Identification versus Interpretation

In Objectivism: The Philosophy of Ayn Rand, Leonard Peikoff explicates the four actual stages of human behavior that behaviorists try to condense to mere "stimulus and response" as:

1. Perception (or imagination)
2. Identification
3. Evaluation
4. Response

In other words, the internal processes that behaviorists deny involve identifying and evaluating what the person experiences before responding.

I wrote an article for this site back in 2004 about the Great Books Shared Inquiry method. That method uses interpretive questions and evaluative questions to examine a text for understanding both content and application. In that sense, interpretation does not mean arbitrary or subjective understanding, but a striving to understand fully what the author means objectively.

For my book The Vision-Driven Life, I make constant reference to this process of interpreting and evaluating selected writings of Ayn Rand while crediting the Great Books program for the process. In the interest of keeping the language consistent with Objectivism, I might want to change interpret to identify. One reader of my discussion list noted that an animal could arguably "interpret" an experience. By contrast, a human, through reason, can "identify" an experience such as a text reading by the method of logic.

I would like to read some comments about this distinction between interpreting and identifying.

Post 1

Friday, September 8, 2006 - 8:07am

I regard "identify" and "interpret" as synonymous but not identical. "Identify" seems more fitting when there is more, and/or less ambiguous, information; "interpret" more fitting when there is less, and/or more ambiguous, information. "Interpret" also seems to allow for situations where there are more alternatives, given the ambiguities, as a conclusion.

Consider the duck who is fooled by the decoy from afar. It is fooled by a paucity of sensory information about the entity (compared to being much closer). When the duck gets much closer, it has more sensory information on which to base its identification or interpretation. Of course, I haven't a clue as to what the duck takes the range of possibilites to be.

Where more exactly in OPAR did you find Peikoff's stages? I did not find the index helpful.

Post 2

Friday, September 8, 2006 - 8:40am

I found it in OPAR Chapter Five, "Reason," under the heading "Emotions as a Product of Ideas." Per my summary review at

http://rebirthofreason.com/Spirit/Books/132.shtml

Emotions as a Product of Ideas

An emotion is a response to an object one perceives (or imagines), such as a man, an animal, an event. The object by itself, however, has no power to invoke a feeling in the observer. It can do so only if the observer supplies two intellectual elements, which are necessary conditions of any emotions: identification and evaluation. Emotions are states of consciousness with bodily accompaniments and with intellectual causes. The four steps in the generation of an emotion are perception (or imagination), identification, evaluation, and response. Because human minds learn to automatize their evaluations over time, people frequently lack explicit awareness of the intermediate steps of identification and evaluation.

Post 3

Friday, September 8, 2006 - 9:37am

My overly simplistic response:

I can identify the French language when I hear it spoken or see it written, but I can not interpret it at all. It's the difference between knowing what something is and knowing what it means. To me, that's a huge difference.

Post 4

Friday, September 8, 2006 - 9:45am

Intriguing answer, Deanna. Succinct, yet profound.

Ed

Post 5

Friday, September 8, 2006 - 11:06am

What Deanna said.

- Bill

Post 6

Friday, September 8, 2006 - 11:43am

Could I justifiably claim that interpretation falls between identification and evaluation?

In the expanded Great Books approach, the Shared Inquiry starts with factual questions before moving into interpretive questions followed by evaluative questions. All the "canned" questions I have seen in the Great Books study guides omit the factual questions, presumably because the editors assume the facts of the text as self-evident. But that sequence of factual, interpretive, evaluative would fit nicely with identification, interpretation, evaluation.

Post 7

Monday, September 11, 2006 - 8:30am