Thinking in Pictures (review)

Hume Studies Volume XXVI, Number 1, April 2000, pp. 198-200 TEMPLE GRANDIN. Thinking in Pictures, Foreword by Oliver Sacks. New York:Vintage Books/Random House, 1996. Pp. 222. ISBN 067977289 $12.00 paper. Late British Empiricism was a research project built around a two-part psychological theory: that thoughts represent their objects by qualitatively resembling them (the "Theory of Ideas") and that thought proceeds by traversing associative links between ideas ("associationism"). The work of Hume, and then of Mill, were the project's high-water marks; twentieth-century philosophers no longer find the psychology convincing. The problem, as far as the philosophers were concerned, was not so much that the account seemed false upon introspection, nor that the discipline of psychology had itself moved on, but that the psychological theory did not make good on its explanatory obligations : most importantly, a thought's being a mental picture is not a satisfactory account of why it has the content it does. But this reason for rejecting Empiricist psychology, that it could not do its assigned philosophical job, leaves open the possibility of minds for which it is nonetheless a satisfactory description. Grandin's contribution to the emerging genre of autobiography by highfunctioning autistics will interest contemporary Humeans, because it is a window into a mind of which Hume's psychology is for the most part true. As her title suggests, Grandin's thoughts consist of images; words, she says, are like a second language to her. The segue from image to image is associative, and so the puzzles of empiricist theory—how to reconstruct this or that kind of thought, using only associations between images—are for Grandin practical problems. Recall Hume's attempt on the theoretical problem of making mental pictures of particulars do duty for abstract concepts (T 17-24); here is Grandin facing the same difficulty. I quote an example at length to give the flavor of her writing: Spatial words such as "over" and "under" had no meaning for me until I had a visual image to fix them in my memory. Even now, when I hear the word "under" by itself, I automatically picture myself getting under the cafeteria tables at school during an air-raid drill, a common occurrence on the East Coast during the early fifties. The first memory that any single word triggers is almost always a childhood memory. I can remember the teacher telling us to be quiet and walking single-file into the cafeteria, where six or eight children huddled under each table. If I continue on the same train of thought, more and more associative memories of elementary school emerge. I can remember the teacher scolding me after I hit Alfred for putting dirt on Hume Studies Book Reviews 199 my shoe. All of these memories play like videotapes in the VCR of my imagination. If I allow my mind to keep associating, it will wander a million miles away from the word "under", to submarines under the Antarctic and the Beatles song "Yellow Submarine". If I let my mind pause on the picture of the yellow submarine, I then hear the song. As I start humming the song and get to the part about people coming on board, my association switches to the gangway of a ship I saw in Australia (30). The effect of an abstract concept must be managed by surveying fully particular images, and in an associationist mind, associated but irrelevant images tend to—in Hume's phrase—"immediately crowd in upon us": thinking abstractly in this way is more difficult than Hume seems to realize. (Notice, however, the Kantian "I" in Grandin's description, apparently able to intervene to control the flow of associations. While the mind we are seeing is predominantly Humean, it may not be entirely so.) Like many persons with autism, Grandin has difficulty understanding ordinary emotional and social life, and David Owen has taken her to show "what people might be like, and what they would lack, if they were instantiations of pure Humean reason .. .'n Grandin's own account suggests that Owen is off-base here: she experiences Humean passions, and her ability empathicalIy to understand the feelings of...