When Harry met Sally, two fictional characters became obsessed by a factual conundrum: Can a man and a woman be friends, without sex getting in the way?
This is the sort of question that philosophers love, because its answer depends on our first unpicking the meaning of the words used to express it. (Unpicking linguistic threads is one of the first skills that apprentice philosophers learn -- sometimes at the expense of our skills for knitting the linguistic threads that maintain normal social bonds.)
There are several ways of interpreting the question:
1. Is it true that if two people have sex then their friendship will be ruined?
Many a happily married couple would regard this statement as absurd. So perhaps the question means:
2. Is it true that if sex is a possibility between two people then friendship is not?
But why would friendship not be a possibility in these circumstances?
3. Because the question really means: Is it true that if sex is a possibility between two people then inevitably they will have sex?
This is clearly absurd: sex is a possibility but not an inevitability between the vast majority of pairs of people in the world. So perhaps the question means:
4. Is it true that if sex is a possibility between two people then inevitably at least one of them will want to have sex with the other?
At one level, the answer to this is obviously "no" (could it really be true that at least one person in every pair on the planet is attracted to the other?). At another level, however, we'd need to unpick the meaning of the phrase "sex is a possibility" before we could provide a satisfactory answer.
I'll stop there. You see how this way of thinking can get in the way normal social interactions. One minute you're having a light-hearted discussion about sex and friendship; the next minute your train of thought has rattled off the tracks and split into multiple carriages. It doesn't make for great small talk at dinner parties.
If we strip away the linguistic analysis, however, what's left is a puzzle that arises from the human capacity to maintain more than one type of relationship with the same person. Problems arise when we don't recognise the type of relationship in which we're currently operating -- or when each of us interprets it differently.
Humans are an innately cooperative species. Mindful of our history of war and conflict, many of us would disagree with this statement -- but "cooperative" is a term that accurately describes human behaviour relative to the behaviour of other species, even if it doesn't always accurately describe human behaviour relative to the normative standards that we often wish to apply in a social context. Think of two tennis players, who are competing with each other to win the game, but cooperating in the sense that they have both agreed to abide by the rules of the game (Hurford 2007:270). Humans are uniquely good at cooperating, in this sense of working together under a mutually agreed set of rules.
We form different sorts of relationships on the basis of different sets of rules. Natural (spoken/sign) language is one of the most significant cooperative games that humans play. Its socially determined rules are learned during a biologically critical period, and non-players are denied access to the folk psychology, cultural norms and local identity badge that they need for biological success. The local language forges and strengthens social ties between members of a community, increasing their ability to find mates, to establish a place in the social pecking order, to co-operate and agree upon shared systems of values and mores.
But there is also value in people being able to work together, even when they do not have any social links with each other. This can be particularly useful when their task is complex or labour-intensive. An artefactual (written/notational) language, in these cases, can form a bridge between people who do not share any other connections, because it provides a means of exchanging information about the task, even in the absence of any means of communication about anything else.
If you cannot speak my language then we might not be able to communicate very well, but so long as you understand the conventions of my engineering drawings then you can build the road that I have designed, and if you are able to use the same currency as me then we can trade with each other. Artefactual languages thus provide functional links between people who are otherwise unrelated, enabling them to get things done together even when they are members of different social groups.
The distinction between social and functional relationships can help us to understand all kinds of puzzling encounters with other people. Can it also settle the argument between Harry and Sally? I'm not yet sure. My next post will explore some of the ways in which the social-functional distinction can act as a handy conceptual tool, and put it to the test on the question of men, women, friendship and sex.
Perhaps, after all, there's something to be said for having a philosopher as a friend: while other people's friendships are being ruined by one party's unfortunate habit of mentally undressing the other, we're more interested in mentally unwrapping the exciting new conceptual tool that we've just been given.
