an important clue as to how scientific (systematic and verifiable) evidence could be gathered. He said that the children "organized their actions" according to beliefs "about what others had in mind." In other words, infants act on propositional attitudes (beliefs) that are true and about the attitudes or motives of other infants. These beliefs would be about the beliefs of another infant who is receiving or handing an object to the subject while the subject is handing or receiving it. Such a belief would be momentary and "occurrent" (Goldman, 1970, pages 86 to 91) and part of an action-plan (Goldman, 1970, pages 56 to 63). Through systematic observation and ingeniously designed experiments, the occurrence of such beliefs can be confirmed scientifically.

Hence, research in intersubjectivity consists of observing occurrent beliefs about the occurrent beliefs of another person. More specifically, it consists of observing the propositional content of the beliefs (and other propositional attitudes) of one person about the propositional content of the beliefs (and other propositional attitudes) of another person.

It may be noted that "primary intersubjectivity," as observed by Trevarthen, occurs in infants before they are able to manipulate physical objects. Nonetheless, primary intersubjectivity occurs in terms of propositional attitudes such as beliefs, wishes, attention, motives, feelings, emotions, and the like.

Explication as Science

When it comes to understanding intersubjectivity, it is plainly the case that we already understand it very well because we are all so good at it. The problem for psychologists consists of articulating this understanding in a verifiable way. This is where explication comes in. Explication can be viewed as clarification of what we intuitively understand. Needless to say, there is nothing easy about providing a good explication.

As a paradigm intersubjective scenario to be explicated, I propose the Trevarthen-like videos if early infant-mother interactions called primary intersubjectivity. By placing a large mirror behind the infant, Trevarthen created videos that simultaneously captured images of both infant and mother displayed side-by-side. While this type of video would never win an Oscar for cinematography, it captures all the data relevant to understanding how primary intersubjectivity occurs. In this scenario, "mind-reading" occurs in four ways. The infant "reads" the mind of the mother. The mother "reads" the mind of the infant. The viewer of the video "reads" the mind of the infant. And the viewer "reads" the mind of the mother.

In all four cases, the mind-reader estimates the motives of the voluntary and involuntary actions of the other person, including emotional expression, through a sophisticated process of person-perception. It is the cognitive processes that contribute to person-perception that are in great need of being explicated. And we must begin with what we already know in order to avoid hypothesizing a "model" of explanation that would be open to the kind of devastating criticism that Chomsky made of Skinner.

I propose that, to avoid such criticism, we take into account what is obviously true. For example, when we perceive another person, we perceive him as a person who is an agent of a multitude of cognitive processes and actions, some of which we know about and some of which we do not. This experience of another person is obviously a sophisticated mental construction that is well-informed about a multitude of facts known through perception, past experience, and a priori.

Something else that is obviously true is that much of this mental construction is based upon the assumption that the other person is like us in important ways. Indeed, the most serious mistakes we make in person-perception consist in presuming he and we have had much the same past experiences. This is especially disastrous in primary relationship in which the other person has had very different childhood experiences.

Another obvious factor is that human motivation involves both evaluation and belief. Hence, one of the reasons we "read" others so well is that people always perceive, do, address, or get emotional about what is most important (optimal, desirable, practical, possible, etc.) under the circumstances and take into account almost all beliefs relevant to the situation. This means that everything a person does and feels reflects the outcome of the background cognitive processes that generate these evaluations and beliefs.

This sounds complicated because it is. Any model of person-perception that attempts to reduce it to a few simple mechanisms is foredoomed to failure.

Science is the product of a scientific community. In other words, a particular approach, model, or theory requires a consensus among several (preferably many) scientists who work together to articulate, apply, and test a particular set of assumptions or hypotheses. A cognitive theory of infant and childhood intersubjectivity must be built up in this way. There is too much work to be done for one person to handle.

One issue that must be resolved is the reference to object-causality and event-causality in the description and explanation of intersubjective behavior. One form of object-causality is agency in which a person is responsible for his actions. But research in intersubjectivity has shown that interpersonal perception and action occur so rapidly and unconsciously that the conventional view of human agency cannot explain intersubjective behavior. Instead, a reference to event-causality is required to take into account the rapidity of information exchange and the sophistication of empathy. In this way, the dyadic system can be understood in terms of interacting cognitive processes in each individual.

A Fundamental Problem in Theoretical Psychology: Intelligent Performance

As scientists, we remain uncertain about what a good psychological theory should look like. We are undecided as to what theoretical issues need to be addressed and, when they are addressed, we do not know when they are adequately or even meaningfully addressed.

As an example, I offer the problem of intelligent performance in animal and human behavior. This problem is sometimes referred to as the problem of selectivity. It is easy enough to define: When an animal or person behaves or does something, it or he selects a basic bodily action (movement, sound, gesture) or a sequence of such actions that causes or generates one or more outcomes that have a number of obvious properties, one of which could be described as "intelligent."

At any moment, an animal or person is physically capable of performing a vast range of actions or acts of omission. The action or behavior actually selected is nonrandom in important and obvious ways. More specifically, the action performed is almost always optimal, as well-informed as possible, and understandable given the perceived circumstances, beliefs, desires, capacities, skills, and/or (in the case of some animals) innate mechanisms of the performing organism. This is about as far from being random as you can get. Even when a mistake is made or a maladaptive behavior is performed, it is almost always understandable considering the circumstances and other factors.

The scientific problem has been long since defined as the "problem of organized complexity" by Warren Weaver (1948) in his paper "Science and Complexity." The problem is how to describe and explain the nonrandom complexity evident in biological organisms and animal behavior. Since then, the problem of organized complexity in physiology has been pretty much addressed by the new science of molecular biology, which strives to understand biological structures and processes in terms of molecular structures and processes. Recent discoveries in this area have been outstanding.

In modern psychology, we have not been so fortunate. To be sure, remarkable facts keep being discovered, but one major aspect of the problem of organized complexity remains with regard to behavior. It is the problem of nonrandom uniqueness in intelligent performance. An obvious example of this problem has been pointed out by Noam Chomsky. He noted that, in spoken and written language, we rarely repeat ourselves. This is characteristic of almost all forms of human behavior, especially interpersonal behavior. Even primate behavior is usually unique when observed in detail.

Scientific research in psychology could be viewed as casting a net in an ocean of possible observations. But this net captures verifiable data by counting events (with the aid of statistical analysis) and an occurrence of one (a unique event) passes through the net unnoticed.

For example, in 1979, Trevarthen talked about the complexity of (primary) intersubjectivity of infants and referred to mothers perceiving their infants as persons. Yet, in more recent discussions of infant intersubjectivity (as in Forms of Intersubjectivity in Infant Research and Adult Treatment by Beebe and her colleagues, 2005) refer only to "patterns of coordination" in intersubjective behavior. While such patterns certainly occur, nonrandom and unique interactions would continue to pass through the scientific net defined by their "dyadic systems model of interaction."

They don’t have to. The reality is that a child (and even a young infant, according to Trevarthen) finds nonrandom and unique behavior understandable, familiar, and, to some extent, predictable. A child or adult does this by estimating the action-plan that motivates the observed behavior (see Alvin Goldman’s Theory of Human Action). Trevarthen’s most important conclusions came from his estimations of the motives of infants, not from his observation of frequently repeated patterns of interaction. In general, understanding the minds and actions of other people consists mostly of understanding nonrandom and unique behavior. There is no a priori reason why we cannot get scientific about such understanding. But how?

The basic fact is that a nonrandom and unique action is nonrandom because the beliefs and wishes that cause it are almost always optimal, well-informed, and understandable. We all (infants, mothers, children, adults, and scientists) understand the actions of others by estimating the conceptual content of those beliefs and wishes.

The answer to being scientific about such estimates, in my view, lies in paying attention to those observable details relevant to making them. Hence, for example, it is not just what a person says but his choice of words, tone of voice, emotional expression, body language, and, most important, his perceived circumstances that provide relevant information about the speaker’s beliefs and wishes. The same is true of infant behavior. For example, in Trevarthen’s videos of infant-mother interaction, all relevant detail was recorded and observed over and over again by Trevarthen and his colleagues. It was because of this kind of observation that he made such outstanding discoveries. Unfortunately, while he took relevant details into account, he had no scientific framework in which to report them. His discoveries therefore remain controversial. Many relevant details passed through the net of reportable science. And he did not describe intersubjectivity in terms of the beliefs, wishes, feelings, perceptions, and other propositional attitudes.

Hence the problem of organized complexity reduces to a problem of reporting observable details relevant to estimating the action-plans of other people and the beliefs and wishes that contributed to those action-plans. Reduced in this way, the problem becomes solvable (but not easily). The solution is to cast a much larger, indeed a huge net so that unique events reoccur in at least recognizable variations and that evidence can be accumulated to demonstrate that the observed infant or mother has the relevant beliefs and wishes under different circumstances. The raw data in the form of videos would remain part of the recorded experiment and the method of selecting relevant data would be part of the reported methodology. Someday scientists may have access to very large digitized databases that could be searched by programs that detect relevant details that would escape even a trained observer. The program would search actions that seem to be optimal and/or well-informed in specific ways, including ways in which actions in the present take into account (are well-informed about) past recorded events (presumably through memory or learning). Needless to say, ingenuity in experimental design is indispensable for the resolution of ambiguities and uncertainties.

Such a search for relevant beliefs, wishes, feelings, and perceptions could reveal that an infant sometimes smiles because he believes his mother is perceiving him, believes that she will understand his smile as an indication of his happiness, wants to communicate his happiness to her, and anticipates a happy exchange of feelings with his mother. Presumably, smiles that are motivated by such beliefs and wishes are detectably different from smiles that are not. The basic strategy is to look for the observable differences and to look for the occurrence of the same beliefs and wishes under different circumstances. The infant may delay his smile when she is distracted or preoccupied with expressing something to him. Or, for understandable reasons, he has a different set of beliefs and wishes and frowns instead. When an infant has accurate and non-accidental beliefs about the subjectivity of his mother, then intersubjectivity on the part of the infant has occurred.

Even though beliefs and wishes are propositional attitudes, they can be unconscious, inaccessible to articulation, or learned from past experience without the involvement of reason or reflection.

The psychologist of the future may be like Google using Web 3.0 to search a database of infant-mother videos to answer questions like "When does the behavior of an infant indicate that he accurately estimates the subjectivity (motives, beliefs, wishes, feelings, intentions, or some other mental attitude) of his mother?" An intersubjectivity-detecting program would quickly and completely scour hundreds even thousands of hours of videos to detect and evaluate various combinations of observable events that indicate or potentially indicate that intersubjectivity has occurred and outputs a short list of promising scenarios. Longitudinal studies would then search for ways in which these scenarios would develop throughout childhood, perhaps showing conclusively how children learn language, interpersonal attachment, and other forms of social behavior.