have muddled the emotional and judgmental meanings equally well and often. For example, when a person says, ‘All in all, I’m happy about the way my life has gone’, psychologists are generally willing to grant that the person is happy. The problem is that people sometimes use the word happy to express their beliefs about the merits of things, such as when they say, ‘I’m happy they caught the little bastard who broke my windshield’, and they say things like this even when they are not feeling anything vaguely resembling pleasure. How do we know when a person is expressing a point of view rather than making a claim about her subjective experience? When the word happy is followed by the words that or about, speakers are usually trying to tell us that we ought to take the word happy as an indication not of their feelings but rather of their stances. For instance, when our spouse excitedly reveals that she has just been asked to spend six months at the company’s new branch in Tahiti while we stay home and mind the kids, we may say, ‘I’m not happy, of course, but I’m happy that you’re happy.’ Sentences such as these make high school English teachers apoplectic, but they are actually quite sensible if we can just resist the temptation to take every instance of the word happy as an instance of emotional happiness. Indeed, the first time we utter the word, we are letting our spouse know that we are most certainly not having the you-know-what-I-mean feeling (emotional happiness), and the second time we utter the word we are indicating that we approve of the fact that our spouse is (judgmental happiness). When we say we are happy about or happy that, we are merely noting that something is a potential source of pleasurable feeling, or a past source of pleasurable feeling, or that we realize it ought to be a source of pleasurable feeling but that it sure doesn’t feel that way at the moment. We are not actually claiming to be experiencing the feeling or anything like it. It would be more appropriate for us to tell our spouse, ‘I am not happy, but I understand you are, and I can even imagine that were I going to Tahiti and were you remaining home with these juvenile delinquents, I’d be experiencing happiness rather than admiring yours.’ Of course, speaking like this requires that we forsake all possibility of human companionship, so we opt for the common shorthand and say we are happy about things even when we are feeling thoroughly distraught. That’s fine, just as long as we keep in mind that we don’t always mean what we say.
New Yeller
If we were to agree to reserve the word happiness to refer to that class of subjective emotional experiences that are vaguely described as enjoyable or pleasurable, and if we were to promise not to use that same word to indicate the morality of the actions one might take to induce those experiences or to indicate our judgments about the merits of those experiences, we might still wonder whether the happiness one gets from helping a little old lady across the street constitutes a different kind of emotional experience–bigger, better, deeper–than the happiness one gets from eating a slice of banana-cream pie. Perhaps the happiness one experiences as a result of good deeds feels different from that other sort. In fact, while we’re at it, we might as well wonder whether the happiness one gets from eating banana-cream pie feels different from the happiness one gets from eating coconut-cream pie. Or from eating a slice of this banana-cream pie rather than a slice of that one. How can we tell whether subjective emotional experiences are different or the same?
The truth is that we can’t–no more than we can tell whether the yellow experience we have when we look at a mustard jar is the same yellow experience that others have when they look at the same mustard jar. Philosophers have flung themselves headlong at this problem for quite some time with little more than bruises to show for it,20 because when all is said and done, the only way to measure precisely the similarity of two things is for the person who is doing the measuring to compare them side by side–that is, to experience them side by side. And outside of science fiction, no one can actually have another person’s experience. When we were children, our mothers taught us to call that looking-at-the-mustard-jar experience yellow, and being compliant little learners, we did as we were told. We were pleased when it later turned out that everyone else in the kindergarten claimed to experience yellow when they looked at a mustard jar too. But these shared labels may mask the fact that our actual experiences of yellow are quite different, which is why many people do not discover that they are colour-blind until late in life when an ophthalmologist notices that they do not make the distinctions that others seem to make. So while it seems rather unlikely that human beings have radically different experiences when they look at a mustard jar, when they hear a baby cry, or when they smell a former skunk, it is possible, and if you want to believe it, then you have every right and no one who values her time should try to reason with you.
Remembering Differences
I hope you aren’t giving up that easily. Perhaps the way to determine whether a pair of happinesses actually feel different is to forget about comparing the experiences of different minds and just ask someone who has experienced them both. I may never know if my experience of yellow is different from your experience of yellow, but surely I can tell that my experience of yellow is different from my experience of blue when I mentally compare the two. Right? Unfortunately, this strategy is more complicated than it looks. The nub of the problem is that when we say that we are mentally comparing two of our own subjective experiences, we are not actually having the two experiences at the same time. Rather, we are at best having one of them, having already had the other, and when an interrogator asks us which experience made us happier or whether the two happinesses were the same, we are at best comparing something we are currently experiencing with our memory of something we experienced in the past. This would be unobjectionable were it not for the fact that memories–especially memories of experiences–are notoriously unreliable, a fact that has been demonstrated by both magicians and scientists. First the magic. Look at the six royal cards in figure 4, and pick your favourite. No, don’t tell me. Keep it to yourself. Just look at your card, and say the name once or twice (or write it down) so that you’ll remember it for a few pages.
Fig. 4.
Good. Now consider how scientists have approached the problem of remembered experience. In one study, researchers showed volunteers a colour swatch of the sort one might pick up in the paint aisle of the local hardware store and allowed them to study it for five seconds.21 Some volunteers then spent thirty seconds describing the colour (describers), while other volunteers did not describe it (non-describers). All volunteers were then shown a lineup of six colour swatches, one of which was the colour they had seen thirty seconds earlier, and were asked to pick out the original swatch. The first interesting finding was that only 73 per cent of the non-describers were able to identify it accurately. In other words, fewer than three quarters of these people could tell if this experience of yellow was the same as the experience of yellow they had just a half-minute before. The second interesting finding was that describing the colour impaired rather than improved performance on the identification task. Only 33 per cent of the describers were able accurately to identify the original colour. Apparently, the describers’ verbal descriptions of their experiences ‘overwrote’ their memories of the experiences themselves, and they ended up remembering not what they had experienced but what they had said about what they experienced. And what they had said was not clear and precise enough to help them recognize it when they saw it again thirty seconds later.
Most of us have been in this position. We tell a friend that we were disappointed with the house chardonnay at that trendy downtown bistro, or with the way the string quartet handled our beloved Bartok’s Fourth, but the fact is that we are unlikely to be recalling how the wine actually tasted or how the quartet actually sounded when we make this pronouncement. Rather, we are likely to be recalling that as we left the
