Ossorio: "What are your thoughts about significance deficits and brain function pathology? How does one gain or develop significance appreciation and/or lose it?" This one I can answer certain aspects of it. I think it connects to one of the others here. [looking through the questions] Another question is, "How does one develop what’s significant, or how are Person Characteristics developed in general?"

We’ve got two questions on significance. I couldn’t swear to it, but I would bet heavily that when I presented the schizophrenia paper about ten years ago, one of my tag lines was "There is no such thing as significance." [See "Cognitive Deficits in Schizophrenia" in Volume II of The Collected Works of Peter G. Ossorio.] Anybody remember that?

Audience: Significantly, no.

Audience: Is that when you were talking about concrete versus non-concrete?

Ossorio: Yeah. Remember I drew the ladder of these going upwards and downwards. If you go upwards that’s in the direction of significance. If you go downwards it’s in the direction of implementation. Ok.

Number one, significance is a relationship. It’s a relationship between two behaviors, and you express that relationship in ordinary English by saying that you do one of those behaviors by doing the other behavior. Whenever you have a case of doing A by doing B, you have a case of significance. You also have a case of implementation. Significance and implementation are converses. Implementation is the inverse of significance. Now again what that tells you is that it’s not a phenomenon.

Audience: So what you are saying in the analysis of significance is what’s the next higher level of behavior.

Ossorio: What’s a higher level behavior. Everything above is the significance of a given one. Everything below is implementation. Now like insight, there’s a missing piece there. What does it take for there to be that relationship between two behaviors?

Remember when I was developing the "Staircase Effect" [in the schizophrenia talk], I said you add context. In this context doing B is a case of doing A. So by going to a broader context, you generate significance. And by going to the broadest context of all, you generate ultimate significance and anything in between.

So, how does one gain or develop significance appreciation? The answer in short is one acquires a world that serves as the ultimate context for anything that occurs in it. And that provides the significance of whatever behaviors occur in it. That’s how one gains significance appreciation.

Audience: The word context is one that I don’t hear you use that much.

Ossorio: I don’t, but I did in connection with the schizophrenia talk. That’s why I am using it again. It’s a perfectly good thing. It just means additional facts. You bring in additional facts and that’s your context, your broader context.

Audience: The word I tend to use is perspective.

Ossorio: Perspective is a standpoint or way of looking at things. That’s not what we’re talking about. We are talking about what’s out there, facts.

Audience: Ok, you mean additional facts.

Ossorio: Yeah. The fact, for example, that you are sitting in the crowd means that when you say something, it has a different significance than if you were sitting in this room by yourself saying exactly the same things. That’s not just a perspective or a way of looking at things.

Audience: There seems to be some lore that some folks have a lot more difficulty moving to those broader contexts and looking at higher significance than other people do. Is there some truth to that lore?

Ossorio: We have about six dissertations at significance levels ranging to five zeros as evidence. All of the research on performativeness deals with this, significance deficits.

Audience: I was just trying to look beyond the original question to see what might be... Maybe the person who asked the question might want to reflect on whether what’s come up here has answered what they had in mind.

Ossorio: Yeah, what about that?

Audience: I was just going to say, I think most people know it but some don’t. I think it is so helpful. If you could say a little about the example of moving your arm up and down and how when you add new facts... That might be very helpful.

Ossorio: Ok, yeah. This is the standard heuristic that goes with explaining significance. It’s in the form of an image. Except that this particular image is simply taken from some long forgotten piece of philosophical literature.

Audience: Elizabeth Anscombe.

Ossorio: Think of being out there on a lonely heath in England. And the main thing that you see other than the heath is a farmhouse. And standing close by that farmhouse is a man and he’s going like this [moving his arm up and down]. Now what’s your description of the behavior? Well, you say he is moving his arm up and down.

Then I tell you that he’s got his hand wrapped around a pump handle and the pump is in good working order. I’ve added context. I’ve added additional facts. Now you have another description of the guy’s behavior: he is pumping the pump.

Then I add that there is water in the pump and the pump is connected to the house. Now you have another description of his behavior: he is pumping water to the house.

Then I add some more facts. There are people in the house and they are drinking the water. Now you have another description of his behavior: he is pumping water to the people.

Now I add some more facts. There’s poison in that water and this guy knows it because he put it there. Now you have another description of his behavior: he’s poisoning the people in the house.

Finally I tell you the people in the house are a bunch of conspirators who are conspiring to over throw the government and have a good chance of succeeding. Now you have one last description of his behavior: he is saving the country from these conspirators.

Now notice what it took to generate the new descriptions: simply the addition of some relevant facts. But each time you had a new description that was the significance of the earlier one. He was saving the country by poisoning the people, by pumping the water to the people, by pumping the pump, by moving his arm up and down. You said, "What was he doing by moving his arm up and down?" He was pumping the pump. "What was he doing by doing that?" He was pumping the water to the people. "What was he doing by doing that?" He was poisoning the people. "What was he doing by doing that?" He was saving the country. So there is your significance series and your implementation series.

Now these are what I call empirical identities. They have no generality whatever. Take any of those. When somebody moves his arm up and down, what are the odds that his arm is wrapped around the pump handle? Well, it’s vanishingly small and we don’t have any data on that. What are the odds that if somebody is pumping water to the people he is poisoning them? Again, vanishingly small. But in this context, in these circumstances, doing the one thing is the same as doing the other thing. What are the odds that poisoning some people is saving the country? Zero. But, in this case there is an identity. In this case, in these circumstances, doing the one is the same as doing the other. That’s how this stuff works. So what you need to see the significance of things is to have the larger picture in well-organized form so that you can make use of the connections and then you just see it. You have insight. [Laughter]

Audience: It’s the relevant data, information, that’s the context. It’s not just you know and part of that, isn’t it, there are tons of things that you know that are potentially related here, and part of this is that you are recognizing those that are the context that this person was acting from. Because significance is a significance of the behaving person and it either has that significance or it doesn’t.

Ossorio: Let me bring out something else. There is an asymmetry between the Observer and the Actor. The Actor works from the top down. The top one is what the Actor is purely and simply doing. Now all of the other ones are there only because they are ways of doing that. So the behaver, the Actor, has no problem of significance. He has a problem with implementation: how do I save the country?

Now the Observer looks, and what’s most obvious is something on the order that the guy is moving his arm up and down. Well, unless he takes it that that’s just what’s happening, period, and basically he can’t because that’s not an intrinsic social practice, he knows there is something missing. He’s the one who has a problem of significance. He is the one who has to ask, "What is he doing by doing that?" Because he knows that there is a missing answer. When he reaches an intrinsic social practice description, that’s the first place where he has a genuine candidate for stopping and saying that’s what’s going on. Now it isn’t that necessarily that’s all there is to it. It’s that any claim that there’s more to it carries a burden of proof.

Audience: Is there a relationship between significance and appreciated significance? There are two things that I have a vague recollection that you used in the Projective class. One was the cow. For the other one, you drew a bunch of lines on the board and you asked, "What is this?"

Ossorio: Yeah.

Audience: Is there any connection between the two?

Ossorio: There is, but those two things were part of a set of three things, which were simply heuristics dealing with the fallibility of observation. You can have something right under your nose and fail to see it, if it’s like the cow. You can fail to see it if it’s too complicated and goes by too fast.

For example, if you’ve ever watched a football game and tried to follow the action, unless you are very experienced, it’s just a jumble. It slowly sorts itself out and then you can tell what happened. But as it’s happening, it’s going too fast for you and you just can’t tell what it is. But, the coach down there on the ground level can tell. He takes one look and he knows because he has the experience. He has the familiarity and so he can tell by looking but you can’t. And yet it’s right there in front of both of you. So those were simply to bring out some of the fallibility of observation, partly because of a philosophical background. There is sort of a general idea that if something is observational, it’s foolproof, and it’s not.

Audience: Did you say what the second one was?

Ossorio: What was the second one that you mentioned?

Audience: One was the cow and one was the soldier and his dog.

Ossorio: Oh, yeah, the soldier. [draws picture]

Ossorio: Something like that.

Audience: Right. Right. That’s it. [Laughter]

Ossorio: I show you this and I say, "What’s this a picture of?" And either you guess or you don’t. And obviously some people are going to be better at this than others. [Laughter] Let me tell you what it is. It’s a picture of a soldier and his dog walking by a fence. Here’s the bayonet and here’s the tail of the dog. Now the trick on these is not to make it impossible. You can look at it and sometimes guess what it is. There’s just enough information there.

Now, when it comes to observation you may be in exactly this position. You see a client for the first time, you hear this story and what you’re getting is part of some larger patterns. If you are experienced enough, you recognize that what you are seeing is part of these larger patterns and which one it is. If you have no experience with them, you’re never going to see it. And one of the troubles with observation is sometimes this is all you’re observing. And from that you have to be able to see what else might go along with it that you are not seeing. By the way "Dinner at 8:30" is a good example that has that same feature.

Audience: Is that the third one of heuristics?

Ossorio:The one is that it goes by too fast and it’s too complicated. The second one is that you are only seeing part of it. And the third is that you are seeing a degraded version of it. Unless you have a pattern clearly in mind, you’re not going to recognize it.

Audience: And that was the cow?

Ossorio: Yeah, that’s the cow.

Audience: I remember you used the Escher picture. And also the card that said "I think that I think that..."

Ossorio: Yeah, those are variations. No, one of them is a variation on the football game. The other is a sort of a hybrid because with the Escher picture you follow it along and there’s no place where it looks wrong. It’s not until you step back and look at the whole thing that you say "Hey, this can’t be". Well you get the same experience spending an hour talking to a client. [Laughter] You get a story from the client and you interact and raise the same questions you usually do. And at any point, the client is making sense, giving you good answers to your questions. Then you step back and say "Wait a minute, this can’t be." That’s like the Escher picture. So, like I said, observation is far from fool-proof, but it’s fundamental. That’s where everything begins.

Audience: This might be a little peripheral but you told a story once about coming into the classroom and taking your coat off and then asking the students what you had done.

Ossorio: That’s a variation on the football game. Just imagine that I came in and take my coat off and hang it on the hook up here. Then we are talking about behavior and somebody says "Well, what you’ve really got there is a set of movements." I say "Well, ok, tell me what I did when I walked in the room." And they say, "You hung your coat up on the hook." I say "No, no, no. If what’s really there is a set of movements from which you deduce what I did, tell me what movements I made from which you could tell that what I was doing was hanging my coat on the hook." [Laughter] And nobody is able to answer that because in fact obviously they don’t do it that way.

See, what they recognize directly is the action. They don’t infer the action from seeing the movements. They don’t infer the action from the performance. They see the action. In fact, you could do a better job inferring the performance from the action. [Laughter] If you know that what I did was hung my coat on the hook, you could do a pretty good job of reproducing the movements.

Audience: Earlier in this question on saying something about getting better at appreciating significance, you said that you acquire a world. Is that the DP version of "get a life"? [Laughter] Or could you say some more?

Audience: I take it you don’t acquire a world simply by observation.

Ossorio: You acquire what you might call a real world, not an abstract world, not a purely formal world, but a real world with all of the detail connections and gradations and variations, etc. that’s there. Once you get that far, then think of the cow. See, you can see that cow there even though the conditions observationally are far from ideal.

If you’ve been in the world long enough, there are things in the world that you are familiar enough with to recognize. You have seen them, you have seen instances of them, and so when you encounter them you recognize them, like you recognize the cow. Now your recognition of those things is -- guess what? You’re seeing the significance of the concrete behaviors.

Think of "Dinner at 8:30." The behavior was simply having dinner at 8:30 under one description. But, you know enough about anger, you know enough about human relationships, so when I tell you that I had that argument with my wife and we hadn’t settled it, and that usually we have dinner at 7:30 not 8:30, and that I like steak but I like it rare and I hate it well done, it’s like seeing the cow. You look at it and say "Boy she was really giving him the business." Now the interesting thing is that it’s not necessarily true, but it sure as hell is obvious. [Laughter]

My rough figure is 90% of undergraduate classes will see that because they are all smiling and when I call on somebody at random and say "What was going on?", they say "Anger." So, it’s your familiarly with that world that enables you to work it like seeing the cow. That’s significance. That’s the substance for which when we say significance we are implying that sort of thing. There’s not a separate phenomenon called significance.

Audience: When linguists talk about context, is that different from the way you’re describing getting facts here?

Ossorio: I am not in good touch with linguistics these days.

Audience: Some of the humor stuff gets real goofy.

Ossorio: Well, the humor stuff was always goofy. [Laughter]

Audience: The explanations of how they are understanding the context.

Ossorio: Linguists like everybody else make use of whatever theories are around at the time. And there’s some awful goofy theories around, but that’s what they have to work with.

Audience: For some reason I’m thinking of the pleasure of a good mystery, where all the clues are laid out, all of the facts are there, but you don’t know who did it until the very end.

Ossorio: And you say "Aw, yeah." See it’s too much like work to solve it. You can do it if they’re playing fair with you, but I’d rather just read it for the enjoyment and be surprised at the end.

Audience: What is the difference between the real world that I have, which isn’t necessarily the real world, because it only has a certain scope, and my world?

Ossorio: That is your world.

Audience: Say I live in a world, and there is also a world for each community that I am a member of. It’s the world I take to be real. I might be wrong but...

Ossorio: No, it’s the real world. There are some things that you can’t disclaim and that’s one of them. You can say of him that that’s what he takes the world to be, but you can’t say of yourself that that’s what you take the world to be. For you that’s the way things are. It takes somebody else to do that.

Audience: But, as an Observer I can recognize about myself that I don’t have all the facts, I don’t have all the facts straight. It’s workable for me at the moment but, I know that’s not all I am expecting. It’s a reality check. I look for reality checks to see if I am going wrong.

Ossorio: There’s a reasonably long argument, but you can’t get away with it. And that’s because whatever for you is the real world, for you is the real world. It takes somebody else to say, for him it’s the real world. But you can’t afford to say that because you can only say that in the context of a real world, in which for you that’s the real world.

Audience: So what you are saying, if you don’t have all the facts yet and you know that, then your world is one in which you don’t have all of the facts.

Ossorio: Something like that, you see there’s...

Audience: I can still have the concept of a reality check that I am going to make, and I can say what is the real world for me at the moment won’t be tomorrow.

Ossorio: There is a social version of that and it’s called "us and them". If I am speaking to one of us then I say, "This is a can of Dr. Pepper." If I am speaking to one of them, I say, "This is what we call a can of Dr. Pepper." So depending on whether you are speaking to one of us, or one of them, you’re going to disclaim or not. But, among us, it’s pure and simple fact and it has to be that way.