Lacan, Zizek, Badiou: Why Sellars Matters in These Debates?

LACAN, BADIOU, ZIZEK:

Why Sellars Matters In These Debates?

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As a response to my last post about Zizek's claims to realism, and my latest post on the theoretical cogency of psychoanalysis, I have been receiving some critical commentary, all roughly along the same lines. Characteristically, by my friends Levi Bryant, and Javier Urbina, all defend Lacan from my criticisms. As far as I can gauge, the main criticisms are that:

a) Lacan, and by extension Zizek, are not interested in a notion of the Real like that of philosophers. Therefore that the questions about realism raised by people like Meillassoux or Brassier, concerning our access to the in-itself, are not to be conflated with Lacan's own questions.

b) Badiou, similarly, has no analogous concept of the Real as impossible, but rather of Being as inconsistent, which is radically different, and should not be identified.

Levi wrote the following:

"You treated psychoanalytic practice in terms of knowledge, presupposing a set of transcendent criteria for evaluating it, missing the entire point that the psychoanaytic clinic is a site of evental truth and a truth-procedure for the analysand that undergoes it. The psychoanalytic clinic is not after *knowledge*, nor does the analyst *have knowledge*. The psychoanalytic clinic is after that which *escapes* knowledge and language. This is what the term "subject" means in psychoanalysis. Subject is precisely that which is in excess of any linguistic category and that through this excess generates a series of signifying effects as language strives to gentrify it."

In private, a friend wrote the following:

"Dear Daniel,

I just read your post on realism and your critique of Zizek which is very good and makes an excellent point about how Lacanians (and Zizek) in general are trying to enter into the debates started by the speculative realists/materialists/etc. I have a few questions though, I hope you don't my launching directly into criticism.

Perhaps the real -subject/object issues are not really the same between the Lacanians and, say, Brassier. This is one of those situations where the question already defines the answer. This is ultimately Zizek's error but I think you err precisely in taking him too seriously. To be specific, Lacan's Real occurs within an economy of the symbolic and imaginary: the barred subject faced with objet a does not correspond to those discussions of the real being addressed in realism, neither ontologically nor epistemologically. The legacy of structuralism is right here: the price we pay for the generation of semantic distribution is the alienation from the real.

Zizek's point precisely is that it is this precise exchange that is the real. I would disagree here with your paragraph that starts "put simply". If Zizek and other Lacanians want to argue that the rule is precisely a fracture within discourse itself (barred S <-> a) and that is what truth is: well obviously there is no real conversation to be had with Sellars, Brassier, etc. We are talking about different things.

Now we get to your brief comment about Badiou. I would say that the matheme does not touch the real in Badiou because there is no real. Being, yes. Truth, yes. Knowledge, yes. No real. What is more important is that despite all the differences between Badiou and the Lacanians, they share on this point that you are criticizing. That is: for Badiou the very possibility of ontology is rooted in the inaccesibility of the unity that underlies the Parmenidean condition in its original meaning: what is not one, is not. By arguing that the one is not, mathematics doesn't really "touch" the real. What it does is fully flesh out what is being "not one". This is a version, again, of Zizek's point, which locates being (if we want to call that "real") on its incapacity to be grasped "adequately" or "qua ens".

Having said this about Badiou, I want to empahsize again that I do not think there is a real in Badiou nor do I think that he can play any significant role in these discussions. The problem is that they talk past each other.

Let me know what you think of these brief reflections.

Hope you are well.

"

Despite the pertinence of these rejoinders, I think my original criticisms, if read carefully, anticipate these potential rebuttals, and show that nevertheless the indicated problems remain for these thinkers. But I thought I might use this as a way to clarify what I think is precisely at stake in the axis composed by Zizek, Lacan and Badiou, in spite of their differences.  Predictably, Hegel turns out to play a somewhat important role here.

I - Zizek and Lacan: Why it's not just a different question

As indicated above, the main problem both Levi and my friend indicated apropos my reading of Lacan and Zizek, is that I illegitimately import standards proper to the concept of the Real in contemporary realist debates, and which are enveloped by ontological and epistemological concerns, with Lacan's psychoanalytic concepts. Levi targets the residual concern with representation in my account; my other friend, in turn, simply indicated that the Real couldn't be thought of as pertaining to a mind-independent reality, and therefore couldn't be judged in accordance to standards set by philosophers in regards to that problematic. 

With regards to Lacan and Zizek, I think a few observations are in order. I certainly agree in that Lacan does not want to formulate his thinking about the Real in epistemological, or indeed ontological, terms. Nevertheless, I think it is important to distinguish between what an author says they are doing and what they effectively end up doing; or put differently, between what they want to say and what they commit themselves to saying. I recently wrote in more extensive length why I think that, in spite of Lacan's 'anti-philosophical' attempts to wrest the theory of desire that psychoanalysis produces away from classical ontologico-epistemological concerns, he ends up effectively cornered into a sort of methodological quandary, that results from the elision of representation. Finally, I think that this quandary demands, in spite of its protestations to the contrary, from us to read Lacan as moving within a philosophical register, which indeed implicitly relies on representation.

       With that said, I think that Lacan's account of the Real is certainly ambiguous: on the one hand, we have the structuralist adherence to the immanence of the signifier, and therefore of the articulation of desire between the imaginary and the symbolic. On the other hand, we have a conception of the Real as that which resists symbolization, and of the recalcitrance of Real desire to the order of the signifier. But how to attempt to give an account of this separation between the Real and the symbolic-imaginary, without thereby ontologizing desire, in its structural coupling between the barred subject and the Real object? My contention is that, beginning from Seminar XI onwards, Lacan begins to flirt with the idea that mathematization allows precisely for this kind of operation. On the one hand, as Russell had already noted, the matheme subtracts itself from the order of the symbolic, because it is not inherently meaningful. Thus, we cannot 'translate' mathematical formulas or their syntactical composition into ontological, or epistemological terms. Of course, for Lacan, this is precisely a crucial requirement in dislodging psychoanalysis from (ego)-psychology, which continues to reify the subject as an individual, and which must therefore tacitly remain encumbered in the imaginary-symbolic envelopment of the signifier, and of the symptom. 

What the matheme offers, in turn, is a non-translatable formal ideography recalcitrant to such operations. But the question then becomes about how we can distinguish between the Real of the mathematic inscription, and that of the Real phenomenon or 'Real desire' that psychoanalysis is in the process of providing a theory of. And my claim is that this forces Lacan, and consequently Zizek, into a methodological quandary. On the one hand, it is clear that he cannot avow for the separation between Real inscription and Real phenomenon without reactivating the distinction between representing and represented, signifier and signified, that marks epistemological discourse. On the other hand, it seems clear that if psychoanalysis is to be a theory of desire, rather than just another phantasy, circulating around its own proper impossible object, the formalizations it carries out and the claims it makes about desire cannot be identical to the Real desire that the analyst is set to deal with in practice. This is because if we conflate the generality of the statements/formulas with the analytic transference with the analysand, then the theoretical practice that psychoanalysis embodies, and the clinical practice, become conflated. But short of accounting for this separation, it renders suspect the theoretical status of psychoanalysis, purporting to have done away with representation.

So the question becomes: what is the relation between these three crucial levels:

a) The Real of desire, in its structural coupling between the barred subject, and the object-cause.

b) The claims of psychoanalysis, that are still formulated by way of the signifier.

c) The formulas of psychoanalysis, that formalize the structures described by those claims.

And I think here is where Lacan must tacitly rely on both an ontologization of Real desire, on the one hand, and an epistemological account of the relation between the claims that psychoanalysis makes, the formulas it produces, and the Real phenomena that these claims describe. For the matheme would be truly 'meaningless', and couldn't count as a formalization of anything, unless psychoanalytic discourse and claims held a prerogative when describing the general structure of desire. But what sets this prerogative for psychoanalysis, considering that Lacan insists that there is no 'meta-language', and that, like structuralism demands, the signifier does never reach out onto things, but defers invariably to other signifiers, eliding any representationalism? And by the same token, how are we to understand the difference between the formal reality of desire and the subject, which 'slides through the signifying chains' tethered to the formal vacuity of the impossible object, and the formalization of psychoanalytic claims? My position is then that although Lacan wants to say that 'Real desire' preconditions its objectification in discourse, it is actually the objectification of desire in psychoanalytic discourse which conditions the reification of desire as Real, and the matheme as adequate to its formalization. These are the relevant passages from my paper, which begin by a statement from Lacan, and which the reader should obviate in case they have read the paper in the past, or if they so wish to forward to the conclusions:

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"There is a fundamental ambiguity in the use we make of the word 'desire'. Sometimes we objectify it- and we have to do so, if only to talk about it. On the contrary sometimes we locate it as the primitive term, in relation to any objectification." (S2, pp. 225) This ambiguity is not trivial whatsoever. For if desire must be objectified in order to be spoken about, in what sense is it any different than any of the other terms that philosophers or scientists purportedly use to describe phenomena of all kinds, desire included? How are we to understand the claim that desire is simultaneously of the order of signifier and that which conditions any objectification whatsoever? How to address the Real of the libidinal subject and the Real of the object if, like Zizek insists, "There is no ontology of the Real: the very field of ontology, of the positive order of Being the Real are mutually exclusive: The Real is the immanent blockage or impediment of the order of being, what makes the order of Being inconsistent..." (LTN; Pg. 958). 

         This problem is particularly acute: Lacan insists that desire cannot be ontologised. But then what is it that psychoanalytic theory is doing when they 'objectify' desire "if only to speak of it"? How could such an act constitute anything but the making of an ontological valence? Despite his precautions, by flattening the symbolically enveloped epistemological relation between knowing individual and known object into the relation between the Real of the unconscious subject and the impossible object, Lacan seems to be effectively ontologizing the relation between the desire and its object-cause. The deflection of the transcendental relation between words and things at the level of the symbolic is coupled to a reification of the relation between the desiring subject and desired object, at the point where the Real of both becomes indiscernible. The Real of desire appears thereby as the ontologization of the relation between the Real subject and the Real object, as the distinction between them becomes a nullity. Desire as precondition for symbolic-ideal objectification is the reification of the transcendental correlation between subject and object, by reducing it to a formal difference allegedly intractable by conceptual means. For psychoanalysis to be a theory of desire, it's symbolically enveloped statements must conditioned by Real desire, rather than statements being the condition for mere 'talk' about the Real. For the latter would merely duplicate the philosophical 'myths' in question.


        Yet to claim that desire is not just one more signifier in the commerce of the symbolic, but rather the enabling condition for signification and objectivation, is once again to reactivate the relation between signifier and signified, only this time in terms of desire as Real precondition for objects understood as linguistically individuated posits.  In other words, although Lacan has done away with the transcendental relation of reference at the level of the symbolic, he still depends on such connection between the Real of desire, in its formal vacuity suspended in the subject-object polarity, as the condition of possibility for the symbolic individuation of the signifier. This is to covertly ontologise desire as an Aristotelian 'first mover', as the 'ground of being', as Ineffable Being stripped even of the honor of the name. And since symbolic objectification occurs on condition of the Real unobjectifiable cause, it follows that even the theory of desire, that psychoanalysis purports to advance, is conditioned on separation between the claims and formulas about desire, and desire itself.  In other words, if Lacan claims that the objectification of desire relates to a pre-objectified desire, then he has reactivated the referential relation between signifier and signified, sign and referent, in the dichotomy between objectual desire-for-us and unobjectifiable desire-in-itself. This surrenders Lacan to a bizarre, libidinal paradox of Kantianism. But to do that he must once again rehabilitate not just the ontological valence of desire as such, but the epistemological valence of the relation between desire's objectification in language and the depths of the desire that it bridges us to in the act of theorizing it, that is, in the making of claims and formulas that express it or which are about it. It is impossible to understand Lacan's claim that desire is a 'precondition' for its objectification unless one reenacts this philosophical cunning of the original psychoanalytic coup against philosophy and science. 

...
First, a possible answer is to leave it open that psychoanalysis may gain traction with respect to Real desire, via the objectification of the signifier. That is, the signifier might grant access to desire as an unknowable, unobjectifiable, but nevertheless thinkable condition of possibility for signification (a variety of 'weak correlationism'[1]). Under this light, Lacan's account of desire as Real precondition begins to startlingly resemble the minimal realism of Heidegger, for whom the opaqueness of the Earth qua unobjectifiable being stands as necessarily refractory to the variegated structure of Worldhood, with its populating entities and individuations at the ontic level. Real desire would be the proto-ontological motor conditioning, ironically, the merely ontic register of being and the symbolic investment of symptoms. The early Lacan seems to indicate this much when he claims in a rather cryptic passage: "Desire... is the desire for nothing namable... this desire lies at the origin of every variety of animation. If being were only what it is there wouldn't be room to talk about it. Being comes into existence as an exact function of this lack." (SII, pp 223). This is the direction in which the later Lacan, through his idea of the Real as that which resists symbolization, seems to have succumbed, as we shall see below[2].

          Alternatively, in this first re-philosophizing scenario, the structure of desire remains epistemically accessible without residue, but confined to the signifying order, in which case Lacan is involved in a bizarre structuralist parody of textual idealism. Yet as we surmised above, this cannot be done, strictly speaking, without a qualitative distinction that vitiates the structural uniformity of the signifier. In other words, it requires a qualitative distinction within the order of the signifier, a typology that sets those signs which map the structure of desire from those which are merely within the libidinal commerce of phantasy, and so those which are theorized by the former in expressing their conditions of possibility. Both options in this scenario rehabilitate the philosophical spooks that Lacan took to have demoted, at the price of reactivating the possibility of a special kind of reference or relation between signifiers, apart from the articulation of the four discourses, and with it one must accept the neutral possibility of attaining the status of a 'meta-language' to save psychoanalytic theory from itself.

        The second alternative, foreclosing the explanatory purchase on desire, and leaving the exteriority of Real desire unthinkable, shuns the status of psychoanalysis as a theory and surrenders it to a sophistic endeavor marking its internal contradiction (a variety of strong correlationism). This is the tragedy that we surmised above, when showing that psychoanalysis couldn't even surrender its rights to knowledge if it fully relinquishes its epistemic vocation, and the possibility of distinguishing between Real desire and its theorization. For in this scenario, the Lacanian edifice ends up undermining itself, rendering the conceptual endeavor it pursues into utter incoherence, the knowledge of desire undermining its theorization, and the theorization of desire undermining the possibility of knowledge of it[3].


         As we suggested above, however, Lacan seems to have progressively realized that he couldn't do without explaining how a theory of Real desire relies on such a conceptual envelopment, as evinced in a particularly telling passage: "[Our] conception of the concept implies that the concept is always established in an approach that is not unrelated to that which is imposed on us, as a form, by infinitesimal calculus. Indeed, if the concept is modeled on an approach to the reality that the concept has been created to apprehend, it is only by a leap a passage to the limit, that it manages to realize itself. We are then required to say in what respect- under what form of finite quantity, I would say- the conceptual elaboration known as the unconscious may be carried out." (SXI: pp. 19) The metaphor is that of an asymptotic approach to the Real via the matheme, forever removed from the concept's touch.

            Yet at this point, signaling both the beginning of a mathematical obsession and that of a poetic escape, Lacan begins to opt for the first horn of the dilemma and to surrender psychoanalysis to what appears under all lights to be a re-philosophizing of its fundamental task, along with the valence of knowing. A passion for the purity of formalization and the inscription, which begins sliding down to the notion that the matheme is closest to the Real. The matheme becomes the receptacle of a pure transmission, insofar as formalization subtracts writing from its conceptual envelopment, prizing it free from any semblance of meaning or intention. This is why, for Lacan, "The mathematical formalization of signifierness runs counter to meaning." (SXX, pp. 93) The matheme is said to be closest to the Real insofar as it formalizes while symbolizing nothing: it has a Real status insofar as it cannot be positivized in a representation. The Real subtracts itself from all positive content and all imaginary-symbolic envelopments; it is delivered only to the pure act of transmission, the transference of the analyst's intervention which opens the promise for the traversal of the phantasy. Just like the subject, there can be thus no theoretical knowledge of the Real: the latter cannot be totalized or unified by a predicate, or thought of consistently through definable properties. Therefore, it cannot be qualitatively determined so as to be tractable conceptually: "If there is a notion of the real, it is extremely complex and, because of this, incomprehensible, it cannot be comprehended in a way that would make an All out of it."[4] What formalization enables, Lacan wants to say, is not a representation of desire and so of a knowledge about the Real, but rather an experience or 'act' with respect the Real, a possibility for transference in analysis: "Truth cannot convince, knowledge becomes act.[5]" (Ibid; Pg. 104)


          And yet, as we saw, as much as the matheme itself remains recalcitrant to the symbolic, it is just as true that Lacan cannot dispense of the task of deploying the matheme to formalize psychoanalytic concepts and structures. Lacan himself says that the formalization is the formalization of the signifier: of whatever is articulated through the signifier, psychoanalytic claims included. But if mathematics can operate to formalize psychoanalysis, this is because formalization operates over the concepts and claims that psychoanalysis deploys. But in order for psychoanalytic claims and concepts to be any more apt for the formalization which 'touches the Real' of desire, then the claims of psychoanalysis must be in some respect peculiarly related to the Real of the unconscious, or else the formalization would appear arbitrarily dependant on a discursive register. Yet the on what methodological grounds could we assess whether psychoanalytic enjoy this priority, if not epistemological or semantic?

         At this juncture, the claim that the matheme resists translation is merely to refuse to explain how it is that it functions as a formalization adequate to the statements of psychoanalysis, and which concern the Real as much as the symbolic or the imaginary. The matheme is said not to obey the norms of knowledge or enter into the rule of the symbolic, but at the same time is coordinated with a series of theoretical interpretations, granting it rights before the Real. But what grounds this proximity between the matheme and the Real, as regulated by psychoanalytic concepts? Without explaining this connection, psychoanalysis fails to adequately account for the relation between the practice of formalization and the theoretical statements which provide the semantic interpretation for the mathematical formulas. For the psychoanalyst needs not only the matheme which is recalcitrant to meaning, but a series of theoretical claims explaining how the matheme formalizes certain structures. Without this connection, any mathematical inscription cannot count as the formalization of anything, is truly 'meaningless', and there would be nothing to distinguish pure mathematical forms from Real psychic structures[6]. This would render psychoanalysis complicit with a kind of Pythagorean upsurge. Just like unobjectifiable desire was 'objectified' in theory only to speak of it, the Real non-translatability of the matheme is translated by psychoanalytic theory since, without such a theorization, the matheme could not stand for the formalization of anything whatsoever. The interesting paradox is therefore that although in order for the matheme to be non-translatable to any discursive register that operates under the symbolic it must, paradoxically, be able to be translated into the conceptual register of psychoanalysis, for the latter provides the interpretation without which, the abstract terms would fail to account for anything.


         What this evinces is that psychoanalysis ultimately is forced to speak of the Real ambiguously: in one sense it said to pertain to formalization in its untranslatable dimension, and in another to desire as the unobjectifiable condition for any discourse. It is precisely at this juncture that the unobjectifiable Real of desire, touched only in the act of transference, is mediated by a tacit separation from the matheme that ordains it, evincing a division that psychoanalysis ultimately cannot resolve.  Much like for Heidegger Being qua the unobjectifiable opaqueness of the Earth cannot be apprehended conceptually but must be delivered to the poetic word of the thinker and the act of the artist, the Real qua unobjectifiable opaqueness of desire cannot be known but must be delivered to the epistemic opaqueness of the matheme and the transference occasioned by the analyst in act. As Lacan puts it: "Mathematization alone reaches a real - and it is in that respect that it is compatible with our discourse, with analytic discourse- a real that has nothing to do with what traditional knowledge has served as a basis for, which is not what the latter believes it to be- namely, reality, but rather phantasy... The Real, I will say, is the mystery of the speaking body, the mystery of the unconscious." (SXX; pp. 131)


          However, the call for the bodily act signals also the inevitable moment of loss for explanation, the moment in which, no longer capable of separating the thought of the Real from the Real itself, one must surrender all theoretical pretences and en-act the traversal itself, a clinical pilgrimage before the inflections of the symptom through the lessons of formalization. The discursive access to knowing-that becomes delivered to the oblique efficacy of  non-discursive know-how. This is how we should coordinate these two seemingly disparate statements from Lacan: "There is some rapport of being that cannot be known" (SXX, pp. 119, TM), and "If analysis rests on a presumption, it is that knowledge about [subjective] truth can be constituted on the basis of its experience" (Ibid, pp. 91). The impossibility of a knowledge of being is but the obverse of the possibility of knowing how to speak in bringing about the transference. Or as Badiou formulates it: "The paradoxical position of Lacan concerning truth is that there is no knowledge of truth, but finally there is a psychoanalytic knowledge concerning this absence of knowledge. This is the great paradox of the unconscious...a subject can have an experience of its proper Real only in the form of an act." (Badiou, 2010)

       The levels must be clearly demarcated: the analytic transference enjoins the traversal of the phantasy and is supported by the formalization of the symbolic by the matheme. But as we have seen, the operation of formalization which demarcates the positions and structures is in turn supported by the conceptual register of psychoanalytic theory itself. Lacan can thus claim that: "It is in the very act of speaking that makes this formalization, this ideal meta-language, ex-sist." (SXX, Ibid; pp 119) The two Reals glare forth in their unresolved difference: the pure form of the mathematic inscription, recalcitrant to incorporation within the symbolic order of language, and Real of desire in the passage to the pure act that deposes all representational knowledge, where the traversal of the phantasy takes place. As Badiou stresses: "This act is like a cut in language and also a cut in the ordinary representation of the world- a representation which is imaginary. So the act suddenly isolates the Real from its normal collection to the imaginary and symbolic orders." (Badiou, 2010).

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    I encourage readers to take a look at the rest of the paper, since there I develop my reading and case in much more thorough fashion. 

With regards to Badiou, I think that he basically appropriates the structuralist move that Lacan makes apropos psychoanalysis into a philosophical register. Thus, the matheme is, for Badiou, adequate to the thinking of being qua being, because it resists translation into transcendental terms, thereby refusing envelopment by 'bourgeois epistemology'. The latter, as one does well to note, remains encumbered in the "third dogma of empiricism" that distinguishes between form and content, and which thereby conditions all forms of 'naturalist' epistemology and ontology, even still in the case of Quine. But Badiou goes further than this, because he avows explicitly the extensional core of set-theory to resist intensionality, which for him is what remains of Aristotelian essences in mathematized logic. Thus, the mathematization of being allows him to subtract the latter from the One, or render it 'inconsistent', insofar as it refuses any qualitative determination. This works to simultaneously deflate the (Kantian and post-Kantian) transcendental problematic of the distinction between thought and reality, or form and content, in favor of an immanent ontology of the pure multiple, and later a phenomenology with a 'subjectless object'. Yet the price to be paid for this liquidation of 'empirical content' is an ontological reification of form or ideality, which results in an endorsement of a form of the Parmenidean thesis according to which being and thinking are one and the same. And at this juncture, Lacan and Badiou meet again: in conversation, Badiou told me that precisely because one cannot distinguish between mathematic inscription and being-in-itself, the matheme is 'closest to the Real'. 

   But in my estimation, if epistemic indiscernibility ensues as a criterion for ontological identity, then short of rendering possible a materialism, Badiou has reified, like Plato and Hegel before him, the intelligible at the price of eviscerating sensibility and content. This is the invariable result that obtains when one folds the epistemic into the ontological, or logic and metaphysics, as Hegel shows. Nevertheless, if one cannot distinguish between our thought or inscriptions about being and being as such, then we yield a form of Platonist idealism, which becomes difficult to differentiate from Pythagoreanism. Indeed, in conversation with Luke Fraser and Ray Brassier, I have become increasingly convinced that, in spite of his extraordinary advances in Logics of Worlds, the fundamental problem in Badiou continues to be the articulation between mathematical and non-mathematical situations, so as to avoid reifying mathematics ontologically (like he claims from the start).

   Yet whereas in B&E the articulation between the ontological and non-ontological was tantamount to the distinction between the mathematical and non-mathematical, where the latter was theorized through the former by a process of analogy (like Lyotard, Deleuze, and others claimed), in LOW Badiou proceeds to give a mathematical formalization of the consistency of Worlds, or non-ontological situations, so that the crucial connection then becomes the articulation between set-theoretical ontology, and category-theoretical phenomenology. In spite of these advances, I believe that the fundamental question about the relation between the mathematical and the non-mathematical remains, and forced him into a quandary not unlike that of Lacan. That is, if Badiou wants to claim there is such a thing as non-mathematical reality, not of the order of being, but rather the 'unthinkable' or 'unknowable' by cognitive means, then he has committed himself to a form of correlationism. I am afraid this is the position that one would have to draw if the claim that Badiou is simply 'not concerned with the Real' in any sense analogous to that proper to transcendental philosophers holds. But if Badiou wants to eviscerate any notion of inscription-independent reality altogether, as Hegel does, then he has effectively endorsed a form of Pythagoreanism, where all situations, ontological and non-ontological, must be mathematized. It is the latter which, I think, ultimately must be Badiou's position, in spite of his ambiguous proviso that the claim that ontology is set-theory is a claim about discourse, and not about the world.

Now, the reason why I think Sellars is important for these discussions, and where I think some crucial cross-breeding can be done, is that he proposes to reconcile nominalism about semantics, with realism about ontology. He thus proposes to offer an account that, like structuralism, does not appeal to a relation between words-things to flesh out semantic proprieties, in turn offering a full blown inferentialist semantics, while at the same time advocating a process ontology of his own. I am currently working on a paper explaining how precisely this works, and what I think is most valuable about this strategy; but the basic idea I would like to extirpate from it is the following one:

We can agree with Badiou in that materialism, indeed philosophy, requires the rehabilitation of the Platonic axis between truth and doxa, in order to stave off the (neo)-sophistic conflation of the former into the latter. But I think it is also important to understand Badiou's work as operating on the second crucial Platonic axis distinguishing between reality and appearance, in terms of the intelligible and the sensible. I think that Badiou, like Plato and Hegel, proposes to identify reality or 'being' with intelligibility, and demote sensibility to appearance or doxa. In the three philosophers, what we obtain is a trivialization of sensibility as that which is not real, at the price of reifying ideality ontologically, in order to save rationalism from the phenomenological reification of being as an irrational Otherness, only tractable by poetic-practical means.

The Sellarsian alternative proposes, in turn, rather to insist on the reality of appearances, while rendering this reality fully intelligible, while refusing to reify ideality metaphysically. We can understand the ontological valence of appearances, as part of objective reality, without thereby forcing us into separating, in dualist spirits, between the ideal and the real.  Now, this is not to say all reality is sensible, which is the panpsychist hypothesis. Rather, it means that sensibility can be both a) ontologically investigated, and b) that it conditions our knowledge about the external world. Realism obtains precisely by refusing the ontological reification of the sensible or the intelligible, while recognizing the logical irreducibility of the intelligible, while its causal reducibility. The trick then consists in finding out a way of preserving a positive role for sensibility to anchor us to the mind-independent world, without thereby render it ubiquitous. And this requires, in turn, that we distinguish between the semantic-epistemic conditions under which we can talk and adjudicate claims about the real, and the positive metaphysical claims that result once we have cleared up our semantics. Finally, Sellars will propose to think of the connection between language and the world in terms of a non-semantic relation or 'picturing' which, developing on the work of Wittgenstein, seeks to establish how second-order isomorphy obtains between matter-of-factual claims qua 'natural linguistic objects' and real objects and events in the world. 

     The details here are complex, as ever with Sellars, but the major result is that in persisting on the Kantian methodological distinction between reasons and causes, while refusing their metaphysical separation, we can understand how while there is an ontological priority of the logical on the natural (without proper evolutionary conditions sapience wouldn't obtain), there is an epistemological priority of the natural on the logical (only sapient creatures who inhabit the logical space of reasons can adjudicate claims, and undertake normative statuses required for knowledge). In short, the Sellarsian alternative proposes to preserve the distinction between form and content, in the name of a revisionary naturalism, that avoids reifying intelligibility at the price of evacuating sensibility (idealism: Plato, Hegel, Badiou), or reifying sensibility at the price of demolition intellection (Bergson, Deleuze...).

      I think here some crucial work can be done in tandem with both psychoanalysis and Badiou. The former integrate a thinking of how libidinal structures are both causally and normatively constitutively binding the Real practices and transference, and the symbolic. The latter provides a formal account of change relative to structural conditions by modeling truth on generic sets, defusing the romantic exuberance tethered to creation 'ex nihilo', which including post-Kuhnean approaches reifying change and discontinuity in the way of instrumentalizing science. Incidentally, this is also a fertile ground to assimilate insight by people such as Ladyman and Ross, who further the case against instrumentalist approaches by insisting that discontinuity at the level of content in scientific theories is underwritten by continuity at the level of form. I think if can sort out the pragmatics with the semantics here we can integrate both approaches beyond the strict axiomatics of mathematical Platonist approaches, while opening the playing field for a discussion of not only traditional epistemic practices governed by standard proprieties of inference, but all sorts of intricate articulations. In a larger scheme, I am looking to amplify the Brandomian project of integrating pragmatics with semantics, with the Badiouean project of providing a synoptic ontology-phenomenology adequate to the articulation of different thought procedures. 

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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
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    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.

On Sellars and the Inconsistent Triad: Brassier and Brandom

On Sellars and the Inconsistent Triad:

- Brassier and Brandom -

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       I have been continuing my study of Sellars' Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, and I think a few crucial points are worth making in relation to Ray Brassier's (2010) presentation of the rejection of the Myth of the Given, at the excellent conference To Have Done With Life.

 

The point in contention concerns how Sellars responds to a quandary concerning the construal of sense contents. Sellars considers the following inconsistent triad:

 A) 'S senses red sense content x' entails 'S non inferentially believes (knows) that x is red.'

B) The ability to sense sense contents is unacquired

C). The capacity to have classificatory belieds of the form 'x is F' is acquired.

     In Brandom's study guide to EPM he claims that Sellars drops A, since the latter is a version of the Myth of the Given, i.e. the belief that certain experiential states can serve as foundations for beliefs and epistemic states just by virtue of having them. Now, the interest thing is that Brassier claimed in Zagreb that Sellars endorsed A and C, and refused B instead. With this in mind I was trying to figure out why these discrepancies obtained in their respective readings, and what I thought was going on.

What Brandom argues is that A must fail for Sellars in favor of a new account of thoughts and sensations, at the order of justification and causation, respectively. Thus, he thinks such an account must disassociate epistemic states which concern the intentionality of thoughts and beliefs, from the non-epistemic realm of causes which concerns the causal order of sensations. This is part of what Sellars envisions as an integration of sensa into the scientific image of thought, as opposed to reifying non-conceptual immediacy as a phenomenological bedrock for the underdetermination of all posterior intentional states. Thus, Sellars contends that linguistic intentionality must be predated by a kind of psychological intentionality, i.e. experience is epistemically mute, both at the level of objectual individuation (Husserl) and of holistic integrated comportments (Heidegger). I shall suggest below why this is an issue of particular importance within the contemporary debates concerning epistemology and psychology that have become central in much philosophy of mind, and in particular in the dispute between externalists and internalists. The point to stress, for the moment, is simply that Sellars takes sensible experiences to be non-cognitive in character, and thus refuses to reify them as foundational items for higher order intentionality. If so, then how could Sellars be said to endorse A in any sense, like Brassier stipulates?


Now, I think that what Brassier was trying to convey by saying that Sellars retains A and drops B is the fact that non-inferentially acquired states (i.e. causally triggered states) are not for this reason unacquired, since one can give an evolutionary story for how organisms and species come to be in these sorts of states. These states are not miraculously divined capacities, and that much is certainly also a crucial rejoinder that Sellars makes to the Cartesian account of sensory transparency. Now, the delicate issue here is that non-inferentially acquired states can amount to knowledge if the subject is imbedded within the space of reasons, i.e. if the subject is not just capable of reliably responding to the situation in question, but also knows that he/she is reliable in doing so. This means that for a non-inferentially acquired state to count as a knowledge, the subject must be capable of responding to a hypothetical challenge to his endorsement.

  The examples McDowell gives are simple and excellent: one directly comes to observe that one's neighbor is at home when one sees the neighbor's car parked in his parking lot; one does not need to make an inference to arrive at this state. Yet for this state to count as a case of observational knowledge, it must be possible for the us to respond to being challenged about the issue: "couldn't have he taken the bus to work?", in which case I must be able to provide a justification for my claims, or perhaps, revise my commitment and accept that my belief was not a good one. So, to return to the inconsistent triad: the idea behind reading Sellars as endorsing A would be to say that there is a sense in which non-inferential states which serve as observation reports can count as knowledge. Yet one must resist the idea that this entails these capacities are unacquired, since they surely require a period of conditioning and acculturation, i.e. one learns to see that one's neighbor is home on the basis of seeing the car present, and knowing oneself to be reliably reporting in such cases. And even if this capacity required at some stage inferential procedures, the point is that there it is possible to be in a state of knowing that was not arrived at by means of inference: this is what Sellars famously calls language entry transitions, of which perception is the paradigm case.

     Indeed, as Brassier has highlighted more recently, this is what Sellars' thinks in terms of the disambiguation between doing things for a reason and things because of reasons. The former does not require intellection or sapience, while the latter requires that one be engrossed in the logical space of reasons, and thus be capable in engaging in meta-discursive talk about the rules one is following. The former case is exhibited uniformly by sentient creatures and machines, and simply play a functional role, i.e. a thermometer may reliably report on the room's temperature, but it lacks knowledge since it cannot know of its reliability or respond to being challenged. This means that although non-inferential capacity to issue observation reports can amount to knowledge, they only do so on condition that these reports/capacities be properly integrated within the capacity to draw inferences from them, i.e. to be able to undertake logical revision of beliefs and states. Thus, not all non-inferentially acquired states are knowledge.

        However, I think that what is probably at stake for Brandom in the three claims is the idea that insofar as we are speaking about sensory states qua causally triggered states, then these are in strict Sellarsian terminology not epistemic in any case. I believe that he would insist in that we need to be careful not to conflate perceptual states which involve judgments on the basis of perception to function as language-entry moves, with sensations of sense contents qua non-epistemic causally triggered states. And the idea is plainly that while non-inferential perceptual states can be epistemic insofar as they entail that one judges (that some x is the case), sensations qua purely causal phenomena intractable to the conceptual domain of judgment remains resolutely non-epistemic in character.

        Brandom's proposal is to read Sellars along these lines and to say that the capacity to bear sense contents is correspondingly unacquired in the simple sense that such a capacity not gained by virtue of the process of conditioning that we associate with knowledge-acquisition, i.e. hypothesis building, projectibility, etc. So, he thinks that Sellars endorses B in the inconsistent triad. Brandom thinks that Sellars' sense of non-acquisition is narrower than the sense in which Brassier reads him, i.e. he does not take unacquired states to imply that the capacity to have the appropriate causal onsets requires a complex story in the development of the organism's growth, and more broadly its evolutionary history within a species. For in this latter sense 'acquired' appears almost trivially equivalent to 'having appeared in time for some reason', and he thinks that can't possibly be of philosophical interest.

        With this distinction in mind, the disavowal of A seems to run from the disambiguation between sense/perception. If sensation is epistemically mute, then we must distinguish perceptual beliefs qua non-inferential states, and which are already of facts- propositionally articulated by universal subsumption, from the sensory apprehension of particulars. So the idea would be that Sellars drops A in order to distinguish sensation from perception, deflating sense-datum theories, and running with the idea, proposed by (C), that the capacity to be in epistemic states is acquired by acculturation and a process of conditioning which itself might be inferential, without for this reason vitiating the non-inferential character of the states it comprises.

    Perhaps a route out of this dilemma is to claim that Sellars actually endorses (A), (B) and (C) in qualified manners, by reshuffling the terms, albeit he seeks to rescue crucial points from the three claims in their usual form.

    From (A) he seeks to rescue the idea that perceptual states may constitute non-inferential knowings; but he will distinguish conceptually enveloped perceptual judgments from non-conceptual and so non-epistemic sensory states.

   From (B) he seeks to rescue the idea that sensory states are causally acquired capacities while accepting that they are non-conditioned by cultural learning in the sense defined above; so he will distinguish causally triggered sensory states from causally triggered epistemic states.

    From (C) he seeks to rescue the idea that epistemic states require cultural conditioning and so are acquired in that sense; but he will disambiguate between the evolutionary rationality of sensory acquisition that explains causally triggering non-epistemic states, and the causal triggering of non-inferentially acquired beliefs as epistemic states that function as language-entry transitions within the logical space of reasons.


Thus, both sensations and perceptual judgments are causally triggered in a broad sense, and so acquired, i.e. the evolutionary sense in which nothing happens ex nihilo. We learn to enter a language much in the same way as we are causally delivered into sensory states, we develop capacities by virtue of our evolutionary history, and our causal interactions with the environment. The crucial difference is that classificatory beliefs require conditioning within the sensus communis and social order of language, and sapience marks the transition from merely causally triggered states to the epistemic capacities associated with entering a conceptual economy. But the capacity to have epistemic states, while causally acquired and non-inferential like sensibility, involves a narrower sense of conditioning. We move from merely causal non-inferential state of being to non-inferential knowledge when we move from sentience to sapience, from pure mechanical process to knowledge.

  Thus, we should insist, in that proposition (C) is endorsed, since perceptual judgments are acquired causally, both in the way that sense contents are, but also in the narrower sense in which they require conditioning into language.

 So the tricky word here is 'acquisition', since it is used in three ways:

a) Generally causal: in this sense both classificatory beliefs and sense contents are acquired (C, holds, but B fails)

b) Narrowly/Culturally causal: in this sense only classificatory beliefs are acquired (both B and C hold)

c) Non-inferential: In this sense both classificatory beliefs and sense contents are unacquired (C fails, B holds)

    The trick concerns disentangling these three senses and realizing that while perceptual knowings of the sort required for classificatory belief are also causally triggered, they require a narrow sense of cultural acculturation which distinguishes the sentient strata of species-relative general causality, from full blown conceptual rationality and knowledge. By the same token, sensations are generally acquired in the causal sense, but unacquired in the cultural sense. Both are non-inferentially triggered, and so causally derived in the general sense, but ony knowings involve acculturation and social conditioning in their acquisition, and are so acquired also in the narrow sense. I think this goes back to what Tripplet and Devries call attention to by disambiguating between non-inferential knowing, and independent knowledge. The former simply means that a given piece of knowledge did not result from an inferential procedure. The latter implies the claim that there are knowings of given facts that may be had independently of any other knowings. Sellars endorses the possibility of the former, but denies the latter. Knowledge can be non-inferentially triggered in perception, but in any case, if it is to count as knowledge, one needs to be able to integrate it within a nexus of other beliefs that suffice to render such states justified, i.e. embedding in the space of reasons.

I think this might be why also Sellars does not flatly say which of the three propositions he would drop; he reworks the triad by amplifying the descriptive scope.



II - Some Brief Considerations About Sellarsianism

The question that obviously suggests itself is whether in fact it is fair to construe perceptual representation as involving something like conceptual/linguistic judgment. This is the heart of Tyler Burge's contentions against Sellars, and I think they map onto the tricky debacle between externalists and internalists.

On the one hand, it might seem as if Burge's contention that Sellars over-intellectualizes perception by enveloping it conceptually is really a terminological issue. This is because Sellars is perfectly aware that organisms have a pre-conceptual capacity to react to their environments in reliable or unreliable ways; this is the whole point of RDRD's as a condition for sentience, as Brandom emphasizes. However, by reserving the term perception for the conceptual achievement knit to judgments, Sellars seeks to render it epistemically productive as part of what characterizes sapient activity, and full blown linguistic rationality. Thus, while Sellars reserves a role for sensation simpliter, the latter is plainly non-epistemic in itself, or more precisely is indifferent to the distinction between reasons and causes, i.e. the latter is only a distinction possible from within the normative space which adjudicates claims on the basis of their justification and inferential role. Only creatures embedded in the logical space of reasons could ever articulate knowledge. One could thus just say that perception in Burge's sense would fall within sensation in Sellars' terminology, without there being a substantial disagreement at stake. However, there is a more profound non-terminological issue at stake, and this is the crux of the debate.

Whereas intentionality remains, for Sellars, restricted to the epistemic domain of inferentially articulated beliefs and reasons, Burge ascribes intentional content to non-conceptual, perceptual states. Sellars warned against this because it became the gulf for versions of the Myth according to which experiential primitives could serve as justifications for conceptually articulates beliefs. However, Burge dislodges intentionality from knowledge; sentient creatures have intentional states without the necessity for conceptual rationality. Thus, although Burge agrees with Sellars in that the primitive ability to have experiences would not be conceptual and so would be not-epistemic, it is nevertheless representational insofar as perceptual states have conditions for veridicality which explain the conditions for success or failure in the performance of a perceptual faculty in relation to its environment. The result is that while for Sellars the domain of sensibilia is delegated to the scientific study of the neurophysiology of the individual, bereft of any appeals to intentionality, Burge follows the nativist lead in thinking rather that perceptual psychology is key to understanding perception as a representational capacity. The latter option becomes then that of the possibility of ascribing intentional states and representational capacities to non-sapient creatures, or whether we cannot do this lest we make a category mistake. The question is whether something like representational states, of the sort that host conditions for veridicality, can be built into the Sellarsian account of sensing as a purely causal-mechanical functional process void of epistemic valence. I think the stakes here are far from clear.

 This is, I think, an incredibly interesting juncture of the debate, since it constitutes a crucial dividing line within naturalist approaches to the philosophy of mind today.