Biosemiotics and meaning-making

Since beginning my PhD program in communication, I have become increasingly interested in the emerging interdisciplinary field of Biosemiotics. The website for the International Society for Biosemiotic Studies can be found here. Scholars in the nascent interdiscipline publish in journals ranging from biology to philosophy to linguistics. What they share in common is a willingness to consider the communicative/signing possibilities of all living systems. That is, communication and meaning-making are not seen as the province of humans (or near-humans) alone. Cells communicate through exchange of chemicals that cause fundamental changes when they breach semi-permeable membranes. Ecosystems communicate through any myriad of living processes - communication that is interpretable from both within and without the systems. Animals communicate and make meaning of those communications in ways that cannot be reduced to Cartesian mechanics, nor to a reductionist physicalism.

As someone who is interested in the possibility of dethroning humans from the top of a communication hierarchy, instead inviting us to see ourselves as but part of an interconnected web of communication that embraces all existence, I welcome the vision that I have seen in biosemiotics. I think there is real promise in this emerging field to address the fundamental anthropocentrism that is a part of our current understanding of rhetoric, meaning-making, and politics. It is for that reason that I will be bringing some insights from biosemiotics into my semester project, examining how the animal voices were or were not heard in the fight over Prop B here in Missouri.

Representing Animal Suffering in Pictures

How does one speak of/for animals in the public debates about animal welfare legislation? One of the ways that many choose is through visual depictions. Animal welfare and animal rights groups publish photos or share videos that depict animal suffering, or perhaps show animals who are healthy and happy in contrast to those who are cruelly abused. Currently I am reading a study of such visual representation, which draws on post-structuralists such as Derrida to analyze more deeply what is happening through the use of visuals. It will be interesting to continue to explore the rhetorical aspects of these questions, but I also plan to approach the issues from a quantitative perspective in another class I am taking.

In Advanced Quant, my semester project will be a proposal for a project that assesses people's cognitive/emotional responses to visual depictions of animal suffering, with a sample drawn from actual materials distributed by animal welfare/rights groups. The question I plan to explore is whether certain depictions cross the threshold of cognitive overload, causing people to turn away (and thus, most importantly, not to process the intended message). I think that this study will be an important complement to the rhetorical explorations I will be doing in our class.

Looking forward to seeing how the connections unfold...

Missouri Senate guts Prop B

This St. Louis Today article coves the rollback of Prop B that passed the Missouri Senate on Friday, subverting the will of the voters of the state, and once again putting the economic considerations of agribusiness ahead of the well-being of animals: http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/article_c424620b-4208-5f34-81e5-4ed018ceca8e.html

(btw, I am used to WordPress's much easier interface. if anyone knows how to insert links in Blogger, please let me know)

What is interesting about the article is the way it portrays the opposition to the bill as voicing "barely a whimper of dissent." This, when I know from emails I have gotten from various organizations that there were repeated citizen protests at the capitol throughout the process, both for the House and Senate versions of this bill. Perhaps the article is only talking about the senators themselves, but the silencing of the many, many (majority, in fact) who supported Prop
B, and are opposed to its obviation by this ill-conceived measure is noticeable. When this is coupled with the article's portrayal of a supporter of the bill with his dog on a bed in his office, giving the bill a "two paws up," it is, truth be told, infuriating!

So here is my "arguing differently" question: what happens to the passion when we are trying to be understanding of the opposition? I have found the tactics of big agribusiness to be odious throughout the Prop B campaign, and now they have succeeded in getting their supporters (who constitute a majority of our representatives in Jefferson City, even though the areas they represent do not constitute a majority of our state's population) to do what they could not accomplish last fall. In the midst of all this, mistreated animals seem to be left out of the equation. I am not sure I am prepared to be understanding of the message or tactics of big agribusiness here!

Much to ponder...

Project Nim and my project

This past weekend I was privileged to attend some of the films showing at the True/False film festival here in Columbia. Among them was Project Nim, reviewed here (http://www.movieline.com/2011/01/project-nim-opens-sundance-proves-life-stranger-than-fiction.php). Unlike at Sundance (as mentioned in the review), we gave a standing ovation, particularly when we saw Nim's best caretaker/rescuer was there at the screening.

Project Nim tells the story of Nim Chimsky, a chimpanzee taken from his mother and raised by humans as part of a communication experiment in the 1970s. He learns sign language, and does indeed communicate with the humans working with him. But their own foibles, including an inability to foresee that their primate charge would soon be too physically strong for them to handle, leads to tragedy, as Nim is passed off to an increasingly grim set of prisons/laboratories. It was a stark commentary on the callous instrumentality with which humans can treat animals, at the same time that it was a fascinating look at the thought processes and emotions of one of our closest evolutionary relatives.

Maxwell asks how I will propose to speak with the voice of the animals (or ecosystem) in my semester project, and it is a good question! The proponents of biosemiotics, particularly those interested in inter-species communication, have been struggling with this issue for some time. We need to be careful of the tendency to anthropomorphize, but we also need to be aware that the traditional idea of a clear dividing line between human and animal is simply not tenable. The goal, I believe, is to see how the animal(s) can speak with their own voices, which may look very different from the way humans communicate.

I admit that I was always fascinated with animals like Nim (anyone else remember Koko the gorilla, who was also taught sign language?), but that this movie made me realize that, as fascinating as such a communication study might be, it is at far too great a cost to the animal(s). We in the U.S. currently still imprison 1200-1500 primates for experimentation, while the E.U. has outlawed such a practice. It needs to stop here too!!!

Maybe my project can contribute in some way to that cause, as I look at the way the voice of animals was portrayed in the Proposition B fight here in Missouri. But after this weekend, I wonder if the best way to contribute is to tell stories truthfully and powerfully by becoming a documentary filmmaker!

Directions for my semester project

First, a prologue: the other day a former T.A. of the writing intensive course (Comm 3050) that I am T.A.-ing this semester told me that he was surprised that the Comm Dept would have a second-year PhD student T.A. for that class because it is so work-intensive. He felt that it should only be students who are done with coursework who would be teaching a class that takes so much time. His words affirmed for me what I have been feeling this semester, which is that I seem to be a teacher first and student second. I feel constantly behind the 8-ball in my own classes, and regret that I don't currently have the mental space to be blogging all the time or daydreaming about what I might be doing for my project in English 8040.

That being said, there are a few directions that I would like to explore.

1) Part of the process of training to be a pastor is learning to listen with an open heart and mind. I was trained in Rogerian reflective listening as part of my pastoral care & counseling work, and have done some personal study of spiritual direction (I love the concept of "holy listening"). I have also had wonderful models of holy listening in mentors who have been a part of my journey. I will never forget Gordon Lathrop, my liturgy professor and chaplain at the Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia, who likened the process of receiving and caring for people's deepest concerns to an image of carefully carrying a precious, beautiful bowl filled with milk.
It seems to me that there is something that a spiritual perspective on listening could contribute to the process of "arguing differently." If we are hoping to speak the truth in love and hear the other person's truth, so that we might come to some sort of mutual understanding, rather than just fight it out, then listening is crucial.
Heaven knows we haven't done it very well all the time in the church! One has only to witness the fights over glbt issues to see that. But the ideal is there, and dealing in ideals is often my modus operandi (just call me Platonic).

So one thought would be to do a combination of a theoretical/theological paper on the contributions of spiritual listening to the process of argumentation PLUS a curriculum for a seminary class that would explore the connections. Since I see one possible future trajectory for me being a seminary professor, that would be a useful combination. Another take on that would be to make it more pan-religious, as if I were going to teach in a department of religion at a university.

Another thought would be to make it a longer, strictly theoretical paper, aimed at the Journal of Communication and Religion, looking at the connections and discontinuities between spiritual listening and persuasive rhetoric. There is the whole history of Christian "apologetics," but truthfully studying that doesn't interest me in the least, as it tends to be the province of a particular form of fundamentalism (here are the rational reasons why my religion is better. yuck).

2) On a completely different note, I have a strong interest in environmental protection and animal rights, and have been interested for some time in developing an approach to political communication that honors what I call "the organic polis." How can we see animal and ecosystem "voices" as equally valid and honored participants in our political debates? Can "arguing differently" include those voices? Again, I would be interested in developing a theoretical paper as well as a syllabus around this set of questions.

Adding to my bibliographic network

Here is the book summary that I wrote on Richard Rorty's Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature:

In the introduction to the 30^th Anniversary edition, Michael Williams writes: “Rorty’s book is a visionary work that challenges us to rethink our understanding of the philosophical enterprise. It is the single greatest influence on the revival of American Pragmatism.”

The central argument of the book: “we understand knowledge when we understand the social justification of belief, and thus have no need to view it as accuracy of representation” (p. 170).

Part I: Our Glassy Essence

(chapters 1 & 2)

The “glassy essence” (a quote from Shakespeare) is the intellectual soul – that is, the essential part of humans that reflects or mirrors truth/reality. Against a background of Platonic ideals and Aristotelian hylomorphism (the inner self knows an object by literally sharing the form of that object, not by “being aware” of it), Descartes develops the completely new idea of the mind as the location of our glassy essence. According to Rorty, Descartes “created” the mind. Previous to him, philosophers had not conceived of the mind/body split the way he outlined it, especially the way he described the mental as having a more direct connection to truth (where “truth” is taken to be what one could know for sure).

Part II: Mirroring

(chapters 3 – 6)

The Cartesian concept of consciousness (“the mental”) led to the “epistemological turn” in philosophy, developed by Locke and later, Kant. According to Rorty, Locke makes a fundamental mistake with his “idea idea,” which is to confuse the workings of the mind with the grounding of our claims to knowledge (Rorty later makes the same argument against those philosophers that would find a basis for epistemology in modern psychophysiology). That is, knowing how our brains/minds process sensory stimuli is not the same as knowing that the ideas we have of those stimuli are justified. Furthermore, it does not tell us anything helpful about the way ideas or concepts function in society, which is a central concern of Rorty’s.

In an era that was seeking to demarcate the role of philosophy from the role of science, Kant solidified the project of philosophy as epistemology. That is, whereas previous eras saw philosophy as the “Queen” of the sciences (i.e., metaphysics), in the developing modern era, Kant repositioned philosophy as the foundational discipline. Philosophy would no longer concern itself with the “universal and least material,” but with the question: how is our knowledge possible? Crucial here is the concept of knowledge as accurate representation of reality, with an increasing quest for certainty, structure and rigor.

The Kantian project of analytic certainty has influenced every major philosophical movement since his time, with each one claiming to have found the best way of addressing the fundamental epistemological questions raised by Cartesian dualism. Analytic philosophy is founded on two Kantian distinctions regarding our concepts: 1) between the analytic (true in virtue of meaning alone) and the synthetic (true in virtue of meaning + how the world is), and 2) between the “given” and our contribution (also called the language/fact distinction). With the “linguistic turn” in the 20^th century, these questions and distinctions become the province of the philosophy of language. That is, the project of analytic certainty gets transferred onto the project of explaining how (or whether) our language accurately mirrors reality.

Rorty critiques this entire project, claiming that it is time for philosophy to move beyond conceiving itself as epistemology in the analytic sense. He proposes one of the central concepts of his book: Epistemological Behaviorism, which, briefly put, is a “conception of philosophy which has nothing to do with the quest for certainty” (p. 171), but rather, is based in conversational justification. He bases this argument in a reading of Quine and Sellars, two 20^th century philosophers of language, who raise behaviorist questions about the representational view. Quine claims that there are no analytic truths, because any claim to justification is based in an entire network of assumptions that cannot be separated from one another, and Sellars grounds all justification in linguistic awareness, and thus eliminates “the given.” In other words, what is considered rational, justified, or even “true” is based in “what society lets us say” (p. 174), rather than in any claim to privileged representation (accurate mirroring of reality). Rorty states clearly: “there is no way to get outside our beliefs and our language so as to find some test other than coherence” (p. 178).

Rorty then spends a chapter critiquing psychological epistemology, which is a more extended discussion of the Descartes/Locke concept of mental entities (Lockean “ideas”) and its relation to equally problematic modern philosophical conceptions of psychological processes. He notes that “the notion of psychological states as inner representations is unobjectionable but fairly uninteresting” (p. 242) but warns of a tendency in a psychologically oriented philosophy to articulate a new mental/physical split on the line between the abstract and the concrete. He notes that there are no direct links between psychology and epistemology.

Chapter 6 addresses philosophy of language, which has been in many ways the modern articulation of the Kantian project (that is, how does language “hook on” to reality?). Drawing on 20^th c. philosopher Davidson, Rorty lays out a non-analytic project, where “the question of ‘how language works’ has no special connection with the question of ‘how knowledge works’” (p. 259). Philosophy of language can examine (a la Wittgenstein) the language games of a society, rather than attempting to find a privileged mirror in the use of words. An important point: we need historical examination of how language has been used, and what society has deemed to be true, rational, but there is no “Truth” standing behind all of these historical true uses.

Part III: Philosophy

(chapters 7 & 8)

From Epistemology to Hermeneutics argues that philosophy should let go of epistemology because the project of finding common ground for rationality is impossible. Some have looked for common ground outside of us (Plato/Aristotle and modern positivists) and some have looked inside of us (Descartes and following) and some have looked to language, but Rorty draws on Dewey, Wittgenstein, Quine, Sellars and Davidson to suggest that a more fruitful path is to take a hermeneutical approach. He specifically lifts up Kuhn and the distinction between normal and abnormal/revolutionary discourse, and pictures hermeneutics as making space for abnormal discourse at the same time that it provides an opportunity for conversation across different normal discourses.

Clearly Rorty could be read as a interpretivist or even post-modernist, but although he notes that he views all discourse as value-based, he also says he is trying to move our thinking beyond the subjective/objective split, which he views as another reading of Cartesian dualism. He is truly a pragmatist, interested in how meaning is made in actual societal dialogue and language use, willing to concede certain epistemological claims to science (as long as those claims are not seen as more “real”), but hoping for a conversation that is a “continuous cultural dialogue in which the arts and sciences, knowledge and imagination, would be given free play” (from the afterward by David Bromwich, p. 429) and no one discourse would be privileged.

Finally, Rorty’s last chapter (Philosophy without Mirrors) lifts up the idea of philosophy as edification, by which he means that the philosopher is to play a Socratic role of questioning, challenging and helping society find “new, better, more interesting, more fruitful ways of speaking” (p. 360). He is particularly interested in opening up discourse “to take us out of our old selves by the power of strangeness, to aid us in becoming new beings” (p. 360). He cites Gadamer’s critique of objectivity, saying that it “is the attempt to prevent education from being reduced to instruction in the results of normal inquiry” (p. 363). Finally, he ends with this thought: “The only point on which I would insist is that philosophers’ moral concern should be with continuing the conversation of the West, rather than with insisting upon a place for the traditional problems of modern philosophy within that conversation” (p. 394).

APA citation for the volume we consulted:

Rorty, R. (1979/2009). Philosophy and the mirror of nature (30th
     anniv. ed.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Starting my bibliographic network

I believe that my approach to "arguing differently" begins with my long-time interest in the different perspectives of men and women. Most of my reading in that area is from two decades ago. Then there is the work in Myers-Briggs that I have done over the years. Lastly, there is my work in spiritual listening. This list is just a taste of where I want to go with this, and it doesn't have individual comments about the books yet, but I wanted to get something out there to start the process:

Deborah Tannen: You Just Don’t Understand: Women and Men in Conversation

Harriet Lerner: The Dance of Anger: A Woman’s Guide to Changing the Patterns of Intimate Relationships

Patricia Evans: The Verbally Abusive Relationship: How to Recognize it and How to Respond

Carol Gilligan: In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development

David Keirsey & Marilyn Bates: Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types (Myers Briggs stuff)

Margaret Guenther: Holy Listening: The Art of Spiritual Direction