Home Argument RepRev  PhotoGallery

References

Taken-for-Grantedness

Most obviously the notion of invisibility operates in relation to the perceptual range of human beings.   I one sense things are invisible because they exist beyond people's established perceptual range.  So, for instance, micro-organisms were invisible to the human eye before the invention of the microscope.  Of the discovery of bacteria, for example, Julian Huxley observed that:

'We have learnt the tremendous importance of this invisible life to our national health, to our food, to agriculture: we recognise some bacteria as friends, some as enemies.'

[Huxley, 1934, p. 10.]

     Whereas, in contrast, things are also invisible because their existence is taken for granted. In which regard it is far more socially acceptable to extend people's perceptual range than it is to open up the domain of the taken-for-granted.  That, in other words, the working of any human collective at any particular time is based upon an established balance between the personally taken-for-granted and the publicly granted.  It is, therefore, to the notion of taken-for-grantedness that I briefly turn.

    The notion of 'taken-for-grantedness' is most readily instanced by many of the plays by Alan Ayckbourn[i] wherein characters are left visibly on stage but whose presence the audience is, from time to time, expected to ignore and thus to take-for-granted within the Ayckbournian dramatic convention.  A sense which is also explored within literature by, for instance, Ralph Ellison[ii] in his 'much acclaimed novel' of 1952 - the Invisible Man:

'I am an invisible man.  No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasm.  I am a man of substance, of flesh and bones, fibre and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind.  I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.  Like the 'bodiless' head you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surround by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.  When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination- indeed anything except me.'

[Ellison, 1965, p. 7.][iii]

    The influence upon behaviour by what is taken-for-granted is further illustrated by the investigations of problem solving carried out in the thirties by psychologists such as N R F Maier and Karl Duncker.[iv]  Their investigations serve to illustrate that problem solving necessarily starts from within the granted but, in some cases, to be effective must be moved into the domain of the taken-for-granted.  A move that, unless it is made, renders some problem solving abortive.  [Maier, 1930, pp. 115-144.] [Maier, 1933, pp. 144-155.][v]

    Maier's experiments were concerned with material within the taken-for-granted of a trivial kind.  But that is not always so.  In this web site my particular concern is the way in which people typically taken-for-granted the causal significance of representational goings-on in general.  From which I conclude that people generally are sometimes puzzled and perplexed by a whole array of seemingly intractable problems simply because they take-for-granted the key for their solution, namely: representational goings-on. 

    Thus, crucial to my argument overall is the notion of representational things.  That being so it is necessary to stress that I start from the use of the term 'representation'  in a wholly non-technical sense - that is simply as the identifier for an overarching category that embraces a trio of sub-categories, namely: practices such as speaking, writing, painting, filming, acting, mapping, and so on; products such as words, numbers, pictures, statues, photographs, puppets, and so on; practitioners such as: scientists, artists, priests, politicians, teachers and doctors - all of whom are vocationally engaged, wholly or partially, in some form of representational practice. To the above trio of practices, products and practitioners can be added other associated practitioners such as: patrons, purchasers, purveyors, and the like. That vocational concern with the representational also requires setting within the wider non-vocational involvements and competences of people in general. 

    Moreover, central to the domain of the representational is the practice of making, using, storing and handing-on language.  Yet that centrality is, I suggest, commonly taken-for-granted.  So, for instance, Gordon Allport[vi] could state in the 1950s that:

'Nothing could be of more pervasive influence in our lives than the store of concepts available to us in our ancestral tongue and the frames of discourse under which our social contacts proceed.  And yet the use of English is ordinary felt to be quite peripheral to the core of our existence.

[Allport, 1955, p. 40.]

    Maters are somewhat different these days with the representational made more explicit with the growth of women's studies, media studies, and cognitive psychology.  Nevertheless the causal significance of the representational has yet top be fully brought within the domain of the publicly granted.  So much so that there continues to linger the assumption that communication is possible without recourse to language - as exemplified by the psychical researcher Sir William Barrett expectation that language, as an instrument of thought, could be expected:

'to disappear under the action of evolutionary forces.  For how much more perfectly should we be able to transmit complex ideas and subtle emotions by the naked intercourse of minds than by the mechanism of speech.'

[Barrett, 1918, p. 293.]

Although what one is to make, in any instrumental sense, of 'the naked intercourse of minds' I do not know. 

The domain for invisible goings-on is not exhausted, however, by the above perceptual and conceptual dichotomy.

The domain for invisible goings-on is not exhausted, however, by the above perceptual and conceptual dichotomy.  In addition there is a further distinction to be drawn based upon the notion of 'taken-for-grantedness'.  That further notion I use to embrace goings-on which have an obvious material existence, within the perceptual range of the present day, but which are, nevertheless, mentally ignored.  That sense is readily instanced by many of the plays by Alan Ayckbourn[i] wherein characters are left visibly on stage but whose presence the audience is, from time to time, expected to ignore and thus to take-for-granted within the Ayckbournian dramatic convention.  A sense which is also explored within literature by, for instance, Ralph Ellison[ii] in his 'much acclaimed novel' of 1952 - the Invisible Man[iii]:

'I am an invisible man.  No, I am not a spook like those who haunted Edgar Allan Poe; nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasm.  I am a man of substance, of flesh and bones, fibre and liquids - and I might even be said to possess a mind.  I am invisible, understand, simply because people refuse to see me.  Like the 'bodiless' head you see sometimes in circus sideshows, it is as though I have been surround by mirrors of hard, distorting glass.  When they approach me they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination- indeed anything except me.'

[Ellison, 1965, p. 7.][iv]

The influence upon behaviour by what is taken-for-granted is further illustrated by the investigations of problem solving carried out in the thirties by psychologists such as N R F Maier and Karl Duncker.[v]  Their investigations serve to illustrate that problem solving necessarily starts from within the granted but which, in some cases, to be effective must move into the domain of the taken-for-granted.  A move which, unless it is made, renders some problem solving abortive.  [Maier, 1930, pp. 115-144.] [Maier, 1933, pp. 144-155.][vi]

Maier's experiments were concerned with material within the taken-for-granted of a trivial kind.  But that is not always so.  Indeed, it is within the domain of the taken-for-granted that an understanding of representational goings-on in general is typically located by people as a whole.  From which I conclude that people generally are puzzled and perplexed by a whole array of seemingly intractable problems simply because they take-for-granted the key for their solution, namely: representational goings-on.  Central to that taken-for-grantedness is, for instance, the practice of making and using language.  So, for instance, Gordon Allport[vii] states that:

'Nothing could be of more pervasive influence in our lives than the store of concepts available to us in our ancestral tongue and the frames of discourse under which our social contacts proceed.  And yet the use of English is ordinary felt to be quite peripheral to the core of our existence.

[Allport, 1955, p. 40.]

It is, moreover, that taken-for-grantedness which enables others to write as if language's instrumental[viii] importance can be rejected altogether.  So, for instance, the psychical researcher Sir William Barrett asserted that language, as an instrument of thought, could be expected:

'to disappear under the action of evolutionary forces.  For how much more perfectly should we be able to transmit complex ideas and subtle emotions by the naked intercourse of minds than by the mechanism of speech.'

[Barrett, 1918, p. 293.]

Although what one is to make, in any instrumental sense, of 'the naked intercourse of minds' I do not know.  Indeed, it is a conclusion which only makes even superficial sense based on the kind of mysterious view of mind which psychical researchers have sought to validate over the last hundred years and more - albeit, as I will show, without any scientific success or justification whatsoever. 

But whilst attention to language is paid in certain places and at certain time - in, for instance, schools and colleges - nevertheless scant attention is paid to its representational character or to its place within representational goings-on in general.  Yet all human behaviour and experience is necessarily mediated by goings-on within two categorially separate dimensions - which for brevity can be identified as the physiological and the psychological.[ix]  The physiological dimension comprises how the body works; sensorially, cerebrally, neuronally, and viscerally.  In contrast, the psychological dimension comprises, I assert, how people make, use, store and hand on representations - mentally and materially.[x]  Such representational goings-on mediate, moreover, all human behaviour and experience and not just that linked to the activities of thinking, dreaming, and the like.  It is, moreover, the combination of the mental and the material which constitutes the representational; as it is the dynamic relation between the mental and the material which constitutes representational practice.  The mental without the material makes as little sense as the material without the mental.  Yet it is that seeming separation of the mental from the material which predominantly underpins the representational practice of the academically educated.  So, for instance, psychologists work as if mental goings-on form a sui generis object-matter which can be investigated in isolation from all other things.  Whereas, albeit to a lesser degree, literary critics work as if material texts can be studied in isolation from the mental goings-on of their authors.  Here, it is significant to note in passing, that when literary critics do concern themselves with mental goings on they tend do so within the framework large constructed by Sigmund Freud.  A framework which is premised upon the seemingly invisible domain of the unconscious.[xi]

I assert here a stance which, whilst advanced by others, runs counter to common sense[xii] in that I hold that it is impossible for the world 'out there' to be experienced directly and independently of human physiological processes and psychological practices.  The world as experienced is necessarily a product of the physiological and the psychological: the bodily and not simply the mental but the representational.  As a consequence the world as experienced ought not to be conceived as having an independent existence but as wholly dependent upon both bodily and representational goings-on.  Albeit a view which runs counter to the common sense assumption that the world 'out there' can be directly experienced in ways which are independent of representational if not bodily goings-on.  As a consequence such representational goings-on are commonly taken-for-granted. 

Such a state of affairs makes limited sense within a primitive community but which fails to make any sense whatsoever within societies as they become increasingly complex.  Indeed, within complex industrialised societies such taken-for-grantedness of the representational becomes increasingly dangerous as work is based more and more upon complex representational practices which require to be shared. 

I assert, therefore, that the representational cannot be taken-for-granted either socially nor scientifically - and certainly not within the emergent science of psychology in that its de facto object-matter comprises representational goings-on.

This unsatisfactory state of affairs for representational goings-on continues to exist because its clarification would threaten the established relation between the granted and the taken-for-granted.  For that relation to be supported, and to be maintained, psychologists must take-for-granted the representational goings-on which form their de facto object-matter of investigation and so ignore that such goings-on also constitute their de jure object-matter of investigation.  Hence, not surprisingly, the task of entering the domain of the taken-for-granted is one which so far has been shirked by most psychologists.  To do so would require psychologists turning their discipline up side down in that so far they have view representational things as providing the means for the investigation of other non representational goings-on - such as mind, intelligence, instinct, motivation, and so on and so forth.  Whereas, in contrast, I assert that terms such as 'mind', 'intelligence', 'instinct' and so on provide the intellectual apparatus for the investigation of representational goings-on.  It is, however, to that task which, foolhardily, I embark upon in this text.