George Tudorie

Societies in the global North face a future of accelerated ageing. In this context, advanced technology, especially that involving artificial intelligence (AI), is often presented as a natural counterweight to stagnation and decay. While it is a reasonable expectation that AI will play important roles in such societies, the manner in which it affects the lives of older people needs to be discussed. Here I argue that older people should be able to exercise, if they so choose, a right to refuse AI-based technologies, and that this right cannot be purely negative. There is a public duty to provide minimal conditions to exercise such a right, even if majorities in the relevant societies disagree with skeptical attitudes towards technology. It is crucial to recognize that there is nothing inherently irrational or particularly selfish in refusing to embrace technologies that are commonly considered disruptive and opaque, especially when the refusers have much to lose. Some older individuals may understandably decide that they indeed stand to lose a whole world of familiar facts and experiences, competencies built in decades of effort, and autonomy in relation to technology. The current default of investigating older people’s resistance to technology as driven by fear or exaggerated emotion in general, and therefore as something to be managed and extinguished, is untenable.

In painting portraits, artists used to subtly place objects which reflected the biography or ambitions of the subject, but it is only more recently that objects which were part of the everyday life of institutionalized individuals became themselves part of the narratives offered by historians and other scholars of psychiatry. Excavating these remains – and finding ways to listen to them – is part of telling a fuller story of the people who lived for many years in mental institutions, and indirectly of madness as both part of medical science, and a figment of our culture.

In a rather long piece which an exhibition catalog has called „catholic propaganda”(Busch & Maisak, 2013, p. 342), Guido Görres reflected on madness and art, using Kaulbach’s iconic 1835 drawing of asylum inmates (Das Narrenhaus) as pretext. Görres wrote of “this hospital of the human spirit (…), this charnel ground of the living, who like specters roam, wearing on their foreheads the faded and almost illegible traces of their former names.”1(1836, p. 9). Overdramatic prose, but unlikely to strike one as unprecedented. If anything, it has long been customary to exhibit a mix of fascination and revulsion when discussing the institutions which in the past two centuries at the same time sheltered and shattered those deemed mentally ill.

This volume adds a largely redundant stratum to Searle’s effort to develop a systematic social ontology, a theory of the nature, kind or status of social entities. This has been one of Searle’s main concerns in the last two decades, and, while this thread of his work stands on the views about language and mind he developed since the 1960s, we can safely trace its origins to a paper published in 1990, “Collective Intentions and Actions” (Searle, 1990/2002). Beyond this early reference, the book is a sequel to The Construction of Social Reality (Searle, 1995), and it builds on the texts written to complete that book or in response to criticism.

This is a book about a kind of bitterness, one which shares a number of philosophical reflexes with the drive that made the old biologists search for the inexplicable spark of life, to paraphrase Collingwood, “at vanishing-point” (1992, 227). Much as the riddle of life haunted the philosophically inclined biologist, the mystery of mind became the make-or-break bet of the psychologist. To a certain extent, this was a bet that human minds were indeed mysterious, and that therefore adequate explanation was long overdue. The emergence of psychology as a scientific discipline and its obsessive quest to emulate the successful natural sciences is, at least in part, the story of frustrated attempts to study the mind, as it were, “anatomically.” If biology has for long been in the position of putting aside worries about the evasiveness of life, psychology, even in its recent history, has been more prone to hesitations about its subject matter and method. As a first determination, what is explored here is this endemic fragility. Why is it so with psychology? Perhaps mind is more mysterious or resistant to scientific investigation. Or maybe its slipperiness is persistent for other reasons—reasons that tend to be ignored or downplayed once the investigative machinery of the psychologist is set in motion. The central notion explored here is that of “margins of psychology”. The paradigmatic human subject in psychology is the typical human being: mature, in possession of at least one language, reasonably competent in the social and cultural matters characteristic of her position in the world, more or less normal relative to the standards of the community to which she belongs. Admittedly a loose description in an endlessly problematic language, but this is a claim not about, say, the statistical fact of the matter in psychology (e.g., number of publications on such topics) or even the factual history of the field (something like Kuhnian paradigmatic problem). It is an observation about the central position occupied in psychology, as landmark and measure of things, by the concept of a normal person. It is not, to be clear, that psychologists work on anything like the “problem of the normal person,” but that they work in a field organized by this concept, with explicit or implicit expectations about what people do or would do, what they think or would think—and so on. This central anchor determines a series of peripheries or margins. The marginal is not simply different or distant from the paradigm of the normal person. What isolates individuals we can consider marginal in the intended sense, what makes them special, is precisely their isolation from the surrounding culture and its affordances of meaning-making. The nonverbal infant and the (psychotic) madman, though in vastly different predicaments, are almost outside language, community, and culture; these human beings come in and out of view at the horizon of (psychological) intelligibility. The first is not yet at home in it, the second no longer. This confronts us with a problem of understanding, which is not a new problem, but which has renewed relevance given the attempts of psychology to say something illuminating about such subjects. At the root of this problem is the tension between (psychological) intelligibility, which depends on public and culturally embedded practices and concepts, and the limitations of the infant and the madman, who cannot act as parts of the open and structured world which makes understanding possible, even if they are not completely foreign or detached from this world. This tension destabilizes explanatory discourse, to the extent that it is rooted in our common interpretive practices.