Kevin Winters and Dr. Mark Wrathall, Philosophy
In May of 1843, Joseph Smith gave a decisive statement against dualism: “There is no such thing as immaterial matter. All spirit is matter, but it is more fine or pure, and can only be discerned by purer eyes; we cannot see it; but when our bodies are purified we shall see that it is all matter” (D&C 131:7-8). This led to a handful of expositions by various leaders and thinkers, such as Orson Pratt’s “The Absurdities of Immaterialism” or, more recently, Truman Madsen’s Eternal Man. But beyond Madsen’s brief treatment and a few other short works on the issue, there has not been an extensive modern exposition or defense of a Mormon materialism in the 20th/21st century.
As part of a larger project that began when I was first introduced to philosophy, my ORCA research focused on the question of embodiment within philosophy and psychology. Throughout my investigation of the role embodiment plays in human cognition I have come to better understand what phenomena a Mormon metaphysic has to account for. In order to find relevant phenomenal descriptions of human existence, I focused on perception, particularly visual perception. Traditionally, vision is a common metaphor for understanding and knowledge so our understanding of it holds wide implications.
The greatest impetus for my research has been the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, particularly his Phenomenology of Perception. Merleau-Ponty argued against the common view that perception is the end result for stimulation of sensory organs and the appropriate neural firings. Rather, Merleau-Ponty argued that perception is a vital and deeply embodied action; perceptual experiences don’t simply happen as an impersonal event, they are enacted. While I found Merleau-Ponty’s analyses to be insightful, I desired empirical evidence in the discipline of psychology to further buttress his claims.
This quest for additional evidence led me to research on inattentional blindness, primarily as elucidated in Arian Mack and Irvin Rock’s Inattentional Blindness. The general hypothesis claims that retinal stimulation, even in healthy individuals, does not suffice for perception to occur. Perception requires attention: vision that is directed at objects and motivated by needs, desires, and goals. Multiple studies have demonstrated that objects in one’s field of vision can go unnoticed, even if immediately adjacent to objects that are seen. In one humorous and poignant example, subjects are asked to monitor certain aspects of a basketball game; in the middle of the game a man in a monkey suit walks into the middle of the game, dances a jig, and walks off. A significant percentage of the subjects did not even see the monkey. The pertinent lesson of these studies is that perception is active, not passive.
To better understand the transition from perceptual experience to thought, I researched further into James Gibson’s ecological psychology and that of his wife, Eleanor Gibson, on perceptual learning. James Gibson agreed with Merleau-Ponty’s account of active perception, but he and his wife added a propaedeutic aspect: how perception grounds our understanding of things. Building on the notion of inattentional blindness, a case can be made for the claim that learning to attend to objects, or to attend to particular aspects of objects depending on a desired goal, is foundational for all types of learning or understanding. Just as we learn what kinds of flooring are slippery and how to walk on them, we also learn how to work with words and numbers, what kinds of actions are allowed with them, etc. All these are ways of seeing things and are constitutive for the discipline in which they are enacted. Thus, attention modifies our perception of objects, not merely what objects come into view.
As a final move from concrete experience to abstractions, I discovered work on concept formation and metaphor. Classically, metaphor has been seen as a literary device, quite divorced from the more ‘theoretical’ disciplines. Within the last 30 years that perspective has shifted to view metaphor as a central aspect of all understanding and language. Abstractions, then, develop through a process of metaphor that depends on our embodied interaction with things. Here I found Martin Heidegger’s argument for the “as-structure” of understanding and the excess of uses found in things to be incredibly relevant—we understand an object as this-or-that and our understanding does not exhaust what we can see it as. This is one area that will require further research and thought.
The publication that I proposed progresses slowly as I continue to learn. Other research projects, also, have greatly benefited from this grant, such as my review of J.P. Moreland’s critique of Mormon materialism, currently submitted to the Society of Mormon Philosophy and Theology. My writing sample for graduate school, concerning the nature of possibility, and another work concerning postmodern conceptions of truth also benefited from this grant; I hope to eventually publish them both. The research performed because of the research grant has increased my understanding of those issues that I will study in graduate school and, I believe, has made me a more viable prospect for acceptance. It has gotten me significantly closer to fulfilling the wider project that birthed my proposal, also.