The Verstehen Tradition

M A R Y G A L B R A I T H Center for Cognitive Science and School of Social Work, State University of New York at Buffalo, Buffalo, N Y 14260, U.S.A.

Abstract. Two different meanings of "understanding" are central to the question, "Can a computer understand?" The traditions associated with these two meanings are briefly traced, focusing on the continental "verstehen" tradition. It is argued that a beneficial dialog can emerge between these traditions, and that the presentations herein selected contribute to such a dialog.

Key words: Verstehen, understanding, lived experience.

If one believes . . . in a phenomenological approach to understanding, where the feelings of the experiencing human body are central, one is committed to an epistemological tradition foreign to virtually everyone in the world of computer science and artificial intelligence. (Gardner 1985)

Experiencing plays basic roles in behavior and in the formation of meaning. If logical schemes are not considered in relation to these roles in experiencing, then logical schemes are empty . . . . The roles of felt experiencing in all our conceptual operations are not illegitimate "biases." They are natural and proper functions. These functions can be studied, and then it is seen that the functions of experiencing in cognition are much broader, more varied, and more essential than has been realized. (Gendlin 1962)

Two central and related themes of those who disagree with computationalism are (1) that experiencing in itself, as "the concretely present flow of feeling" (Gendlin, 1962: 11) plays a primary role in thought, perception, and all other essentially human processes, and (2) that there is a basic level of human understanding originating in bodily experiences and social interaction-what Jeff Coulter calls "the person level"-which cannot be reduced without losing the essence of thinking and understanding. According to those who offer these critiques, the first task of cognitive studies must be to describe experiencing and understanding on their own terms.

The historical origin of these critiques is Continental philosophy of understand- ing, Wittgensteinian logico-grammatical critique-represented here by Stuart Shanker and Jeff Coulter, Anglo-American ordinary-language philosophy, and a new theory of mind and language emerging primarily from the University of California at Berkeley, which includes among its pioneers our first speaker, Mark Johnson, our new director Leonard Talmy, as well as Charles Fillmore, George Lakoff, and Eleanor Rosch, with intellectual help from John Searle and Hubert Dreyfus, representatives of other traditions who are part of the dialogue at Berkeley. The Berkeley group is by no means monolithic, and not all the people I've mentioned are specifically critical of computationalism. But their work is taking cognitive studies in a new direction, specifically focussed on the relations between cognition and human experiencing. There is an additional tradition of critique derived from logic and mathematics-especially from G6del's theorem

Minds and Machines 5: 525-531, 1995. © 1995 Kluwer Academic Publ&hers. Printed in the Netherlands.

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and from quantum physics-including Roger Penrose and speakers Danah Zohar and Ian Marshall.

Here, I would like to give a brief introduction to a few highlights in the European tradition, which has given rise to specific critiques of artificial in- telligence by Hubert Dreyfus and Terry Winograd, and to alternative models in the social sciences such as ethnology and Schutzian sociology.

According to Karl-Otto Apel, a present day philosopher of understanding, the debate over two kinds of understanding goes back to scholastic arguments in the middle ages. But with the increasing ascendance of natural science in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries, one kind of understanding became stringently divorced from the other in the theory of knowledge, and seemingly put the other permanently outside the bounds of science.

This explanatory form of understanding, which I will call here understanding-l, was first proposed by John Locke in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690, and schematized by Immanuel Kant as the foundation of natural science in The Critique of Pure Reason in 1781. Understanding-1 is detached logical and propositional knowledge of phenomena from the position of a spectator, guaran- teed to be valid by experimental repeatability. Understanding-1 gives us the ability to predict results on the basis of covering laws and initial conditions. The methodology of understanding-1 - controlled observation and experiment, precise measurement of variables, statistical evaluation, operational definitions of con- cepts, and demand for repeatability-has revolutionized the relations between human beings and nature, and transformed human life.

The queen of sciences in the realm of understanding-1 is physics, with chemistry and other natural sciences close behind. But the question arose as early as the 18th century as to how or whether other fields of study should imitate the methods of the natural sciences.

One group said no. The first champion of the "human studies" was Giambat- tista Vico, whose treatise The New Science, published in 1725 (see Chronological Sketch of the Verstehen Tradition, following this essay), argued that the human sciences have an intrinsic advantage over the natural sciences, since their subject and their object share a common epistemology in that both are human beings or the work of human beings, The "understanding" of human beings of each other's actions and words is a different kind of understanding than that gained by scientific experiment. Friederich Schleiermacher refers to this second kind of understanding as hermeneutic-that is, as a dialogical relationship in which we interpret meaning from each other's gestures. There is a speaker and a hearer, or a reader and a work of literature, or two (or more) actors in a situation- an I and a Thou. In the hermeneutic situation, humans understand each other's actions not as physically caused, but as emerging as expressions from each other's projects of life. (Aside: note that the Turing test and the Chinese Room argument-both staples of argument about computers and the nature of understanding- are based on hermeneutics: in an interaction between a human and some other entity, the

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human must decide whether she is truly in a dialogue. Surprisingly, it is the computationalist who is willing to rely on the hermeneutic test as conclusive. That is, if a human believes she is in a true dialog, then that is conclusive evidence that her interlocutor understands what she is saying.) Vico's and Schleiermacher's theses were taken up by Wilhelm Dilthey later in the 19th century as central to his attempt to write a "critique of historical reason" analogous to Kant's critique of pure reason. Again and again, Dilthey returns to Vico's argument to underpin his own: natural science has to overcome a handicap in order to know anything at all, but historical science is based on the identity of subject and object -human life. Human beings cannot understand (in Dilthey's special term for understanding, Verstehen, hereafter also known as understanding-2) the natural world because nature does not "speak." In order to explain natural processes, we are forced into methodological formalism-we have no access to nature-in-itself. But as human beings, we already possess the reality of humanness: this is our reality-continu- ous, lived experience amid humanly meaningful contexts. In Dilthey's view, it is absurd to exclude from our definition of science the very knowledge with which we are most intimate, and which in its givenness constitutes the essence of the subject matter of the human studies. But this intimate, given experience is not the solipsistic subjectivity of Descartes- it is reality as it is there for us prior to any split between subject and object, experience called by Dilthey Erlebnis or lived experience.

According to Dilthey, "We explain nature; we understand psychic life" (Dilthey 1977; GS V: 144). The stance of understanding-I, may be schematized as [S]--~ O: the subject is bracketed, and the focus is on an isolated object, which exists independent of the subject. In contrast, the epistemological stance de- scribed by Vico, Schleiermacher, and Dilthey could be schematized better as S-1¢:>S-2 (or as S¢=>work, where "work" is an intentional object fashioned for meaningful purposes, as opposed to a naturally occurring object). Subject S-1 encounters and enters into the expressions of subject S-2. That is, S-2 symbolizes his or her lived experience in spoken words or perhaps in a work of art, thus creating new lived experience for S-2, and S-1 comes in contact with this expression, which evokes a new lived experience for S-1. The new experience evoked in S-1 is not the same as the experience expressed by or evoked in S-2, but there is an important, if (as yet?) unspecified, relationship between these experiences. For example, an author writes a novel, and this expression is available to be read and experienced by any number of readers (including the author), for whom the novel leads to involvement, new lived experience, and new understanding. Each reading is different, both because it is in a unique moment of time, and because the experiences the reader brings to it are different. But there is also an important relationship between all these readings. Through reading the novel, we participate in something which we share in common with the author and other readers. This something is hard to characterize, but in Gendlin's terminology it is also very intricate. The structure of lived experience is so "near"

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to us that we often do not have a ready vocabulary to talk about it. But a descriptive psychology such as Dilthey proposes would explore the contours of this structure.

Dilthey's notions of lived experience and understanding-2, and his advocacy of descriptive methods to capture this pre-reflective form of knowledge, were picked up and developed by the new approach to knowledge called phenomenology which developed at the turn of the 20th century. Whereas scientific method might be described as a practice which attempts to purify our experience of its experiential aspects, phenomenology is a practice which attempts to capture experience as it is given. Phenomenology in its infancy was not only a philosophi- cal movement but an aesthetic one, familiar in impressionist painting and in modernist literary style for its attempt to capture the lived experience of time, space and consciousness as opposed to its formal properties. Think, for example of space and light as it is captured in Turner's landscapes, Monet's waterlilies, or Degas's dancers, or the experience of time in the prose of James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, or Marcel Proust. These artists might not have described themselves in terms of phenomenology, but their work calls attention to properties of ex- perience more so than properties of objects "in themselves." I will not attempt here a description of phenomenology as a philosophical movement, since it is beyond the scope of this essay. But several terms from phenomenology relate directly to the notion of Verstehen, among them Edmund Husserl's concept of the Life-world, Martin Heidegger's Being-in-the-world, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty's notion of the lived body, and his related philosophy of lived language. I would like to comment briefly on Merleau-Ponty's view of understanding.

Like Dilthey, Merleau-Ponty wanted to study experience as a whole phenom- enon, as the relation between subjects, or between the subject and language, subject and world. He was disgusted by the anemia of the philosophical subject as conceived by what he called "intellectualists," or idealists, who saw everything in terms of representations, and the naive empiricists, who considered the subject, if at all, as a kind of transparent eye on reality. Like Dilthey, who proclaimed that "In the veins of the knowing subject as constructed by Locke, Hume, and Kant runs no real blood" (Palmer 1969: 102), Merleau-Ponty said of positivistic science: "Science manipulates things and gives up living in them" (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 159). But even as he rejected the standpoint of the "estranged spectator," Merleau-Ponty believed in a "reciprocal envelopment" as he called it between phenomenology and empirical studies, and he even chided his mentor Heidegger for not learning from contemporary developments in the empirical sciences (Schmidt 1985: 14).

Merleau-Ponty's concept of the "lived body" is central to his philosophy of mind and of language. Bodily experience, not thought, is the basis of conscious- ness: "Consciousness is in the first place not a matter of 'I think that' but 'I can. '" (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 137). We inhabit language because and in the same way we inhabit our bodies in the world.

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[L]anguage is the subject's taking up of a position in the world of his meanings. The term "world" here is not a manner of speaking: it means that the "mental" or cultural life borrows its structures from natural life and that the thinking subject must have its basis in the subject incarnate. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 193)

One enters into language, as one enters into the physical world, by taking up a bodily position within it. Understanding the world and language happens through living it:

We do not understand the absence or death of a friend until the time comes when we expect a reply from him and we realize that we shall never again receive one. (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 80-81)

To highlight this aspect of mind, Merleau-Ponty describes the case of certain

brain-injured parents whose disability is that they no longer enter into relation to

themselves or other people through language or through social action. Their

speech is reduced to a series of propositional statements without liveliness,

familiarity or involvement. Their general knowledge and ability to speak in

well-formed sentences remains intact, but they have lost most of their power of

entering into present situations, either imaginary or real. Their only access to

present reality is through laborious scanning and representation of their sen-

sorium. Oliver Sacks, a present-day neurologist who uses phenomenology to

describe the life-world of his patients, writes in his book, The Man Who Mistook

His Wife for a Hat, of a patient (he of the title) whose vision has been gradually

affected in this way:

He approached faces - even of those near and dear - as if they were abstract puzzles or tests~ He did not relate to them, he did not behold. No face was familiar as a "thou," being just identified as a set of features, an "it." Thus, there was formal, but no trace of personal, gnosis [knowledge]. And with this went his indifference, or blindness, to expression. A face, to us, is a person looking out-we see, as it were, the person through his persona, his face. But for Dr. P., there was no persona in this sense- no outward persona, and no person within. (Sacks 1987: 13)

Merleau-Ponty and Sacks point out, apropos of these injured patients, that they

call our attention to human powers which we may miss because they are not on

our theoretical maps. What is not on our maps may be passed over in the

landscape, even if it is present in our experience. Sacks laments that "By a sort of

comic and awful analogy, our current cognitive neurology and psychology

resemble nothing so much as poor Dr. P!" (Sacks 1987: 20)

People who criticize computationalism from the perspective of the tradition of

Verstehen and existential phenomenology point out the danger of a theory of mind

which does not consider the experiential and bodily dimension of m i n d - t h a t to

the extent that we lack concepts for distinguishing between human functioning and the formal operations of an algorithm, we leave these distinctions more and

more outside the realm of accepted discourse. Further, these critics argue that

computationalist theories and the technologies they produce, as they enter our

concepts of ourselves and the dailiness of our lives, may have the affect of dulling the special capabilities of human beings, so that we ourselves come to resemble

the brain-injured patients described by Sacks and Merleau-Ponty.

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However, such pessimism is only one side of the story. In my own experience with the cognitive science group here, I have found a great deal more de facto pluralism among cognitive scientists than one might expect from their theoretical writings. Many practice methodological computationalism in their formal pre- sentations, but are philosophically and practically more eclectic and creative, so much so that I am often surprised when they describe themselves as com- putationalists. They have been exceptionally open to hearing other views from their own, including mine, and they respond enthusiastically to invitations to discuss the issue, as we will do today and tomorrow. Even more hopefully, a growing number of researchers here and elsewhere are working on issues of language acquisition, language disorders, understanding of narrative, categoriza- tion, navigation, and effectiveness of therapeutic interventions using approaches to human experience which follow, knowingly or not, from the Verstehen tradition. A pioneer in this bridging of the Continental and American pragmatic tradition is our contributor Eugene Gendlin, who has developed a careful and highly useable description of eight different relations between language and experiencing and a methodology of focusing which teaches people to use their own experiencing as a means to personal change and creativity, and which I find of great use for explicating the relations between the language of narrative and the experience of reading.

The field of cognitive studies encompasses these new "Understanding-2" approaches and those deriving from "Understanding-l," and perhaps most importantly, the relations between these two forms of understanding. What all our contributors share, if I interpret them correctly, is a desire for a cognitive studies which allows for open dialogue, both critical and hermeneutic, between different models of human functioning. That is, their critiques contribute to and enlarge cognitive and human studies rather than attempt to destroy them.

Chronological Sketch of the Verstehen Tradition

1725 Giambattista Vico, The New Science

1819 Friedrich Schleiermacher, Hermeneutics

1870-1911 Wilhelm Dilthey, various works on lived experience (Erlebnis), under- standing (Verstehen), and the human studies (Geisteswissenschafien)

1913 Edmund Husserl, Logical Investigations

1927 Martin Heidegger, Being and Time

1936 Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European Sciences

1945 Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Phenomenology of Perception

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1960 Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method

1962 Eugene Gendlin, Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning

1968 Jfirgen Habermas, Knowledge and Human Interests

1972 Karl-Otto Apel, Towards a Transformation of Philosophy

References

Apel, Karl-Otto (1980), Towards a Transformation of Philosophy, trans, by B. Adey & D. Frisby (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul).

Dilthey, Wilhelm (1977), Descriptive Psychology and Historical Understanding (Gesammelten Schriften V: 139-240), trans, by K. Heiges (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff).

Gardner, Howard (1985), The Mind's New Science (New York: Basic Books). Gendlin, Eugene (1962), Experiencing and the Creation of Meaning (New York: Free Press of

Gleneoe). Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1962), The Phenomenology of Perception, trans, by C. Smith (London:

Routledge and Kegan Paul). Palmer, Richard (1969), Hermeneutics (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press). Sacks, 0liver (1987), The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat (New York: Harper and Row). Schmidt, James (1985), Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Between Phenomenology and Structuralism (New

York: St. Martin's).