The previous post (What About Truth?) brought to the fore difficulties we might encounter ascertaining what is true or not.  We are all familiar with such difficulties, and we may find them somewhat unsettling, yet we typically accept them as a manifestation of the unreliability of our common, everyday ways of finding out about the world.  But there must be, we think, a reliable, unequivocal way of establishing what is true or not, whether something is a scorpion or a lobster, of green or red color, the reason why the antibiotics did not cure me, and so on.

And we do feel we have such a way of generating reliable knowledge about the world, an obvious way, Science!  Science is the dominant authority of our times on knowledge.  It employs powerful ways, we feel, scientific ways, with which we find out about the world, and provides us with scientific truth.  Not the unreliable, the everyman’s kind of truth I described in the previous post, which can lead to all kinds of disagreements and difficulties.

We describe knowledge as “scientific” to indicate value and reliability, our confidence in it, and that other people should share that confidence, should trust it.  We read on labels that this or that supplement has been scientifically proven to help us lose weight or protect us from disease, we expect that our water and food supply are safe on the basis of scientific tests, we want politicians to base their decisions on scientific findings instead of the heeding of powerful interests…  Such is the authority of Science, that even those who try to confront mainstream scientific views claim that their own positions are scientific – they rush to occupy the scientific high ground, or to the very least suggest that the matter is still not scientifically settled.  So, resistance to the teaching of Evolution in schools in some US States for example, has led to the emergence of “Creation Science”.  And to lend credence to non-mainstream positions on climate change, genetically modified organisms, or the safety of vaccinations, scientific experts are found, ready to articulate the requisite views.

Our everyday life provides overwhelming support for the authoritative position we accord to Science.  Our world is full of objects whose origins can be traced to the sciences, such as physics, chemistry, or biology: electronic devices (including the computer I am typing this on), telecommunication, transportation, food, medicine, clothing, weaponry…  Science, through new objects it gives rise to, or even just as a way of understanding the world, permeates virtually all aspects of our everyday lives.  In this regard, we also have the strong sense that the knowledge that Science furnishes us with, the scientific truth, is independent of our socialization.  After all, our world is full of objects, hard, material objects, that have arisen from scientific knowledge.  What possible influence could our socialization have?

So, how does Science manage to provide us with what we consider reliable, authoritative knowledge?  We typically attribute this to Science using a uniquely powerful way, the Scientific Method, to reveal the true nature of the world.  If indeed there is such a reliable way for finding out about the world, a way independent of our socialization, this way would also provide the answer to the question about a superior understanding of the world that I posited in the opening post of this blog, Two Basic Observations: Science would provide the superior understanding of the world that would inform the way to lead one’s life.

In the following post, I will directly address the question of whether there is indeed any special way to obtain such a superior understanding of the world, an understanding independent of our socialization.

My previous posts have suggested a strong, even dominant, influence of our socialization on our experience of the world.  After all, I have suggested that our experience of and conduct in the world depends on our abilities and we acquire these abilities through a process of socialization.  Such a position however would seem to be at odds with our intuitive sense of truth.  For example, if you tell me “There is a scorpion under that stone”, if you are telling the truth, first, I better lift the stone carefully so I do not get stung, and, second, I will indeed find a scorpion when I do so.  The statement corresponds to the situation in the world, it is true.  What is more, the truth of that statement does not seem to have anything to do with our socialization.  We have the strong sense, the conviction even, that our socialization, our abilities, are irrelevant to whether the statement about the scorpion is true or false.  What is going on?

This apparent contradiction is not a minor concern.  We depend on each other for the passing on of reliable information about the world, that what we are told corresponds to what we find.  We depend on it during our socialization of course, for constructing an initial map of our world from only limited experiences, and later during our daily lives, to avoid scorpions, to eat and drink safely (“This is good to eat!”, “The water is contaminated!”), to get well (“These antibiotics will cure your infection”).  We express the correspondence of statements with what we find in the world by calling the statements true, and, unsurprisingly, we value truth and appreciate and trust the ones who speak it.

But sometimes things get complicated when we encounter people from other lands and cultures.  Imagine, for example, being told by a Hanunoo to bring over the fresh bamboo, you know, the green stuff, and getting rather confused.  Or a friend of mine who has never before seen and has no clue what a scorpion is, telling me that there is a small lobster under the stone – and I love lobsters!  Other times things just break down, or they just don’t work as expected.  For example, I find that the antibiotics did not cure my infection – oops! I am infected by a resistant strain, or, perhaps, my immune system is weakened.  Or people disagree which foods are good to eat, or whether the water supply is contaminated.

Such encounters or breakdowns bring forcefully to the fore our abilities, our link to the world.  How do you tell green from red?  How do you tell a scorpion from a lobster?  How do you tell whether the water is contaminated?  And so on. Or, perhaps, the world has changed (rise of antibiotic-resistant strains, weakening of my immune system) and our knowledge and abilities do not match sufficiently with it any more.  We all more or less realize that to resolve such disagreements or breakdowns we have to refashion our abilities, learn how the Hanunoo tell green from red, how to recognize a scorpion, how to assess water contamination.

Disagreements and breakdowns reveal the abilities that support the truth of the statements that we make about the world and use to communicate with each other.  When everything is working out as expected, we simply forget about our skills, and their link to the regularities of the material world.  It is these skills and regularities that the smooth flow of daily activity hinges on.  These hard-earned and easy-to-lose-track-of skills are the basis of our intuitive sense of truth.   But when we are good at something, when things go on smoothly, then our bodies go on auto-pilot, we stop paying attention to what it takes to engage smoothly and successfully with the world, and the truth of statements about the world appears to us to be independent of abilities or socialization.

So, there is no contradiction.  Different knowledge and abilities are associated with different ways of being in, of engaging with the world, and these abilities support different truths about the world.  What is more, for each one of us, our truth will be intuitively obvious and at the same time experienced as independent of our abilities.

Many years ago, from about 10 to 14 years old, I used to spend 3 weeks each summer in a camp close to Cape Sounio, south of Athens.  The camp was in a pine forest, and less than a kilometer from the Aegean sea at the Asimaki beach.  My fellow campers for those 3 weeks were all boys of similar ages – there was a separate all-girls 3-week period as well.  We lived in small wooden cabins, 4 boys per cabin.  Each cabin comprised a group, 4 groups a community, and, oh, I don’t really remember any more the exact number, something like 10 communities made up the whole camp.  Each cabin had two sets of bunk beds, against each of the two side walls, 4 cabinets for our clothes and toiletries on the wall between the bunk beds, and the door and a large window on the fourth wall.  In the middle of the room, there was a table and chairs.  The camp had a speaker system for announcements and the calls for morning rise, assembly, meals, siesta, and bed time.

Every day, except Sunday, we would be woken up by 6:30 am or so, go for physical exercise, then morning cleansing.  We would then assemble for prayer and the raising of the flag, sing the national anthem, then march to the camp’s dining hall for breakfast.  After breakfast, we would return to our cabins to prepare them for inspection: make our beds, fold our clothes in our cabinets, and clean the room.  Each group was graded, and the top performer names were announced and congratulated during the evening assembly before dinner.  After the inspection, we got ready and marched to the beach for the daily swim, then back to the camp for showering, then lunch.  Following lunch was siesta time – its beginning and end punctuated by the speaker system – that we were supposed to spend quietly in our cabins.  We were not supposed to be out playing, for example, and there were inspections to make sure we were not.  When the siesta time ended, we had a snack, followed by a few hours of free time giving us the opportunity to play sports if we wanted to.  At dusk, we assembled for the lowering of the flag and the announcement of the morning inspection grades, and then we marched to the dining hall for dinner.   After dinner, we watched TV, a movie, played games, or sang songs together, until it was bed time, marked by the speaker system.  On Sunday mornings, we went to a small church within the camp for mass, and it was also parents’ visiting day.

We all had a wonderful, memorable time, living in a pine forest next to the sea.  But simultaneously with this wonderful life an intensive process of socialization was also taking place.  Each day was broken up into time slots for different activities, for cleaning the living quarters, going swimming, eating meals, sleeping, being quiet, even free time had its own time slot.  And all these activities were group-coordinated, we would clean our cabin together, pray together, eat meals together, all together at the same time.  We also learned to respond to the speaker system signals telling us what was the activity we were expected to do, again all together, as a group.  Group rituals, prayer, raising and lowering the flag, singing the national anthem, brought us all together in common religion and nationality.  Our bodies learned to be mobilized.  An interesting part of this socialization, that most of us at the time found quite amusing, was teaching us proper table manners: where to put the plate, the napkin, the fork, the knife, or the spoon, how to hold them, how to use them, and how to eat different kinds of food.

Of course we are all familiar with such socialization, in groups or as individuals.  Schooling involves a similar process, with well-defined time slots, time signals, a different subject taught in each time slot, all sitting quietly in class, all together, as a group.  Army drills and training, army life in general, are another example.

Socialization, individually as well as in groups, ensures the transmission from generation to generation of knowledge, skills, and abilities that are essential for the survival of a community.  This is how language and general communication skills are transmitted, the domestication and cultivation of plants, hunting and fishing, making and using tools, cooking, and so on.  Group socialization in particular is what ensures the coordination and integration of the individual activities.  And taking part in such integrated activities, as well as in common rituals, creates the sense of belonging to a community.

I am sitting at a café, steaming coffee in a porcelain cup on the table next to me.  I am reaching to take a sip of coffee, my hand goes to grasp the cup’s handle, as it begins to grasp it adjusts the strength, not too light a grasp, enough to lift the weight, I bring the cup to my lips, keeping it steady not to spill, my lips sense the heat, my hand tilts to take a sip or a gulp, depending on how hot the coffee felt, how thirsty for it I was.  I have just taken a sip of coffee.  On the table there is a plastic soft cup of water, I reach to take a drink, my hand grasps the cup, squeezing gently, not too tightly, it adjusts the strength as the cup gets squished, but there is enough strength to lift it.  I empty the cup, and as I am still holding it, a waiter comes to refill it, I lift it for him and as he pours fresh water in, my hand adjusts its squeeze to hold the increased weight, maintaining the position of the cup.   I have just gotten my cup of water refilled.  I am browsing through the day’s newspaper, reading parts, while at the same time reaching at the table, barely looking, to get the cup of coffee or the cup of water to take a sip.  I adjust my seat, my legs, my posture, mostly without realizing it.  I am just sitting at a café drinking coffee and reading the newspaper.  Friends arrive and join me, as we begin to chat I adjust my breathing to handle the talking, actually I modulate the airflow during breathing to talk, as I change my posture my trunk and respiratory muscles adjust to handle the different loads for breathing, at the same time coordinating with the muscles that move my vocal cords, mouth, tongue, with those changing my facial expression, and so on.  I have just been sitting chatting with friends.  Later we take a walk, climb a long flight of stairs, my breathing adjusts to accommodate the increased demand.  I have just taken a walk.

We are all familiar with what I am describing, with all the background support and maintenance and adjustments our body is continuously carrying out to sustain our interactions with our environment.  An environment that may be pre-structured in certain ways to sustain, even guide, our interactions with it: the table and the chairs at the café for example instead of a rug with pillows, or the flight of stairs instead of a ramp for wheelchair access.  Indeed, we typically consider this background activity trivial, we take it for granted.  It is when due to injury, disease, or age that the bodily abilities that sustain this activity are impaired that they are focused upon, when for example we might have lost part of our visual field, or our sense of how tightly we are holding something, or our sense of where our limbs are with regard to the rest of our body.

These considerations extend Bian the wheelwright’s insight to the minutia of daily activities, highlight how much our verbal descriptions, our representations of what we do, leave out.  Our descriptions are incomplete, can only be incomplete, as they edit out most of what is going on, while foregrounding only certain features of the material world along with aspects of our actions.  The material world, our body included, is always in excess.

In short, there is plenty going on, allowing a host of different descriptions of our world, ourselves, and what we do.  This may be obvious, but these descriptions, our understanding of our environment and of ourselves, play an important part in orienting us in the world and guiding our actions.

The last section of The Way of Heaven, (天道, tian dao), the 13^th chapter of the Zhuangzi, relates an exchange between duke Huan and Bian the wheelwright – I have used the translations from Schipper’s The Taoist Body and the Chinese Text Project.

Duke Huan sat in his hall, reading out loud. Downstairs [in the courtyard] stood Bian the wheelwright, making a wheel.  Putting down his work, Bian went up the steps and asked the duke: “May I ask your Grace what are you reading?”

“The words of the sages,” answered the duke.

“Living sages?”

“No, these have died.”

“So, what you are reading is just the dregs and sediments of men of former times.”

“What! A wheelwright ventures to judge what his prince is reading?  Explain yourself or I will have your life!”

Bian the wheelwright said: “Your servant looks at this from the point of view of his craft.   In making a wheel, if I go at it too carefully, it won’t be round; if I go too fast, it won’t be the right size.  Neither too carefully, nor too fast; my hand knows how to do it in harmony with my mind, but my mouth cannot put into words how this is done.  There is an enormous distance between the word and the doing.  I cannot even instruct my own son in my art, nor is he able to learn it from me.  That is why at seventy, I am still making wheels in my old age. But these ancients, these men of former times, and what it was not possible for them to put into words, are dead and gone: so then what you, my Ruler, are reading is but their dregs and sediments!”

The insights of Bian the wheelwright are profound, yet very familiar.  One insight is that there is so much about doing that is unverbalizable, cannot be put into words (口不能言, kou bu neng yan).  Another insight is about the enormous distance between the description of doing and doing itself.  And these insights are familiar to us all from our daily lives, from describing how we, say, drive a car from one place to another, to how we prepare a meal.  Verbal accounts of our activities amount to a superficial sliver of what we do.

For the past few years I have been learning Mandarin Chinese.  Many, many things have struck me, one of them being that my mistakes in Chinese are usually a mirror image of the mistakes my Chinese friends make in English.   Another striking thing has been the detailed attention the language pays to family relations.  In Greek or in English, we have single words for brother (αδερφός in Greek), sister (αδερφή), as well as sibling (αδέρφι in Greek, using the neutral gender).  Not so in Chinese.  There are distinct words for older brother (哥哥, gege), younger brother (弟弟, didi), older sister (姐姐, jiejie), and younger sister (妹妹, meimei).  You cannot directly ask someone whether they have brothers, sisters, siblings, you have to be specific.  There are of course terms for brothers (兄弟, xiongdi – 兄, xiong, being another term for older brother, and 兄弟 being the title of a beautiful novel by Yu Hua), sisters (姐妹, jiemei) and siblings (兄弟姐妹, xiongdijiemei), but are not typically used to find out what siblings one might have.  For that, one asks generally about family, 你家有几口人 (ni jia you ji kou ren = how many people does your family have?) or 你家有谁 (ni jia you shei = who are your family?).

The language extends this fine discrimination further, to uncles, cousins, grandparents, placing special emphasis on the male side of the family, consistent with patrilineality, and a strong preference of boys over girls – a preference that shows up in the highly skewed male-female ratio in areas of China.

This preference shows up in an interesting way in the terms for grandparents.  English, as well as Greek, have single words for grandfather (παππούς in Greek) and grandmother (γιαγιά in Greek).  Chinese on the other hand distinguishes between paternal grandfather (爷爷, yeye), paternal grandmother (奶奶, nainai), maternal grandfather (外公, waigong), and maternal grandmother (外婆, waipo).  What is particularly interesting – and the Chinese themselves joke about this – is that the first character in the maternal terms, 外 (wai), carries the meaning of ‘foreign’, ‘outside’, as in 外国 (waiguo = foreign), 外国人 (waiguoren = foreigner), 老外 (laowai = foreigner), 外面 (waimian = outside), 外空 (waikong = outer space).

Preference notwithstanding, Chinese nouns do not have genders, and even the pronouns for ‘he’ (他) and ‘she’ (她) are pronounced exactly the same, ta.  Which sheds some light on the common mixing of ‘he’ and ‘she’ by my Chinese friends in English.

And all this reminds me of the beautiful opening by Michel Foucault of the preface of “The Order of Things”:  “This book first arose out of a passage in Borges, out of the laughter that shattered, as I read the passage, all the familiar landmarks of my thought—our thought that bears the stamp of our age and our geography—breaking up all the ordered surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to tame the wild profusion of existing things, and continuing long afterwards to disturb and threaten with collapse our age-old distinction between the Same and the Other. This passage quotes a ‘certain Chinese encyclopaedia’ in which it is written that ‘animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) suckling pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (l) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off look like flies’. In the wonderment of this taxonomy, the thing we apprehend in one great leap, the thing that, by means of the fable, is demonstrated as the exotic charm of another system of thought, is the limitation of our own, the stark impossibility of thinking that.”

We have all learned through instruction, when being taught our first words by our parents, how to say ‘hello’ or ‘thank you’, how to sit ourselves in a chair or on our haunches, how to hold a fork or a pair of chopsticks to eat, how to brush our teeth, wash ourselves, and so on.  Later, as we grow older, we may be instructed how to ride a bicycle or how to drive a car.

All this learning involves the all-too-familiar trial and error process, we are shown how to do it, try it out, get corrected as necessary, try it out again, practice, and slowly get the hang of it.  We end up learning how to perceive and do things.

But we are also familiar with another type of instruction, sitting in a room with our peers, listening to a teacher, watching their writing on a board, or their show and tell.  On the face of it, it looks passive, the teacher instructs, the pupils listen and watch.  But, especially when we were younger, the teacher would ask us to repeat, recite, sometimes in unison, sometimes one-by-one, would conduct regular drills with multiplication tables, ask us to go to the board and write words out, or do it at our desks, frequently give us exercises in class.  We would take homework at home, to practice with the material we covered in class.  We would write short compositions, write out answers to questions, write essays on topics.  And when studying alone, we would frequently repeat out loudly to memorize what we wanted to learn.  Even when we would try to repeat in silence, our lips usually would move.  And we would check, a friend or our parents would check, and the teacher would check as well, whether our trials demonstrated that we had learned or not.

We sometimes tend to focus and remember the passive aspect of that classroom instruction, of just sitting in class, and we forget the extensive trial and error activities that went on behind the scenes.

During my years in Baltimore, I worked with several Chinese and Japanese colleagues, and we frequently went to eat together at Chinese restaurants – the greater Baltimore area has several excellent ones.  We always shared dishes, whether whole entrées, or dim-sum, small plates with 3-4 pieces of delicacies – dumplings of all sorts and shapes, steamed or fried, sweet and savory cakes, stuffed buns, rice wrapped in lotus leaves, and so much more.  To properly eat Chinese food one has to use chopsticks, which I had never really used before.  With communally shared food, to manage to feed oneself requires efficient use of eating utensils, and my friends found this a great motivation for me to learn how to use chopsticks.

When I began my tries at holding a pair of chopsticks, my fingers did not know what to feel for, what was relevant for the hold and what not.  When trying to imitate how my friends were holding their chopsticks, my eyes did not know what to look for, to see the important part of the hold and ignore the unimportant.  I tried to copy the way my friends held their chopsticks, my eyes looking at their fingers, then at mine, adjusting, registering what my fingers felt, then try to use.  Reach to grab a dumpling with the chopstick tips, use the tips to tear a piece of cake, try to bring the piece over to my mouth, registering what my eyes saw, what fingers felt.  Sometimes I held the chopsticks too close to their tips, sometimes they were not stable enough and the morsel of food would fall off, sometimes too stable and could not open to grab.  Amidst my friends’ mirth and guidance, there was a clear criterion for whether I had learned how to use chopsticks: could I feed myself?  could I grab a piece of food and bring it from the plate to my mouth?  For the first few outings I did go a bit hungry, but eventually I began to get a feel for holding the chopsticks, one always held stable, the other mobile, controlled by the thumb and index finger.  My fingers learned to recognize the chopsticks, adjust them, coordinate with my eyes.  And with practice I got better and better, and now can comfortably hold and use different kind and size chopsticks, long, short, thick, thin, very thin, wooden or plastic or even metal ones.

It is through such trial and error processes that we develop abilities, learn, acquire knowledge.  Sensations – from the eyes and fingers in the case of the chopsticks – come together with muscle movements (hand and fingers).  Muscle movements and their effects on the world result in a change in sensations, adjustment of muscle movements, and this back and forth continues, until a goal is reached – in the case of the chopsticks, get to grab a piece of food, get the food into the mouth.  This trial and error process brings together our body and the world, and as the back and forth of sensory input and muscle output goes on, our sensations are organized into perception of objects and our movements into discernible actions directed toward these objects.  The objects we perceive in the world emerge through the feedback provided by the results of our actions.  An important feature of this trial and error process is that the more we do, the better we become at doing, at integrating perception and action.  Practice makes perfect.

This is also how we begin to learn a language, through a trial and error process, under someone’s guidance, pointing at the world, hearing a sound, vocalizing (moving lips, jaws, tongue, vocal cords), hearing our own sound and receiving feedback from our guide as well.  And in this way we organize our perception of the world into objects, objects we associate with specific sounds, and it is an organization compatible with that of our guides and teachers.

With trial and error, we learn and develop abilities on our own, by engaging with the world on our own, but also by copying others (sometimes even animals).  We also learn through socialization, under the guidance of others.  We learn because we may be driven to satisfy a need (eat or drink), be praised by a tutor, feel good about mastering something, or we could be just playing, getting our senses and muscles to work together.

We are all of course intimately familiar with what I have written above, with how we develop abilities, how we acquire knowledge, how we link our perceptions and actions.  We do it all the time, but usually we do not spend much time reflecting and thinking about it.  But our knowledge, our abilities, provide the basis for our experience of the world, how we perceive and act.

Many years ago, reading “The Savage Mind” by Claude Levi-Strauss, I came across what to me at the time was a remarkable passage describing the work of Harold Conklin:

“When he began his study of the classification of colours among the Hanunoo of the Philippines, Conklin was at first baffled by the apparent confusions and inconsistencies.  These however disappeared when the informants were asked to relate and contrast specimens instead of being asked to define isolated ones…  They distinguish colour into relatively light and relatively dark, and into those usual in fresh or succulent plants and those usual in dry or desiccated plants.  Thus the natives treat the shiny brown colour of newly cut bamboo as relatively green while we would regard it as nearer red if we had to classify it in terms of the simple opposition of red and green which is found in Hanunoo.”

Clearly we perceive the world very differently from the Hanunoo, in a sense their perceptual category of color cuts across several of our perceptual categories, including color, freshness, wetness.

However, we can understand how they perceive reality and organize their experience if we spend time with them, following them in their daily practices.