Being's Poem

Two Routes to Idealism? Sellars, Inferentialism and Mathematical Ontology

2012-01-09T01:26:00.000-08:00

TWO ROUTES TO IDEALISM?

- Sellars, Inferentialism and Mathematical Ontology -

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I have been exchanging ideas for quite some time with Peter Wolfendale, on a relatively regular basis, and it has been nothing but a pleasure. I find his command of the analytic tradition, and in particular post-Quinean ‘inferentialism’ to be of inestimable worth, in particular in sight of the project of rehabilitating representation within Continental thought begun by Ray Brassier recently. Perhaps I should say that it is not so much a rehabilitation of representation which is at stake, but rather a necessary re-consideration of the problems set forth by it. At its most general, the question concerns the putative displacement of epistemology in favor of ontology that has somewhat ubiquitously dominated post-Heideggerian Continental thought. Of course, this displacement occurs in various ways, and part of Ray’s polemics with the Continental tradition examines this junction. But also with the analytic deflationary accounts inspired by behaviorism and which solidified in a formal semantics that castigated the valence of the notion of reference, flattening knowledge to semantics. From phenomenology, to vitalism, to deconstruction, to a certain pragmatism complicit with instrumentalism, to inferentialism, to mathematical ontology, Brassier’s work finds in the dissolution of representation understood as how conceptual thought relates to its non-conceptual exteriority a useful lever to motivate what is precisely the impediment for any realist or materialist philosophy in both analytic and continental circles, i.e. the elimination of epistemology inspired by the critique of metaphysics, and the elimination of ontology inspired by the post-Quinean inferentialist deflationary standards for existence, truth and reference. The former option takes representation to constitute one more iteration of the kind of ontotheological posits that require suspension (Husserl), destruktion (Heidegger), deconstruction (Derrida), destratificaiton (Deleuze), or dissolution (Lyotard). For these thinkers the result is either a post-critical restitution of the ontological problematic, or else a progressive de-legitimization of the propriety of the philosophical task tout court, which casts even ontology under questions. The critique of critique ends up in exacerbated forms targetting not just the Heideggerean ban against metaphysics of presence, but eventually all metaphysics, and with it philosophical ‘phallogocentrism’ (Derrida). For the vitalist post-Bergsonian inspired metaphysics, representation becomes the pivotal structure of thought which demands destitution, particularly in the work of Deleuze (inspired by Foucault) against the fourfold axis of conception: identity in the concept, contrariness in the predicate, resemblance in perception, and analogy in judgment. The 'return to Kant' which insists on the propriety of conceptual representation thus resists the displacement of the latter and of the primacy of conceptual knowing all being complicit in some form or other with a pre-Critical metaphysical reification, or an allegedly post-philosophical idealism or correlationism camouflaged under the banners of 'textuality', 'practice', 'thinking', or some other human-relative determinant.

On any account, the radicalization of the critique of metaphysics devolves into an ever aggravating critique of critique which restores metaphysical primacy or else tries to shut philosophy down for good. One of Brassier’s most relevant contentions is to insist, with Badiou, that even in their presumed ‘anti-philosophical’ radicality these thinkers finally display a philosophical complicity to idealism or correlationism. There where philosophy is said to stop, usually an anti-philosophy begins, which is philosophy after all. However, Brassier thinks that what is necessary is not just a ‘forgetting of the forgetting of the forgetting’ of the restoration of the question on being is favor of a subtractive ontology, like Badiou claims against Heidegger. Rather, we also need a ‘critique of the critique of critique’ against the post-Kantian idealist conflation between thought and reality, the elimination of conceptual representation as relating mind and world, as well as the correlationist-idealist dissolution of the primacy of knowing. And of course this entails that we must ask again the Kantian question about possibility of preserving a relative autonomy between mind and world, without reifying this difference into a metaphysical dualism that falls short of the critical injunction to make their congruence contingent. But he must reconcile the realist requirement of plausible separation between thought and reality, while insisting in that this can be done without invoking metaphysics surreptitiously, obviating the need to explain not just what there is, but the critical question about how we know what there is. In this regard, he resists the Badiouan Parmenidean identification of being and thought, and allots the latter to the ubiquitous disavowal of representation of post-Kantian Continental thought. Representation turns out not to have only been illegitimately obviated, but that this obviation explains the correlationist and idealist incapacity to motivate a realist ontology, at a loss for an epistemological footing. For the question about the difference between concepts and objects, thought and reality, turns out to require the preservation of the scope of rational agency which ascribes normative valence to rational subjects. In this regard, the transcendental delimitation of thought retains methodological autonomy vis a vis the ontological, without inflating thought with a metaphysical status. Having moved away from the ‘postural realism’ of Laruelle’s exacerbation of abstraction, Brassier’s current position motivates a Sellarsian revisionary naturalism. In it the necessary rationalist articulation of epistemology and metaphysics becomes necessary to dispel intuition (against all forms of self-legitimizing appeals to experience), but also to avoid the folding of being into thought in the inferentialist deflation of metaphysics, or thought into being in the ontological ‘flattening’ of ideality which devolves from the dissolution of epistemology.

There is of course substantial overlap between Peter’s Brandomian vision and Brassier’s Sellarsian position, and so the connection between a (non-metaphysical) Hegel-inspired inferentialism, and a revisionary Kantian naturalism. While Peter agrees with the inferentialist extirpation of the metaphysical core from the deontological account of thought, he aligns himself with Sellars and Brassier in rejecting the wholesale disavowal of the metaphysical task, by insisting that a naturalistic ontology is both possible and necessary. Of course, it is Sellars who has emphasized this by insisting in the relative autonomy of the ontological and the normative, metaphysics and epistemology. A non-metaphysical deontology describing the transcendental structure of thought is methodologically propadeutic to a naturalist metaphysics, set to describe the univocal structure of being, including the ontological conditioning for the instantiation of thought. This last part is precisely what strict inferentialism proscribes.

One of the interesting things is that Peter seems to accept this Sellarsian corrective to the Brandomian position, advocating a kind of Spinozist and Deleuzian-inspired metaphysics. There is much to be said about Peter’s startlingly brilliant readings of Spinoza and Deleuze, but that is best reserved for another occasion. I would just remark that although I remain skeptical about the plausibility of Deleuzian metaphysics as appropriate for naturalist metaphysics continuous with today’s science[1], I think that there is a more primary issue at stake, which follows from the methodological priority of epistemology, for both Sellars and Brandom. Before we discern between the specific differences in the metaphysical alternatives themselves, or evaluate their internal conceptual coherency, we must explain the nature of objective knowledge in relation to deontological normative strictures which define the transcendental conditions for intelligibility, or thought as such. Much of Pete’s brilliant deontological project delineates a broadly Brandomian account of the use of conceptual norms, and his Essay on Transcendental Realism goes a long way in explaining how this works.

For my part, the difficulty in coordinating the deflationary realism of strict Brandomian inferentialism with the Sellarsian alternative reveals interesting issues. To ask about whether inferentialism could support the rehabilitation of metaphysics cannot but provoke the further question about whether Sellars’ position could be described as endorsing a kind of inferentialism like Brandom thinks, and as McDowell, DeVries-Tripplet, among others, reject. Of course, one could say that inferentialism generally holds as a suitable account of thought, while insisting on the autonomy of metaphysics. And I think that this autonomy is surely of the capital features of Sellars’ philosophy. However, exactly how we should coordinate the separation between the metaphysics and the epistemology in Sellars’ case is quite controversial.

In particular, much polemic has been generated concerning the precise evaluation of the role of perception. For example, John McDowell (2005) seems to take issue with Brandom’s reading of Sellars, insisting that the deflation of experience to judgment is excessively one-sided, and eliminates a crucial empiricist component in Sellars’ naturalism. But even if we don’t agree with McDowell’s alternative reading, I think we can rescue some of his objections to Brandom’s reading of Sellars as advocating strict deflationary standards for perception. Now, I think that Pete and Ray are prepared to agree in that Sellars’ own account of perception and his account of picturing are not obviously reconcilable with the minimalist account that Brandom provides. A discussion of these two positions merits a full scoped investigation which I intend to carry out in coming work. My impression is that the restriction of perceptual experience to judgments, with no intermediary states of the sort McDowell’s polemical reading argues for to play any part, creates problems for any claims to realism. Specifically, the flattening of perceptual judgments to the general capacity to have the appropriate RDRDs deflates sensible experience in the way that vitiates the way perception serves to anchor us in a causally autonomous world. For one of Sellars’ most important insights is that while perception is conceptual, the ontological constitution of sensation, while remaining epistemically mute, permits us to rehabilitate a notion of correspondence and a theory of picturing in which concepts and so perceptual judgments are causally knit to physical objects, thus exceeding a purely semantic account of truth. I quote Brassier in this regard:

“It’s often assumed that Sellars’ critique of relational (or “matrimonial”) theories of meaning dispenses with the word/world relation altogether since conceptual role supplants reference. But this is not so: he supplements his semantic account of truth as ideal conceptual coherence with a correspondence relation between utterances as “natural linguistic objects” and physical events: one must be appropriately connected to one’s environment in order to be entitled to issue certain utterances. It gets more complicated of course, but the key is that while correspondence is never transparent—it’s too opaque to be called “reference”--- it is still there, although not as a semantic relation. This is the insight that Brandom expresses in his claim that sense dependence is not reference dependence: the conditions for the former ought not to be conflated with those for the latter. But unlike Brandom, Sellars has a positive alternative to reference as a semantic relation, which he calls “picturing”.

Now, it might seem premature to claim inferentialism conflates mind and world, but the primary issue becomes more evident upon considering some of the consequences, using Brandom’s own examples against McDowell. The one that comes to mind is the characterization of the scientist who learns to reliably report the presence and movement of ‘mu mesons’ by progressive refinement in his conceptual ability following the observation of a cloud chamber. For Brandom, the capacity to reliably report the fact that mu mesons are there, even at a loss for knowledge about what criteria one is using in the reliable use of the capacity, counts as a case of ‘seeing mu mesons’ just in case one knows that one is reliable in doing so. I quote Brandom in this regard:

“Thus a properly trained physicist, who can respond systematically differently to differently shaped tracks in a cloud chamber will, if she responds by non-inferentially reporting the presence of mu mesons, count as genuinely observing those subatomic particles. She may start out by reporting the presence of hooked vapor trails and inferring the presence of mu mesons, but if she then learns to eliminate the intermediate response and respond directly to the trails by reporting mesons, she will be observing them. “Standard conditions” for observing mu mesons will include the presence of the cloud chamber, just as standard conditions for observing the colors of things includes the presence of adequate light of the right kind. And the community for whom ‘mu meson’ is an observation predicate will be much smaller and more highly specialized than the community for whom ‘red’ is one. But these are differences of degree, rather than kind.”

I find this account largely consonant with a strict Sellarsian position in most respects, and particularly in insisting on the possibility of non-inferential knowledge which is not for this reason unmediated or unlearned, since all knowing requires participation within a complexly articulated linguistic community. But the account of observation predicates raises questions which are precisely of the kind that lead McDowell to read Sellars as one step, yet perhaps a decisive one, short of endorsing a full-blown inferentialism ala Brandom.

To see why, we must just apply the same strictures set in the example of the physicist to a different situation, of the sort proposed by McDowell: a man learns to reliably report that their neighbor is home when he sees that his car is parked in the driveway. For Brandom, assuming the man knows that he is reliable, this counts as observational knowledge and he sees that the neighbor is home. However, the difference between the direct knowledge that is involved in seeing that the neighbor is home by having the neighbor before his eyes, and the knowledge that would be obtained in seeing the same fact when seeing the car, is obscured thereby. Both instances would count as cases of direct observational knowledge, having the same underlying fact as their reported, propositional content, i.e. both report that 'the neighbor is home'. And since they are both non-inferential states, one cannot appeal to the fact that the man ‘arrives’ at such knowledge by a prior consideration of the knowledge that the car is there, since then one must explain how this latter fact motivates the former in situ, which starts sounding a whole lot like inference again. Even if both cases could be construed as examples of non-inferential knowledge, it seems as if what Brassier describes above attests to a complicity between perception and sensible experience, i.e. natural linguistic objects are connected to physical events by the externalist requirement to be properly caused in relation to environmental conditions. Picturing describes a non-semantic relation between perceptual states and the world which, while enveloped conceptually, retains autonomy. And I believe that Sellars’ more acute observation consists not just in severing experience at large, but more precisely in refusing to construe it as the gulf for unacquired knowledge; that is, as cases of independent knowledge. And although he certainly endorses the inferentialist demand for the conceptual envelopment of perceptual experience and the form of judgment, this does not entail that the experience is reducible to the conceptual judgments or to semantic relation. For this is precisely the role that sensation plays, which allows one to level the ontological priority of experience, while preserving the relative autonomy of the sapient, conceptual envelopment of knowledge. Thus while Sellars is perfectly comfortable in accepting that non-inferential knowledge is possible, he denies that independent knowledge is possible, and furthermore insists that sensibility remains crucial for metaphysical reasons, and which illuminate how we ‘picture’ the world rather than simply merely relate to it in accordance to pragmatic norms. Thus the also emphatic interest in Sellarsian naturalism, and in particular in the neurophysiological ontological account of thought advanced by Metzinger and the Churchlands, while refusing tacit pragmatism through the inflation of ‘super-empirical virtues’ that are gratuitously prescribed rather than explained. Rather, while we must deem experience as being conceptually specific in nature, this does not mean that the ontological nature of experience is conceptual nor that understanding concepts means understanding the use of words; one cannot restrict experience to simply signify the capacity to reliably report a fact without completely obviating the naturalist side of Sellarsian philosophy. This is what has made other philosophers insist in the valence of empiricism in Sellars, which one might think is ultimately difficult to reconcile with inferentialism. Thus, for instance, McDowell thinks that perceptual experiences constitute a kind of belief states that are acquired non-inferentially once the subject comes to endorse the content of a perceptual experience. Yet the content of the experience is not by itself judgment, although it has propositional content. It is solely a ‘candidate’ for endorsement. This is still not sufficient to explain how one comes to acquire such content as mere ‘candidates’, propositionally specific and yet not simple behaviorally fixed dispositions or RDRDs, anchored causally in an environing world. But this is just to say that it is highly controversial whether McDowell does any greater justice to Sellars on this particular point than Brandom does. DeVries and Tripplet seem to side against Brandom, while O’Shea reiterates that the role perception plays in Sellars must be closely understood in relation to his naturalism. I reserve judgment in these matters.

The discussion around perception becomes a useful key to understanding how conceptual structures that fix our knowing of being are objective with regards to a world, while subject to rational norms for revision. The non-reviseable logic of rational obligation articulates the necessary rationalist rejoinder to all instrumentalist prescriptions of scientism, as necessary to explain how we acquire knowledge, given the primitive methodological priority of the normative space of reasons. And Sellars’ supplementary account of picturing is not clearly reflected in Brandom, particularly since it is not clear that he would allow for the ontological role sensation plays within our understanding of perception. And it is certainly not clear to me that McDowell’s own alternative fares any better. For even if McDowell is right in that reducing perception to judgment to deflate experience into a semantic relation once again conflates empirical content with conceptual form, one might insist that to introduce intermediary states between judgments and candidates for endorsement falls to the trap of thinking that what occasions judgment is a ‘act of will’ which supplements categorical synthesis. And this is precisely what Brandom finds unpersuasive about McDowell’s alleged commitment to empiricism.

My own position on this matter is that Brandom’s strict inferentialism seems to reproduce the pragmatic conflation of thinking and being which already plagued Quine, and which ends up undermining materialism, not unlike Badiou, in lacking the sufficient resources to disambiguate between form and content. Content dissolves into propositional content, and what Pete calls a ‘thick’ sense of reality falls out the window. I think with Pete that a thick notion of reality is necessary, and that such a notion needs to be advanced without reintroducing the metaphysical dualism of thought and matter. Thus the key moment for Brassier remains the Kantian juncture between the non-metaphysical normative space of reasons and the ontological-natural-causal domain of natural scientific research, while for Pete’s more Brandomian, and by extension Hegelian, position (although I agree with Zizek in that Pittsburg Hegelianism is a misreading of Hegel) the primary task is to eviscerate the myth of phenomenological content in favor of the primacy of logical relation in a deflationary account of thought.

I would suggest that inferentialism can be seen as a precedent of the problem that plagues structuralist-inspired contemporary French materialisms, like Badiou’s and Meillassoux’s, departing from Althusser and Lacan. And by this I would also mention thinkers like Gabriel Catren, or even the post-Landian neo-Deleuzians, like Reza Negarestani. While the last two have taken over the Continental liquidation of epistemological primacy and followed the formalist tendency in tethering ontology to mathematics, the inferentialist camp meanwhile insists on the autonomy of the normative while tethering the latter to logic and semantic analysis. Indeed, while the former have folded into deciding the appropriate mathematical paradigm for metaphysics and resolving the relation between the branches of mathematics (differential calculus, set theory, category theory, logic, topos theory…) as part of ontology itself, the latter have insisted on reducing representational content to propositional content, understood as the inferential structure of thought. For them this reduces semantic content to the pragmatic examination of the relations into which normatively charged propositional attitudes enter with respect to each other within a community of rational agents. It fulfills the promise of a transcendental philosophy that describes the structure of thought without relapsing into the metaphysical dualism of mind and world.

What I find most striking is that both extreme poles, mathematical ontology and inferentialist epistemology, render their respective counterparts impossible, vitiating the possibility of distinguishing mind and world that realism requires, and that Sellars pursues. For Badiou, it becomes impossible to distinguish ontological from non-ontological situations without the surreptitious mediation of philosophical discourse, while for strict inferentialism of the Brandomian type, metaphysics falls out the window completely. The latter option basically eviscerates the metaphysical core of Hegelianism, while the former similarly extirpates the epistemological core of rational agency which annuls the possibility of thinking of a non-immediate congruence between thought and reality, having no choice but to endorse the Parmenidean identification of thinking and being. In both cases we get something like a cunning of reason against realism-materialism: the epistemological confine to the rational community which instrumentalizes the natural (like Habermas, but also possibly Brandom) into the social space of a rationalist pragmatics (which I take Badiou has sufficiently shown to be in complicit with a kind of idealism), and the ontological confine to a formal ideography with no account of the relation it holds to its denied exteriority. The critique of intuitional or experiential givenness is exacerbated to a deflation of all non semantic, empiricist notion of ‘content’ or reference, which has no option but to conflate being and thought. In this regard, the violent anti-phenomenological vocation that drives both mathematical ontology and inferentialism, in annulling experience, end up preemptively throwing the metaphysical baby with the epistemological bathwater (inferentialist dismissal of the necessity of metaphysics), or else throwing the epistemological baby with the metaphysical bathwater (post-Heideggerean strawmans against epistemology).

What is also intriguing is that both alternatives remain surprisingly cogent with each other in that their respective formalisms entail a noocentric enclosure, which keeps philosophy from taking the empirical sciences sufficiently seriously, despite their protestations to the contrary. Thus neither Brandom nor Badiou seem to have much to say about what those sciences which describe human-independent phenomena are doing; where does physics fall for Badiou? Is it regional ontology, like Catren seems to be implying in his (brilliant) topology of the tasks for thought, the great ‘Outland Empire’? Perhaps it is no surprise that people like Rorty can simultaneously find appealing both anti-metaphysical inferentialism, and anti-epistemological ontology. To sum up, we can say that the strong anti-empiricism of rationalist ontology of the mathematical ends up resembling inferentialism in their mutual Hegelian trivialization of experiential content, which becomes ultimately complicit with the idealist indistinction of thought and being.

Badiou in fact motivates this conflation from the start in castigating the unquestioned ‘third dogma’ of empiricism, in the dualism between empirical content and form, which has motivated the idea that formal axiomatic systems model reality. The restriction of ontological discursivity to the dialectics between mathematical forms and for which domains of interpretation model axiomatic systems, however, is given a crude quasi-Althusserian analysis of the intrication of philosophy, science and ideology, in the tripartite negotiation of concepts, functions, and notions. And the meta-ontological gloss of the later Badiou cannot but appear as yet another surreptitious normative injunction in favor of a subtractive ontology of the multiple, ultimately motivated by the need to introduce subjectivity in a gratuitous supplementation of the ontological by the evental, of the objective by the subjective, of the stasis of knowledge by truth, etc. But if this is not, like Zizek claims apropos the Pittsburg Hegelians, an ideological validation of liberalist capitalism, it is certainly an equally ideological political suture by Badiou’s own standards, assigning the subject the peculiar role to be the agent of all structural dynamism, of all change and for all truths. This is idealism with a vengeance, hybridizing the decisionistic fetishism of subjective freedom, while dislodging the requirement to argue for the distinction between ontology and non-ontology, the discursive intelligibility of being and the world, through the philosophical umbrella of ‘presentation’ mediating between the two. The emphasis on subjective creation, and of truth as production, also makes the dimension of discovery proper to science in particular difficult to understand. Other options, like Catren and Negarestani, seem to run into similar problems to Nick Land. Having destratified the empirical transcendental-distinction, and having underdetermined representation by the unconscious thanatropism of intensive matter, it is not clear that anything like a subject remains. So it is not clear that a plausible account can be given to discern how conceptual structure relates to this primary material process. This seems to fold once again on a surreptitious prescription for a given metaphysics, which is itself strictly incompatible with the strictures under which subjective agency, decision, or ‘theorization’ could take place. It’s not clear one could even ‘accelerate’ under this scheme, since in refusing to re-anthropomorphize philosophy with a supplementary ethics of ‘subjective intervention’ along the immanent ubiquity of ontologically primary matter, post-Landians cannot discern between the world and discourse about the world, i.e. they cannot distinguish concepts and objects in their metaphysics as such. Calling it non-metaphysical practicism is simply to obviate the issue that now is resolutely another version of the idealist serpent of absolute knowledge, swallowing itself; only this time cashed out in terms of primary production and a logic of ‘expression’. Shorn of its vitalist residue, this materialism ends up making it extremely difficult to understand the peculiar ‘stratification’ that is theory in relation to the primary process it allegedly it has ceased to described, since no longer experience mediates in it.

The inferentialist option on its part seems to reproduce the instrumentalization which follows from the extirpation of reference from verificationist standards. Here either metaphysics is in principle proscribed, or else ontology becomes a quite foreign matter, subjected to ideological prescriptions and legitimated extraneously through ad hoc appeals to super-empirical virtues of varied assortments. These finally end up, like Ladyman and Ross, but also Quine, being incapable of reconciling the deflation of reality to existential quantification with a robust realism or physicalism. And here the Sellarsian option stands as a necessary interruption, I think, of this line, through a more intricate idea of how perception mediates the knowing of the real. It insists on the importance of perceptual judgment in epistemology and of giving an account of sensibility within ontology, insofar as we must understand the composite intrication of the conceptual and the objectual. And I agree with Brassier in that ultimately the moniker realism becomes suspect at this stage, since at no point concepts ‘reach out’ onto things. But their difference and relation must be one that is possibly clarified without being metaphysically reified, and this is what I am not convinced strict inferentialism is prepared to accomplish. I think Pete would probably agree at bottom, and thus accept that a necessary corrective to Brandom would require recuperating a thick notion of reality, albeit I don’t think that this has been satisfactorily reconciled with a preservation of inferentialism which deflates perception.

Here recent questions about aesthetics raised by Peter and Brassier become peculiarly interesting, since I think they can allow us to see how perception continues to play a role in the story in a way that illuminates the peculiarity of Sellars’ position. As I take it, Brassier endorses the modern severance of the beautiful from the sensible, thereby advocating the former’s allotment to the conceptual. Here I agree with Pete in that the intrication between the Beautiful, the Good, and Value brings Plato to the context of a rationalist epistemology with an inferentialist bent. The basic idea is that we can distinguish Beauty as a species of Value, with varying scales of Universality. Thus Pete distinguishes a broad sense of Beauty akin to that of Value-in-itself, or its pure form, which is independent of all rational interests, and a narrower sense in which different aesthetic values are pitted against each other within the conceptual norms of the sensus communis and which make possible the negotiation of aesthetic judgments.

Here the account of artistic beauty in particular becomes interesting, insofar as it is related to production and intentionality. The idea is that in art, as opposed to nature, we seek to produce affect, and while presupposing communication, art must also resist being communicable, lacking determinate semantic content. This is relevant because this lack of semantic determinacy is meant to capture the Sellarsian rejection of the epistemic valence of sensible transparency as a variant of the Myth of the Given, but can also become a way to address the kernel of truth in the abused cliché about how art is in a way not about ‘mere communication or reproduction’, but about disruption and creation. The point is how to account for this experimental and creative dimension in art without falling into a mindless celebration of the affirmative will, which Brandom castigates rightfully, or a reification of sublimity by interrupting the rational order of causes through a pure experience, or some ‘aura’ which ordains aesthetics to the mystical quality in the work (from Benjamin to Heidegger, to Laruelle perhaps). Here the absorption of the beautiful to the conceptual can allow us to be continuous to the ideal of non-communication in both senses, rejecting givenness while accepting art’s disruptive character, thus embracing a dialectical historicity of artistic production intricate in the conceptual. And this would be the role of the ‘narrow’ sense of beauty of ‘lower order’ universality, in which the production of art would be dialectically imbued within the conceptual seal in aesthetic judgment. This unites one of Badiou’s salient virtues with a proper Sellarsian embedding of productivity within the normative: the semantic indeterminacy of art is to be understood in the sense in which artistic production makes possible new judgments and relations which are strictly irreducible to previous ones, by causing semantic interference with the state of the situation as it is.

One might think that such a ‘conceptualization’ of the aesthetic deprives it of its link to experience; but here is where I think a Sellarsian rejoinder is necessary. We can salvage the link between the conceptual and the perceptual, accepting that the latter is anchored in the sensible, while insisting that beauty concerns only the conceptual. This is a striking reversal of common sense, since now it is the natural which remains refractory from the conceptual, and which concerns the sensible proper. Ihis reversal can be done by amplifying the account of ‘looks talk’ in Sellars, in a way in which I Pete has again made some headway; although I don’t know how it would fit with Brandom. The basic idea is to disambiguate a sense of looks-talk which is not merely emphasizing the epistemic withdrawal of endorsement before a proposition about the world, i.e. in which the function of ‘x looks y to S’ is not reducible to ‘x withdraws endorsement from x is y’. This can be exemplified by using predicates such as ‘looking fuzzy’, where it is clear that the role of ‘looking’ therein is to make a report about a fact concerning the functioning of our perceptual mechanisms, and not the epistemic withdrawal of endorsement. This means that we can accept that there is a role to be played for experientially specific judgments about perception which provide the anchoring on sensibilia without rehabilitating the valence of sense datum transparency, and which would thus be continuous with the conceptual envelopment of the aesthetic. The idea would then be that the semantic indeterminacy introduced in artistic creation would be the (dialectical) interplay in the production of new perceptual judgments and relations, and which include (albeit not exclusively) statements about how things produce affect as states relative to the functioning of our sensory organs, i.e. perceiver-relative facts. These would constitute the specifiable content which relativizes aesthetic judgment to perceptual judgments, though not wholly, without losing grip on participation in the generation and negotiation of value. The trick here is to coordinate properly aesthetic judgments in art with perceptual judgments (whose content is determinate) to explain how the indeterminacy of artistic works themselves is to be understood relative to the articulation of conceptual norms within the sensus communis. The obvious question is whether this requires that we make aesthetic judgments in nature subject to the same sort of dialectics, and how the intentional stance ultimately weighs in. Again, this is a subject matter for a different occasion.

As a provisory note, I would remark that the notion that value is ‘independent’ becomes quite difficult to cash out. On the one hand, I think that the distinction between the projection of value (which is our prerogative), and its construction (which we don’t make) is opaque for the moment. It also doesn’t seem clear to me what natural value consists in, beyond the trivial assertion that nature is not made by or for us. If by projection we simply mean that we need to deploy concepts to make aesthetic judgments, then it is not clear how these judgments are proper to art because of its intentional inflection. Clearly, some sort of projection in that sense would be necessary for natural judgment. This is ultimately a tangential matter.

The main point is that the insurrectional component in art resists the fetishizing of formless sublimity, and imbues the perceptual within a dialectical understanding, in the narrow sense, wherein experience becomes configured and modified productively in relation to the subjective universality of the sensus communis. For art, there needs to be some non-reproductive element to realize the production of affect, by necessity, and it must not be in the trivial sense in which minimal difference at the level of perceptual content entails the production of wholly autonomous aesthetic value. The task lies in pinpointing the singularity of artistic works without relapsing into the theological frame of revelation still wed to givenness. It is not that the disruptive function of art is semantically indeterminate by being non-conceptual, but rather that it must be understood in relation to how it positions itself with respect to the community of rational agents. Art in this regard is what exorcises the Holy: it relativizes its local value to the rational negotiation of norms, underwritten only by the formal imperative of remaining true to value in-itself as its limit case and higher-order universality, and of rational purposefulness. Either one introduces beauty into the normative frame of reasons, or one pragmatically blocks the historical specificity and epistemic valence of art. We can't simply rejoice in claiming art is all about breaking the rules, and using the primacy of ‘pure’ intuition as the obverse of the affirmative will, against rationality. The conceptual negotiation of the manifest image in which aesthetic judgments are made exemplifies the possibility to think of a logic of change, local and structural, which can explain experimental novelty and semantic interference, without surrendering to irrationalism. The idea is how to coordinate a notion of perception as conceptual and epistemically apt, without deflating the sensible-ontological core of experience. But this is all very rudimentary, since it is not clear how to coordinate the predicates that describe the working of our sensory organs ('fuzzy') with a Sellarsian account of picturing, or something of the sort. But anyhow once perception has been understood as a mediated process the dialectics of historicity proper to it replace the quasi-mystical purchase of 'givenness' in experience championed by phenomenological and vitalist alternatives.

In any case, here we can be Badioueans without the revolutionary rhetorical excess. Although the idea that truth diagonally subtracts itself from the situation in the construction of a generic subset does well to formalize a dialectics of change, rather than making it ex nihilo, we must insist with Sellars in that this cannot work within a realist register if one annihilates the autonomy of rational agency which guarantees the normative Universality as limit of value-in-itself. If one does, one inevitably ends up tacitly overruling the neutrality of subtractive ontology by regulating it with a higher order, undeclared, ad hoc normative meta-ontological discourse to explain the articulation between being and thought as that of revolutionary disruption in the creation of truth. Of course, the latter is what Badiou really is after: to motivate the political revolutionary agenda which rejoices in the ‘great chaos under the sky’. As a result, set theoretical frameworks that operate without the axiom of foundation and admit of self-belonging are conveniently obviated rather than rationally discarded, in order to preserve the dialectics of illegality and of the event. Thus while Badiou moves a long way towards eviscerating the phenomenological myths of presencing, he grants too much to the structuralist deflation of the empirical, and the psychoanalytic allotment of the rational individual to the 'imaginary', along with its ontology fantasy. If anything, I think it is necessary to show that this patronizingly dismissed 'imaginary' is not some secondary spook neatly absorbed as a linguistifying or logicist confusion, but a fundamental condition for any rationalism of the sort Badiou or Brandom pursue.

On any account, this line of thought goes to show that, contra the predominant Continental doxa, representation need not be aligned to metaphysical skyhooks. All the variants of the critique of metaphysics in the 20^th Century simplify fatally in their dismissal of knowledge and representation, in the castigation of the understanding, and the apportioning of philosophy to ontology. Sellars’ putative force, beyond inferentialism and formalism, is to think the nature of experience without the slothful betrayal toward immediacy and first-person familiarity, all too conveniently aligned to armchair reflection. Of course this is why Deleuze in particular keeps obsessing Brassier, since in a way he has been the more articulate critic of the logic of representation, and in favor of the metaphysical priority.

Two great limitations of continental thought are concentrated here: one, to think that thought ‘as such’ is rationally inaccessible because one must deflate transcendental metaphysical frames, and second that there is no suitably restricted notion of an object because the latter remains invariably secondary with respect to some linguistic/subjective/cultural constitution. So the object invariably gets destroyed, deconstructed, or destratified for being a testament to metaphysics of presence, of pure Vorhandenheit, derived extensity, secondary process, etc. And thought itself gets shafted for being the stillborn cunning of the same metaphysical reification of substance which lingers in the form of transcendental agency.

By the same token, the inferentialist thinks that metaphysics as such is impossible since it must hypostasize ‘reference’ in a way that betrays post-Quinean deflationary standards for truth and existence, while insisting in that there is no suitably adequate vindication of experience beyond the pragmatic constriction to RDRDs. Thought on its part gets shrunk to its inferentialist core, while objectivity becomes a function of knowing. But the point is that the object is not a function of thought, and that thought is itself objectifiable. Objectivity is precisely what allows us to understand the ontological priority of what is not thought, while the latter remains the condition for ascribing the rational responsibility to understand reality, to revise our beliefs in ways which are not merely prescriptive, or super-empirical whims by ideological-institutional agents, but rationally validated.

The idea is finally to defend a sense of objectivity as part of metaphysics, without for this reason endorsing a neo-Scholastic metaphysics of objects, and a suitable notion of objective knowledge and so an epistemology, without for this reason endorsing a metaphysical divide between transcendence and transcendent. And all of this while describing the nature of experience as involving a conceptually circumscribed role for perception as that which anchors our relation to the external world.

Here the question of representation and hylomorphism that Deleuze criticizes apropos representation, which is supposed to hold since Aristotle, becomes an important challenge and focal point. The alternative realist account which rehabilitates perceptual judgment must do two difficult things on this terrain. First, it must resist the idea of a hylomorphic stapling of universal form on singular matter, since it must insist in that the specificity of objective matter is not external to itself, and certainly not a projection of our thought. Form is intrinsic to matter, while not being a function of conception, even if the latter remains necessary to know of it and yet external to itself. At the same time, we must accept that the conceptual traction on being must always ‘leave something out’, or that that, as Deleuze puts it, concepts are too baggy (since concepts are not things, and can never ‘touch’ reality), while rejecting that this constitutes an insufficiency before which we can supplant epistemology and the valence of the normative with a metaphysical account of individuating difference, and through a logic of expressive being, like in Spinozist-Deleuzian alternatives.

Finally, in distinguishing between concepts and objects, thought and world, one must specificity the latter’ within a natural-causal order of explanation, in order to render it resolutely non-conceptual. This marks the ontological ubiquity of the scientific image, and its proper methodological autonomy. The way in which natural-causal description relates to its exteriority as developed in the account of picturing, however, remains obscure to me at present.

[1] We could broadly understand the contemporeneity of science along Catren’s broad lines, by defining that philosophy would need to be simultaneously Galilean, Heisenbergean, Einsteinean, Newtonian, Freudian and Darwinean: “First, modern science is essentially Galilean, which means, in Husserl’s terminology, that mathematics is a formal ontology, i.e. a theory of the generic categories of being qua being, like for instance the categories of multiplicity (set theory), relation (category theory), quantity (number theory), localization (geometry), operativeness (algebra), symmetry (group theory), predication (logic), stability (dynamical systems theory), and so on6. In other words, modern science is essentially determined by the physical entanglement of mathematical logos and natural existence, an entanglement which implies both the Galilean mathematization of nature and the Husserlian (and Badiousian) ontologization of mathematics. Second, modern science is essentially Copernican, Darwinian, and Freudian, which means that the narcissistically wounded subject of science can no longer be considered a (self)-centred fundamental first or last instance. Third, modern science is essentially Newtonian, which means that nature is one, i.e. that the pre-modern (transcendental) bifurcation between the (unmoving) earth and the (noumenal) sky has been definitively removed. Fourth, modern science is essentially Einsteinian, which means that nature suspends itself in its (cor)relational immanence by absorbing (or physicalizing) any sort of transcendental or metaphysical (back)ground. And finally, modern science is essentially Heisenbergian, which means that the phenomenological objective consistency of nature depends upon a certain number of quantum categories, which define the general conditions of logical predicability, (in)deterministic predictability, physical individuation, temporal reidentification, experimental observability, and intersubjective objectivity.”

Blackbox Realism: On Quine and the Indeterminacy of Translation

2011-12-19T12:09:00.000-08:00

- BLACKBOX REALISM -

On Quine and the Indeterminacy of Translation

________________________________________________________

Introduction

In this paper I seek to develop some considerations surrounding Quine's thesis for the indeterminacy of translation. As presented in his canonical Word and Object (1964), the thesis states that, for any pair of languages, different incompatible theories of translation, all adequate to the relevant available empirical facts, may be proposed. Thus, Quine seeks to undermine the idea that translation between two languages implies achieving congruence of meaning between them, if the latter is understood as entailing synonymy qua sameness of reference. In doing so, he casts doubts upon the co-dependent traditional notions of meaning, reference, and synonymy. This is supported through what Quine calls the underdetermination of translation by data, which states that the set of empirical facts rendered available for a translator can accept of many possible, incompatible meanings, all of them being adequate to the observable data. There are many ways in which words or expressions fit the facts in spite of being ontologically or referentially ambiguous. Therefore, for a given theory of translation, that theory's conditions for success do not depend on mapping synonymous expressions between the two languages. The translator cannot infer synonymy from the congruence observed in identical behavioral responses to stimuli, when contrasting expressions between languages. Rather, the job of the translator is to preserve the standard relations between given linguistic expressions and behavioral conditions for assent or dissent, relative to observation instances. Quine frames these views in his theory of 'radical translation', supported in the underdetermination of translation by data.

I shall follow Scott Soames' reconstruction of Quine's argument for the indeterminacy of translation (IOT) by clarifying the relationship between three central concepts: stimulus meaning, observation sentences, and occasion sentences[1]. In the first section, I follow and expand on Soames' presentation of Quine in seeking a formal explanation of the abovementioned three interrelated concepts. I shall then propose that Quine's arguments for indeterminacy fail to account for non-observational criteria relevant for translation, which cannot be captured by the restriction of empirical data to stimulus meaning and observation sentences. In particular, I shall argue that it is possible to propose additional criteria for any two hypothetical alternative compatible theories of translation, which are supposed to share their stimulus meaning and so be equally adequate translations by Quine’s criteria. Although these considerations do not belie the argument for indeterminacy, they do set constraints to the scope of what the latter solicits us to conclude about what can be of empirical relevance for the task of translation. More specifically, it will allow us to consider the possibility that non-truth-functional linguistic expressions can be relevant for translation. I conclude that while Quine's theory of radical translation should be read as an argument for indeterminacy, it should not be read as a comprehensive theory of translation applicable outside of strict cases where the only relevant empirical data is limited to linguistic expressions that function as perceptual reports.

I then briefly show some problems that arise for the thesis of indeterminacy, by considering it in conjunction with Quine's pragmatic endorsement of behaviorism and physicalism. I focus on the behaviorist disavowal of representational contents, the physicalist pragmatic endorsement of the truth of physics, and the thesis on ontological relativity according to which to be is to be the value of a variable. I suggest that the conjunction of these three theses create problems for Quine’s deflationary scientific realism, and also for the thesis of the indeterminacy of translation. In particular, I argue that his behaviorism can be read in two senses: an epistemological and an ontological one. In conjunction with his other two positions, both options leave the plausibility of the inscrutability of reference in demand of further justification for its claims.

I - The Indeterminacy of Translation

Quine's focus on theories of translation is contingent upon his intention to advance a general point about language. His two main philosophical targets comprise at least two prevalent orientations in philosophy of mind and language from his time:

1) The logical atomist theory of meaning - which preserves Frege's idea that meaning is primarily a matter of a series of relations between sentential expressions and the items of reference correlative to those expressions. The main idea that the logical atomists adapted from the Fregean view was that, through propositional analysis, an eventual theory of language would yield an understanding of meaning that would allow the logician to neatly separate meaningful sentences from meaningless ones, by isolating those expressions that are apt for empirical verification from those which aren’t. In turn, discerning which sentences are verifiable and thus meaningful would rely on knowing which expressions succeeded at denoting an item of reference in the world. This is an empiricist and verificationist thesis.

2) The sense-datum theories of mind - according to which sense-data, in some form, determines the basic content for all further propositional attitudes, i.e. experience and so knowledge originates in our registration of sensorial stimuli. This (roughly neo-Aristotelian) position entails that a fundamental layer of mental content underlies all propositional attitudes, and so that sensibilia anchors linguistic acts on an analytically available referential frame.

In relation to the logical atomists and philosophy of language, Quine preserves the verificationist constraint according to which the meaning of a sentence is determined by its conditions for verification or refutation. He also advocates the thesis that sentences are the basic constituents of meaningful expressions: “I follow Frege in deeming sentences the primary vehicles of meaning.”[2]At the same time, he rejects that an analysis of language can clarify meaning by explaining the congruity between expressions and referents, because it turns out that conditions for verification render items of reference ambiguous. Rather than to seek an elucidation of meaning in terms of word-world representational mappings, Quine proposes instead that language is mostly a matter of social convention, i.e. of dispositions to react to linguistic stimuli by responding in accordance to behaviorally conditioned responses within given socio-cultural contexts, or as cases of what Brandom (1998) calls reliable differential responsive dispositions. The opening line from Word and Object thus reads: "Language is a social act... in acquiring it we have to depend entirely on intersubjectively available cues as to what to say and when." Quine's argument constraining the available empirical data for translation theories to stimulus responses turns out to be the fundamental feature of his views on translation, and the inscrutability of reference that the latter evinces.

In relation to the sense-datum theorists and the philosophy of mind, Quine endorses the idea that linguistic acts begin in experience, and that the meaning we assign to words is contingent on our capacities for perceptual discrimination. That is, again, part of what is at stake in Quine’s epistemic restriction of translation to observation sentences. However, he rejects the idea of a ubiquitous layer of sense-content which could serve to render linguistic reference unambiguous, i.e. sensibilia has no determinate content which unequivocally and transparently fixes an item of reference across a community of speakers[3]. Alex Orenstein explains in that regard that “the conjecture of indeterminacy is that there is no reason to think, given the empiricism/behaviorism involved in translation and its ontological underpinnings, that translation is determinate [about reference].” (Orenstein, 2002, pp. 144) Rather, communication proceeds while leaving the item(s) of reference inscrutable through the available evidence. In this regard, Soames condenses the two central claims that Quine seeks to advance by using theories of translation: "i) that the class of all possible data for such a theory radically underdetermines the claims about meaning that it makes, and ii) that this indeterminacy could not be resolved even if we had access to all physical facts."[4] (Soames, 2003: Pg. 226) The former follows given the ontological and referential indeterminacy left undecided after observing linguistic behavior. The latter follows from the fact that adequacy to the (natural) facts that constitute the world admit of semantically incompatible expressions, i.e. expressions with divergent meanings can be adequate to the facts. Quine thinks the inscrutability of reference sets epistemological constrains about which ontological commitments other linguistic subjects target in their use of language, since ambiguity of reference persists. However, this does not entail that every possible theory or set of statements are on equal footing before reality: Quine also endorses the physicalist thesis according to which physics describes the totality of facts that structures the world. I shall try to show why Quine’s physicalism becomes difficult to reconcile with behaviorism below. It is important to understand, however, that Quine’s argument for the underdetermination of translation by data in fact depends on the realist thesis that a) there exists an ontological structure composed of true facts which is the world, b) that those facts are specifically those advanced by current bona fide physics. Let us explain how exactly Quine argues for the underdetermination thesis in this context.

Given the verificationist constraint, all scientific theories, including theories of translation, must be tested against plausible observational data. Quine's argument will consist in trying to delineate what the relevant data amounts to for theories of translation specifically. It will turn out that the set of data available for the translator underdetermines the choice for translation theory, i.e. more than one theory may fit the data equally as well. From this, it follows that a theory of translation must include in its conditions for success a severe and fundamental epistemic constraint. That is, the underdetermination of translation by data entails the indeterminacy of translation. Following Soames (2005), let us propose a definition of these two central ideas[5]:

1) (The Underdetermination of Translation by Data) (UTD)

Let L1 and L2 be arbitrary languages, and let D be the set of all observational truths (known and unknown) relevant to translation from one to the other. For any theory of translation T for L1 and L1, compatible with D, there is a theory T', incompatible with T, that is compatible with, and equally well supported by, D.

2) (The Indeterminacy of Translation) (IOT)

Translation is not determined by the set N of all empirical truths, known or unknown. For any pair of languages and a given theory of translation T for those languages, there are alternative theories of translation, incompatible with T, that accord equally well with N and so that are just as adequate to the facts. There is no objective matter of fact on which they disagree, and no objective sense in which one is true and the other is not.

The plausibility of the inference from IOT to UTD supervenes on whether Quine's argument for what constitutes relevant data is reasonable to uphold. We may provisionally anticipate that it is at least not intuitively obvious what a) observational truths amount to precisely in Quine's account, and b) why we should restrain ourselves to a consideration of such facts. The latter is motivated by the empiricist and verificationist constraint that theories should be tested against the backdrop of evidentially salient data. For translation theories, the task is to correlate expressions between different languages or dialects. The set of correlations that map expressions in one language to another is what constitutes a translation manual or translation theory. The basic constituents of such a theory will then yield statements of the form:

“Word or sentence s1 in L1 means the same as word or sentence s2 in L2.”

However, as we have anticipated, attempts to anchor translation on reference-synonymy are undermined by the data. To see why this is the case we must ask what ‘behavioral data’ amounts to in the production of a translation manual. The hypothesis advanced by Quine is that this data involves the observation of occasions where the foreigner uses specific expressions in his native language, where the translator compares them to situations where we use expressions in our language. As we surmised above apropos the endorsement of the Fregean thesis, Quine advocates the restriction of meaning to sentential expressions, but we should remark that the latter may include one-word interrogative utterances, and holophrastically construed sentences such as ‘Here-is-a-rabbit!’ or ‘This-is-red!’ The anchoring of such linguistic behavior in non-verbal, observational stimuli provides the observational data that Quine deems essential for translation, i.e. for what he calls stimulus meaning. Coming to know the relation between conditions for assent or dissent relative to expressions in given occasions constitutes the basis for a translation manual. As Orenstein puts it: “Quine’s linguist offers a hypothesis equating two such sentences (one the native’s and another the linguist’s) and checks it against a native speaker’s assenting or dissenting to the native sentence in the presence of some non-verbal stimuli.” (Orenstein 2002, pp. 134) Without further ado, let us introduce the three essential definitions at work in Quine’s account, following and expanding on Soames presentation (Soames, 2005, pp 254-255):

(Stimulus Meaning - SM)
The stimulus meaning of a sentence S (for a speaker at a given time t) is a pair of classes- the class of situations which would prompt the speaker to assent to S if queried (the affirmative stimulus meaning of S), and the class of situations which would prompt the speaker to dissent from S if queried (the negative stimulus meaning of S).

(Occasion Sentences - OCS)
S is an occasion sentence for a speaker if and only if the speaker's assent to, or dissent from, S depends in part on what the speaker is observing.

(Observation Sentences - OBS)
S is an observation sentence in a language L if and only if i) S is an occasion sentence for speakers of L, and ii) the stimulus meaning of S varies trivially from one speaker of L to another.

The third criterion tries to render the interference of background assumptions ineffectual, to make variability in stimulus response minimal, i.e. it excludes judgments in which collateral-information affects stimulus responses. Quine’s central idea is then that the empirical constraint to observation sentences, as defined by stable stimulus meaning across occasion sentences, yield data that does not sufficiently support reference-synonymy. The latter is therefore not part of the experimental material or the goal of translation manuals. The translator can at best achieve stimulus-synonymy, while reference-synonymy would require that one may unambiguously assert sameness of meaning, which entails sameness of reference. This impossibility is precisely what Quine’s argument is designed to prove: “The recovery of a man’s current language from his currently observed responses is the task of the linguist [or translator] who, unaided by an interpreter, is out to penetrate and translate a language hitherto unknown. All the objective data he has to go on are the forces that he sees impinging on the natives’ surfaces and the observable behavior, vocal and otherwise, of the native. Such data evinces “meanings” only of the most objectively empirical or stimulus-linked variety.” (Quine, WO: pp. 28-9)

As a result of the constraint to stimulus-synonymy, the empirical prediction for theories of translation will hold generally that:

(Empirical Prediction of Translation Theories)
Translation of observation sentences must preserve stimulus meaning. If a translation theory states that an observation sentence S1 in L1 means the same as S2 in L2, then the theory predicts that S1 and S2 have the same stimulus meanings in their respective linguistic communities.

With this in mind we might stipulate a revision of our earlier general formulation, for the theorematic statements advanced by translation theories, as follows:

“Word or sentence s1 is in L1 is stimulus-synonymous to word or sentence s2 in L2.”

At this juncture, we should reiterate that the relevant data described in Quine’s argument is of two kinds: the observational data gathered in stimulus responses, and the totality of physical facts which constitute the world, and relative to which the underdetermination by observational data occurs. Whereas the former is available, relevant and tractable for the translator, the latter constitutes the factual background that can be equally adequate to different and incompatible translation manuals, and so to different sets of stimulus responses. The idea is then that a) observational data is referentially ambiguous and so that different translations are equally supported by such data, and b) the facts of physics do not help resolve this ambiguity.

Quine’s proposed thought-experiment for radical translation asks us to imagine the task of translating a hypothetical native language called Jungle, and which bears little in common to English. Having already stipulated that the translator is capable of discerning the appropriate gestures/expressions in Jungle for assent or dissent, to determine occasions for negative and positive stimulus meaning in the native’s language, Quine considers a specific example in a translator’s attempt to translate the native expression Gavagai! He stipulates that we could find out that the natives will assent and dissent to the one-word interrogative Gavagai? in the same situations that we are disposed to assent and dissent to the one-word interrogative sentence Rabbit? On this basis, the translator might be tempted to conclude that both Gavagai and Rabbit are referent-synonymous. Such a hypothetical translator argues as follows:

1) For any pair of expressions S1 in L1, and S2 in L2, it is possible to empirically determine that both expressions are synonymous.

2) If two expressions are synonymous, then they have the same meaning.

3) If two expressions have the same meaning, then they must have the same referents.

4) Therefore, if two expressions are synonymous, then they have the same referents.

5) Therefore, it is possible to empirically determine for any pair of expressions in distinct languages, that they have the same referent.

As we have suggested above, Quine’s contention against this argument is to disambiguate between stimulus-synonymy and reference-synonymy. Although Quine agrees in that the traditional notion of meaning advanced by the tradition is construed in terms of reference-synonymy and implies it, his point is that translation can at best warrant establishing stimulus-synonymy, and from the latter reference-synonymy doesn’t follow. It follows that premise (1) fails if not qualified to read ‘stimulus-synonymous’, given the empirical constraint set by stimulus meaning. Furthermore, premise (2) is also only sensible to uphold if one qualifies it to mean ‘referent-synonymy’, and so the inference to (3) requires such a qualification.

At this point, it might seem as if Quine is oscillating between two possible ideas: is he trying to dispense of the notion of meaning altogether by showing that synonymy simpliter is evidentially undermined? Or is he trying to redefine meaning so that the coinage of stimulus-synonymy can be said to achieve a behavioral account of meaning? This question lies outside the scope of this paper, but it should just be remarked that in any case synonymy and meaning, as construed by the tradition’s focus on referential relations, remain the target of Quine’s argument.

The second qualification that we must note at this point is that, given the constriction to stimulus meaning and observation sentences, the set of expressions that can be sorted out using the abovementioned procedure is limited. Since the sentential expressions which yield stimulus responses depend by definition on observation instances, they do not comprise sentences whose determination is intractable by such means. For example, expressions like Rabbits share genetic material with Hares or Columbus discovered America will not work under such circumstances (Soames 2005, pp. 229). This raises a question for Quine, as well as for translation tout court. First, in excluding such sentences, haven’t we obviated what is an obvious and crucial part of the task undertaken by real translators everywhere? Quine himself does not address why such sentences are not subject to semantic analysis at a loss for evidential support, which renders the hypothetical nature of radical translation seem less realistic in scope. However, Quine might insist that sentences in a language must be, in the last instance, tethered to plausible direct or indirect knowledge of stimulus responses relative to observation, or at the very least, perceptual instances. One cannot do without being able to correlate expressions to some sort of perceptual stimulus, since it is through the latter that all communication functions to anchor language on the world. That such information might occur indirectly (through third-party testimony, recordings of some sort, or otherwise) does little to change this fundamental constraint.

To consider why such an argument is persuasive for Quine consider the following radical example: suppose that one finds what appears to be an Alien tabula with indecipherable inscriptions presumably coming from a community of Alien speakers, equipped with similar perceptual capacities to ours. We have no diagrammatic representation of these symbols anywhere, and we lack any contact or knowledge about how any of these expressions might relate to the situations that we might register through perception in specific occasions. It seems reasonable to suggest that it would then prove to be utterly impossible to translate or understand anything about this manual; the bare minimum required to understand a language is to know how certain experientially available situations trigger stimulus responses in the right instances, i.e. to understand how they relate to the world. Without any idea of which situations correspond to which expressions in the native language we couldn’t even be capable of proposing candidates from our language to serve for stimulus synonymy, let alone reference-synonymy. Thus, the paucity of criteria offered in radical translation is meant precisely to illustrate a minimal set of conditions for a translation theory, and not an exhaustive delineation of all possible cases. This response, however, still begs the question about what it is precisely about non-observational sentences that renders them evidentially trivial or empty; are there other forms of evidence besides those rendered in SM or OBS? If so, why are these secondary or trivial for translation? Could these serve to overcome the underdetermination of translation by data as restricted to stimulus responses?[6] We shall return to this issue below, but for now let us return to reference.

So far we haven’t addressed how the underdetermination of data rests on the inscrutability of reference. Although Quine himself reminds us to keep these two theses separate, it is clear that the former is meant to be supported by the truth of the latter[7]. The question finally amounts to asking why stimulus-synonymy fails to entail reference-synonymy. Assume a pair of sentences in two different languages with identical SM: s1 in L1 and s2 in L2. Suppose that the two expressions in question are the English Lo, a Rabbit! and the Junglese Gavagai! If both expressions are stimulus-synonymous it follows, by definition of SM, that those circumstances on which a speaker of English would assent/dissent to the one-word interrogative Rabbit? are the same as those in which a speaker of Junglese would assent-dissent to the one-word interrogative Gavagai? From this it might be tempting for the translator to conclude that Gavagai refers to rabbits, and so that Gavagai and Rabbit are not just stimulus-synonymous, but referent-synonymous, i.e. that they have the same meaning where the latter entails sameness of reference.

However, is this really established by the data? Quine remarks that the native Gavagai could just as easily refer to an undetached-rabbit-part, a temporal rabbit-stage, the form of Rabbithood, and who knows what else. Each of those possibilities remains adequate to the stimulus at hand. Thus, Quine argues that “Given that that a native sentence says that a so-and-so is present, and given that the sentence is true when and only when a rabbit is present, it by means follows that the so-and-so are rabbits.”[8] In other words, while it might be perfectly true that Gavagai? is assented to by the native speakers in the exact same situations that Rabbit? is assented to by English speakers, the former’s reference remains indeterminate. Since the referents of both expressions could be dissimilar, it follows that sameness of meaning is not deducible from the evidence. This thesis is also called the thesis for relative neutrality, i.e. the data is not partial to one possibility rather than the other. All of these states correspond to the physical world, in which rabbit, rabbit-stage, and rabbit-part stimulations all yield the same stimulus response in the same real situation. Thus, commitment to one hypothesis rather than another requires supplementary commitments called ‘analytical hypotheses’. For example, in order to ask ‘Is this rabbit the same as that?’ the translator must decide on how to translate articles, pronouns, identity predicates, among other things. Translating into Jungle requires us to reach beyond what SM renders available (Orenstein, 2005, pp. 135). The selection of a translation manual involves the choice of such divergent sets of possible translations, all of which are equally supported by the data. This allows us to understand how the notion of incompatibility between theories is cashed out in terms of the failure of reference-synonymy. The following reconstruction offers the basic position[9]:

(Incompatibility Between Translation Theories)
Let T1 be a translation theory containing statement (i), and let T2 be a translation theory containing statement (ii). The union of T1, T2, and a set which includes following premises is inconsistent:
a) Rabbits are not undetached spatial rabbit parts, undetached spatial rabbit parts are not stages or rabbits, and rabbits are not temporal stages of rabbits.

b) 'Rabbit' (as we use it now) refers to an object if and only if it is a rabbit, the same with every respective expression.

c) If two words refer to different things then they don't mean the same thing.

d) If a word of a phrase w means the same as a word of phrase x, and w means the same as a word or phrase y, then x means the same as y. (transitivity)

This reconstruction obviously rests upon the reading, suggested above, that Quine would be first and foremost be looking to displace the notion of meaning altogether, rather than redefine it. An alternative reading, which sees Quine as relaxing the notion of meaning, could simply qualify premises (c) and (d) to read ‘reference-meaning’ or ‘reference-synonymy’, thereby leaving it open that two expressions with different referents could nevertheless be said to enjoy sameness of meaning in the sense of ‘stimulus-meaning’. In any case, the point outlined above is that given a translation theory T1 that contains a statement (i), and an alternative theory T2 containing a statement (ii), the union of T1, T2 and the set containing (a-d) is logically inconsistent. With this in place, we might offer a formal reconstruction of the argument for IOT, as follows:

(A Possible Reconstruction of the Argument)
1) For any instance of radical translation one must base oneself on observation sentences, and the stimulus meaning for the expressions proper to that community.

2) The meaning of a sentence or word is only intelligible in relation to the entirety of the sentences-words which compose a language.

3) For every theory of translation T1 which maps statements of the form s1 <> L1 = s2 <> L2 on the basis of observation sentences, there is a possible alternative theory T2 which has s3 <> L1 = s2 <> L2, and in which s1 and s3 refer to different objects.

4) If two terms refer to different things they have different meanings; synonymy implies sameness of reference.

5) Therefore, s1 and s3 are not synonymous.

6) Therefore, T1 and T2 are semantically incompatible, even though they both correspond equally as well to the observation statements and so to the data available by stimulus meaning.

7) Therefore, in theory, more than one possible translation, all equally adequate to the data rendered available by stimulus-meaning and to the totality of physical facts, and yet incompatible with regards to their reference-meaning, are possible.

8) Therefore, the data gathered by stimulus-meaning underdetermines any claims to semantic synonymy, insofar as the latter entails sameness of reference, i.e. UDT entails relative neutrality.

At this point, one might wonder whether the thesis for the inscrutability of reference is over-hastily drawn. One could argue that what Quine takes to be an irremediable ambiguity resulting from the relative neutrality obtaining from surveying observation sentences might be nevertheless resolved upon further questioning. Specifically, if one could learn to ask the native more specific questions about the identity and determinate content of what he/she is speaking about, it is not clear why the ambiguity should persist. Quine in fact considers such a possibility, but thinks that nevertheless the inscrutability of reference persists:

"It will perhaps be countered that there is no essential difficulty in spotting judgments of identity on the part of the jungle native, or even of a speechless animal. This is true enough for qualitative identity, better called resemblance. In an organism's susceptibility to the conditioning of responses we have plentiful criteria for his standards of resemblance of stimulations. But what is relevant to the preceding reflections is numerical identity. Two pointings may be pointings to a numerically identical rabbit, to numerically distinct rabbit parts, and to numerically distinct rabbit stages, the inscrutability lies not in resemblance, but in the anatomy of sentences. We could equate a native expression with any of the disparate English terms 'rabbit', 'rabbit stage', 'undetached rabbit part', etc, and still by compensatorily juggling the translation of numerical identity and associated particles preserve the conformity to stimulus meanings of occasion sentences."
(Quine, Word and Object, pp. 52-54)

What Quine attempts to argue for in this rather cryptic passage is the following: the question about whether the native refers to the same object(s) as us depends on what, if anything, the native understands that is equivalent to our understanding of identity notions such as: is the very same thing as, or is identical with. But behavioral evidence does not decide this question. Imagine that the word squiggle is hypothesized as a candidate for expressing the notion of identity. One could utter Gavagai squiggle Gavagai? with the belief that if the native assents to my utterance he must be referring to a Rabbit as opposed to an undetached spatial part of a rabbit, or a temporal rabbit stage, etc. This would seem to follow because whereas the rabbit is one thing that remains identical from a time t1 to t2, a rabbit stage isn't. The same might hold for spatial parts, unless the rabbit was immobile. Of course, other candidates for reference might still persist, but the point would be that nevertheless there are ways to narrow down the ambiguity, and so that inscrutability may be resolved with sufficient effort.

And yet, as far as the evidence goes, squiggle could mean identical with, is an undetached spatial part of the same extended whole as, is a temporal stage of the same enduring complex as, and various other iterations. Thus, for all we know, while the native could be assenting to the underlying belief in unified Rabbithood, he could still be referring to stages or parts, and a variety of iterations like the ones above. With this in place one might begin to wonder about the empirical constraint to stimulus meaning, which Quine thinks sets minimal conditions for translation, as we surmised above.

The question would be whether the scope of data captured by the Quinean examples of radical translation truly captures the breadth of data relevant and available to the translator. This amounts to asking about whether stimulus meaning exhausts the relevant data for translation. In order to see why this is problematic for Quine, imagine the following scenario. It is at least not a priori ruled out that two expressions in a given language might be stimulus-synonymous. For the argument’s sake let us hypothesize that the interrogatives in Spanish Sombrilla? and Paraguas? are taken to be stimulus-synonymous. Furthermore, assume that a native Spanish speaker, looking to find the appropriate translation for these cases, soon discovers that the stimulus meaning for the English Umbrella? is stimulus-synonymous to both Sombrilla and Paraguas. According to Quine’s criteria, Umbrella could be translated accordingly by both terms, and there are no further grounds to decide upon this issue. Yet it is plainly obvious that such concerns by far delimit the scope of Quine’s thought experiment in a way that obviates empirical considerations taken by translators everywhere. For example, consider that the translator is deliberating on the abovementioned example in the process of translating a piece of poetry. Although determination of stimulus-meaning is part of the labor at stake, the translator must also, in deciding whether to use Sombrilla or Paraguas, pay attention to other salient factors, i.e. for example, the phonetic structure of the poem. It might be that translating Sombrilla for Umbrella allows the translator to preserve the rhyme-structure of the work, which would be destroyed otherwise, or preserve in it a case of alliteration in conjunction with other choices, in the process of conveying a particular idea, etc. Analogous examples could be given to show that stylistic decisions, while based on salient data available for the translator, are irreducible to stimulus-meaning. Although these considerations are not arguments against Quine’s thesis of UTD or IOR, they do provide a reminder of the restricted scope of his experiments.

However, it turns out that the issue of competing expressions with stimulus-synonymy has more substantial consequences. To see why, it suffices to consider non-referent-synonymous expressions in two distinct languages, which would be assented / dissented to in all possible circumstances. These kinds of expressions are labeled by Soames stimulus-analytic sentences (Soames 2005, pp 234). For example, consider the English expression There have been dogs. It seems plausible enough to suggest that this is a sentence whose assent to or dissent from would bear little to no variance between speakers of the language, and further that assent to it would be ubiquitous across all instances, i.e. it is stimulus-analytic. The problem then emerges when we consider what we would take to be an obvious falsehood in the native language that is also stimulus-analytic. For example, ubiquitous assent to the interrogative Katamerai? in Jungle might actually mean This is the work of the omnipresent Sun-God! The problem is that, restricting ourselves to stimulus-meaning, we could fail to distinguish universally believed English truths from universally believed native falsehoods, and vice versa.

“This raises the possibility that two sentences might differ in meaning, even though utterances of them would generally convey the same information (and hence prompt the same assents or dissents) owing to the fact that utterances of one of the sentences generally would implicate a proposition that was part of the meaning of the other. In such cases, the difference in meaning between the two sentences would be all but invisible to Quine’s radical translator, and Quine’s constraints on the empirical adequacy of translation would allow the sentences to be assimilated to one another.” (Ibid, pp. 235)

At this juncture, the weight of Quine’s thought experiment turns on the constriction to stimulus-meaning and observation sentences. The problems raised by considering stimulus-analytic sentences show not only that such a restriction might miss some relevant data for the task of translation, but that it can often lead to indistinguishing between semantically incompatible notions. Now, one could argue that this, far from being a limitation in Quine’s account, is actually a result of it: that he is precisely revealing the impossibility of inferring semantic determinacy from available data. However, this again turns on the assumption that we agree in that the constriction of data to stimulus-meaning does not obviate other relevant forms of evidence. As we have suggested above, stylistic decisions in translation include such considerations. The question of stimulus-analytic sentences which prompt expressions that are semantically incompatible, but functionally equivalent, suggests that assent or dissent is motivated by factors which exceed the strict truth-functional conditions of the sentential contents. In particular, conventional and conversational implicatures, and other Gricean categories come to mind. These are precisely the kind of background factors Quine looks to set aside in his notion of observation sentences, but how much it leaves out raises questions. As Soames puts it: “At some point, one must recognize the severe limitations he has imposed on himself, as well as the tentative and approximate character of his adequacy conditions on translation.” (Ibid. pp. 235) Additional evidential factors that he takes could amplify the scope of observational evidence include: situational features like the introduction of a word into a language (verbal definitions vs. ostensive illustrations), situations where individuals acquire competency in the use of the word (explanations vs. examples), spontaneous use of words without prompt (English speakers find it natural to use rabbit rather than rabbit-stage). There are all plausible criteria which could affect the translator’s job, and which amplify the scope of evidence relevantly. Nevertheless, it is not obvious that such considerations would alter the basic conclusion about indeterminacy.

II – Behaviorism, Physicalism, Ontological Relativity

At this stage, we might decide to call into question the reliance on observational evidence entailed in Quine’s endorsement of behaviorism. The latter allows him to proscribe from the relevant evidence considerations about beliefs, intentions, and all cognitive states; the contents of wishes and desires, and motivational states of the speakers; the contents of perceptual experiences and the relation of the latter to their environment, etc. All of these factors are not tractable through the salient behavioral evidence yielded by stimulus responses.

Yet as several commentators have noted, behaviorism is problematic. It is clear that in other domains non-observational facts come into play for supporting our theories and hypotheses, and Quine’s restriction to observationally salient data in stimulus responses leaves such factors out of the picture. Among others, Burge (2010) and Soames (2005) have pointed out that, in order for the indeterminacy argument to be compelling, Quine would need to provide an independent argument for behaviorism, which he does not do. Yet it is not clear how departure from behaviorism would help overcome the indeterminacy argued for by Quine, say, by a hypothetical inclusion of any of the abovementioned items into the set of relevant data. Some commentators, like Soames (2005), argue that aggregating facts about the neurophysiology of individuals does not intuitively help refute the indeterminacy thesis. Specifically, he doubts that the IOR may be resolved through facts about the anatomy of the subject, or information about the content of mental states. Let us pause on this issue for a moment.

Soames calls to question the exclusion of these factors, insofar as the restriction to stimulus responses and observational evidence is supported by an endorsement of behaviorism that is itself not argued for. I just add to Soames that without a proper explication and justification for his behaviorism, precisely what kind of conclusions we should draw about the abovementioned items of data is up in the air. One possible reading is that Quine endorses an ontological behaviorism, that seeks to destroy the notion of representational content altogether, and so to claim not only that reference is ambiguous because of an epistemic limitation in observers, but that there is no determinate relation between words, mental states, and things that could clarify the concept of reference in terms of representational content[10]. Sometimes Soames seems to read Quine in this direction, for example, when he claims that, for Quine, “[T]he ordinary notions of meaning and reference are rejected as illegitimate pre-scientific concepts that have no place in a scientifically respectable description of the world... The problem in Quine’s view is not that we are in danger of forever remaining ignorant of the facts about meaning and reference. The problem is that there are no genuine facts to be ignorant off” (Soames 2005, pp 226) How are we to position this thesis alongside Quine’s conjoint commitment to metaphysical physicalism and semantic holism?

Recall that Quine (1969) endorses ontological relativity, understood as the position according to which existence is to be the value of a variable, i.e. an argument for an existentially quantified true statement[11]. This is part of Quine’s inferentialist commitment which follows from the claim that empirical content undeterdetermines the choice of theory. An ontological disavowal of representational contents under this reading would entail that there are no true facts about reference to fulfill this role, i.e. one doesn’t quantify over ‘referents’, if by the latter we mean something that is supposed to inhere outside our ‘referring’ expressions.

Another way to make the same point is to say that reference is nonsensical except by taking it relatively to a background theory, never ‘absolutely’ or with regard to anything ‘external’, i.e. Quine’s position is that of a deflationary realism in which the objectivity of the world is thinly construed in terms of the holistic network of inferential relations that hold between expressions in a given language, bereft of all transcendent skyhooks. In that regard, Quine seeks to exemplify through the indeterminacy of translation and the inscrutability of reference the extent into which ontology is relative to background theoretical assumptions which are socially convened upon and so holistic in nature. As FØllesdal (1995) claims, “Quine, more than any other philosopher, has made us see the far reaching implications of the public nature of language.”[12]

This reading creates a problem when attempting to reconcile behaviorism with Quine’s simultaneous endorsement of physicalism. If the notions of representational content and of reference have no value; why and how are scientific statements any different than any other, if at all? What grants scientific description, and our understanding of it, a genuine prerogative in adequately describing the determinate structure of the world, without ambiguity? That is, how is it that physics and only physics yields ‘true facts’ about what it existential quantifies? McDowell (1996), similarly to Quine, has claimed that deflationary standards for truth and ontology show that there is nothing more to the reality of beings or properties besides there being true statements about them. However, he thinks that there are many statements which we take to be true, and which are not intuitively part of natural-scientific discourse. Notably for McDowell, value-statements can be also said to be true or false, and do not transparently follow from truths about physics, i.e. they are not logical consequences of physics. It is even less obvious that mundane truths formulated in common language can be shown to be entailed by physics. In this regard, Soames (2005) reasonably claims that to believe that statements such as A car exists, or I own a blue car could be shown to be logical consequences of physical truths is, for the moment, an utterly speculative thesis which exceeds any evidential support made available by current physics. He proposes thus to read the determination of all truths by physics as one of mere (metaphysical) supervenience, as opposed to strict logical consequences. Whereas to construe a given fact q as a logical consequence of a physical fact p requires that q be deducible from p, supervenience only implies the weaker claim that a given entity q could not exist without p. Yet even with a weakened sense of supervenience, it is not clear where from the authority of physics derives, nor the specific relation it bears to other (presumed) truth-functional sentences. These controversies show that even in denying the valence of the concept of reference, problems remain with respect to the endorsement of physicalism. If Quine wants to deny that the notion of reference plays any part in current bona fide physics, and so that the latter need not remain tethered to it, he still needs to explain how it is that scientific discourse describes a mind independent world. Such an explanation would need to be epistemologically explanatory in showing how one can disambiguate between our possible descriptions of the world and the world itself. But a deflationary account which constraints realism to existential quantification seems difficult to reconcile with such a demand since, like McDowell suggests, all kinds of statements appear to be truth-apt which do not seem to be about physics, and which are not construed as consequences of the latter. And it is not clear that in the weakened sense of metaphysical/material supervenience, statements existentially affirming the valence of cars and other middle sized items can be taken to be true on virtue of lower level facts about non-observables, 'real patterns' (Dennett; Ladyman and Ross), or anything else. An account of the relationship between the semantic content of conventional statements and those of physics would be in order, even if some have argued that a physicalism construed around supervenience is empirically supported by current science[13]. On any account, ontological relativity coupled to ontological behaviorism would then run into problems when explaining the relationship between mind and world, beyond the constraints of language and social convention, in order to assert the determinability of a mind-independent world required by any realist account. It is important to see that ontological behaviorism becomes of a piece with the inferentialist core, in entailing that there is nothing more to representational contents than propositional contents, while insisting that grasping the latter has nothing to do with finding out how concepts match some item in extra-experiential reality, and so nothing to do with reference. The representational ‘content’ of a proposition is taken to be nothing but the inferential relations into which it enters.

As we saw above, standards for truth and falsity are socially convened upon, rather than anchored on a non-conceptual world by necessity[14]. At the same time, philosophy endows science the prerogative before the real. Thus the ‘totality of true facts’ which make up the world and which physics describes are simultaneously taken to be a matter of a rational pragmatics subordinated to social convention, and a matter of grasping correctly a determinately structured mind-independent reality. These two aspirations in Quine’s realism are not so easy to reconcile. On the one hand, behaviorism entails that there is nothing more to grasping a concept than to grasp its conditions for use, and the latter is simply to understand the inferential relations the concept can enter into, including which counterfactuals it can support in specified contexts. But this severely restricts Quine’s capacity to explain how physics in particular can relate to a mind independent world, since the truths of physical statements are, like those proper to any other discursive register, subjected to pragmatic convention. As Quine himself claims, the distinction between physical objects and other objects ends up being one of degree rather than kind: “As an empiricist, I continue to think of the conceptual scheme of science as a tool, ultimately, for predicting future experience in the light of past experience [. . .] The myth of physical objects is epistemologically superior to most in that it has proved more efficacious than other myths as a device for working a manage-able structure into the flux of experience.”As Brassier (2008) argues, this ultimately subordinates Quine’s realism to the pragmatic wager between assorted ideological operations and interests, in principle incapable of drawing a relation between competing discourses in terms of how they correctly relate to objects and facts in the world, independent of pragmatic strictures. At a loss for a delineation of the relation between concepts and objects, instrumentalism lurks to usurp Quine’s alleged commitment to scientific realism. Worse still, it might be argued that the failure to distinguish how thought describes being conflates the two, resulting in a kind of idealism. This is precisely what Badiou (2007) proposes, claiming that without explaining the distinction between fact and form, and so leaving the relation between the actual world and formal propositions obscure, one folds the two together. As a result, representation is conceived as a feedback loop, and epistemology becomes incapable of discerning its discursive register from what it purportedly describes. Brassier (2008) writes: “Thus in a surprising empiricist mimesis of the serpent of absolute knowledge swallowing its own tail, naturalized epistemology seeks to construct a virtuous circle wherein congruence between fact and form is explained through the loop whereby representation is grounded in fact and fact is accounted for by representation.[15]” Given that representational is itself accounted in terms of semantic content, the problem becomes clearer. Weakening representational contents to propositional inferential relations whose truths are convened upon socially finally amounts to disintegrating the link to the empirical world that the naturalist claims science is capable of describing. This is to deny that representational contents may bear any ontological status, and to accept that our scientific realism be reduced to the pragmatic prescription of physicalism.

Furthermore, Quine would owe us an explanation of what the endeavors of those special sciences that make use of the notion of representational content in terms of referential relations are talking about, as part of those sciences in which the ‘intentional stance’ remains. Burge (2010) for example describes how perceptual psychology examines mechanisms for pre-linguistic objective individuation carried out by our sensory organs, so that representation is causally anchored in relation to environmental stimuli. Are we to simply render such talk derivative, unscientific in tenor, or its postulates epiphenomenal and thus with no proper ontological valence? We shall say more about Burge below, but we should underline that it is clear that Quine would need of an additional argument to disavow representational content simpliter. Since it is the eviction of the latter which confines objective individuation to linguistic behavior, it follows that without such an argument, the annihilation of the referential relation between words and things is not transparently supported by the demands of a realist physicalism.

In response to this, Quine could claim that physicalism can be rendered compatible with the wholesale destitution of representational content, along the lines suggested above: for example, if one endorses a form of physicalist eliminativism, in which relations between mind and world may be reduced to phenomena proper to fundamental physics. Quine (1953) advocated this position, as conceived through the distinction between the scientific descriptions of basic physical structure (illata), and posterior theoretical re-descriptions of the former (abstracta). The basic idea then was that the former substructure supports the supervenience of higher-order structure back into basic physical relations between elementary particles. As Ladyman and Ross (2009) point out, however, this view rests on the ‘Democritean faith’, refuted by contemporary science, that eventually it will be possible to decompose everything into elementary particles and relations among them, through fundamental physics. They argue that current physics is ambivalent with regard to the ontological status of unobservables, and so that reductionism is not motivated by present science. In addition, this ‘faith’ wouldn’t be easily palliated even if science did motivate such a reduction, since, given Quine’s endorsement of ontological relativity, the endowment granted to physics is in principle a pragmatic matter, and so a position that is prescribed rather than explained. Thus, even if reductionism within science were sound, it would still be controversial whether only physical phenomena should be granted ontological status.

On any account, it is not clear how physicalism and behaviorism are rendered compatible if Quine endorses an ontological behaviorism. A complete disavowal of representational contents and reference seems to entail the liquidation of the epistemological relation between mind and world, and so of knowledge understood (at least partly) as the objective representation of reality. Here it is not only translation and so knowledge of what others mean when they speak that leaves us in a blackbox with respect to other languages and cultures. More generally, the relationship between thought, language, and the world is rendered obscure. Without a clarification of how representation admits purchase on being, it is not even clear how any theoretical posits are capable of gaining traction on phenomena. We might conclude, therefore, that without an epistemological account of how thought represents the world it is difficult to find motivation for Quine’s endorsement of scientism.

Alternatively, one may suggest that Quine advocates a form of epistemological behaviorism. Under such a reading, there may be facts about reference that, for contingent limitations, we are just incapable of knowing. Thus, even if there are genuine representational relations between mind and world, and if words and things stand in referential relations too, the problem is that salient evidence undermines our capacity to know of them. Representational contents would be said to exist, insofar as mental states and perceptual occasions are not merely linguistically individuated posits or conventionally accepted ‘true statements’, but determinate items in relation to the external world. The problem here would be fundamentally epistemological, inasmuch as we must accept ignorance on ontological commitments, mental states, and the representational contents that the latter bear, when confronted by the limitations of observational evidence. This is a more moderate reading of Quine’s position, but does it fare any better? Even on this reading, it remains unclear why enquiry into the representational contents of our mental states should prove fruitless, i.e. incapable of resolving the IOR. Soames (2005) seems amenable to Quine’s skepticism, and on this regard he comes closer to reading Quine as an epistemological behaviorist: “We can no more read off the contents of a person’s words from physiological claims about neurons than we can read off the contents of his words from statements about the noises he makes in certain environments.” (Ibid, pp, 246) But why should this follow? Why should we accept that an enquiry into the internal constitution of mental states and their contents should be incapable of informing us about the ontological commitments of others, and the items to which their expressions refer, seeing that at least some of them do refer, after all? On this account, Burge (2010) in particular has raised a fundamental point of contention against Quine’s behaviorist externalism by proposing an epistemological externalism of his own, where objective representational content begins in fundamental instances of perceptual individuation causally relating environmental stimuli to our sensory organs. Advocating study into the science of perceptual psychology, such a position could entail, Burge suggests, that primitive conditions for spatial individuation constrain higher-order linguistic reference. As a result, we would be capable of successfully resolving the IOR through the amplification of our admissible data, since the former now appears artificially restrictive by excluding precisely the kind of empirical insight that would allow the relevant disambiguation for the translator. Burge agues as follows:

“[Quine] is right in that it does not follow from utterances that occur when and only when rabbits or rabbit facsimiles occur that the utterer mentions rabbits. But he just assumes that the only relevant evidential consideration is the history of black-box utterances in the presence of rabbits. He thinks that if this evidence does not warrant unique attribution of a referent or a meaning, such attribution is gratuitous… Quine does not confront the natural view that the semantics of language is initially determined by perception. He does not consider how perceptual representational content- hence perceptual singular reference and perceptual attribution- are established.” (Burge, 2010, pp. 214-215)

On this account, which we might deem ‘neo-Aristotelian’ in spirit, the relationship between words and things would be antedated by a more primitive relation between mental states and the world. Since the latter is rendered unambiguously determinate, relative to our perceptual faculties in relation to environmental stimuli, and tractable through scientific investigation, Burge thinks that Quine would have to admit that the supplementation of data by such information could restrict IOR, if not eliminate it. Although I am inclined to agree with Quine in that it is not clear that such an investigation could resolve the IOR, at least, he cannot dismiss the import of representational content by endorsing behaviorism without further argument.

A second possibility once again brings us back to eliminativism, but this time one which would preserve the notion of knowledge of the external world while dispensing of representational contents. For example, an epistemological account tethered to neurophysiology could explain how the interaction between the environment and the brain does not make appeal to anything like representational contents, even if it describes a robust interaction between a sapient being and its exteriority. If Quine wants to take the eliminativist route in this regard, and claim that knowledge of the world is to be cashed out in terms other than representational contents, other questions are left pending[16]. As we saw above, Soames (2005) convincingly argues that physicalism in Quine must be understood in terms of metaphysical supervenience[17]. Yet Kim (2010) for instance argues that functionally individuated psychological properties which retain intentional content must be ‘functionalized’ redescriptions of those physical properties with which they are metaphysically identical, or else the local supervenience of the psychological on the physical fails. This failure entails dualism, epiphenomenalism about mental properties, or the view that a singular event can have two causes, a mental and a physical one[18]. Without reinforcing how precisely psychological-kinds which are said to have representational content supervene on non-representational physical terms, it becomes unclear how the former can be brushed off from having any epistemological import in favor of behaviorism. On any account, denying that representational content may disambiguate about ontological commitments, and so overcome the epistemic limitations yielded by observational data, leaves in the dark the relation between physics and the ‘special sciences’, and specifically perceptual psychology. Moreover, it would still not be clear how construing the epistemic relation between mind and world in non-representational interactions between organism and environment couldn't help resolve the indeterminacy thesis. Nevertheless, we should always remember that Quine transfers the burden of proof by challenging his opponents to find a supplementary fact about the world which would render the inscrutability of reference ineffectual. Burge’s contention is that in particular the science of perceptual psychology can rise to this challenge. Other philosophers of mind advocate alternative candidates to fulfill this promise. Whether they do or don’t exceeds the scope of this paper.

In addition, some of the problems that appeared by reading Quine as an ontological behaviorist, reemerge in reading him as an epistemological behaviorist. With regards to the endorsement of physicalism, it is unclear how scientific discourse qua communicational practice, subject to the behaviorist constraint to observational data, relates to other forms of communication and discourse. Is there no inscrutability with regards to the facts of physics, like when, for example, I think to understand what a scientist tells me when he describes the behavior of an electron or some other non-observable cause? Are theoretical posits intractable to behavioral evidence equally susceptible to the inscrutability of reference? The latter is a question which brings to mind Quine’s endorsement of the real ontological status of abstract objects, and so the obscure relation between the latter and observable, concrete physical particulars[19]. If the inscrutability of reference holds even at the sub-observational level, so that even the statements advanced by physics leave reference indeterminate, then Quine’s endorsement of physicalism would render the consensus in scientific community potentially indifferent to the true facts of the matter. But this seems problematic, since it is said that physics describes the world as it is, and given semantic incompatibility between theories, extending indeterminacy to physics would beg the question about whose physics adequately describes the world, and how do we know this? Postulating an ‘ideal physics’ doesn’t quite help, since the question repeats itself in having to clarify the relation between our actual physics, and the ideal physics in exception to the pitfalls of the former. If the UTD applies to physics, then subjecting the epistemic purchase of actual physics to stimulus meaning would seem make Quine’s behaviorism conducive to a kind of radical agnosticism about reference for all intersubjective communication, and not just cases of ‘radical translation’. However, then it becomes difficult to see how such a view could amount to a proper scientific realism, since all of a sudden ontological ambiguity affects even intra-linguistic or intra-theoretical communication. Quine on this reading seems one short step from endorsing full-blown ontological relativism about the world, and not just ontological relativity about discourse, as a result of the behaviorist restriction to stimulus meaning, and the epistemic gulf opened by the inscrutability of reference.

If, on the other hand, IOR doesn’t hold at the sub-perceptual level, then it is not clear why the inscrutability yielded through communication in non-scientific description couldn´t be clarified through determinate, fundamental physical facts. Soames (2005), for example, seems to think that physicalism would entail the disambiguation of inscrutability if we understand by the former the thesis that everything that is true must supervene on physical truths.

“Whatever any of us means by rabbit, it is natural to suppose that our meaning what we do depends ultimately on physical facts. For example, we may ask whether a physically identical twin- someone (in a physically identical possible world-state) whose utterances, behavior, brain states, causal and historical relations to the environment, and interactions with other speakers…completely and exactly match mine- could mean by ‘rabbit’ what I actually mean by, say ‘undetached rabbit part’. It seems to me that the answer to this question must be ‘No’, for the very same reasons that physicalism itself seems acceptable on this interpretation.” (Soames, 2005, pp. 251)

Although Soames separates Quine’s behaviorism from his physicalism and focuses on the latter, I think that, on the contrary, consideration of the former yields reasons to doubt the plausibility of endorsing the latter. This follows even if Soames is right in saying that it is not clear why the IOR persists under such a physicalism. If one additionally casts doubts upon the notion of representational contents, it seems on the other hand difficult to understand how physics stands in relation to the IOR. Since it is physics that provides knowledge of the facts underlying the possibility of there being equally adequate but incompatible theories of translation and so incompatible ontological commitments, Quine cannot obviate the task of describing how physics yields determinate knowledge of a mind-independent world, relative to which sentential utterances are rendered ontologically ambiguous or at the very least epistemologically foreclosed.

Finally, if Quine does not completely eliminate the epistemic purchase of representational contents in tethering the latter to physics, he either needs to explain how such contents don’t resolve the inscrutability of reference, or else claim how they constitute an exception. That is, if physics relates to the world beyond the constraints of convention, and it yields knowledge of such a world, how does it escape the inscrutability of reference, if at all? The former option leads into the kinds of problems we suggested above, making it problematic to discern whose physics is to be championed. The latter option of claiming physics is in exception, renders scientific description and communication metaphysically determined and unambiguous, while leaving other descriptive registers irremediably affected by the IOR, and so subject to the UTD. Thus, Quine could claim that physicalism supports IOT and the UTD insofar as all non-physical linguistic utterances remain referentially ambiguous. At the same time, he can claim that physics, and only physics, gives communicable knowledge about the real, and is not subject to IOR. Finally, the ontological ambiguity presented by IOR would be said to be supported by the plurality of possible incompatible theories while admitting of determinate physical facts described unambiguously by science. As we have seen, given the endorsement of ontological relativity, this prerogative granted to science cannot but be prescriptive in nature. Whether this constitutes a sufficient ground for a full blown philosophical realism is an open question, although I remain skeptical for reasons I have been arguing. If Quine wants to restrict realism to knowledge of unobservables or abstract principles not registered through SM, and so not subject to the UTD, he would need to explain why a supplementation of data by fundamental physical facts couldn’t clarify the entirety of statements that supervene on physical facts. A successful resolution to the quandaries brought by Quine’s behaviorism, physicalism, and ontological relativity would entail showing show that the UTD and IOR hold, while not sacrificing the valence of physical knowledge. Even more, it would need to render the UTD relative to the data yielded by physics in particular. This would be to simultaneously endorse the following two conditions without tension:

(Physicalism)
All genuine truths (facts) are supervene on physical truths.

(The underdetermination of translation by physics)

Translation is not determined by the set of all physical truths (facts), known and unknown. For any pair of languages and theories of translation, incompatible with T, that accord equally well with all physical truths.

As we have seen, however, this is precisely what Quine’s simultaneous endorsement of behaviorism and physicalism renders problematic. Whether these can be reconciled or not lies outside the scope of the present study, and is reserved for another occasion.

Bibliography

· Badiou, Alain, The Concept of Model, translated by Z.L Fraser and Tzuchien Tho, re: press, 2007.

· Brassier, Ray. Badiou’s Materialist Epistemology of Mathematics, in Angelaki 10, 2005.

· Brandom, Robert, Making it Explicit, Harvard University Press, 1998.

· Burge, Tyler, The Origins of Objectivity, Oxford Press, 2010.

· Kim, Jaegwon, Essays in the Metaphysics of Mind, Oxford University Press, 2010.

· Ladyman, James & Ross, Don, Everything Must Go, Oxford University Press, 2009.

· McDowell, Mind and World, Harvard University Press, 1996.

· Orenstein, Alex, W.V Quine, Princeton University Press, 2002.

· Quine, W.V. Whither Physical Objects?, from R. S. Cohen, P. K. Feyarabend and M. W.
Wartofsky (eds.) Essays in Memory of Imre Lakatos, Boston: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1976.

· Quine, W.V. Theories and Things, London: Belknap Press, 1981.

· Quine, W.V. Naturalism; Or, Living Within One's Means. Dialectica 49, 1995.

· Quine, W.V, Word and Object, MIT Press, 1964.

· Quine, W.V, Ontological Relativity, Columbia University Press, 1977.

· Soames, Scott, Philosophical Analysis in the 20^th Century: Volume 2, Princeton University Press. 2005.

· Follesdal, Dagfinn, In what Sense is Language Public?, in On Quine, P. Lombardi and M.Santambogia (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

[1] These three terms will be defined technically below.

[2] Quine, W.V, Reply to Anthony, in Knowledge, Language, and Logic, pp. 419.

[3] In this regard, it should become obvious that Quine’s position is continuous with Davidson, and more crucially Wilfrid Sellars, in claiming that perception is a conceptual achievement, insofar as it involves the exertion of judgment in order to yield determinate content. Perception is not self-evidential, and brute sensation is epistemically inert, i.e. sensibilia do not constitute a ubiquitous layer of pre-conceptual determinate content, available for analysis. This will turn out to be a crucial point of contention for thinkers such a Burge (2010). See Sellars Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (1956)

[4] We shall not be concerned in this paper in assessing whether Soames' reading of Quine does the latter justice. We shall simply assume, for the moment, that his reconstructions are cogent and consistent with Quine's views.

[5] SOAMES, Scott, Philosophical Analysis in the 20^th Century: Volume 2, Princeton University Press, pp. 227

[6] Another set of questions concerns the privilege accorded to observation in Quine’s account. Is the priority given to sight and observation merely arbitrary, so that similar example could in principle follow from experiments constrained to other sense-capacities? If not, then Quine would need a separate argument to show why only observation can yield the kind of data needed for translation.

[7] Quine, In Pursuit of Truth, Harvard University Press, pp 47-48

[8] QUINE, W.V, Speaking of Objects, in Quintessence, 91-91.

[9] Soames, 2005, pp. 240.

[10] Of course, Quine could disavow reference without necessarily disavowing ‘representational contents’, i.e. if one somehow construes the latter as high-order iterations of physical facts for which the concept of reference would have no use. I consider this possibility below. We should just keep in mind that here we use representational contents, in the sense in which the latter are determined by a relation to the world, and thus that sentences are tethered to such contents.

[11] I owe this formulation to Peter Wolfendale, who in his excellent (unpublished) Essay on Transcendental Realism provides a brief but elegant account of Quine (and other’s) positions.

[12] FOLLESDAL, Dagfinn, “In what Sense is Language Public?”, in On Quine, P. Lombardi and M.Santambogia (eds), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995.

[13] See Ladyman & Ross (2007), Chapter 4.

[14] In this regard, Quine famously advocates an extensionalist approach to ontology that reduces reference to being the extension of a concept. According to Quine, intensional determinants are what remains of Aristotelian essences, and are logically opaque instead. Reference in the sense of a relation to a mind independent reality would thus remain tethered to the latter notion, which exceeds the formal transparency of a purely extensional ontology.

[15] Brassier, 2008, pp. 139.

[16] This would not be strictly analogous to the earlier ontological behaviorism, since it could entail the position that internal mental states do relate to the world objectively, but do not require postulating anything like representational contents, or psychological kinds.

[17] Soames, 2005, pp. 256-257.

[18] Marras (2000) shows that this argument generalizes over the other special sciences as well.

[19] Quine, W. 1964. Ontological Reduction and the World of Numbers, The Journal of Philosophy 61: 209-1

Ontic Structural Realism and Scientific Realism: On Ladyman and Ross, Sellars and Brassier

2011-11-13T19:36:00.000-08:00

- ONTIC STRUCTURAL REALISM AND SCIENTIFIC REALISM -

On Ladyman and Ross, Sellars and Brassier
___________________________________________

Ladyman and Ross go a long way in debasing Kuhn-inspired relativisms about science by showing how discontinuity in scientific theories at the level of content is underwritten by continuity at the level of structure. In doing so, they also build on the epistemological (rather than ontological) valence of the distinction between observables and unobservables as posited in theoretical physics. Their brand of ontic structural realism predates on the semantic approach to theory-modeling which situates the relationship between mathematical structures as primary as opposed to the partial-interpretation of theoretical terms on the basis of observables (the 'syntactic' approach advocated by Carnap). Similarly to Badiou's deflation of the empiricist notion of content (the 'third dogma of empiricism' he criticizes apropos Quine in The Concept of Model), L&R seek to undermine the ontological valence of the entities postulated within the manifest image ("Scholastic" and "neo-Scholastic" metaphysics included) and its reference to middle-sized objects and properties, the better to assert (again, like Badiou or Meillassoux) the reality of primary mathematical properties. These, however, do not demand commitment to the positive ontological status of imperceptible particles; the underdetermination of objects obtained in avowing the reality of processes remains ontologically agnostic about any entity in current science. In this regard, L&R seek to anchor their realism in scientific predictive success (the so-called 'no-miracles argument'), while at the same time having leverage to resist the underdetermination of realism by instrumentalism in consideration of theory-change (the so-called 'underdetermination problem'). The latter challenge applies even to positions such as Van Fraassen's constructive empiricism. Below I will explain what I find most problematic about this restriction of the realist commitment to structure, but provisionally we can gauge that if Meillassoux's metaphysical argument against the frequentialist implication is correct, then the predictive success of science is no less miraculous than its potential disruption by the sudden change of these laws ex nihilo. Intra-systemic predictability at the level of local laws provides no less a secure foundation for realism than unpredictable anomalies (in Kuhn's sense) force us into accepting pragmatic instrumentalism about science.

Of course, L&R's principled reluctance to make metaphysics refractory to empirical science would no doubt resist the very epistemological coordination between thought and reality in terms of a correlation between subject and object: ontic structural realism is precisely meant to revise the epistemological framework to dislodge traditional representational analogy in favor of structural isomorphy (or homomorphy). Yet what I find most unpersuasive so far about the book is the early defense in Chapter I of scientism, since in a certain sense it seems to me to rest, on similar grounds to the Churchlands, on an opaque sense of super-empirical virtue tethered to a rather thin pragmatism. Brassier above all has shown the deficiencies in appeals to the super-empirical in Churchland's neurocomputational idealism through pragmatism, much like Badiou criticizes Quine's naturalism for reifying science on alleged pragmatic grounds (again, this point is belabored in The Concept of Model). In L&R's account, the metaphysical subordination to science, and physics in particular, is entirely sketched on pragmatic grounds under what they programmatically label the "Primacy of Physics Constraint", or PPC in short. The following quote provides the basic position:

"Special science hypotheses that conflict with fundamental physics, or such consensus as there is in fundamental physics, should be rejected for that reason alone. Fundamental physical hypotheses are not symmetrically hostage to the conclusions of the special sciences.

This, we claim, is a regulative principle in current science, and it should be respected by naturalistic metaphysicians. The first, descriptive, claim is reason for the second, normative, one." (Pg. 45)

This reinforces the earlier, more general "Principle of Naturalistic Closure", which states that:

"Any new metaphysical claim that is to be taken seriously at time t should be motivated by, and only by, the service it would perform, if true, in showing how two or more specific scientific hypotheses, at least one of which is draw from fundamental physics, jointly explain more than the sum of what is explained by the two hypothesis taken separately, where this is interpreted by reference to the following terminological stipulations:

Stipulation: 'scientific hypotheses' are understood as hypotheses that are taken seriously by institutionally bona fide science at t

Stipulation: A specific scientific hypothesis is one that has been directly investigated and confirmed by institutionally bona fide scientific activity prior to t or is one that might be investigated at or after t, in the absense of constraints resulting from engineering, physiological, or economic restrictions, or a combination, as the primary object of attempted verification, falsification, or quantitative refinement, where this activity is a part of an objective research project fundable by a bona fide scientific research funding body

Stipulation: An objective research project has the primary purpose of establishing objective facts about nature that would, if accepted, on the basis of such a project, be expected to continue to be accepted by inquirers aiming to maximize their stock of true beliefs, notwithstanding shifts in the inquirers practical, commercial, or ideological preferences" (Pg. 38)

Notice the appeal to the communitarian 'consensus' evoked here, which is doubtlessly strange considering that L&R later go on to attack scientific realism (which they distinguish from their own OSR) on the grounds that it is dependent on subjective matters of consensus and pragmatic factors, e.g the disposition of specific scientists or the scientific communities. Their arguments against these accounts in grappling with the problem of the reference of theoretical terms are of great value.

Yet the avowal of scientism is there transparently tethered to an explicitly pragmatic, normative subordination of metaphysics to science, without any further epistemological labor or explanation. Although I endorse the idea of making metaphysics continuous with science, as well as their arguments for structural realism in order to account for theory change, it seems to me that the early stages of the book do not advance a sufficiently robust account about the rational necessity for making science metaphysically authoritative, failing thus to clarify the position from which the ontological prerogative of science derives. Perhaps this is where a Sellarsian approach has something to contribute still, specifically insofar as it insists on the necessity of a methodological dualism keeping the normative-register of the manifest image as a necessary condition of possibility for the epistemic entitlement endowed to science, and for the logic of revision itself. In this regard, perhaps the question concerning the ontological status of unobservables in L&R's account vis a vis their discussion of Van Fraasen's constructive empiricism makes my concern particularly salient. I would quote the following passage from the book:

"Opponents of scientific realism, such as Van Fraassen, deny that the local defenses of realism about specific unobservables are compelling, arguing that they can in each case be reinterpret in pragmatic terms as inferences to the empirical adequacy of the explanation in question, plus a commitment to continue theorizing with the resources of the theory... If unobservable entities merely happened to be around when certain phenomena were occurring then their presence would not be explanatory. Hence, Van Fraassen argues, scientific realism relies upon some kind of metaphysical theory of laws of nature, singular causation, or essential natures. For Van Fraassen, this means it ultimately rests on explanation by posit. Here we reach an impasse with the scientific realism insisting on the need for explanations where the antirealist is content without them." (Pg. 74)

And yet, if I understand Van Fraassen correctly, his point is not that explanation is no good, but that explanation by posit appealing to the abovementioned metaphysical items (laws of nature, singular causation...) is what is left unexplained qua posited by the scientific realist, and as such they would require a justification not circularly defined terms which would simply presuppose the pragmatic requirement that we ought to continue using the theory in dispute. At that point Van Fraassen seems to think the 'realist' wager becomes fatally undermined by its tacit pragmatic instrumental appeals. Similar to Meillassoux's hijacking of the correlationist argument to unearth a tacit realism in the form of the factial, Van Fraassen hijacks the scientific realist to unearth a tacit instrumentalism in their argument. Yet as we have seen L&R do not, despite their claims to the contrary, escape from instrumentalism by witholding epistemic commitment about individuals, and circumscribing realism to structural properties. For whether the prescription to philosophize in continuity with contemporary physics is wed to a notion of individuated objects or to merely relational structural properties is strictly speaking irrelevant to Van Fraassen's point, which is that one obviates explanation by normative prescription/proscription, and as such cannot but be instrumental on those grounds. Even if OSR can explain theory change while remaining metaphysically agnostic about individuals, the same questions raised apropos the latter in classical scientific realism reappear in OSR with regard to the prescription to endorse the ontological valence of structural properties. And since this endorsement seems to be postulated in pragmatic terms, in principle rather than established by argument, it is not clear Van Fraasen's hijacking of the scientific realist argument to unearth its tacit circular appeals to authority is not reproduced in OSR. Pragmatism is idealist in tenor since it subordinates the reality or ontological valence of a given set of postulates, in this case scientific individuals and structure, to the normative injunction to 'do science'.

In this regard, it is important to notice that structure fares no better than individuals in L&R's account: both are finally undermined by the pragmatic claim that physics ought to be metaphysically endorsed since it cannot be rendered explanatorily virtuous and non-miraculous without assuming their reality in principle. If regularity provides grounds to motivate realism this cannot be surreptitiously postulated in order to avoid its instrumentalization, since in doing so one ends up doing just that, whether we tether our metaphysics to structure or individuals. Unyoking scientific modeling from observation and inference fares no better than mathematical structure if it must be assumed relative to the unexplained necessity to endorse realism on the basis of the scientific capacity to explain and predict phenomena, i.e. the latter remains just as susceptible to instrumentalization as the syntactic scientific realism about individuals was susceptible to deflation into empiricist constructivism. Now, ironically, L&R themselves attempt to return Van Fraassen the favor by claiming that constructive empiricism must commit to a minimum metaphysical endorsement of objective modal relations; i.e. it must ground its assertion of the probable-predictable adequacy of phenomena to theoretical posits in the reality of their possibility or actuality, even if it remains agnostic about their other properties. Thus L&R claim:

"If science tells us about objective-modal relations among the phenomena (both possible and actual), the occasional novel predictive success is not miraculous but to be expected." (Pg 153)

However, this misses the deflationary point raised by Van Fraassen, because to be a realist about modal objectivity is not sufficient to be a realist about the mind-independent reality, or about scientific phenomena in any orthodox sense. We know, at least since Kant, that it is perfectly possible to avow the causal efficacy of phenomena as constrained to our experiential field, just like in Hegel's objective idealism the ontological determinations that yield objectivity do not for that reason escape idealism. Thus irrespect6ive of whether pragmatism must be underwritten by some metaphysical commitment or other, the point, which Brassier stresses brilliantly apropos the Churchlands, is that they cannot but be complicit with an idealist miraculous congruence between thought and being. This follows transparently once we realize that just like Kant reactivates the valence of causal efficacy at the price of inflecting objectivity as a function of subjective synthesis, L&R operate under the frequentialist implication whose motivation is the 'no-miracles' argument. The latter is meant to justify the endorsement of naturalist metaphysics. This move, contrary to its pretension, relativizes the explanatory demand of scientific practice to the pragmatic concern to explain predictive success, rather than to legitimate the relation between our concepts and the objects presumably existing independently of the former. Both Van Fraassen and L&R may endorse modal objectivity, but since both finally accept a prescriptive rather than explanatory legitimation for the valence of science, it is the constructive empiricist idealization Van Fraassen openly accepts which seems to be tacitly presupposed by L&R's OSR, and not the latter's realism that is to be found in the former. At a loss for an epistemological account which distinguishes mathematical relations from properly physical structure, L&R simply assume a miraculous congruence between thought and the real through physics, supported by their two founding principles. Now, consider L&R's appeals to recent developments in GR and QM which attempt to ground objectual relations in terms of diffeomorphic transformations, nested in an explanation of symmetry understood in group theory as inclusion to equivalence classes with the appropriate rules for preservation. This allows one to explain structural continuity in purely formal terms. It endows the OSR to ground objective modality in structural symmetry. But how does the latter mathematical structure relate to physical structure at all? What relation holds between the two, i.e. what epistemic grounds solicit the postulate of the mind independence of the phenomena described by structure, once we have disowned appeals to the noumenal or qualia? This, again, L&R fail to do, folding back on their convenient prescriptive principle PNC, at a loss for any justification. Thus if OSR is indeed a realism in any way about science it is because the objective modal structure it ontologically asserts is in fact separate from the relational mathematical expression and yet indistinguishable from it all the same. This point is made by Van Fraassen (2006) and it dramatically entails that OSR cannot properly explain what separates mathematics from physics, they can only postulate it. In fact, they have no shame in admitting this much:

"When theories are empirically adequate they tell us about the structure of the phenomena and this structure is (at least in part) modal structure. However there is still a distinction between structure and non-structure. Merely listing relations among locators does not state anything with modal force. Therefore it doesn't specify structure in our sense and it isn't yet scientific theory as we've defended it. Physical structure exists, but what it it? If it is just a description of the properties and relations of some underlying entities this leads us back to epistemic structural realism. What makes the structure physical and not mathematical? This is a question that we refuse to answe. In our view, there is nothing more to be said about this that doesn't amount to empty words and venture beyond what the PNC allows. The 'world-structure' just is and exists independently of us and we represent it mathematico-physically via our theories." (Pg. 158)

The emergent result seems to be, quite predictably, either a kind of mathematical realism or neo-Pythagoreanism (Maddy, Rednik) purported by mathematicians themselves, or philosophers of science now insisting, like their repudiated Continental 'mystics', on an unobjectifiable excess to structure grounding the realist locus for naturalist metaphysics; which now starts sounding a whole lot more like Heidegger than Hegel, if not Scheller. Take the following passage which sums up the ordeal:

"Of course, all the considerations from physics to which we have appealed do not logically compel us to abandon the idea of a world of distinct ontologically subsistent individuals with intrinsic properties. As we noted, the identity and individuality of quantum particles could be grounded in each having a primitive thisness, and the same could be true of spacetime points. What we can establish is that physics tells us that certain aspects of such a world would be unknowable... On our view, things in themselves and qualia are ideal wheels in metaphysics and the PPC imposes a moratorium on such purely speculative philosophical toys... we take it that such a gap between epistemology and metaphysics is unacceptable. Given that there is no a priori way of demonstrating that the world must be composed of individuals with intrinsic natures, and given that our best physics puts severe pressure on such a view, the PNC dictates that we reject the idea altogether." (Pg. 154)

If our considerations hold here the PNC and PPC both merely aggravate the gulf between epistemology and ontology rather than palliate it. At a loss for justification beyond the super-empirical call for theoretical 'unification' restricted to scientific practice and their instituional approval, both principles are laid to rest on the pragmatic grounds criticized above, and end up soliciting the much repudiated invocations of the 'noumenal' and 'qualia' that L&R associate with philosophical spooks; the specter that Hegel had long since warned against: the uncanny coincidence of all merely 'contingent' (pseudo) philosophical accounts which obviate dialectical necessity by subordinating themselves to the empirical, as well the reification of abstraction in the form of a pure non-conceptual externality, a pure 'thisness' or immediacy intractable by conceptual means. This is yet another dimension in which the kind of pragmatic idealism bolstered by so-called 'hardcore' philosophers who claim to be continuous with science, following Kant, end up enacting, like Meillassoux diagnoses, a Ptolemaic counter revolution of sorts. Although L&R seek to escape this mystical evacuation of realism into a kind of neo-Kantian endorsement of noumenal ineffability, they end up bolstering it through their pragmatism.

Perhaps this is where the dialectical interplay between the scientific and manifest images advanced in the classical Sellarsian account can be put to work in some sense, by securing the relation between the two relatively autonomous registers (the conceptual-normative, and the natural-causal), and so avoiding the gratuitous demand for scientism which renders it epistemologically, if not metaphysically, rest on dubious grounds. Here the question would be to track the dialectic of concept revision by describing the porous frontier between the observable and the unobservable, and thus between the reviseable manifest register, still tethered to the reality of objects, as well as the scientific register's description of both elementary imperceptibles and non-perceptual structural properties all the same. Below I will indicate why Brassier particularly underlines the Sellarsian endorsement of secondary-properties as ontological valences.

The other point which seems of paramount interest is of course going back to the semantic-approach for theory modeling which reactivates the questions raised by Frege and Hilbert, and whether such an approach can be satisfactorily representational in a rigorous sense by means of structural isomorphy without having to invoke the privilege of intuition (in this regard Badiou seems to have taken the side of Hilbert in denouncing any notion of empirical 'content' as grounding structural isomorphy between domains and axiomatics, whereas the scientific realist- empiricist Sellarsian might want to salvage a role for sensibilia in some form or other). I take it that the revisionist naturalism endorsed by Brassier is an attempt to reconcile the rationalism from the Badiouean/Hilbertean deflation of self-grounding intuitions by underlining the relational autonomy of our conceptual economy, while insisting along Sellars' naturalism that an ontological role can be preserved for sensa as long as the latter are understood as pertaining to the autonomous domain of causal efficacy, and so as mediated processes themselves. This would simultaneously revoke the privilege of the manifest image to render scientific postulates of non-phenomenologizable content subordinate to perception (thus against instrumentalizations of science in terms of analogical modeling or pragmatic postulation), while at the same time explaining how sensibilia ontologically conditions conceptual mediation in resolutely non-conceptual terms; that is, in natural-causal terms, as neurophysiological processes. Furthermore, Brassier deems this as a crucial move in order to salvage the epistemic priority of science which, beyond purely mathematical structure, is capable of remaining anchored in the world. At this juncture the idea of 'real patterns' might be metaphysically useful, even if epistemologically still on dubious grounds. The problem with a blunt realism about ontic structure with a physicalist bent is that it adjudicates the privilege of science while remaining open to the kind of instrumentalist-pragmatic seizure of the kind Van Fraassen proposes, in which case we fare no better than Quine or Churchland in grounding the metaphysical labor. I take it this is why Brassier considers the unavoidable juncture of epistemology and metaphysics to remain the problematic moment for thought, and the one in which Sellars can help.

Correspondence From Ray Brassier on this Issue

I share your reservations about their attenuated conception of explanatory virtue and their pragmatic justification for scientism. Ultimately, L&R are too willing to throw out the rationalist baby with the metaphysical bathwater. What is frustrating about the book is they nowhere address the obvious Sellarsian-rationalist rejoinders to van Fraasen's empiricism; which is frustrating given that there was a substantial debate between Sellars and Van Fraassen on this very issue back in the 1970s (and van Fraassen was Sellars' student). In fact, there is only one reference to Sellars in the whole book, at the very beginning of Chapter 1 when they cite approvingly from "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man". But one can imagine a Sellarsian critique of OSR given Sellars' remarks in his 1966 critique of Feyerabend "Scientific Realism or Irenic Instrumentalism": The idea that the framework of common sense has a rock bottom does not require that this rock bottom consists of sense-impressions. The framework of common sense is a framework of (among other things) colored physical objects extended in space and enduring through time. And while objects which are red on the facing surface have the power to cause normal observers in the standard conditions to have sense impressions of red, this is incorrectly taken to mean that the physical property of being red on the facing side is to be analyzed in terms of this causal power.

As Berkeley, Kant, and Whitehead, among others, have pointed out, physical objects cannot have primary qualities only for structural and mathematical properties presuppose what might be called content qualities. And unless one falls into the trap of thinking of the framework of physical objects as a common sense theory evolved with unconscious wisdom to explain the manner in which sense data occur, it will scarcely do to say that the content qualities of physical objects are conceived, by a common sense use of analogy, to be the physical counterparts of the qualities of sense data (i.e. to play in the realm of physical things the content-role played in sense data by sense qualities). For, if the conceptual space of common sense physical
objects is underived, their content qualities must be directly rather than analogically conceived, for it is only in terms of perceived, and therefore conceptualized, qualitative difference that form and content can be distinguished.

1. The abandonment by scientists of the conceptual framework of common sense physical objects would involve either the abandonment of the conceptual space of color tout court, or the retention of this conceptual space as it reappears in its analogical offshoot, the conceptual space of sense impressions. The latter would be cut off from its foundation and left to wither on the vine. In either case, the conceptual space of the qualities of sense (secondary qualities) in one use of this phrase) would disappear from the public observation base of science. It would enter science only in linguistics, in the
study of the structure of the language of non-scientists and of scientists only to the extent that their sense impression talk
continued to reflect the pre-revolutionary framework of common-sense physical objects.

2. Only when the conceptual space of sense impressions has acquired a status which is not parasitical on the framework of common sense physical objects. In other words, only with the development of an adequate scientific theory of the sensory capacities of the central nervous system could the framework of common sense be abandoned without losing conceptual contact with a key dimension of the world. (Scientific Realism or Irenic Instrumentalism, pp. 175-178)

The exceptional strength of Sellarsian rationalism lies in its reconciliation of realism and empiricism: neither manifest objects nor unobservable posits are merely "useful fictions": one severs the link between the sensible and the intelligible at one's peril. By the same token, the notion of "real patterns" seems to me too weak to bear the burden of adjudicating between appearance and reality, or to bridge the gap between epistemology and metaphysics.

________________

So, to sum up:

The view that philosophers would benefit from learning actual science does not transparently entail philosophical sobriety, nor does it overcome by itself the critical injunction. Let us disambiguate:

1) The relation between metaphysics and science is not only ontological, or of ontological choice, but fundamentally epistemological. And in this particular regard, it is the question about the relationship between the two levels: what there is cannot be disassociated from the question about how we know what there is, i.e. the question of normative standards for epistemology cannot be dislodged from the ontological question about the structure of reality lest we revert to a form of dogmatic metaphysics. The question about the relationship between philosophy or metaphysics and science is necessarily at the juncture of questions about what we can know about the world, the relation between concepts and objects.

2) Ladyman and Ross explicitly subscribe to the idea of making metaphysics continuous, and even subordinate, to science, and physics in particular. Theirs is a brand of scientism which undermines the ontological valence of objects qua individuated particulars by arguing that physics teaches us to remain ontologically agnostic about them, the better to avow the reality of structure and primary relations, tracked by mathematical structural patterns. In this regard, L&R are very much informed by work done not just in the philosophy of science, but in science itself; they perform a restricted 'bracketing' about ontological commitments about individuals the better to anchor realism on structure.

3) However, without a proper epistemological footing, naturalist metaphysics cannot be appropriately legitimated on realist grounds, and that in obviating this demand, L&R are forced to appeals on the principled authority of science which devolves in a tacit instrumentalization of science and scientific phenomena, as in Van Fraassen's constructive empiricism, despite their claims to the contrary. The ontological agnosticism about objects is not remedied by an ontological commitment to structure if the authority of the latter merely follows circularly from the 'avowal of science' in principled grounds. In this regard Brassier's remark apropos the Churchlands and Badiou's apropos Quine can be reiterated about L&R, and any variety of scientific realism which is taken to draw its legitimation from a super-empirical standpoint which authoritatively prescribes rather than explains. Pragmatism is complicit with idealism insofar as it adjudicates science from the unexplained principled prescription of the normative practice of science in its current canonical forms.

4) In that regard, L&R's attempts to reshuffle epistemological terms apart from the relation between subjects and objects vis a vis analytic "neo-scholastic" metaphysics is analogous to the criticism against Meillassoux advanced by Gabriel Catren's observation that contemporary physics does not make appeals to inference on the basis of induction from observational terms. This again reiterates the deflation of the terms of the manifest image, and secondary properties in particular, in favor of the mathematicity of structure. More importantly, this reflects L&R's adoption of the semantic approach to theory modeling which dislodges the role reserved for observables vis a vis partial-interpretation in the syntactic approach. We can also say thus that the scientific revision of epistemological norms by ontic structural realism would itself undermine the construal of the relation between science and the world in terms of subjective inference from observational instances. But, in doing the opposite move, that is, by simply modeling epistemology on a physicalist metaphysics, their philosophy already runs on an unjustified epistemological commitment which endows ontological valence to the postulates of science in pragmatic, principled terms. And this is, like we surmised above, subject to instrumentalist relativization, since the argument cannot be formulated in intra-theoretical terms which would simply insist on the importance of thinking in continuity with the theory in question lest we fall on circularity.

In this regard, the authoritarian validation of science on pragmatic grounds fares no better philosophically than classical metaphysics in its dogmatic pretense to uncritically yield descriptively the nature of reality. Saying we must be continuous with science because science helps us predict the world with accuracy does not get us beyond constructive empiricism, and so it is insufficient for a robust metaphysical naturalism with a realist bent. Realism can not rest on the satisfaction of the no-miracles argument plus a commitment to structure. The autonomy of the real does not follow from predictive success, any more than predictive failure reinforces the dependence of the real on thought. Saying the structure can be metaphysically avowed because there is concensus in bona fide science is both a) motivated by subordinating subordinating metaphysical to the institutional legitimation arbitrarily posited in the PPC and PNC. But through the latter the priority of physics turns out to be prescribed rather than explained. This is made particularly salient in the refusal by L&R to explain the relation between theoretical mathematical posits and 'real' physics structure.

5) Following Sellars, we must claim that the dialectic of concept revision must itself be the condition of possibility for the epistemic endowment of scientific claims. This is what Sellars describes as the methodological, non-ontological, independence of the normative-conceptual register of the manifest image with respect to the natural-causal register of the scientific image. Their relation is not one of plain subordination or undermining, but of a perpetual negotiation. Thus eliminativism does not follow from naturalism; the manifest image retains a methodological independence. The autonomy of the conceptual cannot be eliminated since it is the condition of possibility for the endowment of epistemic entitlement and concept revision itself: it alone tells us on what epistemic basis we should revise our theories and metaphysical commitments.

Gabriel Catren and the Correlationist Circle

2011-10-24T00:19:00.000-07:00

- GABRIEL CATREN AND THE CORRELATIONIST CIRCLE -
Speculative Physics, Speculative Realism?
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Gabriel Catren's project, in short, is to advance a 'speculative physics', where the latter is to be understood as the a priori determination of the laws of nature, and more specifically those described by physics in quantum mechanics. Following Schelling and Hegel, and perhaps in a broader sense the work of Iain Grant, Catren thus seeks to rehabilitate the idea of a philosophy of nature, where the empirical scope of physics is ontologically grounded upon what he describes as a non-transcendental, a priori foundation.

It is within the scope of this project that Catren finds himself at odds with Meillassoux's own. Although he openly endorses Meillassoux's claim that the post-Enlightenment philosophical tradition initiated a Ptolemaic counter-revolution against its own pretences, he claims that Meillassoux's endorsement of the contingency of the laws of nature is in fact yet another iteration of the reaction motif which fails to remain true to the lessons of the Copernican revolution. In order to show this, Catren briefly takes issue with what he takes to be a gratuitous dismissal of the possibility of establishing that the laws of nature obtain by necessity. Thus, against Meillassoux, Catren holds that the principle of factiality, which claims that contingency is absolute and not correlational, runs on the unjustified assumption that the necessity of the laws of nature couldn't be established by speculative thought.

First, Catren disputes Meillassoux's assimilation of scientific-natural knowledge to inferential knowledge. In doing so, Meillassoux ignores that 'inductive reasoning does not play any role in contemporary physics'. Although that remark is stated in passing, it should be said that Meillassoux's does not equate scientific knowledge to induction, but rather is targeting the epistemological constraint that the post-Humean correlationist (and idealist) philosophies claimed to condition scientific activity as such. Thus, while it may be perfectly true that physics today makes no explicit reference to physics, this misses the point; since the question is whether physics can be epistemologically grounded without having its principles underdetermined by the constraints relative of the knower; the cognizant pole of the correlational circle. The latter claims that the facticity proper to knowledge undermines any claim at necessity that science could strive to; thus Catren's target should be to dispute facticity itself as an epistemological constraint for knowledge as a whole, rather than to claim physics makes no appeals to inference. For Meillassoux's claim about the contingency of the laws of nature is supposed to follow from the general epistemological construal according to which metaphysical claims (and physical claims by extension) are rendered relative to the experience of the knowing agent, and thus to transcendental conditions for disclosure; this is precisely what the circle of correlation tells us. In this regard, Catren would need to explain why physics in particular is not susceptible to the circle, and this he does not do in the paper, albeit more is to be said about this issue below.

On any account, Catren's weightier argument comes in later. This argument proceeds in different stages. I will address each of these in order, for clarity:

1) First, Catren claims that Meillassoux conflates the formal ontology of worlds with the question about the necessity or contingency of the laws of nature. That is, he reasons that because the idea of grounding the laws of nature with necessity would require either a metaphysical first mover or an infinite regress, their contingency must follow. Since the actual necessity of the physical world could not be said to follow without the dogma of a metaphysical unexplained explainer, it must follow that there is no way to get from the a priori concept to the existence of actual physical reality, no 'ontological argument' as he puts it. Thus even if it was shown that many possible worlds correspond to reason, this has no saying as to whether laws are necessary or not, or whether an enquiry into the necessity of the laws of physics would be futile by necessity. In short, it does not suffice to establish contingency. According to Catren then, even if this were true it doesn't follow that physics could not consolidate an ontological argument it could still be true that 'a physical theory provides a provisional solution to a particular problem. For instance, quantum mechanics is the best solution that we have at the moment for explaining the objective consistency of nature.' (463) Finally, this leads Catren to Claim that '...it is difficult to understand why the supposed impossibility of providing a satisfactory rational global model for the 'topology' of absolute knowledge... would imply the futility of such a project.' (Ibid).

The problem with this line of argument is that it leaves entirely undecided what this putative 'provisional' explanatory purchase endowed to physics is supposed to supervene on, once it is accepted that modally a plurality of possible worlds prevent an ontological streamlining of principled necessity to actual reality. The sense in which quantum physics or any other theory could be 'best' to describe the cohesion of the universe will necessarily be an attempt to describe reality from the purview of its present cohesion. But this does not seem to threaten Meillassoux, for his point is not that a description of locally operative principles could be produced by science or otherwise, but that their alleged necessity fails to obtain. In order to show that the contingency of the laws of nature fail, Catren would need to show not only that quantum mechanics provides the 'best' salient description for reality as we know it, but that the principles it describes can be established as necessary. For the gulf between the manifold possibilities or possible worlds rendered available to thought and presupposed a priori necessity of a set of laws only occurs in sight of the epistemic constraints set on the knower who theorizes. Claims to the 'partial' and 'fallible' nature of science seems on that account to subordinate Catren's putative claim for natural necessity to a kind of pragmatic instrumentalism: our most cohesive theory is taken to describe reality, but we know that it will eventually be displaced in favor of other theories given our epistemic limitations. But this seems to want to have your cake and eat it: either quantum mechanics is endowed with a priori necessity and thus its laws are not contingent to instrumental progress in science, but perhaps susceptible to specification, or they are subject to such variability in which case science must surrender its pretensions of a prioricity. Of course, Catren will claim that this merely states the inherent limitation of all epistemic traction before the real, and it doesn't solicit a wholesale negation of the necessity of the laws established by thought. But Catren surely thinks more: he thinks it is possible to show that the laws of nature are necessary. And yet since this is the goal of Catren's project rather than an accomplished result, it seems that it is he who is presupposing that such a necessity must exist, rather than Meillassoux assuming that they must not exist.

For therein lies precisely Meillassoux's wager against Hume: against the skeptic who claims that even if we cannot establish the necessity of causal laws it doesn't follow that causality doesn't obtain, Meillassoux rather asks why should we assume it does obtain if reason indicates otherwise. Thus, Catren cannot simultaneously claim physical laws are endowed with a priori necessity and that at a loss for showing how the former the instrumental cohesiveness of physical description should suffice to justify belief in such a necessity. For the latter Catren would need to show, against Meillassoux, that something like the 'frequentialist' implication holds, such that the pragmatic success of physical description and the 'cohesiveness' it enjoys whilst framing nature in fact suggests that necessity must be rendered plausible. But at a loss for any such argument, Catren's tantalizing promise for a speculative physics seems to preemptively want to discount contingency as an unfounded assumption, while itself resting on dubious super-empirical virtue of physics, which are meant to indicate the 'provisional' state of the science.

Now, Catren points out that the underlying motivation behind his disavowal of the necessity for such epistemological legitimating of the status of physics concerns the simultaneous endorsement of the principle of reason and the abandonment of the principle of ground. The latter is understood as the transcendental machinery of representation which enforces the circle of correlation in Meillassoux's case; and more generally any form of metaphysical 'grounding principle' which remains refractory to science's subtractive modus operandi. Thus, against Meillassoux's avowal of induction, Catren contends that contemporary physical science does not need to run the gaunlet of having to assume a metaphysical first-principle, or an infinite regress. Quite the contrary, to endorse the principle of sufficient reason adequate to science enforces the disavowal of any notion of ground: "Science does not progress by trying to found itself on a last self-posited metaphysical or transcendental reason, but by trying to absolve itself from any kind of presupposed background." (469).

However, the ambiguity that we indicated above persists in Catren's account, since on the one hand this deposition of any notion of ground is supposed to account for the perpetual revisability of science, while Catren defends simultaneously the a priori necessity of its laws. Of course, the idea is that the lessons of physics force us to adapt to a post-humanist, de-anthropomorphized conception of the universe, where the valence of objective representation construed as a transcendental problematic is dismissed (on this account it is not surprising to see Catren's work overlap with the vocation of some contemporary post-Deleuzians/post-Landians, like Reza Negarestani, whose project seems at times very close to Catren's). But this seems to render the epistemological demand to explain how cognitive claims about reality, either advanced by science or philosophical speculative physics, is supposed to gain traction on an extra-experiential reality. Although Catren's observation that science's scope pushes us to "understand nature in non-correlational terms" is well taken, it is unclear what this prescribes for philosophy, and whether it suffices to circumvent the question of representational access and so of representation altogether. The putative authority endowed to science to not have to scale its descriptive methods through any transcendental machinery surely does not by itself provide an argument for philosophy about why the transcendental problematic is obsolete, any more than a marine biologist's focus on marine life is not a reason to think we have to stop asking questions about how we know the world. Thus it is not clear that 'the principle of ground' can be dispensed of in favor of a physics-friendly principle of reason without further argument.

But in any case, Catren is right to insist in that the crucial problem assuaging Meillassoux is that his entire argument depends on hijacking the facticity that the correlationist claims inevitably places in the epistemological circle. This leads to the second point.

2) Catren states that Meillassoux presupposes the impossibility of determining that the laws of nature obtain to argue for their contingency. This is inaccurate and conflates the generality of the argument, since Meillassoux hijacks in the correlationist argument the claim that it is impossible first to know that the conditions for knowledge are necessary, i.e. thought is factical. This is doubtlessly more general than claiming that the necessity of the laws of nature or physics is impossible to ground, since facticity is targeted at epistemological conditions for knowledge, which are at least not transparently tethered to physical laws. But this is a minor gripe, since the point surely also applies to physical principles, taken as epistemic conditions for objectivation. Still, even if we suppose in a naturalistic register that the conditions of knowledge are those specified by physics, the question concerns whether facticity obtains or not. However, Catren's argument focuses on what he deems to be a confusion of two dilemmas in Meillassoux's argument, which confuses a limitation for knowledge with an idealist determination by knowledge. The two dilemmas are:

1) If we cannot determine the necessity of rational laws is this because of a limitation of our capacities, or because or their contingency?
2) If physical laws are contingent, is this contingency correlative to thought, or absolute in itself?

Accordingly, Catren claims that while Dilemma 1 is a perfectly good one, Meillassoux obscures it by focusing instead on the (fictitious) Dilemma 2. The difference in short is between epistemological criticism and ontological idealism, according to Catren. "To summarize, we can say that Meillassoux's proof... begins with an unquestioned (and probably) false) presupposition (namely, that physics cannot discover any rational necessity in physical laws), and proceeds by means of an illegitimate 'deductive' inference (namely, that of absolutizing a supposed limitation)."

Again, we should remark that, strictly speaking, Meillassoux's construal of facticity cannot be circumscribed to 'physical laws', since the specific argument against the laws of nature follows rather after the principle of factiality has been argued for, as one of the three 'figures of factiality' (which follows from Meillassoux's argument against the frequentialist implication...) To ask whether facticity is relative to thought or not is not necessarily to ask whether physical laws are necessary or not, but more generally whether any knowable principle could be necessary. Thus the focus of the argument is the facticity of knowledge, rather than the contingency of natural laws; since the latter are in a sense subordinated to the former qua objects of knowledge. We have already seen why Catren's attempt to circumvent the transcendental problematic are insufficient for now, but let us leave this for the moment.

As we know, Meillassoux's argument proceeds from absolutizing facticity and rejecting that it is a mere correlate of thought since, if it were, we would have accepted the idealist identification of all thinkable possibilities as necessary correlates of thought. In that regard, we should claim that Catren's 'real' epistemological criticism following from Dilemma 1 is part of what is included in Meillassoux's refutation against the correlationist 'possibility of ignorance'. Recall that in the process of absolutizing facticity the correlationist, as hehijacks the speculative philosopher, claims that Meillassoux has illegitimately confused a mere limitation of our knowledge for an absolute limitation on things themselves. Thus while the speculative philosopher thinks that contingency is necessary lest we become idealists, the correlationist insists that for all we know this contingency is still as conceived for us, while the possibility of necessity obtaining outside our knowledge remains. Thus it would seem that Dilemma 1, as Catren presents it, is actually considered by Meillassoux as a possible objection which arises precisely in the course of absolutizing facticity; and so from within Dilemma 2.

Against the correlationist rebuttal, as we indicated above, Meillassoux claims that the contingency under which reality appears before thought cannot itself be rendered relative to thought, lest we proceed to identify all thinkable reality as correlated to our knowledge, i.e. it wouldn't have occurred to us not to be idealists if we did not accept of the thinkability of an in-itself non-relative to thought. For the putative 'strong correlationist' stand before the idealist is to insist precisely in that it is possible to think of the correlation not being just as it could be, ; facticity threatens the correlation with a loss for reasons for itself to be, and so opens a possible gulf between the thinkable and that which is relative to thought. In this regard, Catren's argument fails again to realize the true pivotal point in Meillassoux's argument is to be found in his putative hijacking of facticity, rather than in the secondary attack on the laws of nature.

For how does Meillassoux proceed? First, we are told by the hypothesized correlationist that one can find no reasons to ground the necessity for the conditions for thought which organize the range of knowable phenomena, i.e. thought is factical. Meillassoux then goes to say that this shows that facticity must be an absolute principle of things themselves, unless we accept the infinity of thought inherent in the idealist. But at this point Meillassoux's argument takes a strange emphasis: the argument against the idealist, and the rejoinder to the correlationist 'possibility of ignorance', consists in insisting on the facticity of the agent of the correlation, that is, our knowledge that the very agent who embodies the conditions of thought necessary for the correlation could not be, and that this possibility cannot itself be rendered relative to thought lest we think it immortal. My capacity-to-be-other must be thought as absolute lest we claim, like the idealist, that even the thought of death is relative to thought. I quote Meillassoux in full here:

"She does so by maintaining that we can think ourselves as no longer being; in other words, by maintaining that our mortality, our annihilation, and our becoming-wholly-other in God, are all effectively thinkable. But how are these states conceivable as possibilities? On account of the fact that we are able to think - by dint of the absence of any reason for our being - a capacity-to-be-other capable of abolishing us, or of radically transforming us. But if so, then this capacity-to-be-other cannot be conceived as a correlate of our thinking, precisely because it harbors the possibility of our own non-being. In order to think myself as mortal, as the atheist does - and hence as capable of not being - I must think my capacity-not-to-be as an absolute possibility, for if I think this possibility as a correlate of my thinking, if I maintain that the possibility of my not-being only exists as a correlate of my act of thinking the possibility of my not-being, then / can no longer conceive the possibility of my not-being, which is precisely the thesis defended by the idealist.

For I think myself as mortal only if I think that my death has no need of my thought of death in order to be actual. If my ceasing to be depended upon my continuing to be so that I could keep thinking myself as not being, then I would continue to agonize indefinitely, without ever actually passing away. In other words, in order to refute subjective idealism, I must grant that my possible annihilation is thinkable as something that is not just the correlate of my thought of this annihilation. Thus, the correlationist's refutation of idealism proceeds by way of an absolutization (which is to say, a decorrelation) of the capacity-to-be-other presupposed in the thought of facticity - this latter is the absolute whose reality is thinkable as that of the in-itself as such in its indifference to thought; an indifference which confers upon it the power to destroy me."

However, we should note that at this stage of the argument Meillassoux seems to be claiming that the capacity of things-in-themselves to be other is established bythe factical knowledge of one's own capacity to be other. In other words, whereas Meillassoux originally claims that his argument does not depend on knowledge of anything actual, but merely considering that which is possible, in order to refute the idealist, facticity appears to be tethered to knowing that one could-not-be; that one cannot find any reasons for thought to exist. However, this by itself does not seem to solicit the thesis that every being will necessarily be contingent, but only that the agent of the correlation, that is one's thought itself, is contingent. This is not to repeat the argument in favor of the possibility of ignorance, since what we are claiming now is rather that while Meillassoux might have claims for the necessity of contingency on the basis of the knowledge of 'ourselves to be mortal' this is at best to know that we are necessarily contingent; that is, that the correlation is necessarily contingent, and perhaps that which appears within it as the realm of 'appearances'. But from this it seems totally illegitimate to conclude that being-in-itself construed as a mind independent reality is necessarily contingent, since there is no logical necessity from my capacity to acknowledge that I am a finite mortal and therefore contingent in being, as is my every thought and phenomenal correlate, to the necessity that everything that is thinkable as being independent of my thought and phenomenal correlates is contingent. The former is to assert that it must follow that facticity is absolute for the correlational agent; the latter is to say that facticity is a property of all things-in-themselves, and not just for the agent of the correlation. Meillassoux slides from one conclusion to the other through by attributing factical knowledge to the agent of a 'capacity-to-be-other', while within the scope of the circle of correlation the most facticity could show is the absolute contingency of appearances along with its conditions for objectivation. The difficulty creeps in the moment Meillassoux must conflate our knowledge of facticity to a knowledge of finitude, in his way to rebutting the idealist.

But if this is the case then it bears radical consequences for Meillassoux's subsequent 'figures of factiality', contingency of the laws of nature included. If the principle of factiality is to be restricted to the realm of the phenomenal and to the reality of the correlational agent qua condition for phenomenal objectivation, then the three figures of the factial appear likewise circumscribed to the agent and its phenomena. And it is here that Catren's argument might be given some speculative weight: the idea that Meillassoux conflates epistemological criticism with ontological idealism. For now it seems that the contingency of the laws of nature no longer applies to being-in-itself simpliter, but only to the peculiar being under which phenomena are given within the circle. And since now positive knowledge seems circumscribed to the circle of correlation, at a loss for a positive knowledge of the actual, this seems to reactivate the Kantian idea according to which the laws of Nature, as we know them, are relative to appearances, and the domain of phenomena. But unlike Kant's static categorical framework, Meillassoux's absolute seems to solicit the possibility of an absolutely contingent modification in the laws that articulate appearances, while nevertheless remaining silent about the necessity/contingency of being outside the correlation.

Indeed, it remains entirely open whether such beings even exist or not, and so the decision between realism and idealism seems suspended in favor of a kind of ontological agnosticism, paired with knowledge about the absolute certain of the contingency of the phenomenal. But this seems like transcendental idealism with a vengeance: we cannot know if being is outside thought, or if it would conform to any necessary laws, let alone whether these resemble our knowledge and appearances. At the same time, we are also unable to establish, a priori, that a given categorical framework for the stability of appearances obtains within the circle itself. Thus the laws of nature, taken in its restricted sense as the laws of appearance, are contingent in form as well as in their existence, i.e. that there is no reason for things to appear as they do entails that appearances could very well not appear, or that they could suddenly appear under radically different modalities than we have known thus far.

The startling conclusion is that Meillassoux's absolutization of subjective facticity rehabilitates the possibility of the necessity of the laws of nature, understood as the laws of a mind independent reality, like Catren stipulates, but for this very reason forecloses the possibility of there being any knowledge of such laws, let alone a priori knowledge, or of their necessity. The only thing about the in-itself that I'm allowed to solicit is a nightmarish hybrid of Descartes and Heidegger: the transparency of my thinking, and the certainty of my death. The status of speculative physics would thereby seem, on that account, merely constricted to a regional study for the transient stability of phenomena presented under given conditions, and to the extent that a metaphysically fragile cohesion allows to discern. Every knowledge of the relation between the in-itself and the for-us is foreclosed in principle, excepting the knowledge that subordinates my being to the possibility of death as the one entity who I know must exist of itself. Thus the conditions for objectivation which remain the sole 'realist' ground for thought remain irreducible to the phenomena yielded within the correlational circle, but for this reason envelops thought as the dream of an opaque shadowy subjectivity which, for all we know, might lay suspended in utter solitude, shrouded by nothing but void.

Hegel and Heidegger on Representation: Objectivity, Truth, Science

2011-09-26T22:53:00.000-07:00

- HEGEL AND HEIDEGGER ON REPRESENTATION -

Objectivity, Truth, Science

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Introduction
In his seminal essay The Origin of the Work of Art, Martin Heidegger advances a robust account of what is art, where the latter comes to acquire a distinctive privilege, along with poetry, as a locus for the disclosure of truth (wahrheit). In doing so, Heidegger seeks to oppose the tradition’s overburdened conceptions of art cashed out in terms of objectual representation and sensible aesthesis, where the being of the artwork is seen to come into bare presence through the act of an apprehending subject. Instead, Heidegger proposes that truth be conceived fundamentally as unconcealment (aletheia), evincing a structure of incompleteness and withdrawal as being co-constitutive of the ‘creative disclosing’ proper to the artwork. Only by unyoking truth from its objectual framing does one escape the totalizing ambition under which the merely ontic enterprise of modern science attempts a compulsive wresting of being and a thorough domination of Nature. These nefarious results which follow from our epoch’s ontological forgetfulness include the devaluation of artworks into mere objects for commerce and curatorial interest, as well as the technocratic compulsion which accounts for both concentration camps and the fumigation of fields in agriculture. Prefiguring thus the latter diagnosis from Was Ist Denken? that “science does not think”, Heidegger dislodges the ‘ontic violence’ of objectual representation from truth, and proceeds to argue that science does not reveal truths. The task of rehabilitating an originary conception of truth as unconcealment through an understanding of art becomes then of a piece with the overcoming of the technical dominance advanced by modern reason, which thrives in an ever aggravating forgetfulness of being. The movement from the earlier attempt at a fundamental ontology, still tethered to a vision of philosophy as (phenomenological) science, is thus progressively displaced in favor of the hermeneutic Destruktion of a post-metaphysical thought wherein science loses its prerogative along with the ontological valence of objectual representation.

Bearing a strong dissymmetry, Hegel's ambitious project as delineated in his Encyclopedia Logic is an attempt to enact the elevation of common knowledge (Wissen) from the explicit cognition (Erkennen) of representational objects into the comprehensive science (Wissenschaft) of the dialectically imbued Concept. Far from signaling the straightjacket of our epoch's waywardness before a rigidified and forgotten tradition or path of questioning, Hegel views philosophy's task as one of securing the necessary logical continuity between thought and the real, which renders a direct complicity between logic and metaphysics, or the discursive presentation on being (ontology) and the world itself. Thus, while Hegel would agree with Heidegger in that philosophy's task is first and foremost to prize philosophy free of the insufficiently developed conceptual baggage that comes with immediate representations and which remain ungrounded, it is not the ‘technical’ unbecoming of calculating reason and its objectual occlusion which is to be overcome. Rather, it is the incapacity of non-scientific reason to settle for merely contingent determinations on being which fall short of logical necessity, and thus of a properly scientific status.

For all their apparent divergences, however, we find at the heart of both theories a common sense of urgency towards conceiving truth as essentially untotalizable, and anchored on an unconquerable point of resistance. In Heidegger’s thinking, this kernel is the receding dimension of "The Earth", as the observe side of Dasein's positive projection of Worlds. In Hegel’s system, this kernel is constituted by the self-relating negativity of the infinite Concept which, always affected by opposite determinations, threatens to usurp the stable identitarian regime of epistemological representation in its rigid individuation of objects under schematic form. The 'truth' of the Concept is therefore nested, Hegel argues, in the primordial self-alienation which constitutes its spiraling movement into various moments. We shall examine below how for Hegel withholding truth from a total deliverance to the stasis of representation implies not just a philosophical rectification of the tradition, but a consummation of a philosophy which had always 'fallen short' of its name.

While Heidegger still sees poetry and the poetic word as possessing the distinctive privilege of placing us before truth, disassociating science from philosophical thought, Hegel's system of the Concept insists on their continuity. This verdict finally separates the two thinkers, in spite of their fundamental agreement in understanding the structure of truth as a dynamic movement, which remains incomplete and untotalizable, and wherein history unfolds itself. The Heideggerean movement of deconstructing (Destruktion) the Western tradition, removing itself from the objectification of conceptual abstraction, stands opposed to the Hegelian operation of sublation (Aufgehoben), where conceptual determination endows being its full actuality. Each of the two philosophers would take the other's attempt as a movement towards abstraction: for Hegel the phenomenological abstraction of the immediate, for Heidegger the abstraction of conceptual determinacy as a reification of the modality of presence-at-hand. Our discussion, in short, will modestly attempt to trace the continuity between the methodological strategies which affect the ontological registers in the work of these two philosophers, through an understanding of how thought attempts to dislodge itself from the shackles of a tradition which has driven it to a forgetfulness of its deeper questions, or failed to rise to the dignity of a science worthy of the name.

I – Heidegger and the Artwork – Things, Thingliness, Truth

”In the midst of beings as a whole an open place occurs. There is a clearing, lighting. Thought of in reference to what is, to beings, this clearing is in a greater degree than are beings.” (Martin Heidegger -The Origin of the Work of Art)

At the outset of The Origin of the Work of Art, Heidegger subscribes to the task of unearthing the origin or ‘essence’ (Wesen) of art, prizing common conceptualizations of the latter free from the presuppositions handed down to us by the metaphysically invested tradition. This amounts to asking how art itself comes to acquire precedence in determining the relation between artist and artwork, or as Heidegger puts it: “In themselves and in their interrelations, artist and work are each of them by virtue of a third thing which is prior to both, namely that which also gives artist and work of art their names—art.” (OWA; Pg. 17) If the question about the origin of art as such comes to acquire methodological priority with respect to asking about the subject of art, or the object (Ob-jekt) of art, it is because an understanding proceeding from the dyad of subject-object relations already occludes a more fundamental determination which Heidegger deems as ‘essential’, i.e. which establishes “…that by which something is what it is and as it is” (Ibid; Pg. 17)[1]. But since the investigation into the origin or ‘Nature’ of art must take the extant reality of artistic works as its beginning, we thereby enter a ‘hermeneutic circle’, where the essence of art is first inferred from the artwork, and yet the latter comes to be seen as determined by the former (Ibid; Pg. 18). This leads Heidegger into a propadeutic assessment of the traditional conceptions of art which obtain from the tradition.

Heidegger first raises the question about the ‘thingly’ character inherent in all works of art, understood as a “self-evident element” which is brought to last or endure in a presencing (Anwesen) which constitutes the work's artistic being and which endows it with a structure[2]: “It seems almost as though the thingly element in the art work is like the substructure into and upon which the other, authentic element is built.” (Ibid; Pg. 20) By the same token, the artist himself is not taken to be a mere ‘subject’ of representation, who stands before the work, endowing it with its ‘thingly’ character. This disassociation of the agent of art from the subject follows since crucially “…a man is not a thing.” (Ibid; Pg. 21) And since the ‘thingly’ element of the work cannot thus be squarely identified with the merely objectual representations of artworks the tradition provides, Heidegger first seeks to point towards the limitations inherent in the three prevalent conceptions about the artwork’s essence, which circulate around these misconceptions in a dominant manner (Ibid; 23-26):

1) The work as a mere thing/object – Under this conception, the work comes to be understood as a mere object or thing; taken as an ‘assemble’ comprised of a bundle of properties. These become then expressed in propositional form, i.e. subject-predicate attributions. Against this view, Heidegger underlines that the visibility of the thing must already precede predicative determinations, whose origin propositions are unable to express. Thus the ‘thing-structure’ reflected in the subject-predicate propositional form is said to derive from ‘a common source’ (Ibid; Pg. 22). This common source remains, however, shrouded in mystery.

2) The work as an aesthetic datum – Under this conception, the work comes to be individuated as a transparent totality delivered over to our perception or sensibility, given as a distinctive unity, synthesizing a ‘manifold of intuition’[3]. Against this view, which is paired to the former in producing a singular thing-concept of the work, Heidegger contests the putative transparency and completeness of the work as given in its presencing, claiming rather that “"In order to hear a bare sound we have to listen away from things, divert our ear from them, i.e. listen abstractly.”[4] (Ibid; Pg. 26) This way, Heidegger invites us to hear in the originary Greek notion of the hupokeimenon a ‘ground’ which is not reducible either to the fully present object of representation, expressed by a conceptual propositional frame, or to the agency of a subject apprehending perceptual unities from subsisting matter.

3) The work as a dual determination of form and matter – Under this conception, the work is understood as a complex articulation between a primal material substratum (hyle) and form (morphe) set visible before an apprehending subject through aspects (eidos)[5]. Against this conception, Heidegger underlines the irreducibility or the dubious subordination of the being of tools or equipment (Zeug) with which Dasein engages in purposive practice to a distribution of form by matter. It follows that the ‘usefulness’ of tools can never be an additional property surreptitiously aggregated to the object, understood as a form-matter compendium. Quite the opposite, the ‘usefulness’ of these tool-beings are said to be ontologically fundamental with respect to such merely ontic, objectual determinations: “Such usefulness is never assigned or added on afterward to a being of the type of a jug, ax, or pair of shoes. But neither is it something that floats somewhere above it as an end.” (Ibid; Pg. 28)

Significantly, these three conceptions tie in with three traditional conceptions of truth: 1) as correspondence between proposition and fact, 2) as subjective-conscious intentionality directing the ‘ego’ towards a unified object, or 3) as the Idea which gives form to the bare givenness of matter in producing the being of the object. The issue must be thus that there is in the ‘truth of the work’ something which resists objectification, and for this the usefulness of tools delivers the first clue (Ibid; Pg. 28). All of these conceptions must already presuppose, Heidegger argues, that beings have already made themselves available to us, taking part amidst in usefulness for Dasein's comportments, in doing so evincing a structure intractable through the modality of objective representation.

Heidegger paves the way thus to a discussion of tool-beings or equipment, extending on the famous ‘tool-analysis’ from Being and Time. What is crucial for us at this stage is simply to underline how for Heidegger the being of equipment challenges the objectual form of representation, construing the latter rather as a derivative function of the ‘breakdown’ or malfunctioning of the former[6]. In other words, whereas the traditional conceptions would have the ‘usefulness’ or serviceability of an entity as one more property or attribute, or as a contingent integration of such serviceability outside its strict determinations (a distinctio rationis, in the Scholastic sense), Heidegger deems the usefulness of tool-beings to be the ‘condition of possibility’ (to use Kant’s language) for objectual representation. This more fundamental understanding pertaining to readiness-to-hand implies thus a kind of ‘mindlessness’ in act, where no 'subject' or 'object' occur in its structure.

We should note that although Heidegger’s frequent examples of equipment involve man made ‘tools’, such as hammers or nails, the propriety of equipment does not pertain to a class or species of entities, since this would surreptitiously reintegrate them within the axes of objectual representation described above. Neither does readiness-to-hand pertain to a modality of beings, such that the same hammer could be said to present-at-hand or ready-to-hand, according to whether it is being theoretically grasped or practically put to use. Both readiness-to-hand and presence-at-hand are modalities of being, and strictly speaking, entities qua particulars obtain only in the modality or presence-at-hand. The point is thus that present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) objects of representation (Vorstellung) are individuated only as derived from the malfunction of ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) equipment (Zeug) in engaged practice. This separates the positive ontic-regional enterprise of the sciences or scientific rationality, from the global-ontological scope of philosophy.

Already a few years later, in The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Heidegger will delineate more clearly the scope of this distinction. Philosophy, understood still as metaphysics, does not concern itself with a particular being (God, the animal, the human…), a stratified domain of beings like science does (biological, physical, social…), or even with all the different beings or domains of beings. Conceptual typologies are delegated to the secondary ontic enterprise expressed by scientific categories, while philosophy in turn unearths their ontological ‘ground’ or enabling conditions through comprehensive concepts (Heidegger: 1995, Pg 9)[7]. Philosophy occupies itself with worldhood, which thinks of 'beings-as-a-whole', i.e. it thinks of the pre-theoretical, unified, and transcendental horizon wherein a "clearing" (Lichtung) of beings are made manifest, and being as such is 'given over' to Dasein: “The fundamental concepts of metaphysics and the concepts of philosophy, however, will evidently not be like this [scientific understanding] at all, if we recall that they themselves are anchored in our being gripped, in which we do not represent before us that which we conceptually comprehend, but maintain ourselves in a quite different comportment, one which is originarily and fundamentally difference from any scientific kind.” (Ibid)

As fundamental, metaphysical comprehension (Begreifen) becomes the condition of possibility for the rest of the sciences or merely ontic enquiries: “there are only sciences insofar as there is philosophy”, not the other way around", or even more dramatically “…all science is perhaps only a servant with respect to philosophy.” (Ibid; Pg. 5) The ontological status of scientific phenomena is thereby said to be derivative from the transcendental and unitary structure of worldhood adequate to Dasein's dwelling, and which it falls to philosophy to clarify. In this sense, if the being of equipment constitutes a subject for philosophical enquiry proper, this is because it cannot be adequate to an ontic, "regional science". That is, even if Heidegger earlier was more akin to associate the strict scientific method with the phenomenological enquiry in advancing a fundamental ontology[8].

The ‘readiness’ proper to the being of equipment is then not simply that of a set of man-made, useful entities. It rather shatters the individuating objectual frame of objects and properties described in propositional (apophantic) form altogether. Heidegger accordingly claims that “taken strictly, there ‘is’ no such thing as an equipment” but only an ‘equipmental-whole’ wherein subject and object are rendered indistinct (BT: Pg. 97). Dasein’s comportments (Verhalten) towards being as integrated and purposive practice thus trump Husserlian intentionality, since the latter remains tethered to the modality of subject-object relations, however reduced to its logical form through successive reductions (epoche)[9]. Consequently, it makes sense to conceive of natural-kind beings within ready-to-hand comportments, as long as we do not formally distinguish them from Dasein.

Heidegger’s famous depiction of Dasein as the ‘shepherd of being’ may be useful here and unpacked as an example: the guiding shepherd follows in unison with the herd of sheep an aim-oriented trajectory, mindlessly integrated and indistinct. Only when a sheep ‘diverts’ from the herd and interrupts the trajectory’s fluid migration, only when the stable functioning of the act breaks down, does 'the animal' appear, as some-thing, as an object to be dealt with. The shepherd correspondingly appears thus as a subject, as an agent which quickly proceeds to reintegrate the sheep onto the undisturbed movement of the herd[10].

At this juncture, it becomes evident that Heidegger’s understanding of essence (Wesen) problematizes the traditional (Scholastic) conception of the same in terms of ‘whatness’, i.e. the essence of an object is not a matter of ‘defining’ what it is. The latter already pertains to the derivation which sets-before the being qua object, and already loses the availability under which the being’s equipmentality comes to work alongside Dasein, rather than against the subject. Crucial then becomes the disavowal of all merely ontic or objectual determinations of being, in favor of a properly ontological clarification of the same. It is clearly thus a question of the ontological difference between being and beings; between entities conceived as individuated particulars, and being as that which precedes and grounds the being of particulars. We obtain here a series of distinctions: art’s essence or truth, which derivatively determines the artist as subject and the artwork object, is: 1) not one distributed in the modality of that-being (Wasein); 2) equipment is not localizable as mere presence-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) but rather as the available, ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit); 3) the agent is not a ‘subject’ but a who (Das-sein), existing there, dealing with beings in the world in ways which are fundamentally practical and productive more than reflexive or cognitively apprehensive. If the objectification proper to representation occludes the being of the work of art then it is because what withdraws from such a comprehension is not a being, or an ‘essential’ property which determines the content of the object propositionally. Rather, being qua thing simply dis-appears as a thing by the philosophical deconstructive operation, and becomes ontologically grounded.

The question becomes then how art as such comes to be understood within this complex distribution, having unyoked ‘essence’ and being from the shackles of representation, and using the clue of equipment. Heidegger takes as his lead example an anonymous painting by Van Gogh, which depicts a pair of peasant shoes. Beyond the explicit objectual content which merely gives us over to a pair of worn shoes, for Heidegger, the painting reveals the background of the peasant woman’s context in its holistic network of relations. Her dwelling above the rugged soil and her confrontation in the vast Openness of the fields, struck by the flagellating winds, are all part of the thick background that withdraws from the work’s explicitly objectual ‘content’. Heidegger’s description reveals the strife or tension between what he will distinguish as the Earth and the World: “This equipment belongs to the earth and it is protected in the world of the peasant woman. From out of this protected belonging the equipment itself rises to its resting within-itself.” (OWA: Pg, 33) In addition to usefulness-serviceability, the shoes in the painting reveal a dimension of reliability in equipment, a grounding in which the dwelling of the peasant woman and her horizon of meaning is firmly placed. Heidegger goes on to identify the World with the projective horizon of possibilities wherein Dasein dwells purposively as equipment becomes serviceable (Ibid). In Van Gogh’s painting, this would correspond to the holistic network of meaningful practices in which the shoes are integrated. The artwork correspondingly fulfills the function of ‘delivering us over’ into the peasant woman’s dwelling-space, transposing us into the 'there' wherein the woman inhabits, while revealing itself in connection to the usefulness or serviceability of beings for a people and an epoch.

Correspondingly, the Earth is structurally twofold: first, it designates the primordial dimension of reliability which simultaneously withholds or resists something from Dasein. In the painting, this can be found in the asymmetry between the depicted content of the shoes, and the receding background which illuminates it. Second, the Earth is the depth of being which withdraws or ‘self-encloses’ itself, the necessary back-ground upon which creative world-formation operates. The ‘self-enclosure’ of the Earth is thus not to be equated with the abstract persistence of beings or objective entities; it rather designates the ‘being of beings’ which resists objectification and which founds it, as well as that from which truth comes to happen for Dasein. The artwork discloses the being of equipment as the destitution of the subject-object dichotomy, evincing the dynamic twofold strife between the World and the Earth, which Heidegger now calls the truth of equipment as such:

“Van Gogh's painting is the disclosure of what the equipment, the pair of peasant shoes, is in truth. This entity emerges into the unconcealedness of its being. The Greeks called the unconcealedness of beings aletheia…” (Ibid; Pg. 35)

The artwork comes to be understood as a locus to disclose truth conceived as un-concealment (Unverborgenheit), from the tense relation of strife between the World and the Earth. Heidegger expounds his analysis expressly through the example of the Greek temple, as being paradigmatic of this non-representational quality in art, and wherein the artist himself disappears and becomes “…almost like a passageway that destroys itself in the creative process for the work to emerge” (Ibid; Pg. 39) Just like the shoes reveal the peasant woman’s holistically articulated world, the Greek temple comes to be a work insofar as it discloses and unfolds in its being a horizon of possibilities common to a people and an epoch. So that it plainly follows that “…to be a work means to set up a world." (Ibid; 43) In the temple, the Gods’ presencing can be felt, i.e. the opening of all ontic possibilities, and the recession of being’s excessive dimension. It is not a ‘full presence’ that comes before Dasein (Vor-handen / Vor-stellung), but an asymptotic deliverance onto being, which can never be fully disclosed. The receding Earth grounds Dasein’s worldly dwellings by providing thus an asymptotic horizon of undisclosed possibilities, which remain untotalizable and inexhaustible, only ever progressively wrested. The Gods are in the temple, before presencing, insofar as they index the recession of being as the Earth as the precondition for Dasein’s being-in-the-world.

At this point we should underline that it is not simply that objectual representation does not pertain to worldhood given its occluding nature, but rather that it is not its primary ontological dimension. It is merely the one which remains most alien to the ‘self-containment’ of being qua Earth, in un-concealment, since it thinks to possess full traction before being in its object by positing the object as something 'grasped' and enduring before a subsistent subject. It is merely the most reified conception of being as presence, which disjoins beings from their dynamic integration in worlds. But doing so of course renders invisible the receding background of immersion where serviceability, availability and reliability mark the dynamic strife of truth in the being of the entity, in equipment as well as 'works'. Dasein’s being is then broadly construed as its factical transcendence onto beings in a World[11]: a) its factical thrownness (Geworfenheit) into the Open (Offen) encounter with beings as ‘being-in-the-world’ (In-der-Welt-Sein); second, b) its dwelling in the earth which is ‘self-enclosing’ and which grounds it; third, c) a projective (Entwurf) horizon which constitutes the World which ‘lights up’ a clearing of possibilities which it creatively wrests from the grounding, withdrawing Earth: "World is the ever-nonobjective to which we are subject as long as the paths of birth and death, blessing and curse keep us transported into Being"[12] (Ibid; Pg. 43) Thus all ‘commercial’ or curatorial dislodging of creative works from their historical, worldly specificity, to exhibit them as objects for contemplation, cannot but destroy their essential capacity to disclose. This creative dimension which opens up a space for the presencing of truth as the World-Earth strife is the prerogative of Dasein’s activity, and is presupposed by all externalized objectifications of being where the latter is merely thought of as present, and not attuned to the integral phenomenon of presencing: "But it is not we who presuppose the unconcealedness of beings; rather, the unconcealedness of beings (Being) puts us into such a condition of being that in our representation we always remain installed within and in attendance upon unconcealedness." (Ibid; Pg. 50).

The role of the artist is then not just to create the work as an object, but to preserve in its coming-to-be the rift wherein truth comes into presencing, in the tension of un-concealment. The artistic work thereby serves as a sort of punctual concentration where on the one hand the creative projection of Dasein’s world-formation, and the grounding self-concealment of being as the Earth on the other, become palpable in their co-appropriateness. Thus to ‘set-to-work’ means to stand within the space of truth opened by the work, realizing that the latter is in such a strife, and that "…to create is to cause something to emerge as a thing that has been brought-forth." (Ibid; pg. 58) This dynamic movement of creation and concealment obviously relates back to the link between equipment as incorporated within a nexus of opened possibilities, discursive or practical, and non-objectual being which withdraws from theorizing. The work in this way produces a ‘framing’ (Ge-stell) for the disclosure of truth; and not merely a presented form (morphe) for objects. Therefore, if the thing’s ‘thingliness’ is to be found in its ‘earthly’ dimension (in its concealment) as much as in its ‘worldly’ dimension (as disclosed usability or serviceability), then it is because truth is precisely this unified tension between the two movements. And since the Earth’s recession does not index a set of invisible properties, essences or forms, that which conceals itself is the void of being as such, in its non-objectual depth: “The thing’s thingness does not lie at all in the material of which it consists, but in the void that holds.” (PLT; Pg. 167) For Heidegger it becomes the prerogative of art and the poetic word, to let unconcealment resonate in the work’s presencing, against scientific abstraction.

As we shall see in the next section of the paper, this will turn out to have a radical bearing on Heidegger’s conception of history, and by extension, of the tasks pending for thought in relation to science, cognition and action. We shall briefly recapitulate how the work of Hegel offers an alternative account of truth which both challenges and expounds the former’s key critical insights.

II – Hegel and Representation: Cognition, Knowledge, Science.

"What is rational, is actual

What is actual, is rational"

G.W.F. Hegel - Preface to the Philosophy of Right (p.ixi)

As we saw above, Heidegger's attempt to unyoke truth from the tradition required first and foremost to overcome the framework of representational rationality wherein being was equated to the object, the merely 'present-at-hand' correlate of thought for a subject. In similar spirit, Hegel's The Encyclopaedia Logic contends that although philosophy must indeed begin with a consideration of ob-jects (Gegenstand) as given to us in common-sense cognition (Erkennen), this is only propadeutic in the way of elevating knowledge (Wissen) into the 'comprehensive cognition' proper to scientific thinking (Wissenschaft)[13].While in immediate representation being remains contingently postulated, it falls to philosophy to produce the appropriate concepts to establish their actual logical necessity: "... in the order of time consciousness produces representational notions of ob-jects before it produces concepts of them; and that the thinking spirit only advances to thinking cognition and comprehension by going through representation and by converting oneself to it... that thoughtful consideration implies the requirement that the necessity of its content should be shown, and the very being, as well as the determinations of its ob-jects should be proved."(Hegel, EL, Pg. 24).

This 'conceptually comprehensive' cognition which exceeds representation must first dislodge itself from the various "forms of thought" in which knowledge is commonly yielded: feeling, intuition, representation, etc (Ibid. Pg. 25). The scientific valence of the philosophical concept is so uncompromising on this account that Hegel will even go as far as claiming that representational notions are 'mere metaphors' of these concepts. (Ibid). In this regard, we can already grasp a fundamental divergence with Heidegger's account, insofar as for the latter the valence of conceptual rationality must in the last instance see itself as performing an ontological occlusion in contrast to the disclosing function of the poetic word, prized free from representation. Although both Hegel and Heidegger agree in that philosophical production generates the discursive necessity of being as opposed to mere objectual representation, for Hegel nothing is lost by virtue of the transcription to the concept. Quite the contrary, it is only within the scope of thought and ideality that the abstractions of immediate being and representation attain full-fledged actuality, i.e. logico-metaphysical necessity. As Hegel himself puts it: "... the genuine content of our consciousness is preserved when it is translated into the form of thought and the concept...the content of philosophy is actuality. The first consciousness of this content is called experience. Within the broad realm of outer and inner thereness a judicious consideration of the world already distinguishes that which only appearance, transient and insignificant, from that which truly and in itself merits the name of actuality." (Pg. 28-29). Thus while Heidegger conceives that the coruscating abstraction of the concept and the object further removes one from the opening of being given over to immediate experience and against the mediation of subject-object relations, Hegel disavows experiential immediacy as a merely transient abstraction which falls short of determining the ontological valence of the datum of representation. Whereas thinking experience requires for Heidegger a deconstructive (Destruktion) restoration from conceptual abstraction, for Hegel all such appeals to experience just exacerbate conceptual abstraction itself, as the most barren thinking requiring sublation (Aufgehoben). The enigmatic formula 'the actual is rational' therefore means: nothing escapes logical necessity, there is no gulf of 'pre-conceptual' being or 'pre-ontological' understanding through which emanates the positive actuality of the wealth of the possible, no 'gift' of being cleared in the Open. The immediacy of that 'inner and outer thereness' is quickly deposed of as a trite banality for Hegel, in which the Concept (affected by self-relating negativity) comes to sublate itself from its height of abstraction. Because logic qua scientific reason establishes the actuality of being, it will follow that all contingent determinations falling back on our unmediated 'clearing onto' the world amidst beings, as conceived in Dasein's primordial 'thrownness', are shed off as gratuitously posited, empty thoughts. More dramatically, Hegel allots such an elevation of the abstraction of experience to being one of the 'passions of the understanding' and which, given over to contingency and facticity, disassociate being and the Idea to the point of exacerbating its emptiest moment:

"But even for our ordinary feeling, a contingent existence does not deserve to be called something-actual in the emphatic sense of the word; what contingently exists has no greater value than that which something-possible has; it is an existence which (although it is) can just as well not be. But when I speak of actuality...I distinguish it clearly and directly, not just from what is contingent... but also, more precisely, from being-there, from existence, and from other determinations.

The notion that ideas and ideals are nothing but chimeras and that philosophy is a system of pure phantasms, sets itself at once against the actuality of what is rational... However, the severing of actuality from the Idea is particularly dear to the understanding, which regards its dreams (i.e. its abstractions) as something genuine" (Ibid: Pg. 30)

What is interesting here is that while, for Heidegger, the dismantling of the object of representation is conceived precisely as such a removal from abstraction, delivered back from the present-at-hand to the holistic integration of worlds and of ready-to-hand equipment, Hegel sees the hermeneutic 'peddling backwards' to a point of originary disclosure as a literary embellishment of abstraction at its culprit. As such, those attempting to seize a 'pre-conceptual' or 'pre-ontological' domain from the understanding through conceptual means, that is, those who have too high a 'regard for their dreams', end up doing reifying the most barren of abstractions, disguising the inherent incoherence of their endeavor. Or, as Hegel puts it, "To want to have cognition before we have any is as absurd as the wise resolve of Scholasticus to learn to swim before he ventured into the water." (Ibid: Pg. 34) Only the Concept in the pure thinking carried by the scientific philosopher can establish by itself the necessity to legitimize the actual; everything else becomes mere moralistic prescription or metaphorical abstraction (Ibid). The 'beginnings' elevated by the phenomenological embrace of the lifeworld, along the purported restoration of an authentic attunement (Stimmen) by heeding to the call of the pre-conceptual, are rather always "immediate, found, presupposed"(Ibid: Pg. 33). Philosophy's job is not to recuperate or restore them, but to prize them free of their contingently established content by the means of 'speculative thought'. The relation between the universal genera of thought and the wealth of particular determinations as found in objective reality must then, through philosophy, follow intrinsically from the dialectical deployment of the Concept's self-relation, and not as a relation of an experiential pole contingently tethered to an externality (Ibid). Against the flattening of the subject-object dyad into the 'World' through an account of purposive practice, Hegel's that "...while each of these moments does also appear as distinct, neither of them can be wanting, and they are inseparably bound together" (Ibid; Pg. 36).

But this must mean that whatever appears as immediately given must in truth be always already, implicitly, affected by a mediation, by its exact opposite. The purely given must in truth already presuppose that to which it is given as given; the object of immediate reflection can only be implicitly given as datum for the factum of thinking. In order to capture the pregnancy of the concept which triggers its reversal, Hegel inscribes thus the general operation of the dialectic's logical movement, in which the identity of a being is all the same affected by its opposite determination, reverting into it before establishing the unity of its moments[14]. And just like the immediacy of pure Being reverts into Nothing, only to see itself sublated as the unity of Becoming, logico-metaphysical knowledge supersedes the immediacy of all sensible content to unearth its tacit conceptual mediation[15]: "In this way, our knowledge of God, like our knowledge of all that is supersensible in general, essentially involves an elevation (Aufgehoben) above sensible feeling or intuition; hence it involves a negative attitude toward the latter as first and in that sense it involves mediation.[16]" (Pg; 82)

We should be clear to read the implicitly anti-Kantian gesture indicated here by the appeals to intuition and sensibility. The point Hegel seeks to underline, and which applies to Heidegger as well, is that the factical 'givenness' of the representational form of experience, tethered to sensuous receptivity, is irremediably external to thinking if merely posited as a given datum 'without reason'. Thus the facultative split in the Kantian edifice, which separates the understanding from intuition as the two 'species' of representation, cannot but reproduce the externality of the universal (categories) with regard to its particularizing sensible content, which then become contingently stapled one onto the other as a series of schematic instantiations of the objects of experience. Similarly, with Heidegger, although the horizonal, ecstatic transcendence of Dasein's projection is the condition of possibility for Worlds and the clearing of all beings, this enabling condition must be itself factically given or unconditioned, i.e. Dasein's facticity (Fakticitat) entails that it is thrown 'without reason' into the world, capable of the anxiety before being's non-latency in the Open.

The result is that while metaphysical concepts may clarify the necessary structure for the encounter with beings, it is no less true that the contingency of the transcendental with respect to its object remains as a purely contingent givenness. This is the unobjectivizable aspect of experiential givenness, the factical ecstatic transcendence which makes Dasein 'in each case mine' (Jemeinigkeit), irreducible to the still conceptually objectified subjective consciousness. This is a transcendental agency shorn of its substantialist residue, and which is tethered to the world not just as object, but as caretaker and producer[17]. Dasein's ecstatic transcendence is the phenomenological analogue to the Kantian spontaneous synthetic transcendence of thinking which yielded the inseparability between the understanding and intuition, concept and object[18]. However, there is a second transcendence at work here, which in Kant already marked the external kernel to the co-determination of the transcendental subject and the transcendental object[19]. While the latter remains the 'empty form of the object' constituted only under the general category of substance within the understanding, the noumenon is rather the 'concept without an object' (ens rationis), which is not transcendental but transcendent to all subjective synthesis, negatively determined within it as its opaque Other[20]. And it is this negative noumenon which, for Kant, grounds the transcendence of the subject in the externality of the world. It serves thus as a kind of index within experience of what is resolutely non-experiential, i.e. it is irreducible to the phenomenal order of appearances and its categorical form as given in thought. Similarly, in the Heideggerean account, we find a structural counterpart to the disclosing horizon of Dasein and beings, signaled through the opaque externality of the Earth. The latter targets a non-objectivizable excess to Dasein's world-disclosing capacity, not just to the objectual configurations of present-at-hand abstraction, but even to ready-to-hand practical engagement, and so to the pre-ontological understanding in the midst of beings[21]. It is not so much an abstract concept as much as the concept of an absolute abstraction, shorn of even the pre-ontological disclosure of the ready-to-hand, let alone objectual presence-at-hand in substance. For Heidegger, however, this paradoxical experiential index of the non-experiential 'nothingness of being' is not the supplementary source of practical imperatives, as is the case with Kant's 'noumenal freedom'. It is rather distantly indexed under peculiar 'ontologically attuned' dispositions such as anxiety and profound boredom, where being-as-a-whole, in its non-latency and removal, levels the horizon of beings, showing their common grounding in the void of being[22].

That way, the ontological difference between being and beings, and the former's incommensurability to ontico-scientific rationality produces an iteration of the contingently posited relation between transcendental subject along with its phenomenal objects, and the purely negative, non-experiential noumenal 'concept without an object'[23]. Only this time it is cashed out in terms of a) Dasein's world-disclosure as a clearing of beings, and b) the transcendence of the Earth's asymptotic and abyssal recession as the ground of being. The former co-appropriation of being and thought remains fully ideal since it locates the transcendence of being within the experiential horizon opened by Dasein's transcendence onto beings, while the latter remains the concept of an abslolute scission from the ideal. Thought's transcendence, just as Hegel remarks apropos Kant's 'spontaneity of thinking' and the noumenal as limit-concept, then simply presupposed as an a priori factum for thought, falling short of the necessity proper to philosophico-scientific cognition. In this regard, the disclosing transcendence of Dasein severed from its transcendent ground repeats the Kantian gesture of locating the 'noumenal' transcendence of the object as a formal distinction (distinctio formalis) within the objectivating transcendence of the subject and its intra-experiential content[24]. Ray Brassier (2011) develops this line of thought in fuller detail.

" [T]he noumenal ground of appearances is not a substance considered in abstraction from its relation to the subject, but a concept considered in abstraction from its relation to the object. Thus the noumenon as “thought-entity” or intelligible nothing is not just an abstract concept, but rather the concept of an absolute abstraction, existing independently of its abstraction from experience. In this regard, and contrary to the familiar Hegelian rebuke according to which Kant abandons the in-itself to the domain of the inconceivable, the noumenon as intelligible nothing lays claim to the territory of the in-itself for conceptualization, without presumptively annexing it to the latter. From Kant, through Heidegger, to Laruelle, the postulate of the in-itself requires that we rethink the metaphysical hypostatization of being-in-itself, which is an abstraction relative to an empirically given reality, as the absolute reality of abstraction.[25] " (Brassier, 2011, pgs. 9-10)

The Earth as the receding polar counterpart of the World as horizon localizes immanently within experiential possibilities an excessive dimension which establishes its actual 'grounding', by virtue of its unobjectivizable transcendence. This is what is indexed by Dasein's dwelling on an abyssal Earth, insofar as being qua being remains intractable by the objectivizing concept. Thus Heidegger can claim that in the passage from the possible to the actual "... this transition is to be understood, not in the sense that the possible relinquishes a way of being, but rather in the sense that it first of all receives a being." (Heidegger, 1988: Pg, 98) The ground of the Earth is the 'gift' of being upon which Dasein's horizonal disclosure of possibilities sets to work. And since this element of productivity is rendered entirely correlative to Dasein's projective disclosure of worlds, endowing a particular prerogative to the laborious production of the poetic word (poiseis) and of the artist, only existence can guarantee the full actualization of the givenness of being's abstract void. While the non-objectual Earth grounds Dasein's existential possibility for worlds, thrown into the world the latter becomes the 'shepherd of being'- its 'caretaker', insofar as existence endows it with the capacity of productivity needed to fully actualize being-as-ground over into the vast expanse of beings.

So in Heidegger's dislodging of essence from substance-determined 'whatness', annexing it rather to the pre-objectual, being as such ceases to be the correlate of an ideal act produced within transcendental disclosure, but becomes a reified conceptual abstraction negatively rendered as the polar counterpart of conceptual thought with positive content. Laruelle (1986) in this regard writes: "Essence is no longer a transcendent ideality, in the metaphysical sense. It is rather real or absolute transcending- not a particularly, i.e. objectivized being that is transcendent in the theological style, but rather the transcending of the real in-itself that no longer has any object-term and that is absolute scission [separating its radical immanence from transcendental horizonal disclosure]. Under the name of Finitude, Heidegger thinks the real, absolute opposite, the 'Other' of every relation of objectivation; the un-objectivizable real that is the essence of Being[...]" (Laruelle 2010; Pgs. 63-4)

Yet under strict Hegelian scrutiny these obdurate appeals to an unobjectivizable transcendence continue to ring hollow, in virtue of the gratuitous facticity endowed to Dasein's transcendental status, and the equally contingent externality endowed to the Earth's transcendent status. In this regard, Hegel's diagnosis against the critical autonomy of immediacy and experience in a way reiterates the criticism Kant had already leveled against classical metaphysics. Insofar as metaphysics remains incapable of deducing the categories which give way to the objects of experience, philosophy falls short of its name by failing to secure the necessity between the empirical and the transcendental: the universal genera which provide the determinations, and the manifold particular contents which actualize them. That is, if the determination of the empirical can only be legitimated a priori by an arbitrarily posited categorical framework for objective individuation, then critique has merely transposed the arbitrariness of dogmatic metaphysics into the agency of the transcendental subject. Thus while we find in Kant a transcendental deduction of the categories, their synthesis as the 'transcendental unity of apperception' is contingently posited, and presupposed as factically given. Indeed, this seems to be Hegel's own contention when claiming that for Kant experience is endowed with necessity, but that it is factically given as the necessity/universality of appearances within the 'spontaneity of thinking'. Hegel writes: "Critical philosophy holds on to the factum that universality and necessity, being also essential determinations, are found to be present in what is called experience. And, because this element does not stem from the empirical as such, it belongs to the spontaneity of thinking, or is a priori. The thought-determinations of concepts of the understanding make up the objectivity o the cognitions of experience...Bu the critical philosophy extends the antithesis in such a way that experience in its entirety falls within subjectivity, i.e. both of these elements together [subjectivity and objectivity] are subjective, and nothing remains in contrast with subjectivity except the thing-in-itself" (Ibid: Pg. 81).[26] Kant thus finally subordinates necessity to a kind of contingency, that of the transcendental subject as the unified agent of synthesis. And insofar as it ventured to neatly separate the subject and the object, and to initiate a preliminary study into the faculty of knowledge ("pure reason") disentangling itself from its counterpart, critical philosophy attempted, like we indicated above, to not go into the water until it had learnt to swim (Ibid: Pg. 82).

The facticity of the transcendental and of the understanding which predates on the immediacy of intuited content as an external datum must therefore appear to Hegel as a gratuitous presupposition. If, as phenomenological wisdom would have it, immediate experience is the source of all philosophical meditation and of the content of representation, then this is only insofar as thinking has always already affected it with mediation, the stigma of contradiction and negativity. Negativity becomes the sufficient reason by which the Concept immanently unfolds itself into its concrete determinations with logical necessity; both object and subject must bear the mark of their respective polar opposites. However, this is not to say that it would be possible to think of an object without 'categories', prized free of individuating distinctions. Rather, what Hegel means is that "Although the categories... pertain to thinking as such, it does not at all follow from this that they must therefore be merely something ours, and not also determinations of objects themselves." (Ibid: Pg 86). This resists the Heideggerean and Kantian appeals to the transcendent object or to the Earth, as the 'thought entity', the 'intelligible nothingness', void even of minimal objectual determinations, glaring in their foreign and empty conceptuality. That Heidegger refuses to acknowledge the height of conceptual abstraction in his appeals to the Earth is on this account trivial, since Hegel insists on refusing to glorify barren abstraction and to endow it with non-conceptual reality. There is no index of non-experience within experience, or of 'the void of being' as external to thought. Thought determines Being as implied in the Concept's self-determination, or as thinking to itself. The Concept is not merely thought's abstracting agent; being-in-itself is not transcendent to thought[27].

It follows that no propadeutic enquiry into the faculty of the understanding or pure reason, inflecting reflection on the 'transcendental subject', could neatly disentangle itself from the object, just like the latter cannot be understood without implicit mediation by the subjective. By the same token, no deconstructive return to the pre-ontological understanding of worldhood can neatly disentangle itself from implicit conceptual determinacy. The putative immediacy of experience, bereft from all thought, constitutes thus the abstraction in critical philosophy we indicated above apropos Heidegger's avowal of a pre-ontological understanding in worldhood:

"We can say that philosophy owes its first beginning to experience (to what is a posteriori). But that is not saying very much, for thinking is in fact essentially the negation of something immediately given... thinking's own immediacy (that which is a priori) is inwardly reflected and hence inwardly mediated; it is universality, the overall being-at-home-with-itself of thinking." (EL: Pg 36) The purported formal emptiness of the categories, quilted in by the 'givenness' of the sensible manifold is utterly disavowed by Hegel, who insists on the contrary that the categories themselves must be taken, not as formal husks void of content, but as the determinate content of the objects themselves: "To assert that, by themselves the categories are empty is unfounded, because they have a content in any case, just by being determinate." (Ibid: Pg. 86)

In similar spirit, we could suggest that the so called 'occlusion' of the Vorhandenheit upon the realm of being, its 'merely derivative nature', and so also the allegedly abstract status of the scientific 'ontic' specification of beings, would all be for Hegel supervening on a gratuitous depreciation of conceptuality by appeals to the non-conceptual / non-latency of being's concealment. The latter is merely to repeat Kant's critical unilateral inflection of the object into the subject in phenomenological form. Even if the phenomenon is nested within Dasein's transcendental horizon, this is still only insofar as their synthesis remains tethered to the unobjectivizable Earth, which ultimately indexes the ontological remove of all scientific cognition-objectification. The inability of critical philosophy to dialectically deduce the possible content of the object from the Concept itself thus prevents it from realizing that immanent contradiction within thought renders it sufficient, with no needs for an ephemeral outside. Once contradiction and radical negativity is seen to infect thought from the start, it is shown to be the base ontological principle or sufficient reason of the dialectic. This marks the fundamental limitation in critical philosophy: in the transcendental idealist account, antinomies reduce contradictions to mere possible schemas of objects, within the specific domain of what Kant called 'cosmological objects'. These, however, remain relatively independent, and merely form distinct classes designating possible instantiations of contradictory objects. Against this, contradiction must be pervasive so that we can see that its “…true and positive significance is that everything actual contains opposed determinations within it, and in consequence the cognition and, more exactly, the comprehension of an object, amounts precisely to our becoming conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations.” (Ibid, Pg. 93).

We may summarize Hegel’s contention as saying that contradiction cannot merely be a set of possible, purely logical schemas on the basis of a presupposed categorical framework. The object is not merely contradictory insofar as it finds itself in possible "antinomic" individuation with respect to certain categories. Rather, the primacy of contradiction entails that the latter is not just logical but also constitutively metaphysical or ontological; the gap between the universal and the particular indexes that which is metaphysically real, the 'between the two' as self-relating negativity. Contradiction comes to install itself from the start and all-pervasively, so that it will not be a possibility of logical reason alone, but a real necessity, shown by the dialectic, as well. The Kantian impasse consists then in subordinating contradiction to the categories and so to the understanding.

”It may also be remarked that, as a result of his failure to study the antinomy in more depth, Kant brings forward only four antinomies. He arrives at them by presupposing the table of categories just as he did in the case of the so-called paralogisms. While doing this he followed the procedure, which became so popular afterwards-, of simply subsuming the determinations of an ob-ject under a ready-made schema, instead of deducing them from the Concept…[but] antinomy is found not only in the four particular ob-jects taken from cosmology, but rather in all objects of all kinds, in all representations, concepts, and ideas.” - (Ibid: Pg. 92)

We must be clear to differentiate the scope of the manifold concepts “within which” antinomies are found in pure reason, from the general claim according to which contradiction functions as a general principle of the Concept, i.e. the logico-metaphysical motor of the dialectic which leads from the immediacy of Being to the full historical movement of the Spirit. Thinking is then deserving of the name of an 'active universal' insofar as it enacts the process whereby actual necessity is established in all of the Concept's moments, and in which the externality of thought with respect to being is overcome: "The Logical is to be sought in a system of thought-determinations in which the antithesis between subjective and objective (in its usual meaning) disappears." (Ibid; Pg. 56)

In that regard, we should not understand Hegel's dissolution of the gap between subject and object to mean that they will be rendered trivially indistinct in a higher synthesis. Rather, they will be shown to be mutually implicating, as opposite determinations, and therefore presented as moments in the Concept's self-deployment. By the same token, every concept or universal determination will be affected by its opposite, and so it will contain within itself a moment of 'untruth' in not fully coinciding with its particularizations. Insofar as every positive determination is finitely given, "...all finite things, however, are affected with untruth; they have a concept but their existence is not adequate to it." (Ibid) This permanent gap between the universal and the particular is what allows us to see that the subject contains in itself the objective determination which was merely a contingent externality for critical philosophy, and a blinding derivation in Heidegger's account[28]. Similarly, it allows us to see how the object in itself is not the mere synthesizing of the transcendental form endowed by the understanding, a factum operating upon the passivity of empirical intuition as a datum. This is accomplished by subverting the identitarian, static regime of ontic individuation in favor of nesting the dynamism of contradiction or 'absolute negativity' at the heart of every finite conceptual determination. This is why, strictly speaking, both Being and Nothingness as the first moment of the Concept remain 'empty abstractions', falling short of dynamic becoming. Only once their mutual implication is established in the oscillation of Becoming do we get a 'first concrete determination', albeit still a rather barren one: "Becoming is the first concrete thought and hence the first concept, whereas being and nothing, in contrast, are empty abstractions... Becoming is imply the positedness of what being is in its truth." (Ibid, Pg. 144).

However, the role of philosophy is not just to isolate the finite, nested antitheses proper to beings (which belong still to the faculty of the understanding). More importantly, the sublation of the nested antitheses at the 'higher level' of mediation, allows logic to specify further the objects of thought by the latter's speculative means (which belongs to Reason properly speaking, and so to infinite thought). Philosophy "...is in fact the very discipline that aims at liberating man from an infinite crowd of finite purposes and intentions and at making him indifferent with regard to them..." (Ibid; Pg 146). Philosophy must both begin by prizing itself free from the finitude of contingent determination, and must thus begin with a pure abstraction from those determinations. If being-in-itself is thus the starting point for the science it is also because it prizes thought free of subordinating being to its finite 'interests', as the abstract starting point for the logical movement of the Concept. In this regard, Hegel sees a putative advantage already in classical metaphysics over modern critique, since it ventured to think of the determinations of being-in-itself as inseparable from thought, thus resisting the severance occasioned by the transcendental "philosophies of access"[29]. Nevertheless, its fault lied in thinking that objective determinations could simply yield the determinations of thought uncritically, and therefore it did not supersede the one-sided dimension of the subjective understanding, and thus of finite thought. Thought's infinity, unyoking itself from the understanding and ascending to Reason, therefore involves enacting the immanent (rather than transcendent) co-determination of thought on being, thinking and its object[30]. Or rather, in philosophy, one cannot think anything but thinking itself, since thought becomes its own object: "Hence, the finite subsists in its relation to its other, which is its negation and presents itself as its limit. But thinking is at home with itself, it relates itself to itself, and is its own ob-ject. Insofar as my ob-ject is a thought, I am at home with myself. Thus the I, or thinking, is infinite because it is related in thinking to an ob-ject that is itself... If thinking thinks itself, then it has an ob-ject that is at the same time not an ob-ject, i.e. an ob-ject that is sublated, ideal." (Ibid: Pg. 67)

This infinitude must be immanently determined within the antithetical positivity of the finite, since if it were merely posited externally to it, then it would pose a limit to it, reactivating the spurious infinity of dogmatic metaphysics and of religious reifications of the 'highest being'. The dialectical movement of sublation as self-relation is finally what renders the speculative identity of the infinite Concept and the finite determinations of being, overcoming their antithetical positing. Or put in Hegel's own words: "Genuine cognition of an ob-ject, on the other hand, has to be such that the ob-ject determines itself from within itself, and does not acquire its predicates in this external way." (Ibid). John McCumber (1993) renders this point in the following passage:

"If finite being can be resolved into its properties, and if those properties are the same as the determinations brought forth in the self-development of the Concept, does it not seem plausible for Hegel to say that correspondence of finite being and infinite Concept is, ultimately, their identity? It is then unsurprising to find Hegel saying that nothing can exist "completely without identity of concept and reality."" (McCumber: 1993, Pg. 50) This is to reiterate the original thesis according to which logic coincides with metaphysics. The thesis 'the actual is rational' reinstates the unity of thought and being, the former endowing with logical necessity the finite determinations of the latter.

The infinite displacement of being's determinacy over and into opposite determinations, then achieving sublating antithesis, is therefore immanent to the Concept alone. And so all appeals to a world-disclosing function by non-conceptual means, in sight of reintegrating thought to its 'world', cannot but be seen from the Hegelian perspective as a desperate reification of immediate being or absolute abstraction as a finite externality of sorts[31]. In its Heideggerean version, this would amount to the transcendent abstraction of the Earth set against the finite transcendence of Dasein's temporal-horizonal being-there. In this regard one might anticipate that, for Hegel, the Heideggerean gesture of localizing the 'realist' locus for metaphysics on the receding Earth, set-to-work in the poetic act and in the artwork, attempts a mystical evacuation of the pervasiveness of the Concept. For, after all, the worldly expanse, the 'there' reserved for the artistic and foreclosed for the artisan, is paired by Hegel to the dogmatic lure which remains unworthy of the Idea: "Being-there is in no way a merely positive determination, but one that is to lowly for the idea, and unworthy of God." and so that attributions of transcendence reified in such a manner offer "... a restricted content, and they show themselves to be inappropriate to the fullness of the representation (of God, nature, spirit) which they do not at all exhaust." (Ibid: Pg. 68).

Although Hegel shares the Heideggerean suspicion against the merely predicative form of propositional truth, he would nevertheless insist that the quasi-poetic ruminations on art and religious temples, in the process of seeking to index the Earth's receding ground, remains a surreptitious moment of predicative attribution obscuring through metaphoric bombast the arbitrariness of its external delimitation. The real means toward overcoming sedentary finite representation consists rather in locating within the Concept's immanence the capacity of opposite determinations, or contradiction as such, in order to dynamically set it in motion. Representational correctness is supplanted by dialectical truth only when the Concept sublates the antithetical placing of terms and shows their co-determination as a unity, or their mutual implication: "...these determinations are not valid when they are isolated from one another, but only when sublated...since the Concept is something-concrete and since it is itself every determinacy without exception, it is essentially, and within itself, a unity of distinct determinations" (Ibid: Pg. 70). Again, McCumber outlines the predicament: "Truth is not then for Hegel the simple identification, partial or full, of concept and thing; it is rather the complex movement from one to the other, in which both degrees of identity are equally necessary and which cannot be understood in terms of either alone: in his early formulation, it is the "identity of identity and non-identity."" (McCumber: 1993, Pg. 51)

Hegel thus allows us to crystallize the reasoning behind the Heideggerean drama against science and technology, and in favor of poetry and art. It also allows us to precipitate the later Heidegger's wholesale deposition of philosophy as complicit with metaphysics, now squarely allotted against 'thinking' as such[32]. Already in OWA, the artwork, and not scientific speculation or metaphysics, is the site of preservation where being's tensional split is ‘set-to-work’ in its having come-into-being through the createdness of world-forming Dasein. Science, the handmaiden of poetry and philosophy, crucially "is not an original happening of truth, but always the cultivation of a domain of truth already opened, specifically by apprehending and confirming that which shows itself to be possibly and necessarily correct within that field. When and insofar as a science passes beyond correctness and goes on to a truth, which means that it arrives at the essential disclosure of what is as such, it is philosophy.”[33] (Heidegger, OWA; Pg. 60) For both poetry and art, as we have seen, testify to the holistic framework of relations and possibilities which structures worlds and historical epochs. That worlds could only emerge apart from science’s coruscating forgetfulness, and only in the ‘thinking’ of truth under which art, poetry and philosophy are siblings, underlines Heidegger's antipathy to the object, to cognition and representation as complicit with the unthinking scientific method. For it is clear that Heidegger’s sustained attack on conceiving being from representation’s emptying occlusion articulates more generally what he deems to be the destiny of the Western historical development, leading down the spiral towards the technical domination of nature’s non-objective givenness. The occlusion of truth in favor of objectual presence cannot but render invisible the primordial strife between the Earth and the World in which art and philosophical meditation (Besinnung) stand to presencing. The compulsion to ‘wrest’ beings without limitation accounts for the modern derail of Man as ‘standing-reserve’ (Ge-Stell), that is, the technological obsession now destining Western thought to ‘frame’ nature, rendering it pragmatically available and fixed before man through the context-shattering cog of representation and science:

“That context is essential, because related to the destiny of Being. Framing, as the nature of modern technology, derives from the Greek way of experiencing letting-lie-forth, logos, from the Greek poiesis and thesis. In setting up the frame, the framework—which now means in commandeering everything into assured availability—there sounds the claim of the ratio redderpda, i.e., of the logon didonai, but in such a way that today this claim that is made in framing takes control of the absolute, and the process of representation—of Vor-stellen or putting forth—takes form, on the basis of the Greek perception, as making secure, fixing in place.” (Heidegger, QCT, Pg; 83)

The dialectic of the Absolute coming into its own thus finds a curious inversion in Heidegger’s thinking. Representation’s proliferation only exacerbates the movement of forgetfulness already implied in the derail of the first Greek beginning of metaphysics, where being was equated to the aspect of presence in the Idea. The calamitous aftermath of this forgetting of being devolves in the conversion of art into a commercial issue, of philosophy into mere science, and all ontology into ontics[34]. Under the oblivious reign of technology, impervious to the call of being, man’s destiny seems apocalyptically sealed, so that in the end “only a God can save us![35]” For Heidegger thus, the hopeless recipe against the maledictions of technology and science imply a certain passivity, rather than cognitive activity, perhaps leading to "three hundred years of silence" and an attitude of ‘releasement’ (Gelassenheit), prescribed to undo the damage performed by the tradition. If we understand the presencing of the Gods as the ‘situatedness’ of Dasein before truth as unconcealment, making up a historical destiny, then we can understand that Heidegger’s call for the Gods' return in sight of their ‘flight’ signals the requirement to recuperate the truth-disclosing and world-inaugurating ambition of art and poiesis, away from science and mere techne. If poetry is wed essentially to art and truth, Heidegger argues, it is in the original Greek sense in which poiesis lets what is present come forth into unconcealment, and thereby articulates a historical world.

“For now the melting down of the self-consummating essence of the modern age into the self-evident is being accomplished. Only when this is assured through world views will the possibility arise of there being a fertile soil for Being to be in question in an original way – a questionableness of Being that will open ample space for the decision as to whether Being will once again become capable of a god, as to whether the essence of the truth of Being will lay claim more primally to the essence of man. Only there where the consummation of the modern age attains the heedlessness that is its peculiar greatness is future history being prepared.” (QCT; Pg. 153).

Against the fatalist drama against the perils of technological reason, Hegel's predicament stands as remarkably modern in turn: philosophy only exist as science, and it has yet to rise to become worthy of that name. The supposition of a non-latent reservoir of unobjectivizable and transcendent being is the truly occluding gesture, which veils the necessity to determine the Concept's self-relation and thinking's immanent pursuit with regards to itself: "But is it easy to see that, even if it is taken in its totally abstract sense, the Concept includes being within itself. For however, the Concept may be further determined it is itself minimally the immediate relation to itself that emerges through the sublation of its mediation, and being is nothing but that... for thought, nothing can have less import than "being". (Ibid: Pg. 94). Mediation does not trump immediacy, but explains it; conceptuality does not occlude the purity of being, it actualizes it and determines it (Ibid: Pg. 115)[36]. This ultimately renders transparent the division between the two philosophers, and wherein they locate truth: either on the side of unobjectivizable being onto which only caring creation in the setting-to-work of art and poiesis harbors the hope of a non-conceptual thinking that restores a primordial innocence, or on the side of the Concept's self development, by its own, strictly immanent means.

References/Cited Works/ Bibliography

1. Brassier, Ray. Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction, Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

2. Brassier. Ray. The Reality of Abstraction, in Speculations, 2011.

3. Brassier, Ray. Alien Theory: The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter, doctoral thesis for Warwick, 2009.

4. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time, translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson, Harper & Row, Publishers, Incorporated, 1962.

5. Heidegger, Martin. The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, translated by Alfred Hofstadter, Indiana University Press, 1982.

6. Heidegger, Martin. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, translated by William McNeil and Nicholas Walker, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995.

7. Heidegger, Martin. What is Called Thinking?, translated by J. Glenn Gray, Harper and Row, 1968.

8. Heidegger, Marin. Poetry, Language, Thought, Harper and Row, 2001.

9. Heidegger, Martin. The Question Concerning Technology, translated by William Lovitt, Harper Torchbooks.

10. Hegel, G.W.F. The Encyclopaedia Logic, translated by Theodore Garaets, H.S Harris, W.A Suchting, Hackett Pub, 1991.

11. Kant. Immanuel. Critique of Pure Reason, Cambridge University Press, 1998.

12. Laruelle, Francois, Philosophies of Difference, translated by Rocco Gangle, Continuum, 2010.

13. McCumber, John, The Company of Words, Northwestern University Press, 1993.

14. Sellars, W. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1997.

15. Veto, M. De Kant a Schelling. Les deux voies de l'Idealisme allemand. Tome II, Grenoble: Jerome Millon, 1998.

Index of Abbreviations

· EL : Enclyclopedia Logic, by G.W.F. Hegel

· OWA = Origin of the Work of Art, by Martin Heidegger

· PLT = Poetry Language, Thought, by Martin Heidegger

· BT: Being and Time by Martin Heidegger

· QCT: The Question Concerning Technology by Martin Heidegger

[1] The German word for 'object' generally has two possible translations: Objekt and Gegenstand. Although these two distinct terms differ little in meaning, both in common German and in Heidegger's account, it will turn out to be a weightier distinction for Hegel, as we shall see below. Provisionally, it should be remarked Objekt is usually paired with Subjekt so as to emphasize the former's relation of 'standing against' the latter, and thus of the correlation between the two terms. Heidegger's use of begegnen is often also used to illuminate how 'beings encounter us within the world (B&T: Pg. 44), which derives from gegen as "coming-up-against", to "en-counter", or confront (LXV, 269). For Heidegger Gegenstand will also tend to be used to underline the object's temporal dimension, as overdetermined by the presence, or the present. For a discussion on these usages see Inwood (1999).

[2] A possible definition of presencing is given on his essay Science and Reflection: “We think presencing as the enduring of that which, having arrived to un-concealment, remains there.” (QCT; Pg. 161) The connection between this term and Heidegger’s account of truth as unconcealment is developed below.

[3] Heidegger seems to have Kant implicitly in mind here.

[4] As we shall see below, this contestation against the unified ‘thing-concept' will turn out to be a crucial point of contention also for Hegel; who already prefigured Heidegger in denying the objectual totalization of truth in the way of affirming the latter’s fundamental incompleteness, that is to say, its excessive character with respect to mere objectivity of its specific moments or instances.

[5] The essential referent left implicit for these last two conceptions would be, of course, Aristotle, who in a certain way already indexes the first two iterations and serves as a pivotal moment in the tradition’s understanding of the artwork.

[6] For reasons of space, we cannot undertake a thorough review of how this process occurs in Heidegger’s account. Let us just note here that the breakdown of ready-at-hand equipment occurs in three successive stages, leading to bare reflexive abstraction from a primary dimension of engaged practice. Usefulness and serviceability withdraw thus, and equipment is reduced to the form of an extant, present-at-hand object (Vorhandenheit). The three stages are correspondingly: conspicuousness, obtrusiveness, and obstinacy. It is this latter ‘objectual’ form which roughly corresponds in Heidegger’s account to the object or representation indexed earlier in three varieties. It is thus, for Heidegger only the most derivative, or abstract stage wherein the indistinction in act between Dasein and tool-beings qua an equipmental-whole is severed. For details, see Being and Time: Part I; Chapter I.

[7] The 'comprehensive concepts' here will thus seem closely knit to Hegel's own determination of philosophy as comprehensive cognition. The 'comprehensiveness' at stake here concerns in both thinkers the establishing of the necessity of these concepts, i.e. their proper philosophical deduction, which elevates them from arbitrary/contingent determinations.

[8] For Heidegger's more confident association of philosophy and in particular phenomenology with the scientific method, see in particular his lecture course The Basic Problems of Phenomenology (1927).

[9] The polemic with Husserl is implicit in Being and Time, much like the polemic with Kant seems implicit in Hegel's EL.

[10] This complicates certain accounts of Heidegger’s tool-analysis from a pragmatic framework; and specifically some readings which purport to find in the realm of readiness-to-hand a second kind of intentionality, supplementing the traditional vector of consciousness intending its objects. For an example of this approach see Dreyfus (1990).

[11] Heidegger crucially appropriates the concept of facticity from Kant (Faktizität), where the latter is to be understood as the 'lack of reason' for the being of transcendental conditions of disclosure. Thus while for Kant the categories are the necessary conditions of possibility for all ontic transcendence, these categories are themselves 'without reason', i.e. we cannot know why there are only twelve rather than thirteen categories, why thinking is ‘spontaneously’ given, etc. Similarly, for Heidegger, while Dasein's ecstatic transcendence allowing the clearing of the world is the condition for the encounter with beings, this ecstatic transcendence is properly factical, and as such simply designates the situatedness onto which Dasein is 'given over'. This is what is meant by saying that Dasein is ‘thrown into the world’. Thus we can gauge the complicity of the critical philosophy with terms such as 'thrownness' (Geworfenheit), which index this horizon of unobjectivizing transcendence that remains itself unobjectivizable.

It is my wager that one of Hegel's most remarkable challenges to Kant, and by extension to Heidegger, lies precisely in his rejection of facticity as a kernel 'without reason' that resists conceptual appropriation, either to open the space for practical reason to glorify noumenal freedom, or the space for the 'morning of the world' of the poetic word. For Hegel, contradiction establishes itself as the 'sufficient reason' which from the very start guarantees and secures the full-fledged deployment of the dialectic with logical necessity, so that immediacy can by itself unfold itself into its other by including opposite determinations within it. This happens just like Being as a first figure of thought becomes indiscernible from Nothing and so reverts to it, both already implying the unity of Becoming, etc. See Malpas (2003), Pg. 110; Heidegger B&T: Pg. 82, Meillassoux (2006), Pg. 35-46.

[12] Significantly, since the horizon for the disclosure of beings is a feature of worldhood, and since the latter is properly the transcendence proper to Dasein’s being (its being-in-the-world as ecstatic-horizonal transcendence) it follows that animals and plants have no world (OWA; Pg. 43). In this Heidegger retracts from his more ambiguous formulation from 1930 given in his lecture course The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics in which it was expressed rather that the animal was “poor in the world”, and which remained, as Ray Brassier (2007) has indicated, a ‘desperate sophism’ since at a loss for horizonal transcendence for which beings are no worldhood can obtain either.

[13] As should be apparent, here it is Gegenstand which is translated as 'ob-ject', while Objekt remains translated as simply object. Although for Heidegger this distinction had limited philosophical interest, for Hegel it plays a more substantive role. For the latter, Objekt pertains to a logical category, proper to the pure thinking advanced by philosophy, while Gegenstand comes to stand for the ordinary objects of experience. Thus when Hegel wages against the 'ob-ject' it should be understood that he sets against the 'common object of experience' which comprises the bulk of representational determinations of the object given to us by common sense and the tradition. These knowledges (wissen) obviously fall of the scientific cognition (Wissenschaft) which gives over the pure form of the object as a component within the dialectic. See the translator's pertinent notes in EL: Pgs. xxii, xxiii.

[14] This is what is generally meant when tracing the passage of the in-itself to the for-itself, and then in the in-and-for-itself as the synthesized alternation of being. From the immediacy of being in-itself we move into the self-alienation of being into its other, which implies already mediation and relation; only to show the mutual implication of one concept into the other as a self-supporting unity. Let us simply recall in passing the initial moment of the Logic which reproduces this movement: Being passes over onto Nothing, and their in-distinction becomes then sublated in the unity of Becoming: B ®N ® B... .«. BC. The same movement repeats itself to determine the entire wealth of determinations from this initial moment of abstraction. See McCumber (1993), and Badiou (2009).

[15] In this regard, the Hegelian logical usage of negation clearly resists the classical Aristotelian principle of non-contradiction and the excluded middle; and consequentially the principle of double negation. The negation of the negation is not equivalent to immediate affirmation, but determines its reflexive existence, its sublation at the next level of determination.

[16] Although the translators use elevation for Aufgehoben I have chosen to stick to the more standard (by now) sublation.

[17] This point is stressed by Dan Zahavi's (2005) trenchant critique of Thomas Metzinger. See his Being Someone, published in Psyche, University of Copenhagen, June 2005.

[18] The formal spontaneity of thinking is of course rendered in the fully impersonal synthetic unity proper to what Kant calls "the spontaneous unity of apperception". This unity is formal and objective since it never coincides with the empirical subject of experience (Kant 1998, B139, Pg. 157). More crucially, it is the unity of apperception which generates the bridge between a priori empty logical necessity and the empirical contingency of the a posteriori, guaranteeing an isomorphy of theory and experience. It is thus the condition of possibility for the combinatorial activity of the transcendental imagination, and so for the bridge between the transcendental analytic and the aesthetic, between the transcendent subject and transcendent object. See Brassier (2001), Pg. 168.

[19] Crucially, for Kant, the reciprocity between the transcendental subject and the pure form of the transcendental object which maps subjective representation to its represented objects. Thus "the conditions of the possibility of experience in general are likewise conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience."" (Kant. 1998, A158/B 197, . p194).

[20] Kant 1998: A290-2/B347-9

[21] In this regard, one of the most salient divergences from critical philosophy concerns how Heidegger dislodges Kant's residual rationalism found in the correlate of subjective synthesis: the 'transcendental object' as the degree zero of presence-at-hand. For Heidegger, it is not just the Earth's properly non-experiential character that designates a non-conceptual reality, but also the pre-conceptual understanding in which Dasein finds itself amidst the World, that is, amidst beings-as-a-whole. The horizon of oppenness which constitutes Dasein's relation to Being is thus not myopically tethered to form of the object, any more than to that of the subject. To do so, Heidegger finds 'the pure category of substance' still tethered to a conception of essence (ousia) as presence-at-hand. In this regard, Heidegger radicalizes what was already prefigured in the Scholastic distinction between essentia and existentia, 'whatness' and 'thatness', and the latter's actuality as irreducible to the determinacy of the former. See Heidegger (1982), particularly Part I.

However, by indexing a pre-conceptual reality and rendering it as co-determined by our meaning-endowed dealings (the co-appropriation of Man and Being, or Sein and Dasein), worldhood remains an ideal configuration, only relative within human 'activity' and thought. The Earth, for its part, remains the non-objectivizable residue which renders, even within Worlds, the dimension of the void of Being, intractable to even pre-ontological thought. In that regard it resembles the 'thought entity' of the Kantian noumenon, the 'empty concept without an object'. Our wager is that, for Hegel, to postulate a pre-conceptual, non-objectual, and indeterminate relation to Being is undermined by the surreptitious conceptual configuration that describes it from the perspective of 'factical givenness'. Facticity becomes a way to obviate the inescapability of rational necessity; it does overcome this requirement . To determine the entire structure of the holistic network of pre-ontological practice through conceptual, descriptive means renders entirely obscure the relation between such a conceptual endeavor and the structure of being itself, rendering the relation contingent and gratuitous. This point will be insisted upon for the rest of the paper in different manners.

[22] Since being is not a being, there is a sense, in which Heidegger avows the Hegelian equation between Being qua Being and Nothingness. However, whereas for Hegel this Nothingness is not a latent reservoir in recession, for Heidegger this being's 'nothingness' can be experienced, not as an object, but precisely as the impossibility of the object, of the radical split between being and beings. It is of outmost interest that if the noumenon is for Kant the 'intelligible nothing', for Heidegger this Nothingness is also intelligible, as a purely empty abstraction, void of specifiable positive content (lacking even, as with Kant, the form of 'substance' as the minimal characterization of the experiential object). This is why the leveling refusal of being-as-a-whole, which reveals the asymptotic dimension of Being as such, is reserved not for cognition or the 'violence' of the understanding, but for the dispositional disquietude which deflates the understanding's occlusion. For Heidegger's account on anxiety as a peculiarly ontologically elucidating disposition, division II of Being and Time is prerequisite. For an account on 'profound boredom' see The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1995.

[23] Kant 1998: A290-2/B347-9

[24] For a discussion on the three kinds of Scholastic distinction, and their pertinence apropos the essence-existence dyad, its effect on the Kantian edifice, and the prefiguring of the ontological difference, see Heidegger's Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Bloomington & Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1988, pgs. 88-99.

[25] Brassier follows Francois Laruelle's (2010) reading of Heidegger, in which Being is read as objectivating transcendence, and the transcendent reality of being is tethered as the non-objectivizable residue in the entity. I believe this conflates Being with Worldhood, or Sein to Dasein, since for Heidegger the non-objectual dimension is finally on the side not of the entity, but of Being itself, which is indexed in the resistant ground of the Earth as concealment. To say being is identical with horizonal disclosure is to render it indistinguishable from Dasein's ecstatic transcendence, which renders the strife between World and Earth unintelligible. Both Brassier and Laruelle are right, however, in mapping out a strong parallel between the noumenon in Kant and the non-objectual in Heidegger, and rendering the former's abstract ens rationis as continuous with the latter's attribution of Being as the void of withdrawal. For Laruelle the Heideggerean distinction between being and the entity-in-itself is analogous to the Kantian distinction between transcendental object and the noumenon. For us the proposed analogy is rather between the Heideggerean World as the unity of Dasein's transcendence onto beings along the Earth as receding index of being, and the Kantian transcendental subject-object unity (the unity of apperception) along the noumenon as the 'thought entity'. See Laruelle (2010), Chapters 2 and 3; Brassier (2011).

[26] It has been shown that in this regard Kant's project remains undermined by its one-sidedness. Transcendental philosophy presupposes the empirical immanence of scientific theory and a scientific delineation of the synthetic a priori through the assumption of a system of apodictic mathematico-scientific principles-truths. Thus, it is transcendental philosophy that assumes empirical science in order to constitute a categorical framework for subjective-objective synthesis, rather than transcendental philosophy which 'grounds' empirical science. As Veto (1998) shows this criticism had been already leveled against Kant by his immediate successors; including Haaman, Fichte, Schelling, and of course Hegel. In short, the criticism is that "...by simply tracing the transcendental conditions from the empirically conditioned, and superimposing the presumed unity of pure apperception onto the synthetic combinations of the empirical manifold, Kant merely construct a redundant, second order abstraction which, far from explaining them, simply reproduces the formal features of empirical generality at a higher level. Consequentially, the supposed transcendental reciprocity between critical philosophy and the scientific mapping of experience is only operative from the perspective of the former." (Brassier, 2001, Pg. 171). As our discussion shows, this renders the putative 'analytic' deduction of the categories and so their putative logical necessity subordinate to a contingent, factical act of transcendental synthesis modeled arbitrarily from empirical sciences. In this regard, Hegel's criticism to Kant and critical philosophy is that it presupposes science rather than grounds it with actual necessity.

[27] This is why for Hegel is makes sense to drive philosophy from the abstract to the concrete through sublation, rather than to seek the fundamental or originary, as in the deconstruction Heideggerean 'history of being' (Seinsgeschick) and its attempt to wrest the primal happening (Ur-etwas) whilst poring over old Greek words. See Brassier (2007).

[28] This point is also elaborated by McCumber (1993): "The finite thing is in truth nothing other than its role in this process- but part of that role is to stand in untruth: to take a stand against the whole process, isolate itself, and assert itself as a moment against the whole Only thus can truth be the process of its own development." (McCumber 1993: Pg. 52).

Externality, or being-other, is thus for Hegel simply a moment in the Concept 'coming-out-of-itself', where reflexivity renders it as an antagonistic pole of opposition, which is then sublated in showing itself as in-and-for-itself; the truth is precisely rendered in the dynamic self-alienation of the Concept as it develops itself through the powers of the negative, i.e. as it shows itself to be nested by opposite determinations, and set to determine itself as united to that which appears at one point as alien to itself. Thinking thus does not close the gap between thought and reality as much as preserves it in its unfolding. The identity of Concept and finite being is therefore established as they both partake as moments of thinking's (scientific) cognition, and self-determination.

[29] The expression is Graham Harman's. See his Tool Being: Heidegger and the Carpentry of Things, Open Court, 2004.

[30] In this regard, while Hegel credits Kant for having delineated the distinction between the Understanding and Reason, he resists that the latter should be indeterminate. He claims "But we ought not to stop at this negative result, or to reduce the unconditioned character of reason to the merely abstract identity that excludes distinction... the genuine-infinite is not merely a realm beyond the finite: on the contrary, it contains the finite sublated within itself." (Ibid; Pg. 88).

[31] Being-there, which already involves the factical specificity of a determination of being by thought, is for Hegel not the first moment or figure of the Concept, but rather follows after becoming has be shown to be the truth of Being and Nothingness, determining their co-determinacy. Thus, being-there is already a figure which is nested within Conceptual determination and which proceeds from abstract Being, rather than beginning 'along with it': "In becoming, being, as one with nothing, and nothing as one with being, are only vanishing; because of its contradiction becoming collapses inwardly, into the unity within which both are sublation; in this way its result is being-there.. as reflected into itself in its determinacy, being-there is that which is there, something." (EL: Pg. 145-146).

It follows that the 'qualitative' dimension of being-there, the something it's involved with, already renders it objectual in the sense in which Heidegger would already see too much of a reification of presence-at-hand, subject-object representation, presupposed into the alleged purity of the determination (Ibid). However, Hegel resists that there is a dimension of pre-Conceptual being which is conceptually made available in abstraction, which devolves thought into the receptive gift of being and renders thetic productivity primary. Such a stipulation would be nothing but a pragmatic-performative contradiction from the Hegel's view, again trying to 'swim before venturing into the water.'

[32] This is most clearly articulated in his late seminar What is Called Thinking?, translated by J. Glenn Gray, Harper and Row, 1968.

[34] And for Heidegger it is specifically this forgetfulness of being through ‘technical reason’ that accounts for the political disasters of National Socialism where, as in his infamous statements from 1949, concentration camps were equated ‘essentially’ to fumigation fields: “Agriculture is now a motorized food industry, the same thing in its essence as the production of corpses in the gas chambers and the extermination camps, the same thing as blockades and the reduction of countries to famine, the same thing as the manufacture of hydrogen bombs." (Heidegger 1949; Pg 64)

[35] See Heidegger, Martin, Der Spiegel Interview, 1966, http://web.ics.purdue.edu/~other1/Heidegger%20Der%20Spiegel.pdf

[36] In that regard, it should become apparent that Hegel's project anticipates the Sellarsian rejection of the 'Myth of the Given'. See Sellars Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, in Science, Perception, and Reality, Ridgeview, 1991, p. 127. I quote Sellars: ‘Many things have been said to be ‘given’: sense contents, material objects, universals, propositions, real connections, first principles, even givenness itself.’ (My emphasis). Also, see Brassier (forthcoming, 2012):

"Self-knowledge certainly comprises a dimension of non-inferential immediacy that endows us with a privileged epistemic access to our own internal states, but only within certain limits, since the immediacy of self-knowledge is itself the result of conceptual mediation and cannot be evoked to ratify the appeal to an allegedly intuitive, pre-conceptual self-acquaintance. The prejudice that immediacy is not the result of a mediating self-relation seduces us into absolutizing phenomenal experience. Phenomenology’s absolutizing of givenness as such is the most extreme variant of the myth dismantled by Sellars."

Sellars, McDowell, Burge -Perception as Non-inferential Knowledge

2011-09-07T14:02:00.000-07:00

SELLARS, MCDOWELL, BURGE:
- Perception as Non-Inferential Knowledge -

__________________________________________

I have been following my reading of Sellars in tandem with some pertinent secondary literature, including: deVries and Triplett's reader's guide, Brandom, McDowell, O'Shea's excellent study, and some criticisms following particularly from Tyler Burge in his 'The Origins of Objectivity'. This has a resulted in a cluster of preoccupations, centered around the Sellarsian account of perception as a form of non-inferential knowledge which includes a conceptual (normative) component, and a non-conceptual sensorial (natural) residue, which remains epistemically inert.

1) The first thing that struck me upon reading Tyler Burge's criticism of what he takes to be an over-intellectualizing tendency in Sellars' account, is the claim that perception must involve a form of conceptual/linguistic response as the only possible way to explain the attributions of sense content by cognizing subjects. I quote Burge apropos Sellars' position as expressed in 'Phenomenalism':

"No serious science of perception agrees with Sellars in taking seeing something to be red as the 'culmination' of the sophisticated linguistic practices that he describes. Sellars leaves no room between (a) 'S has a sensation of x', in the sense of 'S is in that state brought about in normal circumstances by the influence of x on the relevant sense organs', and (b) 'S has a [linguistically informed] thought of x'. That is he allows for no perception of entities as having physical properties that is not backed by linguistically informed thought that attributed such properties to such entities. He moves quickly from a non-representational notion of sensing to a propositional sensing-that- again backed by linguistically informed thought- with no room for any type of perception in-between... Sellars assumes that propositional, linguistically informed thought is the only source of objective representation. Objective representation is epistemic representation. Epistemic representation requires a linguistically grounded propositional ability to represent conditions under which objectivity and knowledge are realized." (OB: Pg 137n).

Burge's entire point is that perception involves a non-linguistic form of individuation for its contents, which is explained without recourse to conceptual training or the capacity to perform linguistic inferences. This is for Burge a property that is to be found not just in sapient humans, but also in other animals. What is interesting about Burge's response at this juncture is that it seems to obviate completely the relationship which Ray Brassier stresses thoroughly in Sellars' account between sentience and sapience. For Sellars does seem to acknowledge that sentient organisms do respond accordingly to sensible stimuli, without this necessitating conception. It is true, however, that as far as perception is concerned, for Sellars there must always be a conceptual counterpart proper to linguistically trained subjects, to individuate sense-contents in judgment. It would thus seem that what Burge likes to call 'perception' is a form of sentient response that ought to be called positively epistemic while being non-conceptual all the same. This leads into my second observation, which takes us to McDowell's recent polemics with Burge himself. This reveals the core issue as I see it with regard to the status of perception, non-inferential knowledge, and the role of conceptuality in Sellars' scientific realism.

2) Elsewhere in his text, Burge objects that Sellars' intellectualist position commits him to the view that perceptual knowledge in rational subjects is arrived at always by taking an 'inferential step'. Here McDowell rightfully takes issue with Burge, since it is clear that for Sellars perception in fact can operate as a non-inferential faculty in producing knowledge. This is after all the first premise of the famous inconsistent triad which Sellars endorses: "S senses red-sense-content x if and only if S knows non inferentially that x is red."

Now, this is a point of terminological confusion since 'senses' and 'perceives' seem to be here interchangeable. This is confusing because we have established that Sellars wants to claim that sensation is epistemically inert (i.e. requires conceptual judgment to form knowledge), and yet that there can be a non-inferential form of knowledge described in perception, which is not to say that perception is non-conceptual. Indeed, it is perception's conceptual counterpart to the inertia of sensation that provides its positive epistemic status. So I take it that proposition A of the inconsistent triad, if endorsed by Sellars, refers to the non-inferential knowledge acquired in perceptual episodes, which involves necessarily its conceptual component, and not just in 'mere sensation'. In any case, McDowell goes on to defend Sellars' from Burge's attack. I quote the relevant passage, from his 'Perception as a Capacity for Knowledge':

"One of the formulations of what he finds implausibly intellectualistic about the Sellarsian picture is that it “implies that the formation of a perceptual belief is a piece of reasoning — a transition from a reason to what it is a reason for”.

But a believer can be self-consciously justified in a belief without having formed the belief by a transition to it from whatever she would cite in giving her justification for it. That is so even if the grounds on which the belief counts as knowledgeable are inferential. When I know that my neighbor is at home on the basis that, as I can see, his car is in his driveway, I do not need to have taken an inferential step to the belief that he is at home. It might be perfectly natural co say I can just see, straight off, that he is at home. Even so, my belief that he is at home counts as knowledgeable, if it does, because there is a good enough inference from the fact that his car is in his driveway to the conclusion that he is at home, And my knowledge that he is at home includes self-consciousness about its warrant, so that I can produce a justification, in Burge’s technical sense, for my belief that he is at home. I know not just that my neighbor is at home but that my warrant for believing that he is consists in the goodness of that inference, even if I did not arrive at the belief by inferring it from the knowledge that grounds it for me." (McDowell, PC, Section 5)

Against Burge, then, it seems as if Sellars would be perfectly at ease in accepting a non-inferential form of knowledge, which involves conceptuality in order to provide judgment all the same. Burge would here insist that such a position deviates from what science teaches, insofar as our perceptual capacities remain non-propositional, and are legitimated thus by the externalist requirement that they cause the proper dispositional/behavioral responses in their cognizing subjects. There is much more to be said about Burge's intricate account of perception, but I shall leave that for the moment.

The notion of non-inferential knowledge in Sellars, however, is a tricky one to disentangle, seeing that it must not fold us back into some form of the Myth of the Given. The crucial qualification in McDowell's account concerns the relationship between Sellars' endorsement of non-inferential or direct knowledge, and at the same time the his rejection of epistemic independence, i.e. that a proposition p could be known independently of knowing other proposition(s) q, y, etc. Directness requires that the subject not infer a proposition from any other, independence requires the stronger claim that in order to know a proposition p the subject need not know any other proposition(s). This is where O'Shea and deVries bring up some interesting remarks.

To begin, the fundamental difference between the two kinds of knowledge seems to be accounted for as follows:

1) Inferential knowledge - S knows p iff S knows q, S knows that q justifies inferring that p, and S infers p from q.

2) Non-inferential/direct knowledge - S knows p iff S knows that p without inferring p from whatever proposition(s) q justify it, and S knows whatever q justifies inferring that p.

It is crucial to note that in any case, and against Burge, for Sellars knowledge demands the internalist requirement that the knower be in possession of the justification for whatever he knows, but that this needn't mean in every circumstance the subject will deduce knowledge by inferring it from whatever propositions justify it. This seems to ground the possibility of non-inferential knowledge being direct yet epistemically dependent, where we understand epistemic independence as entailing:

Epistemic Independence - A proposition p can have positive epistemic status for S independently of any other proposition q, i.e. S can know p without knowing anything else.

Thus every occasion where knowledge obtains, whether inferential or non inferential, will be a case of epistemically dependent knowledge, according to Sellars. While Sellars wants to endorse the idea that no proposition is ever self-justifying or justification-free and so that epistemic independence fails, he wants to do this while accepting that non-inferential knowledge is possible. This is a crucial distinction, since it grounds Sellars' rejection of those 'basic' propositions that would bolster a foundationalist account, while keeping a restricted sense of directness operative. This supplements his rejection of Russellian inspired accounts of non-propositional knowledge by acquaintance, as a second iteration of the Myth of the Given that ought to be rejected.

Non-inferential knowledge is not foundational since it does not constitute justificatory self-sufficient instances of given knowledge, obtained transparently through the intuition of sensory data. Sensation by itself is epistemically inert, and the capacity to sense sense-contents is acquired in that it requires that one knows a cluster of additional propositions resulting from being imbedded in a linguistic community. This is the anti-foundationalist prescription in Sellars that McDowell underlines, against Burge. This results in the strange idea stated above that knowing p non-inferentially requires knowing q, but that one does not arrive at p by inferring it from q, and so not epistemically independently. Furthermore, the strong internalist demand which McDowell seems to be ascribing to Sellars here is the additional requirement that S not only must know q in order to know p, but he must also know that q justifies p.

This follows from the standard tripartite demands for knowledge which Triplett and deVries argue Sellars endorses:

For S to know that p entails:

1) S believes that p.

2) p is true.

3) S must have the appropriate justification for p.

Sellars must thus insist that for any proposition p, p is epistemically dependent on another proposition(s) q for S, i.e. to posses knowledge of p is justified by / counts as knowledge, on condition that one also possesses knowledge of q. Triplett and deVries write on this account, summarizing Sellars' rejection of epistemically independent propositions:

"Suppose [a proposition assumed as basic] is non-inferentially acquired. Any such proposition can have positive epistemic status for a person only if there are other propositions in the person's epistemic system that support it. For example, a person cannot know the truth of the observation report "this is red" if she is merely capable of reliably producing such reports in appropriate circumstances [anti-externalism / anti-Burge]... In order to have knowledge the person must know that her reports are reliable. But then her knowledge of her reliability epistemically supports her observational knowledge which therefore cannot be epistemically independent."

This is what, according to McDowell, would entail that even if one knows non-inferentially that the neighbor is in the house by observing the car, one must nevertheless 'be prepared to justify' their belief if examined. It is not sufficient that one believes what one does; one must know that his belief is justified by appeals to other bits of knowledge, i.e. one must know that seeing the car could serve to inferentially justify that the neighbor is in this house. This is the coherentist demand which Burge finds excessively intellectual in Sellars. And it also constitutes what deVries and Triplett call 'a strong internalist requirement' against externalist accounts. We may thus reformulate requirement (3) above in its 'internalist' enhanced version, endorsed by Sellars:

3*) S must have the appropriate justification q for p, and S must know that q justifies p, i.e. S must be capable of explaining the inference of p from q.

This raises a particular elucidation to O'Shea's description of Sellars' "principle of perceptual reliability" [PR]:

[PR] - S's perceptual judgment [P] that x, over there, is red, constitutes a case of perceptual knowledge if and only if there is a generally reliable connection between cases of S's judging that [P] and its being in fact true that there is a red physical object over there [T&D, Pg. 126)

Thus, under standard conditions, S has reliable (yet not infallible) warrant for x iff one can "infer the presence of a green object from the fact that someone makes this report." This is where O'Shea, however, diagnoses quite menacing problem with regards to the possibility of a vicious regress. If S needs to know q in order to know that p, but also that he must know that q justifies p, then S needs to have knowledge of the meta-principle [PR] which provides S with the capacity to discern reliable occasions of perception from unreliable ones. But since in general [PR] must follow from empirical observation of instances [P], it is not clear whence from it derives its justification, since it is simultaneously meant to serve as the condition for knowledge of [P]. The impending circularity looms transparently here.

T&D state: "...it seems reasonable to accept epistemic principle [PR] only because it is in some way supported by particular observations [P]; but it is reasonable to accept observation [P] only in virtue of their being known to fall under the perceptual reliability principle [PR]" [Pg. 132]. And Sellars' response will be to disambiguate between a) the naturalistic account which tracks down the causal process of acquisition of the conditions for our epistemic sapient capacities, and b) the transcendental non-empirical register according to which principles such as [PR] (or the principle of causality) must be taken as normative conditions of possibility for any knowledge whatsoever, i.e. they seem to function as epistemic norms. Apparently, the reason why this is not another instance of the Myth of the Given is because these normative principles can be given a resolute empirical causal explanation in naturalistic terms, while preserving their transcendental status methodologically autonomous for the structure of knowledge. Thus there is no ontological gulf between the normative and the natural causal; the dualism is not metaphysical but methodological. And as I see it, this is where Sellars' provides a subtle corrective to the post-Kantian subordination of the empirical to the transcendental; the methodological autonomy of the logical space of reasons is nevertheless anchored ontologically and generatively on the causal conditions open to empirical natural-causal description.

This raises an interesting possibility of re-awakening Meillassoux's challenge to the correlationist defense according to which the separation of transcendental and empirical registers remain insurmountable. The corrective Sellars introduces is to say that there is no explanatory gap in the genetic account that science provides between inorganic matter, sentience and sapience; science is fully capable of causally explaining the genesis of thought, and also how the latter comes to be a condition for the very knowledge of itself and the world, i.e. neurobiological-evolutionary accounts expose how the organism comes to acquire those physical capacities to produce knowledge. This causal account is by no means restricted to self-knowledge; and so does not have to run the gauntlet of the circle of correlation. The empirical-transcendental register is thereby reworked by Sellars so that while the physical is causally responsible for the normative, the latter is epistemically responsible for our knowledge of the causal. So while there is an epistemic correlation between the normative, sapient-endowed critters capable of wielding the transcendental apparatus for rational deliberation, this does not solicit any form of bilateral ontological correlation between thought and matter, but it does solicit nevertheless a unilateral ontological correlation of thought on matter.

All of this is obviating difficult issues raises elsewhere about the precise nature of the physical for Sellars (the two senses distinguished by O'Shea), the subtle distinctions between levels of sense content (sensing-that or propositional epistemic content, and sensing-of non-propositional responses), the dialectical interplay between the manifest and scientific image leading to the incorporation of sensa into the latter, and also the question of fallibilism with regard to perception (raised particularly by McDowell's brilliant remark against Burge that even if our perceptual faculties are fallible it doesn't follow that we can never posses sufficient grounds for infallible occasions of knowledge, i.e. as Sebastian Rod claims: "from the fact that, when I am fooled, I do not know that I am, it does not follow that, when I am not fooled, I do not know that I am not. When I know that p as I perceive it to be the case, then I know that I perceive that p."

3) However, there is one issue pending which I find extremely confusing in Sellars' account, with regard to the distinction between epistemic independence and non-inferential knowledge. My problem is that I simply do not know what it means for a subject to 'know directly and non-inferentially' with epistemic dependence. Let us return to McDowell's example:

"When I know that my neighbor is at home on the basis that, as I can see, his car is in his driveway, I do not need to have taken an inferential step to the belief that he is at home. It might be perfectly natural co say I can just see, straight off, that he is at home."

Here the expression "seeing straight off" must be a shorthand for: knowing non inferentially that p, where S also knows that q justifies p, even if at that moment one doesn't make the inference.

I don't know if this convinces me, for how does one 'simply' observe the car and know that the neighbor is there without making an inference, even if unconsciously or very rapidly? How could one make the connection between the observation of the car and the neighbor being at home without inference taking place? Something like a non-inferential immediate connection between one bit of knowledge and the other would have to be at place here; but what this amounts to remains to me utterly mysterious. Notice that this would seem to hold even in cases where perceptual knowledge was established without mediation/non-inferential derivation, i.e. if the subject in question had seen the neighbor directly sitting in his couch (under standard conditions) it would have been a case of 'seeing that' the neighbor is there, but this would require still the appropriate additional knowledge which would allow one to infer this, i.e. the lighting conditions are standard, knowledge about what constitutes the relationship of interiority, what is a couch, and what it means to-be-sitting, etc. A different connection than inference must be at work here for S to be lead from his observation of the car to the belief that the neighbor is there. For S must already know that a parked car justifies the inference to the presence of the neighbor; he must know that q provides inferential warrant for p, even if he does not infer p from q. Furthermore he must know or believe that q ("the car is parked") is the case, as we surmised above in (3*) as Sellars' strong internalist requirement.

But then since he does not explicitly consider the causal connection between p and q at the moment of gaining this non-inferential warrant, what are we to make between this connection of two instances of (propositional) knowledge? Are we to say that a) S non-inferentially knows that q by seeing the car, and simultaneously non-inferentially knows that p? This seems remarkably awkward; and gratuitous without further explanation. But if Sellars wants to say that b) S knows non-inferentially that q first, and then knows than p, then he needs to explain how one passes from one to the other belief without any inference taking place. How does the non-reflexive, memory-stored knowledge that q justifies inferring p operate so that S may come to know that p on the basis of his seeing that q? Perhaps this has to do with the relation between sentience and sapience, where the acquisition of q upon observation could be defined as a kind of sentient response which nevertheless requires that the subject be in possession of certain propositional knowledge as well; but this is utterly speculative. I haven't found anything in the literature, including Sellars, addressing this particular concern.

Dogmatismo y Crítica: En Diálogo con Vacío

2011-07-14T02:20:00.000-07:00

Dogmatismo y Crítica:

- En Diálogo con Vacío -

________________________________________________

En Vacío, Daniel Luna castiga lo naif en el antagonismo 'anti-academicista' propio de aquellos rebeldes estudiantes de filosofía, en su modo más característico. Las dos cualidades que Daniel rescata de este grupo son transparentes y fértiles para la crítica:

"(1) los profesores antes eran más académicos y ahora son más burócratas y esto porque se han dedicado (por ponerlo de alguna manera) a “gobernar” la universidad en lugar de “pensar” filosóficamente (de académicos a burócratas)

(2) los profesores son “argolleros” porque no aprecian o reconocen el talento de nuestro novel estudiante, ya sea porque “se llevan mal con él”, ya sea porque son “discriminadores” (racial, étnica o socioeconómicamente), ya sea porque sus temas de interés son diferentes."

Aquellos desafortunados vituperantes ignoran, Daniel insiste, la dimensión política implicada en la composición estructural de la institución académica universitaria, a través de la cual los intereses de sus funcionarios se articulan. Daniel busca enfatizar sobre todo como aquellos estudiantes pecan de una simplificación a la hora acusar a los profesores e instituciones, a la Universidad y sus "Ordinarios", de haber vendido su integridad filosófica-intelectual en favor de una servidumbre burocrática. Y la segunda característica parece aclarar que lo que motiva, al menos superficialmente, al estudiante, es exigir mayor reconocimiento y legitimación por parte del aparato Universitario y sus docentes. Ante esto, Daniel responde con un recordatorio, y dice que: "Toda institución quiere preservarse y adaptarse y, de hecho, las élites que gobiernan quieren mantenerse gobernando. Hasta aquí, esto es política 101."

Ciertamente coincido con Daniel en denunciar lo naif en la vituperación ciega del estudiante de filosofía, en tanto este sea en su mayoría compuesto por las dos facetas mencionadas. Al mismo tiempo, es importante recordar que el estudiante, en tanto ocupa la voz del renegado, es parte de una dimensión política-estructural también y que, como en el caso del organismo académico, obedece a lo que uno podría esperar del estudiante. Este último es, como el hijo que desea medirse detrás del amparo y autoridad "paterna", el rebelde que resiente al Estado familiar, al Gran Otro del Discurso Universitario que reemplaza la autoridad directa del Maestro, el "proletario" cuya carencia de poder lo enerva e inspira a confabular el coup contra aquello que lo sostiene pero que también lo disciplina y limita.

El desconocimiento de cómo opera la institución académica es, para el estudiante ejemplificado en la descripción de Daniel, una dimensión más de rebeldía juvenil que opera en su relativa modestia con cierta inocencia, pero que también en manos de algunos 'brillantes' pocos termina siendo el motor de reformas y revoluciones, en lo académico-político, y también en lo filosófico-intelectual. En este sentido, si bien es importante que el filosofo-estudiante nunca caiga en una vituperación cínica e impotente en contra las instituciones y sus dirigentes, así también como de la organización 'escolástica' de su disciplina y las tendencias conservadoras de sus monaguillos docentes, aquella rebeldía no debe ser descontextualizada de sus efectos emancipadores. Daniel tiene mucha razón en hacer notar la limitación de una visión crítica que ignora la dimensión política en las instituciones, y a esto agregaría: no hay que olvidar que la mayoría de estudiantes, falto de ideas y guiándose por recelo y sed más que por propuestas o sentido de justicia, también busca lo que Daniel describe propiamente como el eje conservador del aparato universitario:

"No se trata de algo tan burdo como “argollería”, se trata de lineamientos políticos. Y acá no quiero ser reduccionista y sigo a Bourdieu: se trata de muchas más variables. No solamente lineamientos políticos, sean éstos intra o extra universitarios, sino también lineamientos de temas de interés, de relaciones sociales, etc, etc. Desde esta perspectiva vemos pues, que el sistema mismo promueve dicha asimilación de lo similar para formar parte de lo similar."

De la misma manera, uno podría decir que lo propio del 'proletario' estudiantil, sin ningún poder académico más allá de sus aullidos y pocas obras, siempre implica el de renegar contra el Estado académico, y el último es expuesto en alianza con alguna 'ortodoxia' filosófica a ser destituida. Esta faceta es generalmente compartida verticalmente en toda gran 'traición' filosófica que va con una subversión política-académica: Heidegger contra la organización temática universitaria iba de la mano con sus acusaciones contra la prevalencia filosófica de ciertas corrientes que él consideraba sintomáticas de un conservadurismo intelectual. La "traición" contra Husserl y la subversión contra la universidad; quizás es de los ejemplos más dramáticos. Quizás uno de los ejemplos más interesantes en tiempos recientes es el de Nick Land, cuya extraordinaria obra, cada vez más alienada de "Lo Mismo" protegido por la academia, finalmente hubo de buscar una suerte de exilio filosófico. De la misma manera, hoy en día, Badiou vitupera contra el neo-escolasticismo anglosajón, propio de la filosofía analítica, y de la institucionalización del sistema educativo Europeo propio de la Reforma de Boloña, así como de la hegemonía pragmatista que sirve al Estado (en el sentido técnico en que el Estado no es sólo la institución política).

Parecerá un tanto injusto meter a los grandes antagonismos filosóficos de aquellas figuras junto con los pobres estudiantes que menciona Daniel. Pero más allá de la carencia de imaginación, amargura y cinicismo al que puede y frecuentemente deviene la desobediencia estudiantil, insistiría que la excepcional dimensión política del estudiante también motiva un ideal revolucionario y subversivo. El hecho de que la universidad pueda estar atravesada por relaciones políticas no puede asimismo aislar la relación política que guarda la universidad con el cuerpo estudiantil. Este último ciertamente no es menos político por no pertenecer al orden de los Ordinarios, y no por no ser elitista en el sentido en que guarda intereses institucionales es menos interesado. Y ciertamente no sigue de que porque siempre habrán intereses de por medio mediando los enunciados y acciones en aquella relacion, esto implique que no debería haber crítica, antagonismo o incluso oposición por miedo a ser 'naif': es importante no sólo que los temas filosóficos se mantengan abiertos a la discusión y que se promueva el pensamiento progresivo, sino también es crucial que las instituciones, la estructura académica, y los funcionarios, sirvan a la producción imparcial y efectiva de aquel pensamiento y su organización.

Aquí reside el punto de mayor importancia. La dialéctica entre el contenido filosófico y la estructura política es necesaria. Como Daniel menciona, la corrupción atribuida al docente es tanto de materia como de cargo. Y la relación entre el antagonismo o fuerza estudiantil y el "Estado" académico tiene que ser vista singularmente en relación a las propuestas, desacuerdos, críticas y demandas en cuestión. Es crucial que al decir que el estudiante peca de ser naif no se diga que la problemática, de materia o institucional, no requiere de señalar lo conservador-opresivo de ciertas posturas y agentes, que siendo realistas tendríamos que aceptar que lo conservador de la estructura académica los absuelve o vuelve inmunes al antagonismo o crítica. Y en este punto, quisiera simplemente agregar a lo que dice Daniel:

"No solamente lineamientos políticos [han de ser considerados], sean éstos intra o extra universitarios, sino también lineamientos de temas de interés, de relaciones sociales, etc, etc. Desde esta perspectiva vemos pues, que el sistema mismo promueve dicha asimilación de lo similar para formar parte de lo similar."

Es vital que no reduzcamos la situación a fricciones entre 'intereses' subjetivos-institucionales indiferentemente, como si por el hecho de ser intereses los que se ven en juego no fuesen más que eso. Lo que busco recalcar al señalar esto último, que parece un tanto trivial, es lo siguiente: no se debe relativizar la complejidad de factores y actantes de su obligación normativa, reduciendo la última al ámbito jurídico o privado de "interés", donde se negocian relaciones de poder, interpelaciones ideológicas, o voluntades humanas. El problema es que esta última relativización que pretende homogenizar el campo de enunciados ya de por sí asume una posición filosófica, y es la que finalmente implica que no hay criterios epistémicos que nos permitirían determinar la validez, coherencia o virtud de enunciados filosóficos u organismos de Estado sobre otros. Y creo que si uno acepta esto último entonces de ante mano se erradica la función revolucionaria de la filosofía en general, y del estudiante en particular, de siempre estar a la guardia del Estado, no para rendirse a una fácil vituperación, pero por la cual también, dada la exigencia política, uno llega a poner minas en los campos tras haber puesto chinches en los asientos en un principio.

No hay que restarle el coraje antagónico al estudiante, ya que en ello radica también toda posibilidad de un destino para el pensamiento digno de ser llamado filosófico. Pero también creo que reducido al reniego vituperante o a la complaciencia relativista, se asimila al estudiante a una fácil avalación del conflicto, no del todo disimilar al triste espectáculo anti-Estatal que pretende ser política por parte de los civiles en relación al Gobierno o presidente de la Nación y sus funcionarios, a través de lamentos, bullicio y desprecio por todo orden. Y en esto es claro que con Daniel coincido en que una verdadera relación progresiva con el aparato universitario, así como con el pensamiento filosófico, no puede ser nunca meramente destructiva: el cambio es irreducible a una negación de los predicados que conforma el Estado, los rangos académicos, los cánones de pensamiento, la distribución de disciplinas, etc. Esto implica rechazar también el 'realismo sedativo' de aceptar las cosas como son, porque 'son como son', el realismo pragmático y flojo que asimila todo enunciado a la consideración de que, finalmente, habrían meros humanos e instituciones, con sus intereses respectivos, detrás. Es importante que la filosofía, como la política, no sea un simple espacio para la tranquila Gala de vecinos y la complacencia apática que constituye el vehículo de la indiferencia. El pensamiento filosófico y la acción política siempre operan en función reconocer el lugar donde se decide algo fundamental, algo urgente. Y estas últimas cuestiones pueden darse en contra o pese a los intereses de los interesados, de las estructuras y los instructores, de los instructores y de los estudiantes.

Esto tampoco quiere decir que el estudiante no tenga una función 'conservadora' que cumplir, si por la última se entiende, a modo amplio, 'el deseo de preservar algo'. Claramente el ideal de transmisión de conocimiento, de tener una relación con la historia, de respetar a los intructores y las instituciones, van de la mano con el ideal de la ruptura con las restricciones enciclopédicas, la posibilidad de algo sin precedentes, de sobrepasar el pensamiento del pasado y de mejorar nuestras instituciones. En esto me opongo categóricamente a la falsa modestia correlacionista-idealista que reduce la función académica a servir intereses pragmáticos. La substracción que implica un proceso creativo nunca es sui generis ciertamente, y no basta de una simple voluntad destructiva, como señalé arriba. En cambio, el ideal substractivo del que se componen verdades genéricas, como describe Badiou por ejemplo, es una modalidad que explica la relación inseparable entre la prescripción y orden institucional (el Estado de la Situación), y la multitud de agentes que compone el campo de acción. De igual manera, por poner otro ejemplo filosófico, la crítica naturalista de Sellars en contra del Mito de lo Dado constituye un eje que nos pone en ruta de colisión contra el conservadurismo empiricista, fenomenológico, o vitalista, en tanto las últimas postulan una auto-legitimación estructural en el discurso de orden dogmático (sea linguístico, intencional, de inmediatez factual empírica, intuitivo, transcendental-religioso, cultural, semiótico, u otro tipo).

Uno podrá decir que finalmente hay quienes se suscriben firmemente a estas y otras posiciones que este estudiante podrá considerar 'enemigas', pero de esto no debe seguir que la suscripción basta para la legitimación filosófica, ni para su desmerecimiento. Y mucho menos implica que el interés político al que cierta posición filosófica responda tenga que ser 'tolerado' o considerado 'equivalente' a todo otro por estar al servicio de tales intereses. Decir que toda opinión es equivalente a toda otra en tanto opinión es una banalidad; decir que no existe diferencia entre opiniones de parte de interesados y verdades, es probablemente sofismo. Es importante no desmerecer entonces la conexión o relación entre la responsabilidad filosófica y la política; y esta última si bien no puede reducirse al Estado, no puede tampoco valerse de reniegos ilusos, o berrinches infantiles. De lo contrario, es decir, de reducir la tensión entre Estado y situación, universidad y estudiantes, a cuestiones de interés humano, uno arriesga reproducir aquel pseudo-Nietzscheanismo voluntarista en donde la academia y la filosofía no es más que la tiranía del deseo sobre la universalidad de las verdades. La voluntad del estudiante no tendría mayor aspiración que la de aquel yugo humanista que siempre espera el amparo del Padre Estatal junto con una fantasía ingenua en función a intereses propios, como el organismo Freudiano que busca su propio regreso a la libertad inorgánica que goza su externalidad traumática, por sus propios medios conservativos. Por esto, lo que expresa Daniel es capital, con lo que concluyo esta intervención:

Mi interés va por una reflexión crítica (en sentido constructivo) hacia la institucionalidad universitaria. Siento mucho interés por el problema de la educación en nuestro país y abordar el tema de las instituciones de la universidad y de la lógica que opera es muy importante para comprender problemas o cuestiones sintomáticas desde una perspectiva mucho más compleja. Ello permitirá mejorar la universidad y la educación, así como hacernos conscientes de las múltiples variables que operan y atraviesan nuestras relaciones e instituciones.

La siguiente pregunta será, entonces, sobre el imperativo de lucha: en donde reside lo conservador en el campo académico y filosófico hoy en día? Hacia dónde tiene que dirigirse la energía y vigilancia estudiantil, en fidelidad al ideal de aprendizaje y de crecimiento? Estos últimos permanecen, y son solo materia de descarte para el ideal reaccionario que niega el potencial creativo de la negatividad, que protege la integridad del Estado, y que mantiene al pensamiento servil ante el pilar de un humanismo pueril, hilado de intereses banales, y alza altares ante los cuales la crítica es inseparable de la blasfemia.