There have been a number of discussions here at Newapps on various things that philosophical writing can legitimately aim for other than simply tell some truth or other. Here, I want to reflect on a distinction between telling and showing. In the simplest case, this distinction arises when we contrast being told some fact and seeing something for ourselves. So I can tell you about an apple, or show you one. I can tell you how to properly pull a sweep oar or show you. And there are clearly important differences here. For one, showing is "higher bandwidth". That is, the amount of information transfered in a typical observation or physical engagement with an object is orders of magnitude more than the information stated in a claim - even a very complex, say book-length one. And there may well be other important differences. One can talk about those in different ways - concrete embodiment in environmental-social context, phenomenal access, etc. I'm making no claims about what the difference is, merely pointing to the - I hope - uncontroversial claim that there is an important difference. And I claim that this is a difference that makes an epistemological difference. We can know more, know different things, have a different sort of understanding when something is shown to us than when we merely learn various facts about it.
My thought that something very like the showing/telling distinction can arise in language; that is, we can make use of language to show things to one another in ways that carry with them the positive features of material showing. That's to say that there are non-fact-stating features of speech acts that have the upshot of something very like showing.
This is familiar in artistic contexts. Aristotle, among lots of others, talks about how the portrayal of a specific situation, in the right way, can generate an emotional reaction in the audience that constitutes an understanding of something much more general than what is specifically portrayed in the performance - that is that goes well beyond the specific descriptive content that could be reported in a summary of the plot. Art that is, can show us what something is like. Here are two examples. The first is a song by Dar Williams that is a beautiful evocation of childhood. It shows us the way that, as a child we can be emotionally connected to someone like a favorite babysitter, the hard to articulate mixture of awe, understanding, utter lack of understanding, wisdom and naivete. This is something most of us have lived through, but it is dreadfully hard to experience as an adult. We simply know too much. We understand the hostile undertones of the boyfriend's interaction with the babysitter. We know that the first person focus of the song is missing so much and in the normal case, this greater context and knowledge means that we cannot experience the world as a child does. But somehow this song pulls you back. Despite your external context as observer of the interaction, you are also somehow drawn into it as a child. So much goes into making this work - the words, of course, the simple melody and accompaniment, the tone of her voice - "Can't wait to give her the card!!!"
Or consider this brilliant song by James McMurtry that shows us a life that fails, not through a grand climactic failure, but through the slow buildup of tiny failures. Again, though every line in the song has a descriptive function - telling us a concrete and specific story - the whole does much more. I want to say that it shows us a way it can go. And a horrifying possibility it is. Think of what is shown in the line: "And the storm door didn't catch; it blew back hard as she struck a match; but she cupped it just in time; and sent the ashtray flyin."
In literature, this showing function is common. One of my personal favorite examples is the collection of essays by Tim Obrien in The Things They Carried. What is special about this book is that it alternates between war stories - all of which have a primary showing function - and essays about this form of writing. But the essays themselves interweave the very function they are describing: showing by telling us about showing. If you haven't read it, at least have a look at "How To Tell A True War Story". Here's an excerpt:
"You can tell a true war story by the questions you ask. Somebody tells a story, let’s say, and afterward you ask, “Is it true?” and if the answer matters, you’ve got your answer.
For example, we’ve all heard this one. Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out.
One guy jumps on it and takes the blast and saves his three buddies.
Is it true?
The answer matters.
You’d feel cheated if it never happened. Without the grounding reality, it’s just a trite bit
of puffery, pure Hollywood, untrue in the way all such stories are untrue. Yet even if it did
happen—and maybe it did, anything’s possible—even then you know it can’t be true, because a
true war story does not depend upon that kind of truth. Happeningness is irrelevant. A thing may
happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth. For example:
Four guys go down a trail. A grenade sails out. One guy jumps on it and takes the blast, but it’s a
killer grenade and everybody dies anyway. Before they die, though, one of the dead guys says,
“The fuck you do that for?” and the jumper says, “Story of my life, man,” and the other guy starts
to smile but he’s dead.
That’s a true story that never happened."
It's not that this is right in the sense of expressing a truth about how to express truths.It is, I think. But more than that it is showing us something. And in the context of the essay it shows us much more.
So here's the question for newapps readers: can philosophy do this? And if so, when and how should it? How does showing us things relate to the other sorts of things we do? What are some examples of it done well. (I particularly like Jonathan Bennett's "The Conscience of Huckleberry Finn" which seems to me to show us - of course having Twain's wonderful prose to work with helps her - what moral affect is like in the midst of saying philosophical things about it. I once had the near impossible task of giving the summary remarks at a memoril conference for a beloved professor who died too young, under the conditions that she had forbidden us to talk about her life or to memorialize her. So I sought to show what she was like by talking about the three papers we had just heard. These things are hard, but I think they are important.
Examples?
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