A philosophical approach to the concept of handedness: The phenomenology of lived experience in left- and right-handers

ABSTRACT

This paper provides a philosophical evaluation of the concept of handedness prevalent but largely unspoken in the scientific literature. This literature defines handedness as the preference or ability to use one hand rather than the other across a range of common activities. Using the philosophical discipline of phenomenology, I articulate and critique this conceptualization of handedness. Phenomenology shows defining a concept of handedness by focusing on hand use leads to a right hand biased concept. I argue further that a phenomenological model based in spatial orientation rather than hand use provides a more inclusive concept of handedness.

KEYWORDS:

• Handedness
• laterality
• phenomenology
• grasping
• right hand bias

Acknowledgements

Thanks for comments to audiences at the MidSouth Philosophy Conference and at the University of Florida’s Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere. Thanks to Robert D’Amico, Hajar Kadivar, Chris Lay, Jeff Ogle, and Kyle Whyte, for feedback on earlier drafts of this paper. Thanks to Chris McManus, Scott Hardie, Lynn Wright, and an anonymous referee for comments that strengthened this paper during the review process at Laterality.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹The spectrum idea needs more treatment than I can supply here, but it should be noted that models utilizing a spectrum between two opposed poles are known to encounter serious difficulties in other discussions of bodily difference. See Alcoff (2006) on the black–white binary and accompanying spectrum model of race in the US, for example. Some current research focuses on consistent and inconsistent handedness rather than left- and right-handedness, and organizes handedness in terms of degree of consistency. See Prichard et al. (2013). For this paper, it is worth noting that consistent–inconsistent is still a binary characterization of handedness, and that it tracks degrees between left–right binary poles. Also, consistent–inconsistent still makes its assessments with EHI and the like, which uses left–right binary poles. While still using left–right poles, Annett (2002) provides a more complex, and quite valuable, approach to the left–right binary. Annett strongly rejects the either/or version of the left–right binary and insists that handedness is not a “type,” but a characteristic that “varies continuously between strong left and strong right, with several varieties of mixed-handedness in between.” Annett proposes several groupings of handers based on the nexus of skill and preference (pp. 31–45).

²We can readily envision how skill and preference complement each other. One might express a preference to paint right-handed because one is more skilled at painting with that hand. More generally, if use is a matter of driving towards a goal, then using the more skilled hand would aid in that pursuit. This is not to say that skill and preference must occur together. I seek only to clarify the conceptual fit between skill and preference vis-à-vis hand use, which explains why these ideas recur in the literature.

³Computer mice are usually presented on the right side of the body. The mouse has buttons that click easier with the right hand. (It is true that some mice are designed symmetrically, and others can sometimes have their clicking functions reversed, so that clicking the left side will do what clicking the right side normally does, though the fact that terms like “right-click” mean what they mean suggests how deeply mouse use is right-handed.) Knife blades are often made for cutting with the right hand and are often presented on the right side of the body. Jars are designed to open by turning counter-clockwise, a motion performed more capably by the right hand.

⁴In folk talk about handedness, one would say I am very much left-handed, even if my behaviours do not necessarily justify this assessment. My self-reports of my experience of my left-handedness, and the fact that I must accommodate myself to a right-handed world, seem to matter more than my behaviours do in folk talk about handedness just because we all know that left-handers experience right hand bias in our environments, and therefore self-report of experience is relevant (although perhaps not definitive) to understanding the left-hander’s handedness.

⁵This is a hypothetical imperative sense of “should” and normativity, not a moral sense: “If you want to do this activity (or do it well), you should do it with the right hand.” It is also a kind of cultural norm: “Around here, we do this activity with the right hand.” Because right-handedness is normative across all cultures, however, the convention of right-handedness as normative is general. Moreover, because left-handedness has, throughout its history, been considered morally worse than right-handedness and even evil, there is a persistent concern about moral imperatives when considering normativity and handedness.

⁶I have already outlined a second line of response, which is that the structures I identify hold for all persons, not merely for persons like me.

⁷Worth noting: in other circumstances small populations are treated as relevant in concept formation. About 0.3% of adults in the US are transgender, and 3.5% identify as lesbian, gay, or bisexual, but we would not find acceptable a definition of sexuality that only applied for cisgender or heterosexual persons (Gates, 2011).

⁸Moreover, the objection runs counterintuitively to the normal way we talk about handedness, which makes great use of the feeling of being handed and what that experience is like, and especially regarding left-handers we tend to think that dexterocentric feedback should not be taken as accurate.

⁹A question like “Are you right or left-handed?” is deeply ambiguous, which I take it is the point of this observation, not that persons are unreliable in reporting how they experience their handedness.

¹⁰“Taken together, these results support the postulation that left-handed individuals are not always mirror images of right-handers, nor are they always identical to right-handers in terms of kinematic behaviour; rather, they represent a heterogeneous population in terms of degree and direction of functional lateralization.” (Flindall et al., 2015, p. 298)

¹¹I refer here specifically to epee fencing where striking any body part counts for a point. My findings on the fencing talents on left-handers result from informal conversations with members of my university’s fencing team and are different from, although do not necessarily conflict with, speculations on this topic in Harris (2010), which tentatively align the advantage with brain function.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Center for the Humanities in the Public Sphere at the University of Florida under the Rothman Summer Fellowship.