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Motor intentionality and the case of Schneider

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Abstract

I argue that Merleau-Ponty’s use of the case of Schneider in his arguments for the existence of non-conconceptual and non-representational motor intentionality contains a problematic methodological ambiguity. Motor intentionality is both to be revealed by its perspicuous preservation and by its contrastive impairment in one and the same case. To resolve the resulting contradiction I suggest we emphasize the second of Merleau-Ponty’s two lines of argument. I argue that this interpretation is the one in best accordance both with Merleau-Ponty’s general methodology and with the empirical case of Schneider as it was described by Gelb and Goldstein.

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Notes

  1. Siewert comes close to making the problematic double use of the Schneider case explicit. He notes that though the Schneider case is supposed to bring motor intentionality to light, i.e. make it evident by its perspicuous preservation, it is exactly taken to be present also in the normal execution of spontaneous actions that prove so difficult for Schneider (Siewert 2005, p. 273). Braddock has also noted how the ‘practical, embodied knowledge’ is said to be missing when so-called abstract movements are to be performed but then returns when Schneider is to perform the ‘concrete’ actions (Braddock 2001, p. 13). Braddock, however, does not raise this as a problem for a coherent understanding of the case nor as a problem for a coherent interpretation of Merleau-Ponty’s text. Finally, Baldwin points to the problem which was identified by Zaner. Baldwin draws attention to the fact that Merleau-Ponty on the one hand seems to argue that Schneider has lost his ability to make sense of his objective body but kept his phenomenal body intact and on the other hand ends up placing Schneider’s incapacity ‘within’ his phenomenal body (Baldwin 2007, p. 97).

  2. Waldenfels also emphasizes Merleau-Ponty’s second line of argument concerning Schneider (Waldenfels 2000, ch. 3).

  3. When Dreyfus adds that Schneider is able to perceive stable sizes and shapes he seems to go too far in attributing abilities to Schneider, who was unable to visually recognize the size or shape of objects (Dreyfus 2007a, p. 63).

  4. Schneider recovered to the extent that he could run his own grocery shop from 1932 until 1944 when his house was bombed. After the Second World War he was elected mayor of the village he lived in (cf. Goldenberg 2003, p. 294).

  5. The term apperceptive mind-blindness or visual agnosia had been introduced by Lissauer in 1890 who distinguished it from associative visual agnosia (Farah 2004, p. 4). Apperceptive visual agnosia is generally used about patients who have a failure of normal visual object recognition, in spite of relatively preserved elementary visual functions, such as acuity, brightness discrimination and colour vision as well as reasonably well-functioning general cognitive abilities (Farah 2004, pp. 11–12). Associative visual agnosia is used about patients who have a selective impairment in their recognition of visually presented objects, despite an apparently intact visual perception, which is shown in their ability to copy drawings in which they don’t recognize the motive (Farah 2004, ch. 6). In contrast with apperceptive visual agnostics the patients suffering from associative visual agnosia are able to describe the shape of the objects seen though they cannot immediately identify the object. Schneider was able to copy drawings but his ability seems not to be based on a visual ability to recognize the shape of objects but rather on an ability to trace the shape via imitating movements (cf. Goldstein and Gelb 1918, p. 121). This conclusion is questioned by Goldenberg (Goldenberg 2003, p. 287).

  6. Several scientists have expressed doubts about the validity of the Schneider case. The neurologist Jonathan Cole writes that he for one has never become clear on what kind of psychiatric problem Schneider suffered from (Cole 2008, p. 27). Cole dubs the tendentious use of pathological cases he finds amongst philosophers the “Schneider” problem. The neurophysiologist Georg Goldenberg has argued that the empirical studies of the case made by Gelb and Goldstein and their associates are useless as science (Goldenberg 2003). He argues that the ‘case’ is the result of an unhappy alliance between scientists blinded by their enthusiasm for a certain holistic solution to the mind-brain-problem and a patient eager to please. I don’t find Goldenberg’s arguments convincing. For one thing, as Farah notes, one reason that the neurologists Jung and Bay in 1942 and 1945 were unable to confirm Gelb and Goldstein’s findings could simply be the recovery of the patient, the possibility of which is testified to by at least one other similar case-study (Farah 2004, p. 21). Furthermore it was in particular the compensatory tracing movements that Jung and Bay did not find convincing evidence for, but taking into consideration that later, visually impaired patients have spontaneously adopted similar tracing strategies it seems unlikely that Schneider should have originally invented the behaviour to satisfy the scientists (Farah 2004, p. 12, Marotta and Behrmann 2004, p. 635). Concerning the alledged incoherence of Gelb and Goldstein’s case-report Goldenberg seems too quick when he concludes that Gelb and Goldstein present contradicting evidence concerning Schneider’s use of tracing movements in reading (Goldenberg 2003, p. 285). What Goldenberg points to as revealing their incompetence is exactly noticed by Gelb and Goldstein and they provide a coherent explanation of the relevant facts, which Goldenberg does not take into consideration (cf. Goldstein and Gelb 1918, pp. 81–83). See Marotta and Behrmann (2004) for a direct response to Goldenberg’s arguments and Landis et al. (1982) for a comprehensive comparison of the Schneider case with a more recent case of visual agnosia.

  7. The dialectic oscillation of the chapter on motility in Phenomenology of Perception flows as follows: first a critique of an intellectualistic conception of psychology (Merleau-Ponty 1981, pp. 103–112 / 1945, pp. 121–130), then the empiricist has a go at a merely causal explanation of the Schneider case (Merleau-Ponty 1981 pp. 112–120 / pp. 130–140), the criticism of which leads to the revival of intellectualism (Merleau-Ponty 1981 pp. 120–126 / pp. 140–148). The final defeat of intellectualism is said to justify the return of naturalism unless a new method is provided (Merleau-Ponty 1981 p. 126 / p. 147).

  8. That the attempt to account for bodily agency via the idea of agency-neutral movements generates a general problem of making bodily agency intelligible at all has been suggested by McDowell and is argued by Hornsby (McDowell 1994, pp. 89–91; Hornsby 1997, pp. 93–110). For a recent survey of the widespread assumption of such agency-neutrality within modern theories of action and for a critique of the assumption see Grünbaum (2008).

  9. Bermúdez has proposed a re-interpretation of the Schneider case that reads the case as evidence for the existence of two different ways of representing the location of limbs and of points on one’s own body. He argues that the difference between the awareness needed for grasping and the awareness needed for pointing is a difference at the level of sense and not at the level of reference (Bermúdez 2005, p. 305). Bermúdez’s position differs from the intellectualist’s position by taking the fundamental representation of our body to be non-conceptual. For a critique of Bermúdez’s position from a Merleau-Pontian perspective see Gallagher (2003).

  10. I use Colin Smith’s translation of résultat, which I think captures the meaning of Goldstein’s original presentation of the abstract movements. Goldstein speaks of Schneider’s abstract movements as having a determinate purpose or objective: ‘Festgelegt ist wesentlich die Erfüllung eines bestimmten Zweckes, die Erreichung eines bestimmten Zieles der Bewegung.’ (Goldstein 1923, p. 179).

  11. I have used Smith’s translation of the part of the quote used by Merleau-Ponty except for the sentence “It all happens independently of me” which I have rendered as “It all happens as if by itself”.The rest of the translation is my own. Here is the original German version:

    Ich erlebe, wie die Bewegung aus der Situation, aus der Abfolge der Geschehnisse selbst erfolgt; ich bin mit meinen Bewegungen gewissermaßen nur ein Glied in der Abfolge und werde mir der willkürlichen Innervation kaum bewußt, eigentlich nur, wenn ich mich ausdrücklich daruf besinne. Es geht alles wie von selbst. Die Erlebnisse des Normalen mögen sich so bei den Bewegungen im Leben von denen des Patienten trotz dessen Defekt im Optischen kaum wesentlich unterscheiden, wie ja auch sein Verhalten da kaum vom Normalen abweicht. (Goldstein 1923, p. 175, I have the italicized sentence left out by Merleau-Ponty as well as the sentence immediately succeeding the section he quotes.)

    .

  12. A homologous argument is used when Merleau-Ponty discusses the linguistic disturbances of Schneider: ‘We shall have the opportunity of seeing this power, essential to speech, in cases in which neither thought nor ‘motility’ is noticeably affected, and yet in which the ‘life’ of language is impaired.’ (Merleau-Ponty 1981, p. 196 / 1945, p. 228).

  13. It is the presence of such potential tasks or action opportunities on the horizon of one’s experience of absorbed coping which Dreyfus has recently emphasized in his account of motor intentionality (Dreyfus 2007a, p. 66). Kelly, on the other hand, implicitly denies the possibility of the presence of such affordances on the horizon when he claims that we can only be motor-intentionally aware of affordances if we actually act on them (Kelly 2005, p. 19). The difference is a reflection of the fact that the authors pursue two different lines of argument corresponding to the two lines of arguments concerning the Schneider case.

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Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank Thomas bassbøl, Finn Collin, Thor Grünbaum, Lisa Käll, Dorothée Legrand, Søren Overgaard and Dan Zahavi for valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments as well as the audiences at the 2nd Annual Conference of the Nordic Society for Phenomenology (Stockholm 2004), at the 10th Gathering of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness (Oxford 2006) and at the 9th International Conference on Philosophy, Psychiatry and Psychology, (Leiden 2006). The research for this paper was funded by the Danish Research Council for Culture and Communication.

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Correspondence to Rasmus Thybo Jensen.

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Jensen, R.T. Motor intentionality and the case of Schneider. Phenom Cogn Sci 8, 371–388 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11097-009-9122-x

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