Abstract
Under the influence of psychoanalysis and psychoanalytically inspired research in child development, philosophers have recently begun to acknowledge the role played by loving nurture in the development of the capacity to think about oneself or, as I shall put it – though the thoughts in question obviously sometimes fall short of knowledge – the capacity for self-knowledge. As Neera Badhwar has said, drawing on the work of D. W. Winnicott and others: The look of love does more than see the loved individual veridically: it also shows the loved individual what it sees. … The loving mother reflect[s] the baby’s facial expressions and mental states on her own face, thereby giving the baby a concrete image of its own psychological states. The mother’s look of love is, then, the first avenue to self-awareness and self-understanding.
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Notes
- 1.
“Love”, in N. Badhwar (2003).
- 2.
L. Wittgenstein (1953) [henceforth PI], §302; cf. also especially §351: “Yet we go on wanting to say: ‘Pain is pain – whether he has it, or I have it; and however I come to know whether he has a pain or not.’ – I might agree. – And when you ask me ‘Don’t you know, then, what I mean when I say that the stove is in pain?’ – I can reply: These words may lead me to have all sorts of images; but their usefulness goes no further.”
- 3.
I am indebted here to Hacker’s (1986) discussion: see the comparison of the “weak-kneed sceptic” and the “tough-minded solipsist”, pp. 262–64. Note, however, that to claim philosophical priority for the conceptual problem is not to claim priority in the order of acquisition for concepts of others’ mental states over knowledge of such states. On the contrary, I take it that the concepts and the knowledge are developmentally coeval (and that the development of both is very gradual).
- 4.
See e.g. PI §293.
- 5.
PI §246.
- 6.
PI §244, my italics. See also e.g. PI II, p. 174, “[T]hink of the sensations produced by physically shuddering: the words ‘It makes me shiver’ are themselves a shuddering reaction”; Wittgenstein (1992, 14), “[An] exclamation is [an expression] … in a different sense from [a] report. It is wrung from us. It is related to the experience as a cry is to pain.”
- 7.
Hacker (1986, 293–94).
- 8.
Anscombe (1957, §2).
- 9.
PI §546: “And words can be wrung from us – like a cry”. Cp. Wittgenstein (1992, 14): “[An] exclamation is [an expression] … in a different sense from [a] report. It is wrung from us. It is related to the experience as a cry is to pain.”
- 10.
This problem was emphasized by P. F. Strawson, though it has been overlooked often enough since: see Strawson (1959, 99–100).
- 11.
Wittgenstein (1992, 67).
- 12.
Cp. “We teach the child to use the words ‘I have toothache’ to replace its moans, and this was how I too was taught the expression”, Wittgenstein (1968, 295).
- 13.
Wittgenstein (1967, §§540–41), first italics mine. Compare Wittgenstein (1980, §27), “When I see someone else in a terrible situation, even when I myself have nothing to fear, I can shudder, shudder out of sympathy. … We are afraid along with the other person, even when we have nothing to fear”; PI §287, “Pity, one might say, is a form of conviction that someone else is in pain”.
- 14.
Wittgenstein (1967, §§541, 545).
- 15.
For something very like the expressive account of other-ascription (though I do not mean to burden her with the elaboration of it I give here), see Bar-On (2004, 288). This book came to my attention too late for me to be able to do it justice in this paper.
- 16.
This question is pressed in Hobson (2009).
- 17.
“Recent studies of children in the second year of life indicate that they have the … [capacity] to display integrated patterns of concern for others in distress. During this period of development, children increasingly experience emotional concern ‘on behalf of the victim’”, Zahn-Waxler et al. (1992). In another study, in which parents simulated hitting themselves with a toy hammer and crying out in pain, 100% of normal children looked at their parent’s face and 68% showed “facial concern”, Sigman et al. (1992).
- 18.
Anita Avramides does well to emphasize the importance both of untutored reactions to others and of the person-neutrality issue: see Avramides (2001). However, Avramides seems to have especially in mind the fact that, just as each person is alike in their reaction to their own pain, each is also alike in their reaction to another’s pain. (I take it that this is what she means when she says (p. 196) that “[Wittgenstein] does not intend simply to draw our attention to our reaction to, say, pain; he also intends to call attention to the way we react to each other when we are in pain. We share these reactions just as we do all others”.) But notwithstanding her claims to the contrary (“the description we have given of the asymmetry [between first- and second- or third-person uses] is such as to make it clear how it is that the word ‘pain’ has a univocal meaning”, p. 201), it’s not clear how the person-neutrality problem is solved, if the two sets of common reactive propensities Avramides describes, together with the asymmetrical linguistic practice they are said to ground, is all there is to our practice with sensation-words. Let’s agree that the two sets of common reactive propensities explain how the first-person use of “pain” and its second- and third-person uses both constitute the deployment of a concept. For if these propensities were not common to almost all of us, there would be no pre-linguistic regularity on the basis of which to introduce these words in such a way that they express concepts: “if rule became exception and exception rule; or if both became phenomena of roughly equal frequency – this would make our normal language-games lose their point”, PI §142, quoted by Avramides, p. 196. What these common propensities do not explain, however, is why the first-person use of “pain” and its second- and third-person uses do not simply constitute the deployment of two distinct concepts, one to go with each set. To explain why they do not requires not only that each person be alike in their reaction to their own pain and alike in their reaction to another’s pain, but, as I have emphasized here, that each person’s reaction to another’s pain be such that its nature cannot be specified without reference to the state it’s a reaction to.
- 19.
Nonetheless there is no way of identifying the concepts learners possess at their various stages of development otherwise than as the developmental forerunners of the relevant adult ones.
- 20.
Murdoch (1970, 65–66).
- 21.
Murdoch (1970, 66).
- 22.
I have chosen this phrase of D. W. Winnicott’s (1964, 17) for the same reasons I assume he chose it himself: there is a range of phenomena including attunement to another, concern, emotionally toned responsiveness and so on for which “love” is a perfectly good word, but if you object to the word, drop it and think of another one – at this point at least, it is the phenomena and not the word that matter.
- 23.
For a statement of the mere homonym view, see for example Jäger (1999, 1).
- 24.
Carpendale and Lewis do well to make this point: “In studying talk about the psychological world it is important to remember that researchers should not just be concerned with mental state terms but more broadly with talk about human activity”, Carpendale and Lewis (2004, 88). Some of the studies (e.g. by Meins) cited below might have got on more easily if they had adopted a more liberal view of what they were actually after.
- 25.
Since in the previous section I have been arguing for the interdependence, in the case of a single individual, of knowledge of oneself and knowledge of others, if there is a connection between self-knowledge and love it would be a surprise to discover there wasn’t also a connection between love and knowledge of others – indeed the connection might be expected to confirm the interdependence. But exploration of those further connections must await another occasion.
- 26.
Wellman and Lagattuta (2001).
- 27.
Carpendale and Lewis (2004, 79).
- 28.
Hobson (2004, 109). There are also other interactional factors beyond parent–child interactions e.g. the “sibling effect” (see Ruffman et al. (1998), but this doesn’t seem to depend simply on number of siblings or even of older siblings (Carpendale and Lewis 2004, 79), so perhaps the family environment for which the parents are responsible is what really does the work even here.
- 29.
- 30.
Meins et al. (2002, 1715–16).
- 31.
See e.g. Ainsworth et al. (1978).
- 32.
See Fonagy and Target (1997, 687): children’s SSn ratings at 12 months (with mother) and 18 months (with father) were compared with their performance on three “theory of mind” tests at five years. Of those rated secure at 12 months 82% passed one of the tests (“the belief-desire reasoning task”) as compared with 54% rated as insecure (77% secure at 18 months passed as compared with 55% insecure). See also Meins, Ferneyhough et al. (1998, 1–24): 83% of securely attached children passed a false belief task at four years compared with 33% insecure, and the ratio was 85:50 on a test at five years. Also cited by Carpendale and Lewis (2004, 92), who note that security of attachment is also correlated with proto-declarative pointing which is an early indicator of social understanding (Bretherton et al. 1979).
- 33.
Fonagy, Steele, Steele (1991, 891–905).
- 34.
Fonagy (2004, 106).
- 35.
- 36.
Field (1985).
- 37.
Fonagy and Target (1997, 688), citing e.g. Dunn (1996). The relationship between attachment security and mentalizing capacity would seem to be complex, however, since it looks possible – for example for children in care – to develop their mentalizing capacity thanks to the fact that they have multiple caregivers with whom they interact positively, but to none of whom they are attached (securely or otherwise). (Thanks to Peter Hobson for this point.) If that’s so, security of attachment is a context that favours mentalization, but isn’t necessary for it. The putatively loose link between attachment security and interactivity of the right kind does not on its own, however, challenge the link between mentalization and love of the right kind, since that is itself a looser notion than secure attachment: I’d be happy to say, with David Velleman (Velleman (2005)), that teacher–pupil relations for example can exemplify Aristotelian philia.
- 38.
Murray et al. (1996), cited by Hobson (2002, 136n). Incidentally BPD mothers typically score insecure-disorganized on the AAI (Hobson 2002, 133), and mothers of securely attached infants are more sensitive to their infants’ needs (Fonagy and Target 1997, 689, citing various authors), so this is consistent with the claims about security and mentalization.
- 39.
Hobson (2002, 133–34).
- 40.
- 41.
Hobson (2002, 135).
- 42.
Bateman and Fonagy (2003, 193).
- 43.
Fonagy et al. (2004, 9).
- 44.
- 45.
- 46.
- 47.
Hobson (2002, 128).
- 48.
Bateman and Fonagy (2003, 191).
- 49.
Of course there is another dimension of interactivity here too, namely the learner’s capacity to understand the other’s knowledge of them as such, and which might be absent while the other’s knowledge is present – but I cannot do justice to this extra loop here.
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Acknowledgements
Thanks for valuable comments on this paper and on surrounding issues to Anita Avramides, Dorit Bar-On, Charlie Lewis, Peter Hobson, Angelika Krebs and Roger Teichmann, and to audiences at the Oxford Department of Continuing Education, the University of Hertfordshire, the Universidade Nova de Lisboa, the University of Southampton, and at the Self-Evaluation: Individual and Collective workshop, University of Basel.
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Harcourt, E. (2011). Self-Knowledge, Knowledge of Others, and “the thing called love”. In: Konzelmann Ziv, A., Lehrer, K., Schmid, H. (eds) Self-Evaluation. Philosophical Studies Series, vol 116. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-1266-9_10
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