June 08, 2004

I See by Your Outfit that You Are a Cowboy

I've been thinking a bit about seeing that, partly because of background beliefs, or Searle's Background, or whatever you want to call them (it).

One of the issues in the area is how much you can know by perception. If it is Background for Alice that only upsilon particles leave this sort of track in the cloud chamber, does she simply see that this reaction produced an upsilon particle, where Sarah (who is less trained) sees only that this reaction produced this track and infers that it produced an upsilon?

The "see that" idiom is here quite natural. And if seeing that is always knowledge by perception, you can perceive all sorts of wondrous things. For instance, you can see into the future:

(1) Looking at the sky, Morgan saw that it was going to rain.

You can see counterfactuals:

(2) Jane saw that the vase was on the edge of the table and that it would have fallen off if Mary had touched it.

You can see probabilities:

(3) Barbara saw that the oak was unlikely to withstand the next severe storm.

All of (1)-(3), I think, may be authentic cases of gaining knowledge through perception, but you can't just see that by looking at the surface form.

Take this:

(4) Alice saw that 961 was a perfect square.

This can be true even if Alice's eyes are closed. Nor is mathematics the only area in which you can see with your eyes closed (or to put it more prosaically, in which "saw that" means roughly "realized or had realized that"):

(5) Alice saw that she would have to persuade Sarah if she was to have any hope of getting her proposal through the board.

(5) can be true if Alice is presenting her proposal and looking at the faces of the board. But it can also be true if Alice is plotting her strategy in advance and mulling over who is likely to pull weight with who. No visual imagining need be involved, I think.

An immediate question: Can visual and nonvisual uses of "see that" be conjoined? That's one test (so I hear) as to whether two different senses of "see" are involved. I think they can be conjoined without much strain:

(6) Alice was staring at her photographs of the strange new bird. What could it feed on, she wondered? Then she saw that there was a slight curvature to the beak, and that only the bolanthus flower could spread its pollen by means of a bird with such a beak. [We may assume that Alice does not see or even imagine a picture of a bolanthus while this is occuring.]

Or:

(7) Nash saw that his friends were all talking to the same woman, that she was getting annoyed, that they would be better off each focusing on someone else, that this was a situation that generalized to many game-theoretic setups, and that he could prove that this held across many important cases.

(I'm told that there's a scene in the movie of A Beautiful Mind that can be summed up by (7), and that, much to my informant's chagrin, it doesn't even represent a Nash equilibrium. They shoulda spent more money on philosophical consultants.)

If (6) and (7) work, they could be taken to show that knowledge through ratiocination is just a kind of knowledge of perception. I prefer the conclusion that the acceptability of the "see that" locution doesn't fix how the knowledge is actually obtained.

[A side note: I'm not sure whether "heard that" and "felt that" can actually be used to report the attainment of knowledge through perception. Certainly "hear that" usually means "was told that," and "felt that" usually means "had a feeling that," both non-factive. But does the following work?

(8) Nancy heard that the car was not running smoothly.

More likely perhaps is:

(9) Nancy could hear that the car was not running smoothly

(I think I'm stealing this point from someone)--although the acceptability of (9) may mean that there is a literal reading of "hear that" as "come to know by hearing," since otherwise it seems impossible to generate the intended meaning of (9). Usually, perhaps, the "was told that" reading blocks off the "came to know by hearing" reading, but when you add the conditional the "was told that" reading no longer makes sense.

I vaguely remember a Suzette Haden Elgin self-helpy book that discussed different people's styles of communication, and said that some were more likely to use visual language, some auditory language, and some tactual language. But I don't think this extended to use of "hear that" or "feel that" where visual folks would say "see that"; maybe other people say "realize that" instead.]

Posted by Matt Weiner at June 8, 2004 12:22 PM
Comments

In reading your blog, I was reminded of President Bush's comment on September 11, 2001. He said:

Today our nation saw evil

This seems like a conflated use of a "visual" and "nonvisual" use of the seeing that attitude. On the one hand, "evil" may correspond to the state-of-affairs that obtained that day, the hijacker's use of commercial airplanes as missles. On the other hand, "evil" may concern our seeing this act as a deliberate attack against what America stands for, i.e. freedom, independence, economic flourishing, etc. If the two forms of the seeing that attitude can be easily conflated, then don't we begin to lose sight of the boundary between perceptual and rational understanding?

Posted by: Joe at June 8, 2004 08:07 PM

(6) sounds wrong to me. (7) sounds better, but we should be careful -- if 'see' is ambiguous between 'visually perceive' and 'realize', there is a reading of (7) in which it always means the latter. That is, this sounds ok:

(7) Nash saw that his friends were all talking to the same woman, that she was getting annoyed, that they would be better off each focusing on someone else, that this was a situation that generalized to many game-theoretic setups, and that he could prove that this held across many important cases.
but plausibly, it only does so because it means the same thing as this:
(7) Nash realized that his friends were all talking to the same woman, that she was getting annoyed, that they would be better off each focusing on someone else, that this was a situation that generalized to many game-theoretic setups, and that he could prove that this held across many important cases.

Posted by: Jonathan at June 9, 2004 07:45 AM

Mom thought (6) was zeugmatic too. How sharper than a serpent's tooth!

That's a good point about (7). OTOH, it doesn't help us distinguish knowledge by perception from knowledge by inference; if Nash doesn't know by perception that his friends are all talking to the same person, then what does he know by perception? Perhaps there are examples around in which we can clearly establish that "see that" means "visually perceive" rather than "realize."

It'd be interesting to see how this works with negation. I'm pretty sure that "A didn't see that B or C" will sound awful if A realizes non-perceptually that B and doesn't even realize that C, so maybe that's more evidence for a real ambiguity.

Posted by: Matt Weiner at June 9, 2004 03:33 PM