The Mirror and the Mind: A History of Self-Recognition in the Human Sciences by Katja Guenther

IF 0.3 4区 历史学 Q2 HISTORY
Henry M. Cowles
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Near the frame, where the glass warps, there is a flickering image of the historian at work, projecting a model of the mind many of us take for granted onto the very figures who brought that model into being.Guenther’s chapters sketch a menagerie of human and non-human animals placed before mirrors. From Charles Darwin’s son in 1840, to many monkeys over the last century, to patients with “phantom limb” a decade ago, test subjects have helped hone ideas about consciousness, cognition, and cultural difference. In the first chapter, we watch the capacity for self-recognition become a milestone in child development; in the second, this capacity becomes quantitative data amid psychology’s shift toward behaviorism. Subsequently, robots and apes trouble our human exceptionalism by reacting to their reflections, and a wide range of humans in the second half of the book do the same by failing to react to theirs. Guenther gathers, chapter by the chapter, an exciting cast of characters around the scientific and medical mirror.And that is to say nothing of the book’s main subjects, the researchers and clinicians who scribbled notes and published papers about those whose behavior they observed. Figures like the cybernetician William Grey Walter and the psychiatrist Hilde Bruch drive the plot, even as apes and children (including Guenther’s own) are the ones looking in the mirror. It is in the ideas and ambitions of these scientific and medical practitioners that readers will begin to feel that they are staring not at historical actors, but at historians—that is, at themselves. After all, history is often classified as a human science, and we historians observe and account for behaviors as much as Guenther’s psychologists and primatologists do. What might we learn about our own limits by attending to theirs? How might The Mirror and the Mind be a mirror of our own minds?The advent of the “proper” mirror test, or the “mark test,” is a case in point. Developed in the late-1960s for infants and chimpanzees, testers “marked” subjects with dye and then exposed them to their reflections. If subjects rubbed at the dye, it was a sign that they saw “themselves” in the mirror, rather than a playmate or a rival. Gordon Gallup, one of the test’s inventors, used it to stretch the still-dominant paradigm of behaviorism. By plotting changes in chimpanzee behavior over time, Gallup thought he was seeing the kind of higher-level cognitive functions many strict behaviorists had sworn off. What Guenther reminds us, in exploring the development of the mark test, is that the human sciences must bridge a gap—in this case, from apes scratching to self-recognition. Psychology, on this view, is the story we tell connecting brains and behavior.What does this have to do with history? More than meets the eye. Guenther’s history of the mark test, told through the efforts of Gallup and others, reflects our own approach. How do we know what goes on in the heads of our actors? We bridge a gap, just as Gallup did. We infer motives and mental state by observable traces, and in doing so we practice the very behaviorism that Guenther so admirably historicizes. As a field, we have taken many “turns”: social, cultural, material, affective. But at the heart of each is the same model of the mind, of inner lives revealed through outward action. Guenther’s story is not a materialist one of mirrors “themselves,” nor an affective one of their delights. Instead, this book both explores and extends a particular approach to ideas, seeking them out in animal behavior. That the animal behavior in question is scientific research into the same set of questions only enhances the mirror-ball effect of Guenther’s beautiful book.","PeriodicalId":46755,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3000,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Interdisciplinary History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_r_01981","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0

Abstract

Is history a mirror? One steals glimpses of this question throughout this excellent book, even though the author never steps through the looking-glass to answer it directly. Guenther’s subject is the mirror test, defined broadly as the use of mirrors to probe the capacity for self-recognition. This is a serious and superb intellectual history, tracking how mirrors function as material and metaphorical reflections of cognition across a range of fields. But the book also reflects aspects of the historian’s craft, or at least of the assumptions we bring to it. Near the frame, where the glass warps, there is a flickering image of the historian at work, projecting a model of the mind many of us take for granted onto the very figures who brought that model into being.Guenther’s chapters sketch a menagerie of human and non-human animals placed before mirrors. From Charles Darwin’s son in 1840, to many monkeys over the last century, to patients with “phantom limb” a decade ago, test subjects have helped hone ideas about consciousness, cognition, and cultural difference. In the first chapter, we watch the capacity for self-recognition become a milestone in child development; in the second, this capacity becomes quantitative data amid psychology’s shift toward behaviorism. Subsequently, robots and apes trouble our human exceptionalism by reacting to their reflections, and a wide range of humans in the second half of the book do the same by failing to react to theirs. Guenther gathers, chapter by the chapter, an exciting cast of characters around the scientific and medical mirror.And that is to say nothing of the book’s main subjects, the researchers and clinicians who scribbled notes and published papers about those whose behavior they observed. Figures like the cybernetician William Grey Walter and the psychiatrist Hilde Bruch drive the plot, even as apes and children (including Guenther’s own) are the ones looking in the mirror. It is in the ideas and ambitions of these scientific and medical practitioners that readers will begin to feel that they are staring not at historical actors, but at historians—that is, at themselves. After all, history is often classified as a human science, and we historians observe and account for behaviors as much as Guenther’s psychologists and primatologists do. What might we learn about our own limits by attending to theirs? How might The Mirror and the Mind be a mirror of our own minds?The advent of the “proper” mirror test, or the “mark test,” is a case in point. Developed in the late-1960s for infants and chimpanzees, testers “marked” subjects with dye and then exposed them to their reflections. If subjects rubbed at the dye, it was a sign that they saw “themselves” in the mirror, rather than a playmate or a rival. Gordon Gallup, one of the test’s inventors, used it to stretch the still-dominant paradigm of behaviorism. By plotting changes in chimpanzee behavior over time, Gallup thought he was seeing the kind of higher-level cognitive functions many strict behaviorists had sworn off. What Guenther reminds us, in exploring the development of the mark test, is that the human sciences must bridge a gap—in this case, from apes scratching to self-recognition. Psychology, on this view, is the story we tell connecting brains and behavior.What does this have to do with history? More than meets the eye. Guenther’s history of the mark test, told through the efforts of Gallup and others, reflects our own approach. How do we know what goes on in the heads of our actors? We bridge a gap, just as Gallup did. We infer motives and mental state by observable traces, and in doing so we practice the very behaviorism that Guenther so admirably historicizes. As a field, we have taken many “turns”: social, cultural, material, affective. But at the heart of each is the same model of the mind, of inner lives revealed through outward action. Guenther’s story is not a materialist one of mirrors “themselves,” nor an affective one of their delights. Instead, this book both explores and extends a particular approach to ideas, seeking them out in animal behavior. That the animal behavior in question is scientific research into the same set of questions only enhances the mirror-ball effect of Guenther’s beautiful book.
《镜子与心灵:人类科学中的自我认知史》,作者:Katja Guenther
历史是一面镜子吗?在这本优秀的书中,人们可以隐约看到这个问题,尽管作者从未穿过镜子直接回答这个问题。Guenther的实验对象是镜子测试,其广义的定义是使用镜子来探测自我认知的能力。这是一部严肃而卓越的思想史,追踪了镜子如何在一系列领域中作为认知的物质和隐喻反映发挥作用。但这本书也反映了历史学家手艺的各个方面,或者至少是我们给它带来的假设。在玻璃扭曲的画框附近,有一幅历史学家在工作的闪烁图像,将我们许多人认为理所当然的思维模式投射到创造这种模式的人物身上。冈瑟的章节描绘了一个人类和非人类动物的动物园,它们被放置在镜子前。从1840年查尔斯·达尔文的儿子,到上个世纪的许多猴子,再到十年前患有“幻肢”的病人,实验对象帮助我们磨练了关于意识、认知和文化差异的想法。在第一章中,我们看到自我认知能力成为儿童发展的一个里程碑;在第二种情况下,随着心理学向行为主义的转变,这种能力变成了定量数据。随后,机器人和猿类通过对它们的反思做出反应来扰乱我们的人类例外论,而在书的后半部分,大量的人类也因为没有对自己的反思做出反应而重蹈覆辙。冈瑟一章一章地围绕着科学和医学的镜子,讲述了一群令人兴奋的人物。更不用说这本书的主要研究对象了,这些研究人员和临床医生对他们观察到的那些人的行为做了笔记,并发表了论文。控制论专家威廉·格雷·沃尔特(William Grey Walter)和精神病学家希尔德·布鲁赫(Hilde Bruch)等人物推动了情节的发展,而照镜子的是猿类和儿童(包括冈瑟自己的孩子)。正是在这些科学和医学从业者的思想和抱负中,读者会开始感到他们不是在盯着历史演员,而是在盯着历史学家——也就是说,在盯着他们自己。毕竟,历史经常被归类为人类科学,我们历史学家观察和解释行为,就像冈瑟的心理学家和灵长类动物学家所做的那样。通过关注他人的极限,我们能了解到自己的哪些极限呢?《镜子与心灵》怎么可能是我们自己心灵的一面镜子呢?“适当的”镜像测试或“标记测试”的出现就是一个很好的例子。这种方法是在20世纪60年代后期为婴儿和黑猩猩开发的,测试者用染料“标记”受试者,然后让他们看到自己的倒影。如果受试者摩擦染料,这表明他们在镜子里看到了“自己”,而不是玩伴或竞争对手。该测试的发明者之一戈登·盖洛普(Gordon Gallup)用它来扩展仍然占主导地位的行为主义范式。通过绘制黑猩猩行为随时间的变化,盖洛普认为他看到了许多严格的行为主义者发誓放弃的那种更高层次的认知功能。Guenther提醒我们,在探索标记测试的发展过程中,人类科学必须弥合一个鸿沟——在这个例子中,从猿抓挠到自我识别。从这个角度来看,心理学是我们讲述的连接大脑和行为的故事。这和历史有什么关系?比表面上看到的要多得多。通过盖洛普和其他人的努力,冈瑟讲述了标记测试的历史,反映了我们自己的方法。我们怎么知道演员脑子里在想什么?我们弥合了差距,就像盖洛普所做的那样。我们通过可观察到的痕迹来推断动机和精神状态,在这样做的过程中,我们实践了冈瑟如此令人钦佩地将其历史化的行为主义。作为一个领域,我们经历了许多“转折”:社会的、文化的、物质的、情感的。但在每一个的核心都是同样的心智模式,通过外在行为揭示的内在生活。冈瑟的故事既不是唯物主义的反映“他们自己”的故事,也不是情感主义的反映他们的快乐的故事。相反,这本书探索并扩展了一种特殊的思想方法,在动物行为中寻找它们。所讨论的动物行为是对同一组问题的科学研究,这只会增强冈瑟这本美丽的书的镜像效应。
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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.60
自引率
20.00%
发文量
68
期刊介绍: The Journal of Interdisciplinary History features substantive articles, research notes, review essays, and book reviews relating historical research and work in applied fields-such as economics and demographics. Spanning all geographical areas and periods of history, topics include: - social history - demographic history - psychohistory - political history - family history - economic history - cultural history - technological history
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