On Wolfendale and his Critics - OOO

- ON WOLFENDALE AND HIS CRITICS -

\-On OOO-/

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      I have become quite upset at the recent criticism directed at Pete Wolfendale's comprehensive critique of Harman's philosophical program, criticisms waged by both Jon Cogburn and Harman himself. Now, I am good friends with Pete and with some of the folk more sympathetic to OOO and its philosophical virtues (Levi Bryant notably, is my friend). And, despite some agitated polemics with their crowd, I have tried to express my disagreements always in a civil manner, on philosophical grounds.

    What is conspicuously missing from all of this recent commentary on Wolfendale's work is an actual engagement with the philosophical contentions made by Wolfendale, though Cogburn has gone through it. Instead, his post and Harman's read like severe indictments to Wolfendale's motivations and temperament as a thinker, alongside those of Ray Brassier, who was a direct inspiration - as well as the most sympathetic figure among the original SR crew - to Wolfendale's project. To be fair, Harman has not read Wolfendale's book, so he's working on the provisional previews offered by Cogburn. This is problematic in itself, since he is endorsing a criticism of a book which he hasn't read, and is more explicitly disputing Ray's contribution though he hasn't read it. But let's leave that aside.

     Let me get right into the issue; Cogburn questions the motivations behind Wolfendale's monograph, by drawing attention to the lyrically charged verdicts posed in the preface of the book. Now, obviously ,the justification for these severe verdicts would have to be supported by the book itself. Yet Cogburn preemptively writes:""only the already converted give the polemicist a pass on the uncharity needed for the polemic to be rhetorically effective"

    That is just not true. One can be polemical and yet genuinely impartial or even sympathetic to the views one is raising polemics about without being uncharitable. Why assume that polemics entails uncharitability? Can no one disagree on charitable grounds? That seems gratuitous to me: if that is true, then it threatens not so much 'polemics', in the sense of agitated debate, but disagreement or consideration of counter-argument tout court. Unless we pathologize critical engagement, it will be necessary to accept some debate is charitable and fair. Cogburn claims about any text being addressed that " If it's worth reading, it's worth reading charitably." So either charitable criticisms are possible, and then he is just begging the question about why Wolfendale is uncharitable, or else the only charitable engagements are non polemical ones.

    Cogburn continues questioning the motivations and pertinence of the background debate that led to Wolfendale's book. He calls attention into the claim that this extensive engagement seems oddly against the verdict that Harman's work is unworthy of philosophical esteem. What Cogburn misses from Wolfendale's account is that it was Harman who requested that if a debate were to be had with the philosophical detail Wolfendale imposed in the blogosphere, such a debate would be better suited for a formal kind of publication. And this because the payoff for such a discussion in the blogosphere and with a relatively unknown interlocutor would be not be appropriate or sufficiently beneficial for Harman. I cannot but conclude that, in writing these background considerations, Wolfendale is simply making clear that by writing the long book he is in fact just agreeing to carry out the polemics in the medium Harman himself determined, with the degree of rigor expected of the medium.

     But why do this if you so much consider Harman's position as fundamentally confused and unworthy of philosophical esteem, you ask? Well, one might think it is important to make explicit why a particular position that is gaining relative influence be addressed concretely on its perceived philosophical grounds and virtues, so as to deem whether this popularity is warranted or not. That is, to evaluate whether Harman's work is persuasive because he has actually cogent philosophical theses, or whether instead it is merely because, as he says, "I write often, in an engaging fashion, and don’t imply to my potential audience that they are irrational idiots. If you seek influence for your ideas, these three steps are a good start."  That seems like a healthy enough philosophical practice. 

   Next, Cogburn targets those who, from outside academia, take issue with the fact employed professors might not have time or desire to respond to every objection leveled at them. Cogburn writes:

"Yet a whole bevy of people routinely heap scorn on people like him because they doesn't stop everything to respond to every blog post or paper ever written about them."

     This is fair and true. But the question that rises becomes: is Wolfendale one of these people? I don't think so; he is not demanding a response from anyone, but simply engaging Harman through the medium that the latter deemed most fitting for the debate to ensue.

      But again, what is most conspicuous about Cogburn's text is that no serious mention is made on the philosophical indictments leveled against Harman, though they comprise the bulk of the book in question. This is particularly serious considering Harman's own response. I agree with Harman that Brassier's aversion to the blogosphere goes too far, that in doing so he is rhetorically excessive, and that it must accept at least of exceptions deemed of quality lest he deem Wolfendale's own ventures as obsolete.

     The issue is this: Harman accuses Brassier of resenting that his plot to make those involved in the Goldsmith conference more visible worked. Brassier, so we are told, is the victim of a mixture of dogmatism and resentment. Dogmatism, because he refuses to accept the philosophical import of the social sciences and praises the reality of physics only (something, to my mind, which Ray has never endorsed; he in fact thinks the connection between the social and natural sciences to be of paramount philosophical interest) Resentment, because others publish more works and have fallen behind the OOO cause than his own program. Thus, Harman concludes, Brassier cannot but be but the most interested party in seeing the whole Speculative Realism house burn down, while Harman and his copious readers run the show.

    But Ray's text, which again Harman has NOT read, does not complain about the relative popularity of OOO, or criticizes the exposure to the work of the authors involved in Goldsmith's: he questions not the desire to expose the body of work of those involved (a generous enough goal), but the feasibility of characterizing "speculative realism" as a philosophical movement on the grounds of actual philosophical content, and more particularly, Harman's philosophy, since all the other three members have parted ways with the term.

    First, because the term 'speculative' does not bind these authors in any meaningful sense. Meillassoux explicitly calls 'speculative' any philosophical position that is non-metaphysical in scope, to designate a kind of dialectics that makes no assumptions about what there is. In this sense, neither Ray, Iain nor particularly Harman, are speculative, since the latter explicitly endorses metaphysics as first philosophy. That the conference was named after a particular program should indicate nothing but an anchoring of the congregation on Meillassoux's own program, but not the sudden emergence of a movement.

   Second, because the 'realism' involved in each case is immensely different, and incompatible. Grant proposes a process ontology following Schelling, Harman an ontology of objects, Brassier a scientific realism, and Meillassoux a kind of mathematical Platonism inspired by Badiou. There is more in common between Badiou and Meillassoux, or between Sellars and Brassier, than between Meillassoux and Brassier on what they take realism to be (or 'materialism', for Meillassoux). The aversion to correlationism is common to many realists, analytic and continentals, even if they do not share the same terminology or address the same authors. 

     So, Brassier argues, 'speculative realism' designates little but a sociological construct, not a philosophical movement. That much interesting work has resulted from this sociological construct is not in dispute, but only that the phenomenon as it stands does not exist as a philosophical movement, but as a series of divergent positions grouped for contingent reasons, and specifically an identification of it with OOO and Harman's project.

What is truly baffling to me, is thus the following line of attack:

"Meanwhile, Brassier has not published a substantial piece of work since 2007, an eternity in our fast-moving period of blog-driven philosophy discussion. There have been perhaps 20 new books by OOO authors in that same time period, 8 of them written by me. Brassier writes deeply unpleasant, insecticidal prose, filled with expressions of contempt for the irrationality and pathetic emotions of others. He proclaims derision for the blogosphere, yet inhabits it as he pleases through biannual angry interview eruptions and through the daily work of his surrogates. He truly believes that physics is a real discipline but sociology is not, and that an object does not exist unless it is the object of a possible (natural) science. He has expressed a significant degree of contempt for the role of aesthetics in intellectual life. In my admittedly more limited experience of Wolfendale, he shares each of these traits."

     Does publishing less books or articles show one is less productive or relevant philosophically? Does this not obliterate questions about the standard of what is being published? If anything, this confirms Brassier's thesis that, according to Harman, an author's philosophical import, or that of the position he-she defends, should be measured against the standard of the amount of talk about it or publications on the subject by those who address it critically or in support. But this assumption is  truly perverse: Wittgenstein might have written a fraction of the books written by Deepak Chopra, but this says nothing of philosophical accomplishment, or the cogency and virtue of the their respective projects. What is again conspicuously missing from Harman's post, as it is from Cogburn's, is any real engagement with the philosophical content of Wolfendale's contentions with OOO. These should be the grounds for debate: after all, they comprise basically the totality of the book's content.

      Much more could be said about this unfortunate first wave of responses to Wolfendale's work. It is no secret that I am sympathetic to both Brassier and Wolfendale's Sellarsian tendencies; but that is well besides the point. The point is, it is the philosophical content of Harman's work that is being examined, and it is to this examination that criticism or endorsement should be primarily addressed. With that said, whether Wolfendale's position is charitable or uncharitable, whether it effectively is the work of philosophical fairness or of a compromisingly 'colored' vendetta, is an open question. But this should be decided on philosophical grounds, not on those Cogburn and Harman present in these posts.

Response to Levi Bryant: On Methodology and Dispositions

RESPONSE TO LEVI BRYANT:

On Methodology and Dispositions

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   Levi has recently made some preliminary comments about my article-review, published recently in the new issue of the journal Speculations. I thought I would use his response as an opportunity to say a few things left pending after writing the review, as well as to respond to some of Levi’s salient worries about the first half of the paper.

I – Behind Doors

Before tackling the philosophical issues, and considering that Levi begins his post with some rather generous comments, I thought I should reiterate my general opinion on Bryant’s work, and his temperament as a philosopher. Levi’s work has been a perpetual source of inspiration for us, aspiring philosophers, for many reasons. I think his appetite for learning from new sources, his intoxicating passion for philosophy, and his willingness to reinvent his positions time and time again, are all examples of philosophical virtue. His blog has been a constant reference point, sometimes crystallizing better than most secondary literature on the subject, the views of some notoriously obscure figures from the Continental tradition. He has a virtue for demystifying the impenetrable nature of philosophy, making it approachable and fascinating. It is no wonder that his work has become a source of inspiration for many outside the academia, and his sometimes fastidious insistence in that philosophy should always listen to what occurs outside of its academic ivory walls, is invaluable advice.

    As someone who has been deeply influenced by Badiou, as Levi notes in his post, I find such an attitude in tune with what I take to be a necessary part of any truly contemporary disposition in philosophy: it can only recover its synoptic ambition by being attentive to the procedures that condition it, and which occur independently of it. For all of these reasons, Levi has been, and continues to be, a mandatory interlocutor and someone for whom I feel much warmth and admiration. So hopefully, we can continue having a philosophical conversation without vitiating our mutual respect and affection. With that said, I want to address some of the philosophical issues raised by Levi, in response to my review-piece.

II -  On  Philosophical Methodology

    It is no secret by now that Levi expresses much hostility to philosophical schools which emphasize the need and importance of epistemology, at least as the latter has been understood by the post-Kantian analytic tradition, and more recently, by some of those who try to integrate concerns proper to this tradition with questions and ideas proper to the Continental tradition. In his book, Levi targets what he labels ‘epistemological realisms’, which emphasizes the idea that realism ought to begin by an examination of the conditions under which we can say that thought gains traction on being, rather than by an examination of being itself.

     But Levi also targets all forms of anti-realism that result from an exacerbation of critique, such as has been emblematic of many Continental figures during the 20^th Century, some of which are among Levi’s own intellectual heroes.

    This brings me to my first point: I think that Levi often construes epistemology as complicit with forms of anti-realism, or at the very least, that it collides with the prospect of giving a realist philosophy by way of ontological premises. But it should be always remembered that the anti-realisms that are in the process of being examined also include the positions of philosophers who thought they were restituting the priority of ontology in some form or other.

    Of course, Levi himself is well aware that the term ontology acquires a somewhat different meaning in the work of someone like Heidegger, where it becomes more a radicalization of the question of access rather than a positive metaphysical program. And I think that while Levi subscribes himself to the critiques advanced by such Continental figures against epistemology proper, he thinks that the preponderance of the question of access remains complicit with anti-realist thought. Nevertheless, epistemological realism remains the main point of contrast to his own ontological realism

   Levi expresses that he is somewhat amenable to my points about realist epistemology, and even that these might end up nurturing his thought in unforeseen ways. For this I am humbled, and grateful. Nevertheless, I should say that my concern in the review was not so much to defend a version of epistemological realism, but simply to say that epistemology as a whole is not susceptible to some of the objections that Levi proposes. In the book, Levi criticizes the priority of epistemology mainly by referencing the work of Roy Bhaskar, and against classical empiricist accounts which relativize knowledge to the givenness of perceptual or sensory data. My rejoinders to this part of Levi’s strategy were simply to indicate both that Bhaskar’s arguments for ontological realism are questionable when motivating realism, and that there exist a multiplicity of epistemological accounts that do not seem sensitive to the criticisms Levi levels against classical empiricist epistemology.

   Levi expresses himself somewhat strongly with respect to what he takes to be accusations of irrationalism that function more like a Stalinist bullying, and emphasizes that we just have different questions in mind, and different concerns. He ends his piece in a somewhat effusive declaration, which I quote:

“Daniel takes this claim as the claim I think everything is up to individual, subjective, human whim. Indeed, the claim that everything is up to individual whim is a claim that Daniel often attributes to me. I’m surprised by this and wonder if Daniel has read Koyre, Lakatos, and Kuhn. All I’m pointing out when I say such a thing is that certain research projects are incommensurable with one another. I’m surprised that Daniel, who has read and been influenced by Badiou so deeply, has difficulty seeing this point. Daniel seems to miss the point that the Galilean who has resolved to try to see if nature can be mathematized, cannot respond to questions within the Aristotlean-Ptolemaic context.”

 Indeed, one of the lessons I have learned from Badiou is that philosophy should be sensitive to paradigm shifts (to use Kuhn’s phrase), that it should develop a dialectics of change, and that it must include a theory of novelty and creation. But I do not believe that the reasons for why I insist on epistemology are explained because I am still operating within an Aristotelian framework, while Levi in a post-Galilean one. To understand this, I should perhaps say a few words about my own philosophical history, which might resonate with some of the affective declarations Levi makes.

      I started my studies in a Continental-oriented department in Peru, where philosophy was mostly aligned with the social sciences rather than with the ‘scientific’ vision proper to analytic schools, and where figures like Heidegger, the late Wittgenstein, Foucault, and Habermas were most influential. I remember at one point my good friend and excellent philosopher Erich Luna (who runs the blog Vacio) came to me with an article on Plato by Gail Fine, from Cornell. Fine was my first explicit encounter with contemporary analytic philosophy, and at the time I couldn’t but feel that I had been indoctrinated all along. As Levi emphasizes, one of the deficiencies of the Continental tradition is that it breeds generation after generation of historians of philosophy more than philosophers as such. They tend to nod patronizingly towards any form of critical engagement with the canonical figures, and prefer a more reverential approach geared towards hermeneutic precision rather than to argumentative polemics. But Fine was doing something else: she was actively discussing the cogency of the philosophical theses in Plato, and doing so in an extraordinarily rigorous manner, while preserving stylistic clarity, freeing itself of some of the bombast in the Continental rhetoric.

  Little did I know, I would end up transferring to Cornell, and studying under Fine as my advisor. During my years there, I became quickly astonished and intimidated by the methodological scrutiny of the analytic tradition, and Cornell’s heavily analytic-oriented department. I found myself out of my depth in most conversations, and I strived to learn from this tradition its formal tools for the making and defusing of arguments. And yet, I couldn’t help but feel that something was off. I couldn’t see why this linguistified philosophy wasn’t subject to the kind of criticisms that Heidegger leveled, and which detected unsaid ontological assumptions underneath every attempt at an epistemology. After reading Rorty, I became somewhat convinced that although the rigor and clarity of the school was of invaluable support when entering the trenches, the tradition was fundamentally misguided, and that it continued, somewhat obliviously, to dwell in the shadow of Kant, whereas Continental philosophy had moved far beyond it, and waltzed merrily into post-Modernity. The result? I ended up writing a thesis on Husserl and Heidegger, at Cornell.

   I returned to Peru fairly confident in my Heideggerean proclivities, which I found were fundamentally correct even in the wake of figures that were critical of Heidegger: Derrida, Foucault, Gadamer, Habermas, Lyotard, etc. It was not until I read Zizek and encountered Lacan that my confidence in the Heideggerean project was first shaken. And it was not until I read Badiou’s Being and Event that my thinking underwent a full blown ‘paradigm shift’. What was most striking in Badiou is that he began his treatise by making a significant concession to the analytic tradition, understandably in avowing the valence of formal thinking. But Badiou did something else too; he summoned from the dead specters that Continental philosophers had purportedly buried for good: words like ‘truth’, and ‘universality’, and the methodological valence of argument and proof, without the obscurity of style that characterized the tradition. The most important lesson I learned from Badiou was that philosophy could and ought to reinvent its central concepts in accordance with the procedures of its time, that no word was a ‘bad’ word in philosophy, that no view was forbidden in principle, and that one couldn’t bury corpses for good without the possibility of their return. Like Putnam emphasized apropos science, history brings us to retake theses that we had thought to have discarded in the course of progress: the idea that the universe had a beginning being a prime example.

   Having laid this out, the work of Meillassoux and Brassier further radicalized this sentiment. Both at an stylistic and philosophical level,  Brassier insisted on demolishing the sociological barrier that separated concerns proper to analytics and to Continentals, by demystifying the caricatures that each projected about the other. Just like Heidegger and Gadamer offered a ridiculous shadow of the analytic tradition as preoccupied with logic and language games only, Carnap and Searle did nothing but reinforce the suspicions of Continentals that analytics didn’t know how to read. From the beginning of his doctoral thesis, Brassier called into question the very patronizing of knowledge in the name of ontology that had been emblematic in 20^th Century philosophy, both in phenomenology and in vitalism, characteristically. 

 In the end, my diagnosis is that the affective antipathy that Bryant senses apropos epistemologists can be balanced out by reminding ourselves of some of the attitudes in Continental philosophers. Philosophical mediocrity begins when one thinks to be beyond learning, and one's opinions to be beyond revision. Just like the Continentals thought that to be concerned with issues of formal logic and proofs was myopic, analytics were seduced by the idea of progress and often patronized history and tradition. 

    But I believe in progress, and I think that just like Badiou and Sellars were perspicuous enough to realize there was much to be learned from the opposite tradition, we are now in an even better position to realize how this is so. I think that Bryant’s amenities to art, psychoanalysis, and media theory are resonant with concerns classically characteristic of the Continental tradition. But I think that the analytic tradition has done much work in the formal and natural sciences, to which it always remained close, and that we must learn from both. Recently, I criticized both Badiou for eliding epistemology and Brandom for eliding ontology. And I don’t think we have to choose between the two.

    More recently, Brassier’s work on Sellars persuaded me to revisit the work of analytic epistemology, under a more mature, fresh light. And the result was expected. The idea I had formed myself of the analytic tradition was indeed a caricature, and soon I realized that the interests that drove philosophers like Badiou were not incompatible with those of someone like Sellars, but congruent and indeed although in disagreement, potentially reinforcing. It showed me that, far from precluding the possibility of ontology in the name of epistemology, the analytic tradition, less encumbered by anti-realism, had actively pursued manifold metaphysical programs. 

    This brings me to my second crucial point: Levi writes as if I was interested in the question of truth, and of knowledge, at the expense of ontology. I think this is a brutally unfair caracterization, and one that forces one to choose between two things which in my mind are complementary.  The relevant quote is the following one:

“Daniel is obsessed with the question of how a human being knows what he says (it’s always a “he”) about the world is true. I find this question to be rather uninteresting as I think it contributes little to any real practice; scientific, artistic, personal, political, or otherwise. I see it as the question of a hall monitor. By contrast, I’m interested in making some small contribution to shifting the issues we discuss. I’d like to see theorization of how mercury from rain fall affects fish populations and enters human populations. I’d like to see discussion of why people aren’t buying hybrid or electric cars, and what this has to do with availability and semiotics. I want to talk about how sanitation technologies affect the economic and cultural development of a people. I’m interested in how mantis shrimps or bees experience the world. If I make claims about how they do, I’m fine with providing reasons for why I think this is true and how we might come to know this about bees, but I take umbrage at the suggestion that I’m just basing these claims on wild speculation and haven’t engaged in any research or inquiry that might justify these conclusions. I think knowing a bit about bees might go a bit further in addressing real issues such as their disappearance in the States than abstract epistemological questions about how we know in general. I’m not interested in legislating what “true reality” is, but in shifting discussion from an obsessive focus on how we know, on how our minds relate to the world, to a discussion of how things, including humans, interact with one another. Assertions made within this framework are not a mere “subjective whim”, as Daniel suggests. He’s welcome to question claims and ask for reasons. It could turn out that various accounts are mistaken. Be specific. Critique the account. That’s how accounts become better. Don’t, however, throw sand in the engine of inquiry. Daniel, I’m sure you miss this, but the basic point is that we’re tired of discussing your issue. We want to ask other questions and attend to other issues. That doesn’t mean we’re unwilling to provide reasons.”

     I cannot agree with Levi on these points, I’m afraid. First, my argument was not to claim that Levi did not provide reasons for his claims. The entirety of the first part of my review goes over Bryant’s arguments against epistemological realism, and for ontological realism. What I aimed to show was that his arguments do not do justice to the real work done by epistemologists today, and that the solutions he proposes to the critical problem about the connection between thought and reality remain pending and unresolved. It is no mystery that Levi wants to propose a concept of knowledge that amplifies the traditional scope on representational accuracy in favor of an account that takes practice and production as pivotal. But what my review intended to show is that the idea that concern with representation elided concern with practice was misguided. Indeed, one just has to read the work of someone like Tyler Burge to realize how proximate his questions go in hand with the practicing activity of perceptual psychologsts, for instance. My fundamental argument is that in spite of his arguments for ontological realism, the problem of representation remains, that the account he offers does not resolve it, and that furthermore his own account must tacitly accept representation, even if it doesn't explain it.

Levi questions the utility of these investigations, but such concerns can be answered without problems on a case by case basis: in asking about how our perceptual  faculties work and those of animals, for instance, taking Burge's project as an example, we explore the extent to which we share facultative capacities with other living beings, assisting us in understanding better the relation between primitive functional capacities and higher cognitive functions. These relations are fundamental in understanding both how we act and react to our environments, as well as how other animals do so in relation to their environments. We learn which kinds of operations we carry out according to which kinds of process, and we develop formal resources to comprehend the intricacies involved, allowing us to understand ourselves and the natural world better.

    Burge, Fodor and Carey, for instance, construe a concept of representation that includes conditions for veridicality and objective representing that precedes strict linguistic representation, and which expands our traditionally anthropocentric conceptions of how we access the structure and features of reality. These are not questions fundamentally about sentences or propositions; they are questions about the kind of things natural scientists are concerned with on a daily basis. Use of propositional logic is no more instrumental in this regard than the use of sentences to express our views about things: just because we write sentences to express a given claim, one couldn't make the suggestion that we are bound to remain in talk about talk, or become enclosed in an anthropocentric prison. And the same goes for using propositions to express the formal structure of thoughts, sentences, states of affairs, and whatever else.

    But Levi oscillates between saying that he has resolved the methodological questions indicated above by way of Bhaskar, and saying that he is not interested in these questions altogether. It is the latter which I find objectionable as philosophical practice: just like a person cannot call themselves an ontic structural realist and claim at the same time to be disinterested with the queston about the distinction between mathematical form and content (like Harman notes), the question about how our thoughts about things are distinct from the things we think of is a necessary critical filter to all forms of dogmatic metaphysics, and cannot be obviated by any claims to realism in ontology.

Put differently: there is a distinction between the question about WHAT are our ontological theses, and the question about WHY we should advocate an ontology with such theses. The latter is not itself an ontological question, but is set to explain the grounds under which we ought to endorse an ontological program over another. Without understanding the semantic proprieties of words such as 'being', or 'real', our discussions are bound to be too fuzzy to be of any use, or too lax to be appropriately answered. And such a propadeutic, methodological investigation, is the condition so that our metaphysics won’t be arbitrary or dogmatic. 

But if before we say what out metaphysics is we must say on what grounds metaphysical theses are adjudicated, dissuaded or encouraged, then we must accept that metaphysics is not first philosophy. This part of the critical legacy remains, I think, and leads one to ask: what status does such a propadeutic discourse have, if not epistemological? If one has no such account, then one’s metaphysics become precisely dogmatic. I think that Levi attempts to have such an account, but also wants to say he is ultimately not willing to engross himself in this issue.

    Levi formulates his propadeutic methodological enquiry by appears to Bhaskar, and the  first part of the review expresses why in my estimation: a) his argument does not succeed in motivating realism, b) it does not succeed in motivating an ontology of objects, c) it does not succeed in establishing the priority of ontology over epistemology. As a result, my contention was not that Levi was being irrational because he gave no reasons, but that a) the reasons he provided were not satisfactory, and that b) he seemed to relapse into pragmatic considerations when claiming that he could dismiss further argument, and let the epistemology police bitterly scold him from a distance.  But if the latter criteria for dismissal are what drives his obviation of epistemology, then Levi has surrendered his ontological program to a kind of subjective whim, to pragmatic considerations of the sort caracteristic proper to instrumentalist approaches, nevermind the talk about bees and Jupiter.

    The important point is that Levi’s motivations for his onticological program were problematic, and that without such resolution the program’s feasibility was suspect. When Levi emphasizes that he is just ‘not interested’ in the same kind of questions that I am interested in, I think he touches precisely on the point of concern.

It is not that I believe all philosophers should do the same thing, or that everyone should ask the same questions. But from this it is another thing to say that there are no questions that philosophers ought to answer, or be accountable for. Certain things must be done in order for us to be doing philosophy rather than something else. The question of whether we can sidestep the critical quandary about the connection between thought and reality by way of ontology, or whether epistemology can be motivated before ontology, are open questions. Indeed, towards the end of the first part, I acknowledge Levi’s virtuous considerations about this knot, and offer some arguments in the way which I won't repeat.

In any case, the problem about the connection between thought and reality is at the heart of any philosophy that claims allegiance to post-critical realism, and against dogmatic metaphysics. My idea, developed elsewhere, is that the epistemological corollary to ontology is necessary in order to proscribe the authority of subjective attitudes as admissible in philosophical argumentation. One can be as disinterested in epistemology as anyone else, but this this not mean that the cogency of one’s project remains without an answer to these questions. To say these questions are quixotic concerns of a pre-Galilean spirit seems to me a convenient scapegoat.

   Again, this is not to say that Levi does not offer arguments for his claims. It is to say that if the arguments he offers are inadequate in establishing what he intends them to establish, then not being interested in addressing these shortcomings surrenders one’s account to volitive grounds. It is not that I am not interested in ontology, or that I think epistemology is the telos of philosophical activity. It is simply that to acknowledge the separation and connection between thought and reality remains a necessity, and my arguments insisted in that these are not problems that Levi can sidestep. 

I refuse to accept that epistemology is ‘my issue’ simply because someone is tired to discuss it. I don’t believe philosophical legitimacy can be subjected to one’s interests, precisely because I believe philosophy must be synoptic. It is those who think they can afford to ask one set of questions at the expense of methodological clarity that end up making careers out of how many grains of sand make a heap, or whether Gadamer’s reading of Heidegger is good. One of the lessons I take from Heidegger, is that the beginnings are the most difficult, and that methodology is required. Finally, this does not mean that Levi’s ontological theses are false simply because they lack a proper methodological footing. Nor does it mean that they won’t help certain people do certain things, perhaps admirable ones. That’s all fine.

       But it does mean that without proper grounding, these theses are still not obviously yielding the kind of realism that he considers as a goal. Levi’s Spinozism seeks to inspire creative practices, and assist our negotiation with a material world in multiple forms. Yet it is important to remember that the desire to serve the interests of our kind, however noble, will only motivate philosophical positions at the expense of other considerations if one ascribes to philosophy primarily an instrumental status. Needless to say, as an aspiring realist and materialist, I think Levi should contend this possibility. The question is whether he is in a position to.

As Badiou mentions in his latest presentation from the EGS, I think we cannot begin from anthropologically configured considerations about practice, politics, creation, and whatnot. We need a new logic, in the primitive sense in which the latter entails the articulation of the conditions for what is thinkable. In this respect, I find that the projects of people like Badiou (thinking of a generic form of novelty) and Brandom (thinking of the articulation between semantics and pragmatics) can mutually reinforce each other, and therefore that ontology and epistemology can be reconciled in making a truly contemporary philosophy, beyond classical sociological dividing lines, and without stale strawmans thrown in each other’s way.

      To close up, I think that Levi has been negatively impressed by epistemologists to the point where his skepticism against the discipline is total. My only rejoinder to his remarks on affect would be to say that in patronizingly dismissing the work that drives many without having a solid grip on the field’s present state, it is he that seems to emulate Stalinist tactics: maligning thinkers for their thwarted temperaments, accusing them of endorsing positions they effectively don’t, and misconstruing their claims so as to effectively dismiss anything that might appear, even coarsely, as a challenge to one’s position. I know Levi is far better than this, so I don’t think we need to reduce the best of us to the worst representatives of each tradition. Lest, that is, if we want to return idiocy with idiocy, like the analytic lab rat who thinks Continental con artists do nothing but eloquent sophistry, or the pious Continental that thinks looking to the past suffices to skeptically dismiss or warn against novelties in the present. The real obscurantism comes in facile dismissals, in unwarranted disavowals, and in overconfidence in one’s assumptions about the other.

With that said, I think that Levi’s project is one that is just beginning, and that in the company of great thinkers, it will only continue to grow and nurture itself. Finally, we are all in this together, and if Levi can learn a single thing from my sincere attempts to find out what works and doesn’t in his incipient project, then I may have returned a fraction of the wealth he’s given me.

_________________

Appendix - Added Friday, September 7th

Levi made a further response, to which I thought I would attach the following:

I think the claim that epistemological concerns are anthropocentric because they ask about relations between humans and the world is a bit like saying that questions about bees are beecentric because they ask about bees. In other words, it tautologically follows that in asking the question about the relation between humans and the world we are, well, asking a question or set of questions about humans. But epistemology is a bit broader that this. And I think anthropocentrism should entail something a bit stronger: namely, not only that a set of questions take place which are about humans or the relations between humans to other things. Rather, anthropocentrism entails that in asking these questions, these thinkers preclude or de-prioritize other considerations.

   I think that here it is important to distinguish methodological priority and general priority: to say that certain questions must be resolved before others does not mean that the former questions are more important than the ones which can only be answered on condition that the former have been. Epistemological priority, if it obtains, should be understood in the logical sense in which it conditions how we understand and adjudicate metaphysical theses, not in the sense that it favors or precludes metaphysical theses.

I think Levi is right in that much epistemology has been anthropocentric in that it construed its concept of representation on the basis of typical human faculties, and often using the linguistic capacity of humans as determining all forms of knowledge. But epistemology need not follow this route. Epistemology need not restrain itself to asking about language, or it need not suppose that only humans know. A good example is Burge's critique of what he calls 'individual representationalism', which he accuses of over-intellectualizing objective representing, in a way that precludes us from understanding how we share representational cognitive functions with other, non-sapient animals. Similarly, epistemology need not preclude connections between practice and discourse, like Sellars and Brandom propose in articulating semantics with pragmatics.

In this regard, I think epistemology is not so different than other scientific fields of investigation. From cosmology to biology and physics, our first theses are encumbered by assumptions, overdeterminations, etc. Epistemology has also had such faults, and one of the virtues of contemporary epistemology is its proximity to advances in cognitive science, in perceptual psychology, in neurophysiology, in ethology, etc. Epistemology today in fact is not constrained to asking questions about how we represent the world, even if the question about our relation to the world conditions this understanding, as the paradigmatic examples of Fodor or Burge show. In any case, epistemology does not in general preclude ontology, but conditions it, while allows us to distinguish between levels of priority by distinguishing ontological from logical priority.

This is a point that I think Sellars does well to emphasize: even though there is an ontological dependency of the logical on the causal (sentient and sapient creatures couldn't exist without the proper evolutionary conditions obtaining), there is an epistemological dependency of the causal on the logical (without the capacity to have beliefs, make claims and so on, we don't have theories). Burge and others suggest that, although knowledge in this strict sense depends on sapience, there are pre-linguistic forms of objective representation which we share with non-sapient creatures, and which they set out to investigate. In other words, human knowledge does not exhaust the question of knowledge, indeed of representation.

Finally, I would just say that in no way an exploration of the conditions under which we, as knowers, represent or know the world forecloses metaphysical investigation of the sort Levi wants to do. Just like asking about bees might become necessary at a certain stage of our argument without making our entire philosophy beecentric, we can acknowledge the question of our access to the world has a necessity and methodological priority with respect to other questions, without for this reason accepting that there aren't other questions, perhaps ultimately more interesting to us, to be answered.

In short, I don't think epistemology either: a) constrains us to ask questions about human knowledge, even if this is constitutive of its investigation, b) that it doesn't foreclose other kinds of investigation, including ontological investigation.  My concerns are that by eliding the epistemological component in philosophical thinking, we run into methodological quarrels of the sort I have been exploring, and that ultimately render suspect the status of our ontological claims.

   Now, ontological propositions can get off the ground without such footing, but at the price of rendering our metaphysics dogmatic, in the sense that it does not answer as to why we ought to endorse a given metaphysics, or it relies on instrumental considerations as the ultimate court. I think that these two ways are much more deserving of the label 'anthropocentrism', because they subordinate ontological theses to pragmatic concerns about our activities, our creative elan, our search for political emancipation, etc. But I think we can, and should, be concerned with exploring the world in ways that exceed considerations of the human. While scientists can carry an exploration suspending all kinds of questions, and have instrumental efficacity work on the background of no fixed ontological position, the distinctiveness of philosophy is that it, to use Badiou's phrase, begins with the beginning.

The Destruction and Reconstitution of Experience: On Sellars' Account of Ur-Conceptuality and Sensibility

THE DESTRUCTION AND RECONSTITUTION OF EXPERIENCE:
On Sellars, Sensibility and Correlationism
__________________________________

   

    I have been re-considering Sellars' account of "ur-conceptuality" from the Lever of Archimedes in the Carus Lectures, after evaluating my contention, presented during the Bonn summer school about a month ago, that these are not to be understood in terms of 'pre-linguistic' cognitive capacities, but are rather more like 'rudimentary concepts', already linguistically mediated, if not fully functional in the logical space of reasons.  In what follows I intend to present this issue which, I believe, ties up some essential knots on the questions about the relationship between Sellars' nominalism and his realist metaphysics.


1. Ur-Concepts and Primitive Representation

           In a discussion with Roderick Firth, Sellars sets out to separate the primitive conceptual capacity of pre-adult humans to discern secondary qualities as component-parts of physical objects. He thereby seeks to pin down precisely how it is that appearances already enjoy a primitive ontological status, the better to eventually offer successor concepts in order to supersede not only the base conceptual attributions that children make, but also our available 'adult' concepts for secondary qualities.  The ur-concepts that Sellars attributes to the infant Jones Junior are as follows[1]:

1.       Junior has an ur-concept of volumes and expanses of red stuff.

2.       Junior has an ur-concept of seeing a volume of red stuff.

3.       Junior has an' ur-concept of a physical object as an individuated volume of color stuff which is endowed with certain causal properties.

4.       Junior has an ur-concept of seeing a volume or expanse of red stuff not only as a volume or expanse of red, but as a constituent of a physical object.

5.       Junior has an ur-concept of what it is to see of a physical object a volume or expanse of red which is one of its constituents. If the constituent is the surface of an opaque object, e.g., an apple, it is the very redness of the apple.

6.       Junior has an ur-concept of what it is to see the very redness of an object.

      The problem at hand is what precise status these ur-concepts have; are they linguistic capacities or representations? Or are they another species, perhaps psychological, of intentional representation? What is behind Junior's capacity to do all of these things?


   At Bonn, Ray Brassier flirted with the idea that these might be understood best as pre-linguistic capacities, while I contended the opposite. Essentially, I think my original contention was fundamentally correct, but I think I can see why Sellars' own formulation of the problem might nevertheless tempt us to identify ur-concepts with pre-linguistic capacities, especially judging from what he says in other writings. Moreover, in his influential study, James O'Shea identifies ur-concepts with pre-linguistic capacities, which would seem to settle the case once and for all. I think the issue is more complicated, and ultimately important.


   The two crucial texts that I think help us figure out what's going on, however tentatively, are Some Reflections on Language Games and the Mental Events paper. These will also shed a lot of light into why many consider Sellars' venture into process metaphysics to constitute a relapse into a form of the Myth of the Given, or finally a form of adherence into naturalist prejudices that strictly speaking are 'pre-Sellarsian'. The separation between left and right wing forms of Sellarsianism can be mapped to some of the neighboring issues as well. But anyhow, I think these texts allow us to see why the thesis that ur-concepts are pre-linguistic is infelicitous.

   In Some Reflections on Language Games, Sellars considers the original empiricist or naive realist appeal to pre-linguistic ur-concepts as facilitating the capacity to associate undefined descriptive predicates ('red) with items in the world. The basic idea that these thinkers shared is that the meaning of our observation statements derives from our primitive cognitive capacity to apprehend the categorical structure of the world, and specifically the content concerning perceptible qualities. The subsequent idea was that the predicates involved in observation statements (as paradigmatic ways in which causal stimuli trigger linguistic responses or "language-entry transitions") acquire meaning  as we learn to obey "semantical rules" which in involve recognizing colored things. Say, our concept of 'red things' acquires meaning as we learn to explicitly obey the rule red objects are to be called 'red', and so on. This is not to say, of course, that we need to have a concept of the rule in order to obey it; but that our behavior exhibits conformity to the rule in a sense in which we count as having internalized it, as exhibited by regularities of behavior, and specifically in learning to recognize objects of the right sort. But what grounds the surreptitious pre-linguistic capacity for recognition that subjects make explicit as they learn to deploy observation talk? Sellars critically considers two such candidate accounts for these ur-concepts that allow pre-linguistic categorical apprehension:

1) A symbolic structure or language -  Under this hypothesis, there is a fundamental language or symbolic system that is not itself acquired by obeying rules, but that rather conditions that possibility of identifying different terms in different languages as being about the same thing, beyond their functional role. For if learning to use a concept requires identifying by way of its use an appropriate kind of object/properties or class of objects/properties, then we need to explain how we come to identify such objects or properties of being of that kind.

         If in order to learn the meaning of 'rot' we obey the rule 'red objects are to be called rot' then, in pains of regress, we need to say that the symbolic language by virtue of which we identify 'red objects' is unique, and not itself learned by virtue of obeying a further rule, for this would obviously unchain an infinite regress. This must hold necessarily since obviously the ur-concept of 'red object' would have to be different than the concept we learn by virtue of obeying the semantic rule in which the ur-concept is formulated, in order not to fall to the inconsistent hypothesis that we acquire concepts on condition that we already have them. Thus, some basic language is primitive in the sense that it is not acquired by obeying rules and in that it conditions all further learning by relating the functional role of a term in another language to the objects/properties that we identify primitively in the base language.

 

      It is precisely on the basis of such an ur-conceptual economy we can then learn the functional role that specific linguistic tokens bare to empirical reality, i.e. the contents of descriptive predicates (redness, red items...etc). I think this preemptively anticipates the nativist hypothesis championed by Fodor and Lepore, among others, according to which innate conceptual structures precede and condition that capacity for learning, and thus full-blown linguistic rationality.

2) The capacity to apprehend items as belonging to kinds or resembling classes of particulars  - Sellars castigates this position as a variant of the 'mental eye' view which ascribes to the mind the capacity to immediately apprehend the categorical structure of the physical world, sense qualities, or whatever else, by fixating itself inwardly and outwardly at once. But it seems clear that were Sellars to endorse this, he would be delivered right back into both the matrimonial account of meaning and the epistemological Myth of Given. For it would require postulating both that we have immediate awareness of abstract entities which furnish the categorical structure of reality ('redness'), and that it is by virtue of such awareness that words acquire meaning. But this is to reactivate knowledge by acquaintance.

       At this juncture it becomes clear that the the first, proto-Fodorian hypothesis must also postulate a pre-rational cognitive symbolic economy that simply staples mind into world. But this is another version of the Myth of the Given since, it seems that whatever this system is, it works to grant a sort of luminosity into at least the undefined color qualities of objects.

    It is important to note that in SRLG, Sellars rejects both accounts of pre-linguistic ur-concepts as facilitating the rule obeying usage of observational language. The solution seems to be clear: we have to account for language acquisition not as the explicitation of a semantic protocol for recognizing 'red things' via some dubious 'semantic intuition'. We don't learn to say red because we learn to obey the rule that we should utter 'red' when we see a red thing. For then the ur-conceptual protocol as a foundational discourse is introduced simply to halt the inevitable regress that follows from the thesis that we need a meta-language to learn a language. The obvious alternative thesis is to say that an observation-language is, if not learned as rule-obeying,  a conditioned responsive behavior. We can relax our account to claim that although one does not obey rules to apply observational discourse, one must nevertheless be conditioned to respond to the right sorts of entities in the world. Thus, to say that "...the fact that the word 'red' means the quality red may be identified with the fact that 'red' is a conditioned response to red things" (Sc. 38). But while Sellars accepts that indeed the proper application of the word involves being capable of reliably responding to the occurrent stimuli, he warns against the dubious claim that this entails that words acquire meaning by being associated with things. Reiterating the distinction between acting in accordance to rules and acting in accordance with conceptions of rules, Sellars' suggestion is that in acting in accordance to rules we are simply conditioned to respond to red things in the right circumstances, rather than assigning a term to an object we have already recognized in advance by some prior intentional mechanism. This is obviously a corollary of Sellars idea that there is no form of intentionality that precedes the linguistic; neither psychological nor practical.

       What is going on, then, when Sellars speaks of ur-concepts in Junior's talk?

     Now, it seems tempting to claim that when formulating his account of ur-conceptuality to open the space for the analysis of sensibilia or sensa, Sellars reverts into something like the second variant of the empiricist/ naive-realist account outlined above, in virtue of which we have some kind of immediate awareness of the categorical contents of reality. This might be reinforced by considering that Sellars also wants to account for something like pre-linguistic, "animal representations" or proto-cognitions roughly around the same time as the Carus Lectures, in Mental Events (1981). And yet it seems just implausible that Sellars would have suddenly relapsed into a mind's-eye view, of all people! How are we, then, to account for the ur-conceptual status of Junior's experiencing of sensible qualities as constituents of physical objects?

   I think Sellars' remarks in S. 38 of SRLG point towards the right solution. Although it is true that our we cannot have a concept of red without being capable of reliably responding to instances of red, it does not follow that we must equate the meaning of the word with a relation to an item in the world. We can simultaneously accept that our capacity to use undefined predicate-quality words as conditioned by capacity to differentially respond to environmental stimuli in a way that precedes rational rule-obeying, while maintaining that the meaning of the word is nothing but its role in a conceptual economy. Sensibility itself plays no epistemic role, even if it is necessary to acquire knowledge. Sellars must preserve his nominalist account: meaning is functionally specified within a conceptual economy.

     But this means that Junior's ur-concept of red is not 'pre-linguistic' in the sense that it involves the operations of a nativist ur-language (hypothesis 1), nor the fixation of the mind's eye upon the categorical structure of the given via intellectual intuition or some other pre-linguistic intentional mechanism (hypothesis 2). Junior clearly is conditioned to respond with the verbal output 'red' when he sees red things, and can do so somewhat reliably. He uses language already in a self-conscious manner, even if lacking full fledged capacities to enter into deliberative reason-giving behavior.

          Furthermore, his ur-concept is not one of something looking red, but of something being red, since he lacks the contrastive concepts of 'looks/is' introduced upon further conditioning. Junior attributes the redness he sees to the objects he interacts with rather than to private experiences, fields of sense, or whatnot. This is not to say that Junior has a fully-developed concept of 'physical object, extended in space' at that stage, or something so sophisticated. It's clear Junior is not yet capable to playing the game of giving and asking for reasons, or of using the contrastive concepts of 'looks/is' to enact withdrawal of endorsement, or to characterize episodes as merely ontensible seeings. He reports redness as pertaining to objects, and is flummoxed when some evil grown-up tampers with lighting conditions so that what he takes to be a red object suddenly appears blue.  He must then simply retort to thinking that a blue object is before him, and needs eventual introduction into the contrastive concepts to distinguish between mere seemings/lookings and actual features of objects, by modifying his entitlement towards the content of the claim. Thus, Sellars' 'ur-concepts' are utterly linguistic capacities; they cannot be understood as primitive capacities at the level of mere sentient registration and causal responsiveness. Junior's repertoire is surely already more sophisticated than that.

     So what does then, this ur-concept of redness, encompass? Sellars list is amply clarifying.

  It clearly already involves the capacity to see a red thing as red, or that it is red, since Junior attributes redness to that which he sees. Although Sellars characterizes this as-content as being 'of a physical object' this should be taken in tandem with his qualification in section 32, where he makes it clear that Junior has the notion of an object as a 'determinate thing-stuff'; but not the full-grown concept of physical we attribute to adults and which evidently Junior could not have. This is of a piece with his reductive semantics of sensa that he provisionally already proposed in Some Reflections on Perceptual Consciousness (1975).

 

   Junior also has the capacity to see of the thing the redness which is a extended surface of the object, i.e. Junior is not shocked if when splitting an apple in half the inside of the apple is not red too. Junior sees of the object the facing side, which is non-conceptually given to him through his senses. But having an ur-concept of what it is to see of an object, Junior thus both is capable of attributing redness to the object, and at the same time realizing that this redness pertains to something like the extended surfaces of opaque objects, rather than being a thorough characteristic of objects through and through. This is crucial, since it is the first step towards untethering expanses of sense-qualities from objects; a move that Sellars subsequently exploits for metaphysical speculation. This is what is fundamentally added by conditions (5) and (6).

      Junior's ur-concept of red is thus conditionally acquired and not rule-obeying, linguistic insofar as it involves predicative attributions and the capacity to see things as such-and-such, yet too rudimentary to count as an 'adult concept' since it lacks the contrastive concepts that allows one to formulate one's endorsement or lack thereof, on the basis of warrant tethered to a notion of standard conditions, and so on.  And precisely because Junior's ur-concept of red is simply a 'rudimentary' rather than 'foundational' concept that Sellars can resist the myth of the categorial given: it's not that Junior, before learning language, already accesses the categorical structure of the physical world. Junior is conditioned to respond in ways through which he becomes capable of characterizing the contents of his experience, but this already involves linguistic mediation/acculturation.  Junior has no determinate category of colored physical objects extended in space, he has an determinate concept of something-being-colored as a colored-expanse more generally. This is the only way to reconcile the psychological nominalism with the holistic account of linguistic rationality, I think.

       On this account, it becomes a lot clearer just where the Carus Lectures depart from the account of the Myth of Jones, and the looks-talk analysis. Sellars' eventual supplement to the Myth of Jones is to say that before the contrastive concept of looks, which can be applied to color-qualities as easily as dispositional ones, we have a proto-concept of color-qualities or 'the proper sensibles' characterizing them as constituent parts of physical objects, if not identical with them. There is a positivity of appearance that precedes the epistemic regulation of looks talk, which does require fully grown linguistic rationality or integration in the game of giving and asking for reasons. Understanding this also allows us to understand why looks-talk, when applied to color-concepts or sensible-predicates operates withdrawal of endorsement in the form of ostensible seeings, i.e. to merely see red is not just to refrain from claiming that something is red, but to report on the autonomy of the colored expanse from the properties of the object.  The occurrent properties of sense can thereby be examined positively in a metaphysical account.


2. Against Correlationism 

         On a different but related note, this allows us to see how Sellars is precisely not a correlationist. Correlationism requires three conditions:

1) the sense dependence of objects on concepts,

2) the reference dependence of concepts on sensibility, and

3) the ontological identification of sensibility with subjective appearances. Sellars' trick is to accept the first claim, qualify the second, and reject the third.

       Yes, knowledge of anything requires concepts. This is true, but somewhat trivial. Even people like Tyler Burge think knowledge requires justification of the sort only sapient creatures enjoy. Yes, the empiricist is right in insisting that our concepts and so our knowledge of the world begins in sensible experience. But, against the sense-datum theorist or phenomenalist, this is not to say that there is a reference dependence of concepts on sensibility, but only another form of epistemic dependence. That our knowledge is anchored in the world through sensibility is not to say that all knowledge is of the sensible. This is not to refuse that there is such a thing as sensibility, or to say it cannot be metaphysically investigated. Rather, it is simply to say that sensibility can condition our knowledge of that which is not sensible. We can  investigate the non-apparent structure of appearances as belonging to the domain of physical nature, just like we can investigate the micro-physical constitution of the manifestly described world of middle-sized objects and properties apart from their phenomenological conceptual envelopment. Thus, against (3), it is simply false to equate the content of sensibility with 'subjective appearances', where the latter are understood as self-presenting episodes.

         The properties of sense-qualities, although relative to sentient organisms, are irreducible to the phenomenological categories that furnish our commonsense description of the world. Granted, phenomenology reveals that there is a dimension of appearing that must be accounted for. But this is not to say we are forced into construing appearances as subjective correlates. They can be accounted  at the genetic neurocomputational level in terms of how environmental inputs relate to our cognitive faculties by triggering appropriate neuronal onsets.

          Now, Sellars thinks on top of this you can actually characterize the apparent particularity of sensa as ultimately non-object bound physical phenomena, which have irreducible qualitative properties. Sensa turn out to be features that are objectively constituted only in relation to sentient organisms, but they are no less objective for that. In other words, that sensa are dependent on sentience does not render them subjective in any interesting sense. Again, no basic categorical stratum of the sort phenomenologists fetishize over can hope to undergird the objectivity of the physical within which even appearances are constituted.

     Whether that much is tenable remains an open metaphysical question. But the point is that once we have  defused the ontological equation between sensibility and subjective appearances, both forms of epistemic dependence won't do to motivate correlationism. The link between knowledge and conceptuality, and that between conceptuality and sensibility requires that we investigate precisely how observation statements, qua language entry transitions, are articulated with complex causal mechanisms that relate environment to organism. Even if it turns out that the presentational content of experience is fundamentally tethered to sense-data, this is not to assert that sensibility has an autonomous categorical status apart from the physical, nor that the content of our judgments is reducible to sense data just because we require sense data to make them: we can examine the link between appearance and reality by examining the reality of appearing, refusing the phenomenological hypostasis of the categorical status of subjectivity as foundational, by reintegrating sensibility to physical theory, acknowledging it as our anchor to the world, rather than our solipsistic prison.