Wilhelm Dilthey on Understanding Other Persons |
ABSTRACT Dilthey was an unconvention thinker. Dilthey's lifelong preoccupation was to develop a sound account of the Human Sciences which, for him, were those studies that focused on our mental life including psychology. For him, human interactions revealed aims, values, and purposes in the way in which they were expressed. Though the relations between these states of mind and their expression in human actions was not always obvious, he insisted that expressions were nonetheless "objects" that can be studied; but not in the same way that the Natural Sciences study their objects. In Dilthey's view, the "unit of mental life" to be studied was the structure of human action. This unit finds its expression in various ways. Human actions are not random. They have a discernible structure. Lived experience (Erlebnis) has three components for Dilthey: cognition, feeling, and conation which are interdependent and follow one upon the other in a definite order. Dilthey's conception of Verstehen as Erlebnis has nine aspects: Aussere Erfahrung, Erlebnis, Ausdruck, Füling, Nachbild, Nachlebe, Schichhineinversetzen, Einfüling, and Struktur (Weltanschaung). Influenced by Dilthey's delineation of the process of Verstehen, drawing upon Cognitive Science, parallel terms can be found in contemporary conceptions of cognition, namely,
Much of Dilthey's work concerned the distinction between the Human Sciences (Verstehen) and the Natural Sciences (Erklärung) arguing against basing the distinction on the contrast between the conceptions of objectivity and subjectivity. . Dilthey conception of Verstehen was the inspiration for delineating configuring as a distinctive mode of cognition. |
Wilhelm Dilthey was an unconventional thinker--oddly enough, because he sought a balanced view and evinced a “propensity to see all sides of a question.”
When Hegel's idealism was the reigning view in the German university early in his career, Dilthey, who admired Hegel, tried to balance the picture by attending to empirical thinkers.
When some thinkers rejected abstract theories in favor of the immediacy of experience near the end of his career, Dilthey, who had advocated "lived experience" throughout his career, objected to such an extreme view (Ermarth, 1981, 135-39). “Though sprawling and diffuse, his thought shows an underlying coherence, but it is, to use one of his own categories, a "dynamic coherence" rather than a formal-systematic one. His concepts and categories are not "clear and distinct" but dynamic and dialectical, embodying movement, internal tension, and reciprocal relations.“ (Ermarth, 1981, 342)
Unlike his contemporaries, Dilthey saw psychology not philosophy as the foundation (Grundwissenschaft) of the Human Sciences (Geisteswissenshaften).
Throughout his work Dilthey stressed that the "psychological description" of the human mind must be done in the context of "lived experience" from "the standpoint of life."
From the standpoint of life, the perception of a tree is not simply a set of visual stimuli that can be resolved into optic and neural data but is rather the lived experience of the tree situated in a context of experientially implicit meanings, interests, and values, such as "blocking my view," "shade in summer," "fuel in winter," "beautiful," etc., which have reference to human life itself. (Ermarth, 1981, 111)
He argued that being alive requires us to take a standpoint, so aims, values, and purposes are embedded in all experiences.
Dilthey's lifelong preoccupation was to develop a sound account of the Human Sciences which, for him, were those studies that focused on our mental life including psychology. He sought to put the Human Sciences on an objective footing with other sciences. Regarding it as a mistake to exclude aims, values, purposes, feeling, and emotions when describing our mental life because all of these features of it were interwoven in experience,
Dilthey faced a difficult problem: what data could be used on which to base descriptions of the life of the mind? For him the expressions of the mind provided that basis.
His approach is strikingly parallel to recent developments in Cognitive Linguistics.David Lee writes that “cognitivists argue that linguistic structure is a direct reflex of cognition in the sense that a particular linguistic expression is associated with a particular way of conceptualizing a given situation” (2004, 1).
Dilthey's view of expressions includes not only verbal or symbolic expressions but also the ways in which human being express themselves in their actions.
For him, human interactions revealed aims, values, and purposes in the way in which they were expressed. Though the relations between these states of mind and their expression in human actions was not always obvious, he insisted that expressions were nonetheless "objects" that can be studied; but not in the same way that the Natural Sciences study their objects. In the Human Sciences minds study minds; whereas in the Natural Sciences minds study the world beyond them. As an empiricist, Dilthey distrusted introspection, finding it subjective (Ermarth, 1981, 88). He agreed with William James who pointed to a predicament with introspection comparing it to an effort to turn a light up quickly “to see how the darkness looks.”
Instead Dilthey studied the expressions of the human mind for what they could reveal about the life of the mind. Rather than postulating a-priori structures of cognition in Kantian fashion, Dilthey explored the expressions of the mind for patterns and structures.
[Wilhelm Dilthey] [Expressions of Action] [Cognitive Abilities Entailed in Understanding]
[Verstehen & Exp Transfers] [Objectivity] [Natural -Human Sciences] [Verstehen & Configuring]
In Dilthey's view, the "unit of mental life" to be studied was the structure of human action.
This unit finds its expression in various ways. Human actions are not random. They have a discernible structure. Lived experience (Erlebnis) has three components for Dilthey: cognition, feeling, and conation which are interdependent and follow one upon the other in a definite order. "Cognition comes first, then feeling, then conation. I receive news of a friend's death : I am sorry and perhaps surprised : I am moved to do various things which the situation requires, such as writing letters of condolence or attending the funeral :, and when I have done these my reaction to the situation is complete."
We understand human action as a pattern of behavior. In his Action, Emotion and Will, Anthony Kenny, as far as I know quite independently of Dilthey, makes a similar point, noting that "The description of human feeling and of human willing is dependent on the description of human action."
Actions are preceded by wanted or unwanted states and followed by the opposite states. If I am hot and I purchase a cold drink, drinking it would under normal circumstances make me feel cool and end the state of feeling hot. The order involved arises from the fact that in the structure of the English language, "performances are brought to an end by states."
In ways quite parallel to Kenny's delineation of action, narratologists, for example Gerald Prince,
argue that we tell stories in this structured manner and we read them with the same structure of expectations.
For Dilthey, Hodges argues, "it is a fundamental characteristic of mental life that in one way or another it expresses or “objectifies” itself: " and "expression is the medium through which we know other minds.”
He offers the following instance:
. . . I see a human figure in a downcast attitude, the face marked with tears ; these are the expressions of grief, and I cannot normally perceive them without feeling in myself a reverberation of the grief which they express. Though native to another mind than mine, and forming part of a mental history which is not mine, it none the less comes alive in me, or sets up an image or reproduction of itself (Nachbild) in my consciousness. Upon this foundation all my understanding of the other person is built.
.....This power of expressions to evoke what they express is the basis of all communication and all sharing of experience between human beings. It is not an inferential process. When I see the stricken figure I do not begin by recognizing the attitude as the attitude typical of grief, and conclude from this that the person before me is experiencing grief. The mere sight of the expression awakens in me an immediate response, not intellectual, but emotional, feeling arouses feeling with no other intermediary than the expression itself. Dilthey remarks that what happens in me on such an occasion is the same as what happens in the other person whom I understand, only as it were in reverse. In him a lived experience has externalized itself in an expression. in me, a perceived expression has internalized itself in the shape of a Nachbild of the experience expressed. Guided by the other person 's expression, I live over 'again (nacherlebe) his experience in my own consciousness, and this is the essence of understanding. “To reproduce is to re live" (Nachbilden ist eben ein Nacherleben).
.....When I thus re live someone's experience, the Nachbild of his experience in my mind both is and is not a part of my own mental history. It is, in the sense that it is I who am conscious of it, it belongs to my unity of apperception. It is not, in the sense that it is not my personal response to circumstances affecting me personally, but a reflection in me of someone else's response to circumstances affecting him. It is, so to say, distanced from the stream of my own life, eingeklammert or bracketed off', and ascribed by me to the other person. This again is not an act of deliberate judgment. I do not begin by observing the presence of a feeling in my mind and then judge that it is a reflection of something in his, but it is immediately projected and perceived by me as his. This projection Dilthey calls a “transposition of myself “(Uebertragung, Transposition, Sichhineinversetzen). It means perceiving the other person as possessed of an inner life essentially like my own, and so “rediscovering myself in the Thou " (das Verstehen ist ein Wiederfinden des Ich im Du). (Hodges, 1949, 14-15)
In Hodge's delineation of Dilthey's conception of Verstehen, persons understand each other through analogies with their past experiences. Persons project or map their experiences onto other persons when the memory of those experiences is evoked by the expressions they perceive as the other person's. I refer to this phenomenon as an "experience transfer" (and discuss it in detail in the next essay).
For the time being, note that the process of transferring experience is not a simple point by point mapping of the details of a remembered experience onto the experience just witnessed. In Dilthey's view what is recognized is a "type" of experience, the general contour of a typical human interaction. In contemporary terms, persons recognize behavior "scripts."
In understanding null experiences our capacity to map our experiences onto others is critical as I will argue in subsequent essays.
The experiences that occurred before we were born are necessarily null experiences for us. We cannot have had them. Our understanding of history depends upon our ability to map our experiences onto the experiences of persons in the past. Dilthey's theory is an account of how we understand history. His argument is that we understand history on the basis of the structures of human interactions. His account moves from one individual understanding another individual in lived experience to understanding historical figures. Our "autobiographical" memory provides the basis of our understanding of biography which provides the basis for our understanding of history
[Wilhelm Dilthey] [Expressions of Action] [Cognitive Abilities Entailed in Understanding]
[Verstehen & Exp Transfers] [Objectivity] [Natural -Human Sciences] [Verstehen & Configuring]
the cognitive abilities we use in understanding other persons
Dilthey's work suggests a model of human communication different from the
prevailing models. In the next section, I outline a "sketch" of
a model extrapolated from Dilthey's thought. What I present is not intended
to be an interpretation of Dilthey's philosophy. It is a model inspired by
his thought but designed to be coordinated with contemporary theories of
cognition. As I hope to demonstrate in the next chapter, Dilthey's conception
of Verstehen (understanding) provides us with a clue to how we
understand persons unlike us. I extrapolate from his conception to sketch
a model of an experience transfer
a preliminary model of an experience transfer
Guided by Dilthey's conception of Verstehen as Hodges delineates it, an experience transfer would have the following aspects:
- I see a human figure in a downcast attitude
- the face marked with tears, these are the expressions of grief
- and I cannot normally perceive them without feeling in myself a reverberation of the grief which they express
- sets up an image or reproduction of itself (Nachbild) in my consciousness (a perceived expression has internalized itself in the shape of a Nachbild of the experience expressed)
- Guided by the other person 's expression, I live over 'again (nacherlebe) his experience in my own consciousness
- it is immediately projected and
- construed by me as his (a transposition of myself--It means perceiving the other person as possessed of an inner life essentially like my own)
A conceptual sketch of this process would have at least the following features:
- ACTUAL EXPERIENCE / AUSSERE ERFAHRUNG (seeing "outer sensory experience)
- VIRTUAL EXPERIENCE / ERLEBNIS (lived experience initiated by recalling)
- RECOGNITION / AUSDRUK (reception of expression and recognition of the experience which it designates)
- FEELING / FÜLING ( immediate response of feeling as a consequence of identifying with the other person)
- EVOCATION OF A SCRIPT / NACHBILD (guided by the expression, past experiences are mapped onto it)
- VISUALIZATION OF AN INTERACTION / NACHLEBE ( re-experiencing another's experience by imagining it as mine)
- EXPERIENC ETRANSFER / SHICHHINEINVERSETZEN (transposing my imagined experience as if I were him)
- EMPATHY / EINFÜLING (projecting onto the other person and believing he is "possessed of an inner life essentially like my own.")
While there is an obvious logic to this sequence, it is not a set of stages.
For
example, for Dilthey Erlebnis and Ausdruck are almost
indistinguishable. The key to this process and what marks it out from other
cognitive processes is the experience transfer, the mapping of remembered
past experiences of one's own onto another person. The state of empathy which
closes the process is a far more complex matter than this sketch suggests.
In the
next
section, I gloss each of the concepts in this model of an experience transfer.
[Wilhelm Dilthey] [Expressions of Action] [Cognitive Abilities Entailed in Understanding]
[Verstehen & Exp Transfers] [Objectivity] [Natural -Human Sciences] [Verstehen & Configuring]
verstehen and experiences transfers
Dilthey's conception of Verstehen as Erlebnis has nine
aspects: Aussere Erfahrung, Erlebnis, Ausdruck, Füling, Nachbild, Nachlebe, Schichhineinversetzen, Einfüling,
and Struktur (Weltanschaung).
I will employ the parallel terms used in Cognitive Psychology, rendering these features as
cognitive activities. In this study, configuring has eight corresponding
aspects: sensing, recognizing, feeling, recalling, imagining, transposing,
projecting, and believing.
The English terms are NOT translations of Dilthey's
German terms. By using them as parallels to Dilthey's terms, I wish
to signal my intention to use current conceptions that correspond to contemporary accounts of cognition.. At the same time I
wish to indicate my indebtedness to Dilthey's delineation of this mode of cognition.
As
a virtual experience (mental states), the process has several aspects. If
Dilthey is correct, they make sense as part of a human interaction such as "a
friend inviting me over for a drink." In his view, lived experience
(Erlebnis) "includes elements of three main types, viz., cognitive,
affective, and conative, and these follow and depend on one another in a
definite order which constitutes the ground rhythm of mental life: Cognition
comes first, then feeling, then conation."
In
the example I offered above—being invited over to a friend's house
for a drink, the invitation has to makes sense to me first (cognition). Next my emotional reaction, I'm pleased,
and want to go there which completes the interaction (feeling). It is then followed
by a linked series of interactions: I volunteer to drive and do so (conation). We
arrive and enter my friend's home. I enter a room and recognize
it as a living room because of the particular kind of furniture in it—a
couch, Prairie style tables, lamps, all arranged in a conversational manner
in front of a fireplace. Let's take a closer look at the interaction
of "entering my friend's living room" as configuring.
RECALLING: 
If
I am able to recognize a Prairie style of furniture that implies that I am
able to call up from my memory instances of the Prairie style from my past
experiences. Those experiences might be minimal or they might qualify me
as a person who has expertise in styles of furniture. Recognizing, feeling,
and recalling occur so closely together that it is impossible to consider
them as stages in a linear process. They are aspects of a complex process.
My memory of Prairie style items is only one small part of numerous other
items that I recall.
RECOGNIZING: When we encounter an expression of human interaction, we are often able to recognize it. When I enter a friend's home for the first time, I can usually recognize the room into which I have entered. Often, it is a living room but it could just as well be a foyer. In either case, I can recognize it. This does not imply that I have been there before and remember the room but that I recognize the type of room it is.
Sometimes, I might be surprised. I remember entering the front door
of a neighbor's home and finding myself in a bedroom. I then I adjusted my
sense of the layout of the home and looked for another room that corresponded
to
a living room. In some situations, I may encounter a room that does not
seem to fit any type of room I recognize. Drawing on clues from looking
around, I can probably find some way of accommodating my a-typical experience.
If for example, I see some weight lifting equipment, I then can "recognize" an
exercise room. In most instances, recognition is a simple matter of assimilation.
The experience I term recognition, loosely parallel's Dilthey's conception
of Ausdruck (the perception of an expression). In my example, the
room into which I enter is an expression of the person(s) who live there.
FEELING: It is impossible not to feel something, however modestly, when I recognize something, even a room. I instantly feel that the room I have entered is lovely or ugly or odd or eerie. This is a spontaneous response. In many accounts of human interactions feelings are omitted. As Dilthey argues, they are a vital aspect of what the expression communicates to me and affects how I understand it.
If the room I enter is a living room filled with trash left over from countless
hours of watching the TV in the center of the room, it reflects upon the
person living there. In many such instances, especially if the room was
also dank, dirty, and smelled of beer, I might feel repulsed by my recognition
of what
would
be
for me an unpleasant situation. On the other hand, if the room looked much
like my own or my son's dorm room, I might have quite different feelings.
Returning to the situation in which I enter a friend's home for the first time, let's stipulate that the living room I enter after my friend opens the door is quite lovely, and I recognize a Prairie style of decor.
FRAMING:
I
recognize the Prairie style of decoration by comparing my memory of previous
experiences of it with what I perceive. This
comparison structures my experience of the situation by framing it (locating
its type in my cognitive frameworks).
Frequently, we think of cognitive processes in somewhat atomistic ways. In
this case, we are describing a human interaction which is a complex sequence
of cognitive activities that cannot be described in discrete instances since
the process, as Dilthey likes to point out, is "interwoven.”
From "the standpoint of life," recognizing the
interaction—coming to a friend's house for the first time—structures the other aspects of our understanding
of it (its decor as an expression of my friend's taste).
The general "human interaction" involved in this example is "an invitation to come to a friend's house for a drink." This "script" of human behavior is recognizable as a particular pattern of experience. As I have developed this particular example, a friend has invited me for a drink and opened the front door, letting me into her living room. Now that I have identified the sexes (my friend is a woman), the script of the interaction has to be given in more detail to be understood.
Of course, in a lived experience the details are processed as a Gestalt much more rapidly than the rate at which I can supply them in words. Note that, as I supply the details one after the other, how your imagination of the interaction shifts from "the standpoint of life."
- I am in my 50s and married.
- My woman friend is in her late 30s and unmarried.
- We are colleagues in the same academic department
- and members of the same committee.
- The invitation was issued after the Committee meeting.
- I drove her to her home because her car was being repaired.
- She invited me in for a drink.
- It was a few minutes after 5 p.m.
- Her Prairie style living room was lovely and tactfully arranged.
- I knew beforhand that she is a Lesbian
By now, you have no doubt recognized the null experience I described in more general terms in a previous essay—being a gay woman inviting a heterosexual male to her apartment for a drink. Let's say that, on this particular occasion, I interpreted the invitation as an opportunity for us to talk about the committee meeting and not as an index of sexual interest. I would have read her behavior as I would have read another woman’s. Given the expressions between my colleague and her partner when the latter entered the living room (an event I had not anticipated), I might be inclined to believe that I misinterpreted my friend's invitation as an opportunity to talk about the meeting. I only had her expressions, remarks, tone of voice, gestures to go on but this is true of almost all such situations. What another person feels or thinks to herself is always a null experience for me. In these situations, I draw upon my past experiences.
As Hodges points out, "guided by an expression, a Nachbild of [my] experience is called to consciousness." Many remembered past experiences ("afterimages") allow me to structure this interpersonal interaction. I have been invited to friends' homes for drinks after meetings, especially when I have given them rides there. I have had drinks with gay couples before. I have seen many examples of Prairie style furniture in stores and catalogues. I have correctly interpreted a woman’s expressions as a prelude to talking about departmental politics. And so on. At each moment of the interaction I have just described, I recognize structures of actions and I am able to link them to each other in a way that makes "coherent" sense of my experience even though I am interpreting what for me are null experiences—being a gay woman inviting a heterosexual male for a drink.
IMAGINING: Initially I used the English term, "visualizing," to parallel Dilthey's German term, "Nacherleben" (re-experiencing). I believe that "imagining" is a more heuristic parallel because it suggests that we re-arrange or re-assemble our memories in order to map them onto situations we encounter, especially unfamiliar ones.
For example, in the instance I gave above of entering a room whose function I did not recognize, I picked up clues from items in it. I mentioned seeing weight equipment on the floor. However, to understand the room as an exercise room, I have to draw images from my past experiences of exercise rooms and adapt them to the situation I perceive. In the situation I am describing, I draw upon my experiences with women (my wife, heterosexual women, gay women) and blend them into a coherent frame that enables me to interact in this particular situation.
TRANSPOSING: Where does the experience transfer come into the process? Everywhere. Take my perception of the living room as an instance. I attribute to my friend the sense I have of its style. I find it "lovely" and "tactfully arranged." Let's stipulate that never having been to her home, I have also never talked to her about it. Yet, it would not be strange that I found it lovely. That I found it "tactfully arranged" is more intriguing. Noticing that books by our colleagues were displayed quite visibly on shelves and tables, I might think of this arrangement as "tactful." Of course, I could be mistaken in attributing this motive to my friend. Nonetheless the pattern is recognizable as a particular stratagem. I have encountered this stratagem many times and my past experiences led me to transposing it onto my colleague.
PROJECTING: Transposing and projecting are coordinate processes. For the purposes of this study, I make a distinction between them. I use the term "transpose" to describe the cognitive activity of "transferring" perspectives in the process of blending or imagining experiences. I parallel "projecting" to Dilthey's concept of "empathy." In ordinary language, we often use the term, "projecting," to refer to attributions of feelings or emotions to another person. Sometimes, we complain that our interlocutor is projecting his or her feelings or motives onto us. While a similar cognitive activity to transposing, it carries with it an emotional connotation. In this situation, I project onto my colleague the pleasure I experience in viewing Prairie style furniture.
I also include in the notion of "projecting" the sense of aims, values, and purposes that I earlier spoke of in Dilthey's account of lived experience. For example, in transposing the Prairie style on the lifestyle of my friend, I also project on her my value system and the various ways in which Prairie style living rooms are factored into my worldview. A Prairie style living room is located in my worldview and related to numerous other aspects of it.
Included in my "projection," is a course of action--the conative element of lived experience. For example, I might understand my friend's invitation to have a drink to also be an invitation to have a private conversation about the meeting. However, when her partner appears in the living room, my sense of the scenario might lead me to "do" something quite different than to discuss the meeting we were at but decided against doing that when her partner came into the living room.
This complex and continuous processing constitutes understanding another person in Dilthey's conception of Verstehen.
[Wilhelm Dilthey] [Expressions of Action] [Cognitive Abilities Entailed in Understanding]
[Verstehen & Exp Transfers] [Objectivity] [Natural -Human Sciences] [Verstehen & Configuring]
My example of an experience transfer in which I transpose and project my view of the Prairie style onto a friend because her living room is decorated in the Prairie style is usually construed as "subjective." The connection between the style of a living room and the person who lives in it is not a necessary relation. However, under certain conditions, depending on my knowledge of the variables in the situation, it could be a probable relation. In any event, it is a possible relation in my understanding of the situation. Possibility is the hallmark of our ordinary experience. But, from a disciplinary standpoint, probability is usually required. As Hodges notes, this is one of the peculiarities of academe.
Philosophers have devoted endless trouble to discussing how we come to be aware of physical objects and how far subjective elements enter into our experience of them. They have sometimes talked as if our world consisted entirely of such objects, and as if the knowledge of them were our chief intellectual concern. Yet the most significant of our experiences lie in our relations with other people, and the nature and extent of the knowledge which we can have of other people is a question of equal importance with the first. Dilthey is the first philosopher in any country to tackle the question seriously and systematically, and his work has started a new movement in German thought. (Hodges, 1949, viii)
Experience transfers, which are the result of drawing analogies, yield possibilities more often than probabilities. For more than a century, analogies have been regarded as little more than guess work in intellectual circles governed by the quest for objectivity. In retrospect, the opposition between objectivity and subjectivity may not be as useful or productive a framework for judging the outcomes of cognitive operations. If we switched the framework to necessary, probable, and possible outcomes of our thinking, the opposition between objective and subjective seems somewhat reductive. Is possibility subjective? And is probability objective?
Dilthey's position, as I indicated in the first section, was that expressions of the mind are "objects" that can be studied but not in the same way that scientists study natural objects. In Hodge's example--"I see a human figure in a downcast attitude, the face marked with tears; these are the expressions of grief," his understanding of the situation by analogy with his own experiences of grief can be taken as a subjective response
. However, the following passage from a textbook in Social Psychology concerning "the six major emotional expressions: anger, happiness, surprise, fear, disgust, and sadness" views the understanding of these expressions to be common to more than one subject[ivity].
. . . in a particularly well-designed study, Paul Ekman and Walter Friesen (1971) traveled to New Guinea, where they studied the decoding ability of the South Fore, a preliterate tribe that had had no contact with Western civilization. They told the Fore people brief stories with emotional content and then showed them photographs of American men and women expressing the six emotions; the Fore's job was to match the facial expressions of emotion to the stories. They were as accurate as Western subjects had been. The researchers then asked the Fore people to demonstrate, while being photographed, facial expressions that would match the stories they were told. These photographs, when later shown to American research participants, were also decoded accurately. Thus, there is considerable evidence that the ability to interpret at least the six major emotions is cross-cultural—part of being human and not a product of people's cultural experience (Biehl et al., 1997; Buck, 1984; Ekman, 1993, 1994; Ekman, Friesen, & Ellsworth, 1982a, 1982b; Ekman et al., 1987; Izard, 1969, 1977, 1994).(Aronson, 1999, 108)
This study suggests that expressions of emotion can be recognized reliably. Though such recognitions are not necessary outcomes of experience—in this case cross-cultural, they are probable outcomes. Dilthey believed that the perception of expressions (Ausdruck) was reliable but, for the most part, dependent upon cultural experiences. Responding to the objectivism of his times, Dilthey struggled against the accusation that his method was subjective and hence suspect. In retrospect, his method, by the standards of contemporary science, was subjective. However, the opposition between subjectivity and objectivity is misleading. The judgment that a man in a “downcast attitude” is grieving is not especially well described as “objective.” Nonetheless, as the study to which Aronson refers suggests, the conclusion is probable. When mixtures of emotions—a blend of anger and disgust, for instance--enter the picture, the reliability of such judgments shifts from probable to possible. In Cultural Studies the expressions of human beings provide evidence only by analogy their experiences.
Dilthey's conception of Cultural Study (Kulturwissenshaft) involves describing the various kinds of human interactions we recognize in our worldviews as analogous. Ermarth summarizes his view concisely:
By virtue of the selective yet synthetic nature of consciousness, each individual gradually acquires a particular but comprehensive interpretation of his life in relation to the world, which Dilthey terms the "world-view." This world-view is a combination of reflective, conscious awareness and pre-reflective interests and practical concerns. It relates one's own inner awareness to the world at large. The world-view is a meaning-structure which gives coherence to the individual's ongoing experience. It is a synthesis of the basic and recurring "lived relations" and vital coherences which the person finds himself in. It provides consistency, integration, and stability in the face of the constant influx of new experiences. The world-view, like the lived experience it synthesizes, is not simply the result of cognitive thinking, but of willing and feeling as well. (Ermarth, 1981, 119, italics mine.)
For Dilthey the expressions that give evidence of human interactions in various world views come from the arts, in particular from literary works but also from biographies and histories. His view of the importance of narrative in understanding has several quite interesting parallels. The parallel most relevant to a model of cognition comes in the work of Roger Schank. His conception of a "script" as a unit of memory has had a wide impact in psychology and is often cited. Shank's most often quoted example of a script is going to a restaurant. Take for example this passage from Fundamentals of Cognition:
People record in memory a generalized representation of events they have experienced, and this representation is invoked or retrieved when a new experience matches an old script. One function of a script, in either a written or spoken story, is that it provides a kind of "shorthand" for the whole event; you need not describe every element of the experience but can merely refer to the whole event by invoking the script. More importantly, the activated script provides a framework within which new experiences can be understood, and within which a variety of inferences can be drawn to complete your understanding (Abbot, Black, & Smith, 1985; Reiser, Black, & Abelson, 1985; Seifert, Robertson, & 1985)
Consider the following abbreviated stories, designed to illustrate the richness script knowledge (examples adapted from Schank & Abelson, 1977, pp. 38-40):
1. John was hungry. He went to a restaurant and asked for a hamburger. He paid the check and left.
2. John went to a restaurant. He asked the waiter for a hamburger. He paid the check and left.
3. John went drove around to the pick up station of the restaurant. He ordered a Big Mac. He paid for it and then ate it while driving to work.
According to Schank and Abelson (1977), our understanding of stories 1 and 2 is guided by our scripted knowledge of a particular situation, going to restaurants. According to these authors, we store in memory a huge number of separate scripts, generalized knowledge structures pertaining to routine, frequently encountered situations or events. Thus the average adult, having experienced many different instances of "eating in restaurants," has a generalized script representation of this situation. (Ashcraft, 1998, 206-207) Sentence 3 does not fit the general restaurant script and is recognizable only to those familiar with typical MacDonald's restaurants.
Dilthey's account resonates with recent psychological studies that are regarded as "objective." But as Aronson, et al, note our ability to interpret expressions reliably increases the more familiar we are with the persons with whom we are interacting (Aronson, 1998, 141-142) and the more conventional the expressions (Lakoff, 1984, 54)
Rather than construing experience transfers in terms of the opposition: objective vs. subjective, I construe them as ranging along a spectrum from possible to probable judgments of situations depending on the familiarity we have with them and the conventionality of expressions about them. Since all cognitive operations are virtual, it is confusing to distinguish between them as subjective and objective.
This binary opposition also places the Human Sciences at a disadvantage with respect to the Natural Sciences. Dilthey sought to displace this opposition, arguing that subject-object relations pertained to any form of cognition. His concern was with the varying outcomes of cognition as expressions.
[Wilhelm Dilthey] [Expressions of Action] [Cognitive Abilities Entailed in Understanding]
[Verstehen & Exp Transfers] [Objectivity] [Natural -Human Sciences] [Verstehen & Configuring]
dilthey's distinction between the natural and human sciences
Dilthey may be best known for his distinction between the Human Sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) and the Natural Sciences (Wissenshaft). Although I do not follow Dilthey’s view in this matter, his argument opens the door to a very important issue. What is the methodological status of Verstehen? Up to this point, the examples of Verstehen I have offered from Dilthey’s commentators are drawn from every day life. Yet, Verstehen is the principle method of the Human Sciences in Dilthey’s view. (Ermarth, 1981, 241)
For Dilthey Verstehen was was not a subjective mode of cognition. As a hermeneutic reflection on the structures of the human mind, in his view it was capable of contributing to a body of knowledge as reliable as psychology or anthropology to which it was allied. Dilthey distinguished between an unreflective and a reflective understanding. The former was the ordinary, normal way we understand other persons and the latter was a specialized use of understanding as a method ("methodical understanding"); the same mode of cognition that non specialists employed in everyday life was refined by reflection into a specialized method (Ermarth, 1981, 245. He constrasted it to the mode of cognition employed in the Natural Sciences.
Dilthey’s contrast between the mode of cognition used in the Human Sciences and the one used in the Natural Sciences hinges upon several features of cognition:
SPECTRUM |
HUMAN SCIENCES |
NATURAL SCIENCES |
verbalization |
Concrete |
Abstract |
Expression |
Patterns / structures |
Laws |
Conceptualization |
Experiential |
Theoretical |
Process |
Interpretation |
Dilthey describes Verstehen as “an attitude” (my term would be disposition). A disposition is an inclination to do something in a certain way. As a cognitive activity, thinking is “doing” something virtually. For him there are two contrasting modes of cognition. When controlled by specific constraints designed to produce particular outcomes, they can function as disciplined methods of study. From this vantage point, there are more than two possible modes of cognition. However, Dilthey is reluctant to identify them in detail and offers the two contrasting poles of a spectrum of dispositions or modes.
[Wilhelm Dilthey] [Expressions of Action] [Cognitive Abilities Entailed in Understanding]
[Verstehen & Exp Transfers] [Objectivity] [Natural -Human Sciences] [Verstehen & Configuring]
In the conclusion to his study of Dilthey, Ermarth remarks that “As fruitful as Dilthey's ideas have proven to be, they are problematic in the form in which he left them. . . . Dilthey's prodigious capacity for the understanding of others made it difficult for him to present his views clearly and consistently” (348). As I mentioned earlier, Dilthey’s ideas have been heuristics in this study. In extrapolating from his thought, I have changed it to accommodate more recent models of cognition. For example, in an essay preceding his translation of Dilthey's Introduction to the Human Sciences, Ramon J. Betanzos comments that Verstehen functions "at ever higher plateaus of organization" beginning with personal experiences and extending to cultural and historical systems (24). I interpret this aspect of Dilthey's conception of Verstehen in the light of contemporary theories of memory systems. From this perspective, understanding operates within increasingly comprehensive memory systems.
Here I depart from Dilthey's conception of Verstehen.
The standard translation of Verstehen into English is "understanding." However, the ordinary senses of the word in English are "1. To perceive and comprehend the nature and significance of; grasp. 2. To know thoroughly by close contact or long experience with: That teacher understands children. 3. a. To grasp or comprehend the meaning intended or expressed by (another): They have trouble with English, but I can understand them. b. To comprehend the language, sounds, form, or symbols of. 4. To know and be tolerant or sympathetic toward: I can understand your point of view even though I disagree with it." These uses of "understand" are an appropriate rendering of Dilthey's term Verstehen. However, I wish to emphasize the eight features of the process that I outlined earlier: seeing, recalling, recognizing, feeling, recalling, imagining, transposing, and projecting. In particular, I wish to emphasize the "experience transfer" (transposing) at the heart of this process. The term, "configuring," accomplishes this.
The word, "configure," suggests "with figures" or "figures together." The prefix "con" (from the Latin cum) adds the dimension of "with" which, in turn, suggests "human interactions." Etymologically, the word “figure” (from the Latin figura) means "a thing shaped" or "the shape given to a thing" which suggests an image of an interaction. And, as a verb, “figure” (from the Latin figuare) means "to give form to," "to represent in a diagram or picture," "to picture in the mind, imagine," which fits nicely with the imagination. The ordinary English sense of the word, configure, is "to fashion according to a model" or "to put together in a form or figure," which corresponds to a script as a model of behavior. It also means "to represent typically"—if typical, then typical of another person. A configuration is "the form resulting from such an arrangement”
Finally, in phrases such as "figure out" or "go figure," it means to understand in the ordinary sense.
For Dilthey the "unit of mental life" in our lived experience (Erlebnis) is "the structure of human interaction" (Hodges, 1949, 43-44). In my view, past experiences (human interactions) are structured by the memory systems we use as cognitive frameworks. When we map a past experience onto another person in an experience transfer, we draw upon the scripts (generalized types of interactions) in our memories.
As I have argued previously (see "Worldviews"), scripts are organized "at ever higher plateaus." My account parallels Dilthey's insistence that Weltanschauungen are intimately related to Verstehen but it also departs from his delineation of these concepts.
The cognitive process of configuring (of transposing or transferring an experience) results in a configuration (script) which is located in configurations at higher levels of generality in our memory systems and used to "frame" our understanding of experiences we have such as entering a home or going to a restaurant or participating in a ritual or putting them into the perspective of history. In addition, configuring (in the sense of representing by speech or action) expresses itself in configurations such as stories or histories. The interplay of these registers of cognition play a crucial role in experience transfers, particularly in the case of null experiences.
Like Dilthey, Cognitive Linguists take as their data, expressions. For them, as for Dilthey, there is a strong connection between the experiences of situations, the expressions that articulate them, and the cognitive operations that are implied. For them, expressions “reflect a particular way of perceiving the world.” (Lee, 2004. xi) A central concept in the field is “metaphor,” which David Lee defines as “a device that involves conceptualizing one domain of experience in terms of another” (6) and which corresponds in remarkable ways to Dilthey’s concept of transposition, “Uebertragung.” Configuring, from this perspective, can be construed as a metaphorical way of thinking.
[Wilhelm Dilthey] [Expressions of Action] [Cognitive Abilities Entailed in Understanding]
[Verstehen & Exp Transfers] [Objectivity] [Natural -Human Sciences] [Verstehen & Configuring]
Notes:
. [(Michael Ermarth notes that "as the ideas for which he had been crusading for years came into general currency by assuming an extreme and doctrinaire cast, he modified them considerably and even assumed a contrary attitude" Ermarth, 1981, 88. He also remarks that “It is characteristic that [Dilthey] regarded all methodological monism as ‘impoverished scholasticism’ and often remarked upon his propensity to see all sides of a question (JD 68, 76). “ (Ermarth, 1981,348.) )] ... 
. [(Ermarth, 1981, 50ff.)] ...
. [(Ermarth, 1981, 169-178)] ...
. [(Ermarth, 1981, 169-178, 108-121)] ...
. [(Ermarth, 1981, 118, 114)] ...
. [(Hodges, 1949, 13)] ...
. [(“In several instances Dilthey tried to combine such a linguistic approach with his phenomenological analysis of lived experience, finding that the prepositional forms of "auf," "fiber," "vor," etc., reflect recurrent structures, typical mental "attitudes" and vital relations. Pursuing his earlier insight that "all language is to some extent an anthropomorphizing," he tried to link grammatical forms to modes of consciousness.“ (Ermarth, 1981, 279) )] ...
. [(Willam James, The Principles of Psychology, vol 2, NY, 1890, 244 Ermarth describes Dilthey as particularly interested in his critique of introspection (Ermarth, 1981, 209).)] ...
. [(Hodges, 1949, 43-44; Ermarth, 1981, 218ff.)] ...
. [(Hodges, 1949, 43. “In other words, part of the knowledge base for weekend involves an understanding of certain very specific cultural patterns.” This remark parallels Dilthey’s remarks about social cultural structures of Verstehen. Lee, 2004. 9 (See Ermarth, 1981, 278) )] ...
. [(Kenny, 2003, 106. Kenny’s analysis is deeply influenced by Wittgenstein. He describes it as a philosophic analysis of “psychological verbs.” His focus on language usage corresponds to the work of Cognitive Psychologists.)] ...
. [(Prince, 1973, 16-37 Prince subsequently modified his view but that had more to do with moving away from a “deep structure” theory of narrative. However, his linguistically oriented theory matches Kenny’s account quite well.)] ...
. [(In Dilthey’s account of understanding that another person is grieving, there is little room for recalling or recognizing. In short, memory systems do not play a role in it. In my view, Dilthey’s belief that “The mere sight of the expression awakens in me an immediate response, not intellectual, but emotional, feeling arouses feeling with no other intermediary than the expression itself” is descriptive of the experience at the conscious level. At the unconscious level, the experience is mediated by memories which have cognitive content. )] ...
. [(Cognitive psychologists have developed a theory of “concept transfers.” In my account the key is the function of a memory script, hence the designation “experience transfer,” which are usually accompanied by “concept transfers.” The recognition element in the process of configuring refers to a semantic trigger but it is associated with specific scripts. When I recognize a “living room,” it brings to mind images of living rooms. As Dilthey points out, the process is a continuous interplay between sensation and imaging. (Hodges, 1949, 20). )] ...
. [(See Schank, 1982, 1985, 1997, 1999)] ...
. [(See Langacker’s on “scanning.” (Langacker, 2002, 145-146). Complex conceptualizations require “a complex array of cognitive events” (144). He notes that “The difference between summary and sequential scanning pertains to the relative timing of processing events—whether the scanning events corresponding to different facets of a complex scene are activated simultaneously or successively—not to the conceived location of a scene or its components in the flow of objective time." Given an ordered sequence of states like [a ball falling], it is natural for them to be conceived as situated successively in a continuous series of points in time, and this is indeed the case in a typical process predication. We nevertheless have the mental flexibility to dissociate processing time from our conception of objective time, a fact of considerable import for the analysis of linguistic structure, particularly in regard to aspect. Thus we are perfectly capable of carrying out sequential scanning with respect to a situation conceived as being stable through time. . .” (Langacker, 2002, 145). Configuring is a complex cognitive process whose aspects are articulated as a succession of cognitive events. However, some of the aspects probably occur simultaneously. In different acts of configuring, the aspects may occur in a different order. In this chapter I offer a “model” of configuring which articulates the cognitive activity as a process with successive states. This model abstracts the succession pattern from the experience of configuring and poses it AS IF each cognitive event was the condition of its successor which makes the process more orderly and coherent than it is. )] ...
. [(Although the process of an experience transfer is occasioned by an "outer
sensory experience" (Aussere Erfahrung) such as seeing, I
am concerned with the mental states that comprise it, with virtual experiences
or "lived experiences" in a broad sense as co-extensive with understanding
(Verstehen) or configuring.
Lived experience (Erlebnis) is used here as a synonym for virtual experience. It is difficult in the stream of consciousness to identify the beginning and end of a lived experience. As a consequence I use it to refer to the virtual experience of a sequence of human interactions that are understood as a story or history, meaning that the initial state is resolved.)] ...
. [(Although
Dilthey's term Erlebnis cannot be translated as "recalling," that
cognitive ability sets off the lived experienc, which is co-extensive
with the other aspects of Verstehen.)] ...
. [(In this presentation of the process,
I introduce framing between the process of recognizing and imagining in order
to anticipate later renditions of configuring. For the moment, keep in
mind that framing occurs largely as a consequence of structuring situations
by locating them in our cognitive frameworks which corresponds to Dilthey's
notion of Struktur and Weltanschauungen. The German
term in this location is Nachbilt (afterimage). This parallels
the English term, framing, which is understood by Fauconnier and
others as a "mental space." The parallels in this essay
are only intended to suggest that Dilthey's view of human understanding
has parallels to contemporary views of cognition and expression.)] ...
. [(Cognitive processes are not procedures that follow step after step. They are combinations of cognitive operations that can occur simultaneously and then reoccur when needed to supply a connection. Ermarth,
1981, 108ff.)] ...
. [(I parallel Dilthey’s conception of “the standpoint of life” to a “belief system.”.)] ...
. [(Ermarth,
1981, 108ff.)] ...
. [(Since in subsequent sections of this essay and in other essays, I draw upon Fuaconnier’s work, it helps that the term, “imagining” corresponds to his term, “blending,” which, in my view, he often uses as a synonym of imagining.)] ...
. [(Numerous passages portray Verstehen as similar to an inference by analogy (GS 5:110, 277; 7:207; 8:82). )] ...
. [(Lakoff’s view of metaphor as a mode of cognition parallels Dilthey’s notion of Verstehen in this respect.)] ...
. [(See “The Myth of Objectivism in Western Philosophy and Linguistics” (Lakoff, 1984, 195ff.) )] ...
. [(“Dilthey often expressed the difference between the human and natural sciences by drawing a sharp distinction between understanding and explanation: "We explain nature, we understand mind" (GS 5:144). “ (Ermarth, 1981, 246) )] ...
. [(The term I use to refer to the “plateaus” of memory systems is registers. I argue that our memory systems are organized as registers of cognition.)] ...
. [(By using the term, configuring, I am claiming that there are at least two modes of thinking following a tradition stemming from Jerome Bruner’s argument for a logico-scientific and a narrative mode. However, I am not inclined to use the term narrative or the term narrating (the process of forming a narrative) to identify the mode of cognition that contrasts to Bruner’s logico-scientific mode. Our ability to narrate is certainly a key aspect of the type of cognition to which Dilthey refers by the term, Verstehen, but the process has other dimensions not captured in the term narrating. For example, what Fauconnier and Turner call “blending.”
Another possible contrast is a logical mode and an analogical mode. But these terms present a different set of difficulties. I use the terms: explaining, justifying, and configuring to identify modes of thinking. )] ...
. [(Unfortunately, the word “configuration” usually applies to static complexes of inter-relations with a relatively permanent shape as it is employed in computer science, for example. I could alter the term to suggest movement but that would result in an awkward neologism—e.g., configurization. So, I use the term to refer to expressions, which are fixed, but which refer to sequences of interactions among human beings. )] ...
. [(Dilthey believed that it is possible to develop a typology of worldviews in a hierarchical manner. An interesting parallel to his view is that of Fauconnier & Turner who offer a “typology of networks” of frames in their The Way We Think (see 106).)] ...
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