Psychoanalysis - The Party Game! In his book Consciousness Explained, philosopher Daniel Dennett describes the following party game. Choose one of the guests to be the dupe (though obviously you wont call him that to his face). The dupe will leave the room and, while he is gone, another guest will relate a dream that she recently had. The dupe will then return and interrogate the guests, using yes or no questions only, about the nature of the dream. The game ends when the dupe guesses the identity of the dreamer. If he guesses correctly, he wins. However, once the dupe has left the room, it is revealed that in fact NO ONE will relate a dream. Instead, the remaining guests will answer all the dupes questions yes or no based on some arbitrary criteria, such as, say, whether the last letter in the question was A-M or N-Z, subject to the caveat that guests should not follow this rule if doing so would result in a direct contradiction with how some previous question was answered. The dupe then returns and begins asking questions. The amusing result is that the dream that begins to take shape based on the answers he receives will have narrative structure, coherence, characters and plot, EVEN THOUGH it is being created purely subconsciously by the dupe himself. Dennett uses this game to illustrate a certain theory of perception and cognition. Under normal conditions, he argues, our minds use certain expectations to frame, interpret, and organize percepts into working concepts and narratives. Sane peoples minds are responsive to how the external world fits or fails to fit those expectations, and the resulting feedback loop causes our internal representations of reality to acquire greater coherence, both internally and with the public expressions of others internal representations. Insane peoples representations are no longer responsive to external constraints, but are instead tethered to some arbitrary, internally originated criteria. Compare Dennetts party game with Wittgensteins argument that a private language is impossible. The crux of that argument was that a word can only acquire a stable meaning if it is possible to say whether a particular use of the word is correct or incorrect, and a purely private language is not one in which it would be possible to distinguish between correct and incorrect usages, since there are no other speakers who could check the private language speakers incorrect usage. Questions Presented: The above considerations suggest that truth is not something that can be arrived at purely by introspection. Do you agree? Why or why not? Assuming some public process is necessary to get at truth, what is the nature of that process? Why does it work better than others?
Posted on: Sat, 01 Nov 2014 20:50:19 +0000
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