Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World, a brief incomplete commentary

Introduction

Philosophy causes a very strong feeling of weariness in me. What are we to do with this discipline? Is it relevant to anything whatsoever? Does it matter if we ponder methodology, realism, truth, rigor, or unification of the sciences? Does phenomenology do anything worthwhile other than give the occasional inspiration, without the true force Husserl intended for it. What are we to make of methodology at this point? Are we operating within a super-paradigm of relative anarchy? That is, are there no ways of unifying the methods, under some principles of rationality, under a derivation from base principles, or fundamental observations? Do we have any hope of finding a method for science and rationality that can be universally applied? It really does not seem like it. In the light of Feyerabend, in light of the confusions in physics, the equally strong but contradictory accounts of realism of theoretical entities, theoretical methods, causality itself, notions of explanation and justification, etc., what do we make of the painfully confused state of knowledge of the world, if there even is such a thing we can coherently speak of. Can we really speak of a ‘reality’? Can we speak of objectivity? Can we even speak of objects? How should a small individual fight these overwhelmingly difficult and pressing thoughts, thoughts that undercut all scientific effort, all will to learn, all will to further the knowledge we have of our surroundings, of the fundamental objects (in a broad sense) that make up the building blocks of everything experienceable? Can we really go back and find inspiration in the failed systems of the past? The logical-positivist approach does not hold up to scrutiny, observation is theory-driven and inextricably mixed up with the theoretical (as opposed to the phenomenological). Phenomenology may reduce everything to experience but is it really possible to gain anything from experience itself without reaching beyond it in order to create a sort of foundation that is rigid enough to build on. When we realize that experience is in flux, that the whole world is in flux, and that conception is rigid, what do we do? Can we go beyond Bergson, and by extension, Deleuze, to somehow tame experience without thereby distorting it by the conceptualization of it?

The more I read, the more I feel like we know absolutely nothing. In my attempts to broaden my perspectives I only run into more equally strong positions that contradict each other. Well-reasoned and well-argued points of view that are impossible to synthesize. Where a lot of philosophical questions seem to be decided is in a decision. Surely, this is not good enough. Carnap agrees, Williamson agrees, we have to increase the rigor of philosophy in order for it to regain some respectability, in order for it to be anything other than meaningless intuited babble. Intuition is not good enough as a method for philosophy, they are not reliable, they are not factive, they are nothing but vague hints of pre-theoretic background knowledge, implicit senses we have of the world. But counterintuitive facts more than often end up having to be accepted, so why should we take intuition for anything but a feeling that we are free to disregard if it means we can stick with a more rigorous and logical system of science or knowledge or philosophy? I believe that we can disregard this intuition, that there must be some method that is not mere intuition, that we have a fundamental experience of the world which can be grasped well enough, and described well enough, to be used as a kind of unifying method for all scientific endeavors (philosophy here included).

In an attempt to rid myself of the anxiety brought on by the lack of a method unifying science and philosophy and all other fields interested in factive attitudes towards the world, all fields interested in producing true propositions about the world or the objects around us, I will go through Carnap’s The Logical Structure of the World, wherein he attempts to give us such a unifying method. I do this knowing that his project failed, like Husserl’s project failed before him, in order to see if there is anything that can be salvaged, if there are aspects of it we can make prosper again, if we can make the dream of rigorous methodology a reality in philosophy once more. I feel terribly pessimistic in this prospect, terrified of its high chance of failure, saddened by my own inability to do more, by the endless failures of greater minds that have set upon the same task. I desperately want a methodology which can be rigid enough to withstand the meek arguments philosophers throw against it in order to keep up the ruse, in order to keep the arguments going. Like Williamson’s theory of knowledge who only garnered quite weak and ill-informed responses, I want a method of philosophy (at the very least) which can stand strong through some ill-informed attacks. Let us see where the disregard of intuition takes us, by way of Carnap, in order to re-awaken the much sought-after rigor that analytic philosophy so desperately longs for.

 

1. How do we start?

 

First we establish the aim of our exploration of methodology. Carnap wants a system of concepts that is ‘constructional’, one where we can build concepts upon more foundational ones. This is very much like the phenomenological efforts of Husserl. We want to be able to construct concepts based on the most fundamental ones in a way that lets us trace the entirety of our conceptual edifice to the most basic. What, then, does it mean to have a constructional system of concepts? What does ‘construction’ mean here?

To explain this, first Carnap explains reducibility. This is merely the process of reducing statements about some objects to statement about other objects. This seems insufficiently vague, but perhaps for good reason. The example Carnap gives is the reduction of fractions to that of natural numbers, there can be a straightforward transformation from the former to the latter. 3/7 is reducible to 3 and 7, and so on. Furthermore, reducibility is a transitive relation, so that if you can reduce A to B, and B to C, you can reduce A to C. To then construct A out of B, or A out of B and C, would be to create a rule which has to be followed in order to produce A from B and C, called a construction rule or constructional definition. This takes the shape of a definition, as will become very clear later on.

A constructional system, then, is defined as a structure where each level is ordered such that it is constructed from lower levels. Transitivity of reducibility then assures that all levels are constructed out of the most basal level. There are, then, basic objects in which all conceptual structures are built upon and derived from.

In this way we can also axiomatize a theory by making sure that each statement of the theory is derived from a set of axioms.

Despite the subjective origins of experience and knowledge, Carnap believes that it is possible to derive a sense of intersubjective objectivity which can be identical for all observers, as well as be understood by these observers. This is a very strong claim, and it remains to be seen whether it is possible.

Of course if all conceptual constructions are to be derived from one set of axioms or one set of fundamental concepts, then it quite naturally lends itself to the idea that these fundamental concepts are from the same domain. In this way we get one science, too. Higher level concepts then become complexes of the more fundamental level, which consist of psychological processes. A complex, however, is not the same as a whole. A whole is composed of the elements that constitute it, a complex is not constitutive of its elements, but statements about a complex can be transformed (see above) into a statement of its elements.

Another interesting aspect of this constructional system is that Carnap does not differentiate between object and concept, that there is no real difference whether a sign denotes a concept or an object. The difference is merely psychological, but for some reason this is not a difference significant enough to create a logical distinction, which might be understandable in a system based on the relation between objects. Whether conceptual or real, psychologically vibrant or faint, does not matter terribly. This is how Carnap starts a metaphysically neutral theory of meaning and relations. Concepts are not what apprehends or creates reality, but they are simply constructions out of psychological processes, and these are the only relevant aspects of a scientific method (what else can we intelligibly speak of?).

 

• A plan of attack

 

The idea is to construct a set of external relations between concepts, one which exhausts all possible structures or complexes of objects, and this is to be done in a formal-logical manner. Different types of objects will be explicated, as well, and we will learn how they can be combined. Each object will have a definition which will denote either a class or an extension of relations. The construction of classes and relation extensions will be what Carnap calls ascension forms; since we go from a lower level to a higher level. The whole system will take as its base the domain of the autopsychological, herein do we find the terms with which we connect by way of logical relations. The relations, nonetheless, are the most primary. They come even before the synthesis of various properties of our experiences, they are what creates the experiences themselves. So that the round red ball is a logical synthesis connecting the elements red, round and ball, by way of a conjunction. Carnap foreshadows the great simplicity that underlies the vast complexity that goes into our conceptual structures.

 

1.12 Science

 

“Science deals only with the description of structural properties of objects.” (p.19). A structure of course requires things with which to build the structure, and when we then want to describe a structure, like we want to do in science, according to Carnap, we can describe the properties of a given object, and the relations that hold between the given objects or properties. Property descriptions are thus absolute, whereas the relation descriptions are relative.

 

When it comes to structure descriptions, we are dealing with a totally formal system. Carnap called it formalized and dematerialized, since we are no longer talking about descriptions about relations or properties themselves, but with relations between objects seen from a purely formal-logical point of view (or in the form of a diagram with arrows denoting relations between objects, denoted by points between arrows, and so on).

 

The structural properties are seen as objective, since they are invariant through subjective observation. Regardless of the specifics of the relations or the objects involved from the point of view of an individual, we can maintain the structural relations. This is what is meant to be the goal of scientific endeavors, to reach a point where a structural description can be given which does not vary subjectively.

 

This leads us to so-called ‘cultural objects’ which are manifested individually as psychological manifestations. These are quite complex, since they exist latently, regardless of its instantiations in the behavior of people. From Carnap it seems that a cultural object is that which lies latent in the behavior of people in a society (which would imply that it falls under category of ‘psychological object’). The psychological objects, in turn, are those that are connected to the mind, to the psychological states of human beings, perceptions, emotions, etc. The physical objects are those that have a position in space, quite simply. Carnap is using very minimal definitions here, perhaps for good reason. There is some worry that these might contradict the idea that there is a unified object domain. How can an object domain be unified if it contains distinct object types? Carnap says this only appears to be a contradiction, but we shall have to discuss that later. Another quick notion to add here is the expression relation, which is the relation that connects a sign to its psychological process, this is a lovely piece of straightforward idea of meaning, although vague it really hits home. There is simply a relation that connects sign and the signified, where the latter is a psychological process, perhaps even a cultural object, as some modern semanticists claim.

 

2. Problems of the Construction Theory

 

• Finding a basis (problem of basis).
• Determine the recurrent forms through which we ascent from one level to the next (problem of ascension form).
• Investigate how the objects of various types can be constructed through repeated applications of the ascension forms (problem of object form).
• Over-all form of the system as it results from the stratified arrangement of the object types (problem of system form).

 

So what kind of basis is there. What kind of objects are we dealing with other than the ones mentioned before? Carnap adds the quasi objects, which are basically objects which do not themselves designate, but that directs us to a proper name which designates. It is how he constructs his particular kind of nominalism, where “dog” does not designate a real object, but refers to individual names of dogs, or proper names which designate individual dogs. They are thus not real objects, but quasi objects. Same goes for things like classes and extension relations, that are not themselves correlated with some actual objects, but are indirect ways of getting to an object. Referring to a class is not immediately a reference to its members, but only comes about if the class happens to have members. The class denotes members, so denoting a class is denoting a term which then itself directs our attention to the members of the class (the actual objects).

 

This leads to the difference between a class and a whole, where you would naturally assume that they are equivalent, since a class is a collection of members of that class, and a whole is a collection of part. But these are only equivalent insofar as the members of a class make up the part of a whole. But a whole can be split up in different ways, creating different classes or varying the members of the class in such a way that perhaps a varying number of members could be created. Thus a whole can never be the same as a class, even though they can be isogenous under certain circumstances.

 

2.1 How do we ascend? Construction by way of definition

 

Constructions are made by combining more fundamental objects in order to create more complex objects, which gain new symbols as they gain complexity, but still maintain their complex foundation so that it is always possible to transform the complex object back into the fundamental objects with the beforementioned transformation rules. This is what Carnap calls an explicit definition. There is simply an interplay of symbols and concepts in the way just described.

Then we have definitions in use, which are used when there is no explicit definition to mention. It does not designate by way of transforming complex objects into basic ones. In this case we have a quasi-object. An unexplained complex concept is a concept in use. Ascension always takes place through a definition of use (p. 67). A definition always indicates that a new symbol is referring to the same thing that old symbols already did, so that a definition by use is a leap forward to complexion that can be made explicit with the help of an explicit definition, that is, by uncovering the underlying concepts.

This makes reducibility a crucial concept, since every definiendum has to be reducible to its definiens.

 

3. What are our building blocks?

 

We start with the autopsychological as a basis of all constructions. This is because with any scientific method, the epistemic aspect is primary. We derive all things from that which we know, and we only know that which is given in our experience, we construct complexes out of the autopsychological stream of consciousness and we withhold judgment in all matters pertaining to metaphysics and so on (in the sense of the Husserlian epoché). What we end up with is a epistemically primary method which takes a kind of methodological solipsism as its basis, with which we construct the physical objects, and the heteropsychological objects (or other people’s minds and so on, by way of the physical objects, and through these we can also construct the cultural objects, i.e, meaning, art, customs, etc.).

 

I don’t know, this became tedious and tiresome and I don’t want to continue.

 

Intuition as philosophical method – a worthless short babble

This thing we call intuition is to some central to the philosophical method. We construct various scenarios against which we test our intuitive notions of various concepts or terms (causality, knowledge, meaning, etc.). It is unclear what intuition is, however, and it is even more unclear if intuition is truly the method we use in philosophy. There is an even deeper question, though: what is intuition? The fact that no clear answer to this should send a screaming worry throughout the body of any serious philosopher. What is really going on in philosophy? And what evidential support does intuitive judgments give to a claim?

In Philosophy Without Intuition, Herman Cappelen tries to answer some of these questions. Some philosophers regard intuition as essential, some find it lacking in actual evidential power, some think we should do without it, some think there is no philosophy without it. What a truly terrible mix of positions for such an important issue in meta-philosophy! There does not seem to be any real hope for a synthesis either. But let us still engage with the topic to see what the arguments are, taking as our basis Cappelen’s book.

With this book, Cappelen has two explicit goals: (1), interpreting Centrality (the idea that contemporary analytic philosophers rely on intuitions as evidence for their philosophical theories), and (2), showing that Centrality is false, that, in fact, intuition is not the central method of contemporary analytic philosophy.

There are two kinds of arguments that support Centrality, one is the Argument from ‘Intuition’-Talk, as Cappelen calls it, the other is the Argument from Philosophical Practice.

The first argument comes down to seeing the fact that philosophers often claim that their philosophical method relies on intuition as an indicator that their method in fact relies on intuition.

The second argument is a bit more rigid and is based on the establishing of some features F1, …, Fn that intuitive arguments have that are then compared to the actual arguments of philosophers, which if there happens to be a correlation would show that intuition is used in philosophical reasoning. These are the two arguments Cappelen will concern himself with.

But first, what is intuition? Two alternatives are given by Cappalen. It is either a subcategory of some mental state, or it is a sui generis mental state. The difference is that the former can be reduced to another mental state, whereas the latter cannot.

Intuitions as sui generis phenomena are cases of intellectual seemings, where, by necessity, something seems to be true according to the intellect.

Then there are the reductionists, which claim that ‘intuition’ denotes no more than a belief or inclination to believe.

This then leads to a definition of intuitive, taken from a variety of different usages of the term in different context, that amounts to putting low effort into something. This is a grave simplification of intuitive judgments. But even worse, it seems that Cappelen is dismissing intuition based on the mere fact that it is vague. The term is heavily context-dependent, which makes its meaning too diverse in each context to have any kind of rigidity as a methodology. It is also domain-specific, so that intuition in chess playing is not the same as an intuitive operative system on a phone, and so on. But I believe there is this common rigid sense of definition that we can reference in intuition-talk. What we refer to when we refer to ‘intuition’, is the available background knowledge that any subject has in any given context and domain. It is a context-sensitive term but is still determined by a common semantic source. The idea that ‘intuition’ denotes that which requires little effort is then far too simple. Little effort is correct, but it comes from a reference to background knowledge. In constructing a thought experiment, then, we are testing this background knowledge (which is oftentimes implicit). Saying that ‘knowledge’ defined as a true justified belief does not work in a certain scenario due to an intuitive test is then to compare a scenario’s applicability of the term to what one already implicitly know about a term’s applicability in scenarios in general. We have a test between the new thought experiment and what is already there in our mind, the notion of a term we have internalized throughout years of use. Therefore intuition-talk as presented by Cappelen seems largely misguided, it constructs an argument against intuition as hedging, intuition as low-effort judgment, as snap judgment, etc. But none of these elements of intuition are what philosophers are concerned with in the more rigid cases with thought experiments and conceptual analysis. Philosophers are concerned with how standard judgment compares to a new thought scenario. This standard judgment, or applicability of a term, is part of our snap judgments, it is low-effort, it requires no effort to bring forth in some kind of explicitly computational manner, but this is not what we appeal to when we appeal to intuition as an evidential source. We do not appeal to the ease of which a sense of a term comes to the mind, we appeal to a term’s congruence with current background knowledge and a lifetime of use and thinking about a term. But! Importantly, this does in no way show or prove that the Generality claim is true.

A final argument of the conclusion regarding talk about intuition is that the generality claim, based on the argument from intuition-talk, is that ‘intuition’ is used in various ways. There can be a hedging element to usage of ‘intuition’, but this is no way its only function. In saying “intuitively, p” we do not merely want to convey that p is uncertain, or that we are not completely sure, or that we do not know that p, but we want to say that there are things in our mostly implicit background knowledge, in our customs and in our language use, that make p somewhat likely. It is a hedge due to the process in which p is intuitively true to us, which is far from factive, but it primarily denotes this process of appeal to background knowledge.

This, however, simply amounts to one of many interpretations and stipulative definitions of ‘intuition’. It actually supports Cappelen’s argument. The difference between Cappalen’s view and my own is that I do not find this multitude of senses of ‘intuition’ problematic as long as it is stipulated in each case it is being used. This means that the unreflective use of ‘intuition’ in its different forms is problematic, but a stipulated form is less so (but has to be reviewed on a case-by-case basis).

But just because there is a coherent notion of intuition (there are in fact plenty of such theories of intuition out there that are not subject to confusion) it does not mean that intuition is central in philosophical practice. In fact, there does not seem to be any central method to philosophy. The only method which subsumes all the others would be phenomenology. I believe all the various senses of ‘intuition’ can be view through phenomenology. Cappelen only uses one phenomenological sense, the notion that something has a phenomenological feel of being true. But phenomenology carries with it every imaginable method of philosophizing: logic, introspection, experience, memories, thought experiments, reviewing background knowledge, reviewing biases and beliefs, exploration of semantic content of terms, creating and engaging with ideas. These are all phenomenological processes. The philosophical method is phenomenology, whether you like it or not. Everything philosophers do can be subsumed under a Hegelian or Husserlian system. But it remains to be seen if such a project can be realized, and what Cappelen shows is that we must, if we are to make a claim such as the one just made, we have to show it. A worthwhile project, then, would be to show how phenomenology underlies all philosophical practice. I will think about that.

In Defense of Pure Reason, Laurence Bonjour, an attempted engagement.

The question whether or not a priori knowledge exists or not is difficult. There’s no clear way of reasoning around it that makes obvious the idea that knowledge can exist without basis in experience, or a given, pre-predicated experience. As I go into this text by Laurence Bonjour, I do not believe there is such a thing as a priori knowledge, I believe knowledge and meaning in general are dependent on experience for its content and justification. This is founded on the belief that all inference and knowledge claims can refer back to experience as what justifies the inferential steps or the belief in a particular proposition. Of course this is problematic and difficult to solve, as many philosophers have pointed out. Sellars being one of the major ones, writing about the myth of the given, basically claiming that experience cannot itself carry the terms for the set of sentences and categories that make up any knowledge claim. This is a retelling of the Kantian idea, “Thoughts without intuitions are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind.” This is certainly not something I believe, I do not believe intuition without concepts are blind, quite literally the situation is the opposite of this, as far as I can tell. We do not experience through concepts, we experience and are able to categorize these experiences conceptually through referencing back to these experiences. We simply do not experience through reference to concepts, concept or no concept, we have a stream of conscious experience, of sensory impressions and inner experiences, and they are there before any type of explication of them, each term just listed is simply a reference to something extralinguistic. This would be about it, for me, if I were not to read this book, and challenge this view. Laurance Bonjour obviously sees things differently.

But he’s got a particular idea of what experience is. It is not confined to sense experience, but it does not extend so far as to cover inferential thinking. In fact, this would rule out a priori justification altogether, as Bonjour says. (p. 7) He posits his particular idea of experience on page 8 when he says:

My suggestion at this point is that the relevant notion for experience should be understood to include any sort of process that is perceptual in the broad sense of (a) being a causally conditioned response to particular, contingent features of the world and (b) yielding doxastic states that have as their content putative information concerning such particular, contingent features of the actual world as contrasted with other possible worlds. So understood, there would be no essential connotation that sensuous qualities or imagery are involved. And thus not only sense experience, but also introspection, memory, kinesthesia, and clairvoyance or telepathy (should these exist) would count as varieties of experience and the justification derived therefrom as a posteriori.

Mathematical intuition and things like it are not included in this definition of experience, despite being experience, since they do not concern an actual world as contrasted with a possible world. When we ask ourselves what kind of justification can exist without reference to experience, we have to think of it according to these terms Bonjour has constructed. At least if we want to follow his arguments. But are these conditions a fair definition of justification a posteriori? It seems odd to include (b) which wants experience to yield a doxastic state that have as their content putative information. Bonjour is making his work relatively easy by including these aspects to experience, since they all can be argued to involve a priori elements in a Kantian way. Doxastic states are reliant upon language, the categories of language may be seen as a priori true to some people. But regardless of the adumbration in these conditions, we shall see things through.

Bonjour does not actually deal with the problem of dependence of a priori on experiences, but reverts back once again to Kant, where what is a priori is determined by a propositions after it is understood, thus avoiding the claim that a priori propositions still need experience for the semantic content of the a priori proposition. To know a priori that a fully green surface cannot at the same time be red, you have to know what red and green are, and to know this you have to refer to experience, thus making the claim not a priori. But this is not the case according to Bonjour, since a priori propositions arise after their semantic content has been uncovered. Thus the claim that no fully green surface can at the same time be red is an a priori proposition, since it is determined solely through rational thought – its meaning taken as already established. This does not seem entirely justified, but at least this somewhat alleviates one of the problems that a supposedly a priori theory of justification would have to deal with.

The summation of Bonjour’s a priori justification runs as follows:

A proposition P is justified a priori if and only if that person has a reason for thinking P to be true that does not depend on any positive appeal to experience or other causally mediated, quasi-perceptual contact with contingent features of the world, but only on pure thought or reason, even if the person’s ability to understand P in question derives, in whole or in part, from experience. (p. 11)

Understanding being permitted on the basis of experience even for a priori judgments is a particularly interesting point, since it does seem to go against the idea that any semantic notion whose existence depends on a learning experience would be enough to infect an entire logical process. Experience-based semantics is compatible with the notion of a priori judgment in Bonjour’s view, which makes it far easier to go along with than if this was not the case. It is probably possible to go so far as to see this non-experience-based semantics as incoherent inherently, since the notion is inconceivable as well as unjustified empirically. It is a notion coming from nowhere, but let’s move on.

Bonjour proceeds to go through several potential versions of what an a priori statement could be, from differing points of views, in particular from the point of view of rationalism, moderate empiricism and radical empiricism (notably represented by Quine). One of the views radical empiricism puts forth, apart from the fact that they straight forwardly says a priori statements are not actually possible, is that the a prior statements are based on linguistic conventions, or conventions within a community of speakers. The meaning of two analytic terms are thus determined by the conventional semantics coupled to these. This, Bonjour says, makes it so that a priori statements no longer have any truth value, they lose their propositional character, and are instead some kind of imperative coming from said community of speakers. This seems to think that to say a meaningful statement does not entail an aspect of normativity. If we want to be understood, or produce statement that has an a priori character, do we not have to appeal to the imperatives and rules of the language of which the statement is expressed, and thus the community of speakers within this language? Unfortunately what really goes into a proposition is not lingered on in Bonjour, which would be necessary, since the existence of propositions is neither a clear cut issue. It seems easy enough to skip potential areas that could prove to be problematic for the rationalist, and this is more or less what Bonjour does, perhaps to avoid being bogged down by arguments that do not directly pertain to the a priori, but problematic nonetheless. We have to ask ourselves what would allow an a priori statement to be true if it is not based on the semantic conventions of a linguistic community or on some kind of set semantics for some speaker. If it is a priori true that an object cannot both be square and circular, what is it that makes this statement true, how is our interaction with this sentence something that causes us to assent to it? When we say “circle” there are certain criteria for what makes a circle, something which Bonjour also talks about, same goes for the square, and when they are compared the criteria of each we see that they are simply incompatible. But where do these criteria come from? Are they not conventional? Where else would they come from?

Bonjour does question what exactly a relation between a convention and a priori statement would be, which could be show itself to be of some importance if shown to inconsistent. But his argument amounts to a realization that a priori judgments – if seen as linguistic conventions – are not justifiable based on convention alone. It seems Bonjour forgets about the fact that convention supplies us with semantics, to a large extent, and this is what gives us the truth conditions for a priori statements. The answer here might be, which is what I believe, that we have no strong reason to accept a priori statements at hand, we accept them insofar as we follow the conventions posited by a community of speakers. This would most likely be in line with Quine. Bonjour, on his second point against conventional a priori statements asks: “What convention might be adopted that would make it possible for something to be red all over and green all over at the same time?” (p. 53) Is this not easily answered? It is answered by the convention that says that “red” and “green” denote the same color. This is how easily conventions are changed, and it shows us that they are not necessarily grounded in anything more solid than the whims of linguistic communities. Obviously we cannot have a functional language without a certain amount of conventional semantics, but it is entirely optional. This is especially highlighted in the article “Is meaning normative?” by Hattiangadi. Bonjour realizes this, though, and simply says that regardless of the changes of words that make up an a priori statement, we do not lose the a priori nature of the meaningful content of those a priori statements, like the principle of non-contradiction, or that things cannot be both red and green all over. The semantic content of a priori statements seems to transcend the actual word-usage for Bonjour. There is a definite propositional content behind the words that does not change, which makes a priori statements necessarily true regardless of the conventional words used to express them. The question then becomes what upholds this kind of propositional content, and whether or not there are such things as propositions. We shall see if Bonjour takes a stand here, or if this remains ignored.

Meaning as entities does become of import in Bonjour’s discussion of radical empiricism and specifically Quine’s Two Dogmas. For Quine this is obviously problematic, and in general we could see it as problematic from a metaphysical point of view, because what would a meaning-entity consist of? Since it – as Frege argued for – does extend across individuals, since meaning is in some sense shared, what do we make of it? To think that meaning is an atemporal and aspatial entity is slightly bizarre. Despite my husserlian tendencies I do worry about the notion of meaning as entities. We simply seem unable to refer to an entity when it comes to something like translation. We have a word in two languages, and we say they express the same thing. In this view we would then express the same thing insofar as this ”thing” is an entity that each of the two words represent. This does not seem to be the way translation works. But at the same time there seems to be something other than an environment and a dispositions towards assenting to sentence-use involved in meaning. Appeal to Grice by Bonjour is a very good thing, since speaker intentions does seem to be very involved in meaning. And on top of that, speaker intentions still remain within observable behavior a lot of the time. From my knowledge of Grice (which is not very extensive), there is nothing to say that Quine and him would be incompatible. Quine simply seems to state that the deciphering of speaker intention is a very complex ordeal.

Meaning being constituted by eternal entities is something Quine deals with, as is brought up by Bonjour as well, in a footnote. The meaning of a language is determined by its current speakers, but how a language once was spoken is still remembered and understood. In a sense this is an eternal understanding, we say “at this point in time this word was used in this and that way”, and we say that with our current usage. When we give up a meaning of a word for another, we do this with our current semantics. A priori statements are meant to be eternally true, but the words that make up such a statement are subject to change, according to Quine. But the meaning itself remains, according to Bonjour. A change in the individual words that make up an a priori statement is not of concern according to the latter, since the meaning does not change. But does it not? Is that not what causes a change in the words being used? Are not all statements subject to a change in meaning, or have inherently in them the potential for change? Non-entity semantics can still determine word-usage, clearly, because in linguistic interaction with people we do not refer to entities as we speak, we refer to the world, and we perhaps have ways of thinking about this world, or have associations to certain places and their objects linked to our words, but we simply do not communicate entities to each other. If we allow for these entities there comes a whole slew of metaphysical problems that we have no way of resolving. They’d serve minimal explanatory purposes, but they are far from necessary. Take Kripke’s rigid designators as another example, his account of meaning in terms of causal processes do show how a non-necessary situation can create a necessary meaning coupled to a term, in that the meaning was determined and causally connected to this moment in time. Bonjour seems to deny that we can forgo these rigid designators, and at any point create a new ceremony to baptize or give meaning to a word or statement. It is a common occurrence to think of a word and find new aspects of the things we normally associate with those words.

Ultimately the argument does seem to work in some sense, because there is something that remains with us as the specific words of something we express changes. Exactly what this is can be problematic to specify, and to posit abstract entities is not the answer. If it is a matter of that perspective versus a perspective that deals with concrete behavior, the latter will prove to do more interesting things. Perhaps we can allow for temporary a priori statements, and not let change be a threat to the notion of analyticity. There seems to be no requirement for apriority to be eternally valid here. But if meaning is determined sensorily, as what a lot of Quine’s philosophy would suggest it is, then how can there be a priori statements proper? According to Bonjour this is obviously not the case, so the question is pointless. To him there seems to be non-observational beliefs that can be true. Perhaps it is once again best to move on. I do not think the account of radical empiricism Bonjour offered turned out to be fully convincing, but it has somewhat loosened certain convictions I’ve held on the notion of a priori statements. On we go to moderate rationalism.

Moderate rationalism denotes simply that there is a priori knowledge that is fallible and corrigible. Bonjour distinguishes two types of corrigible a priori statements: those that are external and those that are internal.

If a statement is “externally correctable” it is possible to correct a statement with appeal to external facts. For instance in the case of hallucination we refer to external criteria for what makes up a hallucination, we cannot come to a conclusion of this kind internally. Our mental state, reflections, introspections or perceptive state cannot be the source for the statement that is externally correctable. The correction stems from some kind of external criteria, basically.

The internally correctable is merely the process of coming to notice a mistake in past reflections or ratiocination. We simply replace the faulty part with a correct part, and thus we have a correction internal to our mental states. Bonjour includes perceptual corrections here as well. Internal correction can also be made through the notion of coherence, which is good to point out, seeing as coherence is, suitably, an a priori way of considering facts. The question is if coherence truly is an a priori ordeal, which seems unclear.

Another aspect of moderate rationalism is the ability for a priori statements to warrant belief, without the need to be incorrigible by way of experience, viz., that it is not necessary for an a priori statement to automatically disprove all experience-based statements simply due to it (the experience) not being coherent with an a priori statement. At the same time Bonjour claims that there is no a priori statement that could be corrected by an experience, and that there are no such examples. I lack any such examples as well, how would experience show that something can never be both red and green all over? For instance. But nothing, I think, can prevent this from being the case, as long as the a priori statement pertains to observable facts. However, it is likely that a priori statements are not about things which can be considered observable. We can never observe a surface that is at once both red and green all over, since it seems to reject how perception works in general. We cannot on a one-colored surface see more than one color. But this seems more like a problem with the language involved, or with pointlessly expressing something. To say that something cannot be both red and green all over is entirely excrescent. To proclaim that something is a certain way is obviously automatically a negation of it being all things that it is not. Is this not something we know due to perception? Is it just not the most fundamental fact of perception? It is directly evident, but only insofar as we experience things in this way, and thus cannot conceive of things being any other way. So perhaps, if not by this account then by some other, it is possible to question the a prioriness of supposedly a priori statements. If experience can inform or establish the meaning of what we say, then how is anything a priori? Bonjour’s initial definitions are puzzling and unproblematic in general, since they allow for experience to determine the meaning of the a priori statements (if I remember correctly), and perhaps here is where the problem lies. But on we go!

The final part – forgoing a lot of interesting parts of the book – is about inductive reasoning, specifically the justification of inductive reasoning. It grounds itself in the scandal of there not being any solution to the problem of induction. Bonjour claims every effort to solve the problem in recent times has been largely palliative, while conceding that the criticism against inductive reasoning holds strong. The schematic account runs as follows:

Suppose there is a situation A, and that out of a large number of observed instances of A, some fraction m/n have also possessed some further, logically independent observable property or characteristic B; in brief, m/n of observed As have also been Bs. Suppose further that the locations and times of observation, the identity of the observers themselves, the conditions of observation, and any further background circumstances not specified in the description of A have been varied to a substantial degree; and also that there is no relevant background information available concerning either the incidence of Bs in the class of As or the connection, if any, between being A and being B.

A standard inference would thus be that you go from the premise m/n of observed As are Bs to the idea that m/n of all As are Bs (regardless of observation, or as Bonjour writes: observed or unobserved, past, present, or future, even hypothetical as well as actual). Our problem here is that it is unsure how this leads to “the truth about the world”, and whether or not an inductive premise will increase the likelihood of the truth of the conclusion. Hume’s problem, is the problem of the Principle of Induction, which says that the future will resemble the past. This is the short version of Hume’s account of the problem of induction. We cannot prove that the future will be the same as the past a priori, since its justification works as good as its contradiction. Experience cannot help us either since it leads to circularity, we would prove the principle with appeal to its regular truthfulness, which will lead to an appeal to a further principle that needs to be proved, which would spawn another principle of induction, and so on.

We cannot have this, Bonjour says, it would lead to a very extreme form of solipsism, where our possible justification becomes limited to our own present experience. The main issue with this is its ridiculousness, seen prima facie or intuitively. I do not find this ridiculous, necessarily, not until there are good reasons for finding anything but a methodological solipsism to be possible. I couldn’t go through Bonjour’s a priori account of induction, so it is time to conclude this piece. Hopefully next piece be concluded properly and work as a whole.

Jakob von Uexküll and Trans-/Post-humanism: The Hint of the Outside.

“A Foray Into the Worlds of Animals and Humans” by Jakob von Uexkull is startling. It opens up ideas that shoot past several philosophical boundaries yet it remains believable and seemingly accurate, with a basis in very basic observations of animal behavior. We are talking of entire worlds here, truly, worlds bound entirely by the set of sensory capacities the animal or human possesses. Thus the tick, for example, is determined by its initiation into movement by butyric acid emitted from mammals and the heat-levels of its world. Their world is simple, but nonetheless a world on par with the human world. This is the core idea, a non-hierarchical idea of worlds of subjects.

A sensory subject has so-called perception marks, ways to perceive its world, which act as a ground for the effect marks, which lead the subject into action. Everything is determined by these perceptive marks and effect marks, it seems, in Uexkull, for instance: “Without a living subject, there can be no time.” (p. 52) Time is different in each subject, and each subject is brought out of slumber by their own set of perception organs. We have a non-hierarchical idea of sense hidden here as well, where the scientists perception becomes the same as the tick’s, differing only in complexity. We deal here with “special biological significance”, where environments are delimited based entirely on the special significance its components have to our sensual experience; it is based on what in our environment can cause a perception mark. The notion that excites me about Uexkull’s is the idea of constructing an environment out of perception signs.

What perception signs are, exactly, is a fairly complex idea to deal with. I think it can be defined as the following:

A perception sign or mark is a perceptive quality that appears for a particular species as relevant to it in a particular way. So in an image, we can determine that an animal cannot perceive this and that color, that we cannot experience biological sonar, and so on, but we know there are animals that use these senses in behaving a certain way. We know this by eliminating aspects of our environment until we can specify exactly what acts as a perceptive mark for a species of animal. The bee will focus on flowers that would carry nectar and so on, and their perceptive field is determined by these shapes, according to Uexkull, whereas human beings have a less directly focused image, their focus is determined by a goal, which is not always the case in animals, mostly not the case, even. Animals are often determined by reflex arcs, as it’s called, but even within this reflexive behavior we have have the plan of Nature that guides whether or not this reflexive behavior actually functions. A plan of Nature is a very vague idea, bordering on being nonsensical, but the vagueness also leaves open more charitable interpretations.

What could a plan of nature be? It could simply denote how nature is schematized, how it functions in broad strokes. It doesn’t have to mean a plan in a human sense, but a plan as in “this is how things are”. Nature doesn’t have a plan, it just is, as far as I can tell. But the idea of a plan stems from thinking there is a reason for why a reflex arc works out the way it does causally, and that is because it is according to nature’s plan. In a way that is as far as our explanation of causal relations can ever go. We don’t know why something occurs just the way it does, we only know that it does. We don’t know why it is that salt is soluble in water, if we push the “why” far enough. We can say “because the chemical compound changes due to this and this aspect of the molecules X and Y”, but we cannot further explain why it is that these things happen in these circumstances in particular. I, at least, do not know of a final explanation.

But it is worsened by Uexkull saying: “And people deny them [the plans of nature] because they have no real idea of what a plan is, since it is neither a force nor a material substance.” (p.92) It seems that Uexkull leaves the door open for antique skepticism in a lot of ways. We are bound as subjects to our sensory organs and their interaction with an Umwelt, or the immediately surrounding world. Deleuze, for instance, builds on this by denying the human ability to transcend these. Language and knowledge are but virtual aspects of this groundedness in an experiencing subject. We do not apprehend anything as such, we use tools we have available to survive and prosper, like the spider’s web-building or the tick’s patience or particular time-consciousness (if it can be called that). The meaning of language is on the same level, it seems, as other physical, otherwise seen as mechanical, interactions. Perhaps it is right to deem it all physical, to deem ourselves unable to see a Nature such as it would be to nature itself. This is an impossible idea, it is unthinkable and has no arguments. It is a trans-species approach to psychologism. It is trans-human, post-human. We are not superior, we all act on the same level, within the same piece of music (Uexkull likes the music similes). We all act as notes in this grand melody, and so on. This by no means imply an interconnectedness of individuals, merely a speculative Nature which we are not in touch with. We can only decipher our environment through our tools, what transcends this also transcends all meaningfulness, thus all speculation and writing. If we don’t buy that there is a harmony that could bring us any comfort, but realize that one note is in reality insignificant to itself in all its possible perspectives, we find a deep existential insight. One that stings particularly. We see ourselves as stuck as soon as we start to see the borders of our subjectivity. We find the border through pure speculation, through an intuitive sense of what might be. While it is scary it is without merit. This requires more thought than I am able to give at this moment in time. Life in actuality is becoming increasingly difficult. The idyll of philosophy can only hold its border against so much of the outside. It will seep in, and it will hurt.

Husserl’s Experience and Judgment (incomplete)

What is the genealogy of logic? How do we perform judgments on what surrounds us? How do we explicate the prepredicative experience, the self-evident givenness constantly bombarding our conscious mind? These are the questions Husserl in one way or another dealt with these questions throughout his writing life, and is poses a very difficult problem. What happens in the process of our making linguistic of the non-linguistic? It is still unclear what language refers to, the ontology of language is uncertain, in a sense as well. Our attributes and references do not always include a demonstrative element, we cannot always find a referent for our phrases, but yet language functions quite well without this. In some sense we have a virtual way of understanding, removed from all concrete situations, like the earlier Wittgenstein would call pictures or images, what Husserl would call intentional objects, the noetic-noematic processes, and so on. How do move from the actual situation of objects before us to the logical structure of deductive reasoning? How can there be correspondence between language and world? What follows will be a text that goes through Husserl’s book Experience and Judgment, to hopefully find some kind of possible response to these kinds of questions.

The basic movement goes along these lines: we think back on what first appeared before us in our various cognitive acts, the act of perception, the act of imagination, etc., and we see through the process of retrogression to that very act. We have to realize the repetition that goes on here, the re-enactment of past acts that give rise to meaning – meaning in the sense of meaningful words, significance, reference, etc (although it might be problematic conflate meaning with reference, so perhaps disregard this point if it leads to confusion). We are to seek “the phenomenological genesis of judgments in the originality of their production”, it seems. (p. 23)

Here Husserl touches on something of great importance. We move from an active production of understanding to a mechanical reproduction. For language to function as we intend to, for knowledge to exist as explicable and communicable, we have to sort out the representative function and the function of reproduction. We see a change in intentionality, here, clearly, and this is something that needs to be accounted for and brought into light. What we find is the difference between immediate and mediate judgments. These are then always referred back to a set of immediate cognitions, they are the basis of which all other judgments are formed. There needs to be a line to and fro these forms of cognition, in other words, the mediate cognition is determined by the immediate, and is always related to it. The mechanical repetition is thus mediate, based on the immediate cognition that once gave rise to it. These immediate cognitions are “the most original.” They lay as the foundation to all other cognition. We see here Hume’s basic thought, the reduction to the most basal experiences, those that allow any interaction whatsoever beyond that point. Husserl’s starting point, this time, lies here.

I am starting to understand where Derrida came at Husserl from, the writing of Husserl in this text seem to stray a bit from the rigid place where he once resided. It will become clearer as I go through the text as well. A further distinction is made to clarify what has been said above, that is between objective and judicative self-evidence. We are both aware of object as they appear in our prepredicative experience, they are there as objects constituting a world (yes, a world, somehow). The judicative self-evidence is simply inner sense, you could say, the experience of our own cognition and deductive processes and so on.

“Original substrates are therefore individuals, individual objects, and every thinkable judgment ultimately refers to individual objects, no matter how mediated in a variety of ways.” (p. 26) In a way this is also in line with the talk of particulars that people like Strawson do, we always have terms that are reducible to individuals, as in particular objects in our life that we can share and in some sense interact with. Everything is derived from these fundamental interactions with particulars, or individuals. “The theory of prepredicative experience, of precisely that which gives in advance the most original substrates in objective self-evidence, is the proper first element of the phenomenological theory of judgment.” (p. 27) We start from the ground up, with the substrate, the prepredicative, the objects, the immediate particulars/individuals, this, if anything, should be clear at this point. It seems also that they are intermixed, the substrate is made up of individuals, and they are experience with immediacy. There is thus a relation between these term that should be kept in mind as we go through this.

So what exactly is this pregiven, the substrate? It is a set of objects in an environment. Every object here has a horizon. We are not immediately given a full situation, and every individual is determined by its indeterminacy, it is always possibly more. We can always walk around an object in our environment, it is not immediately apprehended. The horizon denotes possible experience in general, and this horizon of possibility is what is called the world, this is also included in the term “substrate.” Transcendence creeps its way in, here, each object experienced ends up including a set of transcendent not-yet set of experiences. This transcendence however is not truly known, as such. It is undetermined (p. 37), and undetermined generality, a not-yet particular grasping of individuals. But we trust the horizon’s ability to bring forth more individuals, in Husserl, and perhaps this is a general truth of how we interact with this indeterminate world, we move into it, we flip things over and realize that most things do, in fact, have a backside, etc.

This indeterminate substrate of objects is there as an “unfamiliar familiarity” (p. 37-38). We always experience this indeterminacy as something present and as a possibility-to-determine, thus we are familiar with the fact that it is not yet familiar to us. It is this movement from the unfamiliar substrate to the familiarity of genera that is part of the determination of these undetermined prepredicative objects. Still there is a principle of similarity that steers how individual experiences are synthesized into full predicates, or attributes.

Husserl’s critique of the natural sciences have always been intriguing to me. There are points that still hold up today, I would say. There are hidden assumptions behind many terms used in science, perhaps all terms, in one way or another. I’m coming more and more to this idea that Husserl is, in a weird way, a very extreme logical positivist – I do not think many people would consider this to be a correct assessment of Husserl, but still. All terms and categorial activity, he says, is grounded in prepredicative experience. The logical positivists would do the same, but not consider experience as such, but mostly deal with observation sentences. It seems they did not realize a whole world of relations still to be explored rested betwixt the sign and signified, the category and its experiential evidence, and the true self-evidential apodicticity of first-hand experience. As far as I know (not very far), the natural sciences have not truly dealt with this relation. At least we can trust Husserl’s criticism of the science of his own time, but I imagine the problem remains, when he says that science throws a garb of ideas over the life-world, viz., the world of actual experiences of the prepredicative kind. We are dependent on theory for observation sentences, something that is very much known in the philosophy of science. To rely on this structure itself is not yet to meditate on how the terms being used arose in the first place. Perhaps we only have Quine, and in some sense Wittgenstein, who tried to get at the core of how meaning can be linked to expression, meaning, then, is the description of the prepredicative world. Is there not a contradiction here? To express the inexpressible? Is this not why the earlier Wittgenstein, among other things, thought it best to not discuss it? Was it best to keep the “objects” or “things” of his image theory vague as they were? Can we truly find a denotative function for the prepredicative? I believe we can, but let’s continue with the text at hand.

One of the most important principles in philosophies, or for semantics, specifically, for the idea of predicates or attributes in general, or regarding the question of universals (however you want to phrase it), is the notion of similarity or repetition. Without true similarity there is no way to construct predicates of any kind, we cannot describe without predicates. This challenge to description is something Husserl spent a great deal of effort trying to solve. In a strange way you have to presuppose similarity to even talk about similarity, it is deeply ingrained in our way of living. Husserl refers to the notion of prominence, which is what Quine later would call salience, the prominent aspects of perception, the red square on the white screen, these letters against the background, etc. This is primary in the process of finding similarity, one prominent patch is measured against another, Husserl explains it accordingly:

“Let us now consider a unitary field of sense as it is given in an immanent present and ask how in it, in general, consciousness of a particular thing raised into prominence is possible, and, further, what essential conditions must be fulfilled in order to bring about the consciousness of a multiplicity of like or similar things raised to prominence.

Every such field of sense is one that is unitary in itself, a unity of homogeneity. It stands in the relation of heterogeneity to every other field of sense. A particular element in the field is raised to prominence in such a way that it contrasts with something; for example, red patches against a white background. The red patches contrast with the white surface, but with one another they blend without contrast Рcertainly not in such a way that they flow over into one another but in a kind blending at a distance, in which they can be made coincident with one another as being similar.Ӭ(pp. 73-74)

In other words, first we identify fields of homogeneity on their own, as they are prominently displayed against a background, then we extend this field of homogeneity to another field like it, where they “blend at a distance”. This is a brilliant description in that it takes away the abstraction of colors and removes actual distance. Similarity is simply the same as prominence, as contrasting colors, only understood at a distance, made possible through co-prominence that blends together. It is an ingenious solution. The only problem is to what extent memory can be thought to minimize this real distance. Can we really assume that the distance can be negated in this way? It is hard for me to find a preferable description, unless we want to move into pure nominalism. But even if we wanted to, we’d have to completely negate the idea of similitude, is this a possibility? We clearly can compare and find fields of homogeneity, even across far distances, even without direct comparison, so how can we deny it? The further question is whether or not these similarities are real or not, are they coupled with the objects or made by the mind? To think they are created by the mind, or simply are coupled together by association to a word, does not seem to hold up, but at the same time we can’t assume that they exist in themselves in the object. Direct comparison works, in that we could not distinguish the red square from the red square. Once we have a field of homogeneity, we cannot deny the similarity between two points of that one prominently colored shape. To extend that to a similitude over distance is not to jump too far, as far as I’m concerned. So similarity can be considered, but this does in no way imply a necessary connection between things similar, as Husserl says: “To be sure, one can say that similarity between particular data establishes no real bond. But we are not speaking now of real qualities but of the way in which sense data are connected in immanence.” (p. 74) What is “real” here is a difficult thing to consider. Is an immanent connection or notion of similarity not real? The only thing we discover here is that qualities are mind-dependent, but also object-dependent. We cannot deny either aspect.

I will keep going with this part of Experience and Judgment, I find it very important:

“Affinity or similarity can have different degrees within the limits of the most perfect affinity, of likeness without difference. Wherever there is no perfect likeness, contrast goes hand in hand with similarity (affinity): the coming into prominence of the unlike from a basis of the common. If we pass from likeness to likeness, the new like presents itself as repetition. Its content comes into completely perfect coincidence with that of the first. This is what we refer to as blending.” (ibid.)

We fundamentally have the interplay of difference and similitude going on, similarity is what makes difference possible, as the heterogeneity that becomes prominent. In other words, we require a background for shapes to come about, this background will always be homogeneous, similar to its own points. To push this further, is there not always a texture? And does texture not imply a difference even among the homogeneous fields? Is Husserl’s account a simplification of similitude, or unified homogeneous fields? This possibility would destroy the entire system Husserl is building, so let’s leave it for now.

While there is not a coupling to a word, in the synthesis of homogeneous fields, there is an association between the fields themselves. Perhaps the denotative act does precisely this, it denotes the associative net of homogeneous and heterogeneous fields of synthesis. Husserl says:

“What in a purely static description appears to be likeness or similarity must therefore be considered in itself as being already the product of the one or the other kind of synthesis of coincidence, which we denote by the traditional term association, but with a change of sense. It is the phenomenon of associative genesis which dominates this sphere of passive pregivenness, established on the basis of the syntheses of internal time-consciousness.” (ibid.)

This is a dense sentence, but what it goes through is very important. A supposedly static description is never entirely static. It implies or denotes already the movement of association that brings together these syntheses of the given, that is, movement. This is how you’d combat the Bergsonian problem of how something static can describe the non-static. It is by way of having the static denote not a static process, but a movement, here a movement of internal time-consciousness, the associative act, the coupling of similitude (I am aware of the strangeness of these terms). The static symbol serves merely as an indicator of something far more complex, this is a major part of what phenomenological studies elucidate. It’s also important to note that Husserl does not attempt to make of association some kind of psychological law, he does not make it “objective,” as such. Association in Husserl is always a specific interaction between particulars, or in concrete contexts, “Association comes into question in this context exclusively as the purely immanent connection of “this recalls that,” “one calls attention to the other.”” (p. 75) This is the “movement” of the associative act of consciousness, this is what constitutes indication. While Husserl does not want there to be a law-like relation coupled to the associative act, he still says things like “But all immediate association is an association in accordance with similarity.” (ibid.) This seems law-like, to me, not to say that it is incorrect. What else could form the association between two visual elements, if we adhere only to the immediate givens? Prominence will display only difference and repetition, heterogeneity and homogeneity.

To move away from this, there is a notion of double perception that needs to be discussed. In philosophy, especially certain neokantian philosophy, there is a notion that perception can be faulty. We misidentify things as what they are really not. In Husserl this is different, here we have the same perception, only additions in terms of anticipatory ideas. We see something from a distance, we project an idea of what this might be, based on the perception, but this is not the perception itself. The perception remains the same despite the identity of the object changing. When one notion of what the perception is of changes to another, the one that is not used does not simply disappear, it is still there, but suppressed, not used. Doubling is not a doubling of the perceptive experience itself, but a doubling of possible interpretations of this perception. An experience can be apprehended with different terms, in other words, and depending on this we will have possibly more than one term that could be applicable.

The interplay between explication and substrate is both interesting and important in Husserl. The mind operates through ramification, branching out into various focal points from substrates. Substrates can be specified into explications or determinations, which themselves can become absolute and serve as the substrate for further determinations or explications. This movement is very recognizable. The flower in the flowerbed stands out, becomes the point of focus that in itself allows for further focal points, the colors of the flower, its petals, the thorns, and so on. We operate through grounding ourselves in points of focus, starting out with the general horizon of experience, moving inwards. This is by no means an infinite process, though, luckily. To say this would be to transcend experience, which is prohibited in Husserl. There is simply a movement between different absolute focal points. The ray of attention changes, that is. We could simply call it our focused field of vision.

I am leaving Husserl for a while, I spent months finishing this book, about half of it was fruitless and didn’t stick with me enough for processing through writing. Time to move on.

P. F. Strawson, Individuals, A Good Book – A Poor Commentary.

“All identifying description of particulars may include, ultimately, a demonstrative element.” (p. 22) Identification is a difficult matter, usually. Descriptions alone do not always guide us where we need to be, since our various descriptive terms are not always bestowed with the same directionality, the same nodes of likeness or identification. What the quote above denotes is how identification and the descriptions that constitute it are in desperate need of an intersubjective demonstrative act. Pointing is not always it, as Quine sometimes seem to suggest. It is not an ostensive act, as such, but a demonstrative, that leads us to a correct identification of something. Demonstrations are more purposeful than pointing is, and can thus demonstrate a more specific type of identifier. So the imprecision of translation when you are outside of language, as Quine points out, with this emphasis on demonstrations, could be solved.

Strawson says thusly: “For by demonstrative identification we can determine a common reference point and common axes of spatial direction; and with these at out disposal we have also the theoretical possibility of a description of every other particular in space and time as uniquely related to our reference point. “ (ibid.) So we have here a system of demonstration based on reference-points and the relativity of things to a chosen point. Particulars in this way can always find security in that they hold themselves to whatever point we’ve chosen for ourselves.

Since we have to do with particulars, in particular, we have to also develop individuating principles. Strawson posits that to be truly individuating a description needs to lead to a particular A and this particular alone. The description and its demonstrative act will then serve as the core of such a process, where the end-point usually becomes a point in space and time, particulars are always in a substrate of spatio-temporality, Strawson says, and that this is the bottom line identifier. I wonder how warranted this is, since both temporality and spatial identification is based on something as well, is space and time not identified as well? Are these identified by the particulars and their interactions, or are they determined in themselves and later applied to the particulars? Perhaps it is of no greater concern for now.

To identify the particulars you need a datum of some kind, and there are logical individuating descriptions, Strawson gives the example of “the first,” and “the only,” as two of these. (p. 26) When these fail, due to whatever confusing circumstance we are in, where perhaps what came first or what is singled out as “the only” is uncertain, we rely on a principle of demonstration, an indicative act, as has been discussed above.

Then there is a description which relies on no specifics, called a pure individuating description. This relies on no specific date or place or name, it keeps things general. The example given is “the first dog to be born at sea.” It moves through general terms to find its particular, and it relies not on the context in which it is said to gain meaning.

When it comes to the latter, Strawson beautifully notes that there is always an aspect of probability when using generals to arrive at particulars. There is a level of frivolity in such a claim. (p. 27) It is uncertain whether or not there is an application for phrases that are general in kind but refer to a particular. We find thus an emphasis on the importance of directly knowing the particular in some way previous to describing it, at least if we want the description to carry meaning and ability to properly guide us to an object. Both when there is no object and when there are more than one object, the pure individuating descriptions fails. (p. 28)

There is frequent talk in Strawson of a “unified framework of knowledge of particulars” which carry no definition in the work itself, as far as I know. So when a description that is detached from this framework, what does that mean? (ibid.) I think Strawson is saying that to describe a particular sufficiently well, to identify it uniquely, would be to make it useful in general, since it wouldn’t play a part in the usual ways we acquire and use knowledge. A particular in its most precise description is isolated from the way knowledge normally functions.

Perhaps this, on page 29, serves as somewhat of an explanation of what this unified knowledge could be:

“We may agree, then, that we build up our single picture of the world, of particular things and events, untroubled by possibilities of massive reduplications, content, sometimes, with the roughest locations of the situations and objects we speak of, allowing agreed proper names to bear, without further explanation, an immense individuating load. This we do quite rationally, confident in a certain community of experience and sources of instruction. Yet it is a single picture which we build, a unified structure, in which we ourselves have a place, and in which every element is thought of as directly or indirectly related to every other; and the framework of the structure, the common, unifying system of relations is spatio-temporal.”

This unification comes in part in how we synthesize descriptions or stories from other people with our own, this is how we create a world of relations. Your report relates to mine, and ours relate to objects in our shared space. These objects in shared space are shared in spatio-temporal space, we relate to specific points on both axes.

Strawson here explains the origins of the mistake, or fiction, when a description of some kind is made of a thing that cannot be located spatio-temporally. These things “do not really exist,” he would say.

The problem of identification of one unique particular, and not knowing if there is more than one out there, is discussed further, and the anxieties of which is removed. Strawson emphasizes our own part in a reference system, and that this helps the process of identification of particulars. We are not removed from a situation, ever, or the network of reference-points, we are trapped within it and have a sphere of particulars which create itself a delimitation of what can be referred to properly. He wants to deemphasize the privacy of such reference as “here and now” and “this”, “that”, and so on. These are not entirely private in that we share them spatio-temporally with others around us, with as many individuals as there are in the current situation. The vague and private aspects of language are still useful, to Strawson, since they do succeed in indicating various particulars, and direct our attention to them.

The problem of continuity is of high importance when it comes to identification. To identify, properly, requires the ability to re-identify, as Strawson says. Life is discontinuous and we cannot only be certain of things as long as they are within our field of vision, what kind of knowledge would that be? It simply wouldn’t be, it would be a confused perpetual living in the presence. But to have identity be continuous, even when experience is not, you have to be able to re-identify. This is something Husserl very adamantly wrote about, that a general term always needs a way back to its particulars, or its presently experienced self-evident core. Identity needs to on some level transcend the immediate experience, it seems. This is a dangerous path to walk along if you are privy to the skeptical mindset.

The same discontinuity exists in my writing, two months have past between this sentence and the last. But Strawson moves on, and the problem becomes that of solipsism. The question is, why do we ascribe out conscious states to anything other than our conscious states? We can only see a causal relationship between our own body and consciousness, and our own body is discovered only in discovering its causal relationship to our perceptions or consciousness. We close our eyelids and our visual perception disappears, thus our own body becomes supreme amongst the various bodies in our subjective experience. Through this we land at a sort of empirical solipsism. However, we do not find ourselves in this supreme body. The experience itself only shows it as a particular body, a special body with special traits, but Strawson does not seem to think we have a reason beyond this to ascribe the body we experience as causally related to our perception to any subject in particular. (p. 93)

We find ourselves with the problem of inner and outer experience, and how it relates to other people and the signs of things like conscious states. Strawson differentiates between P-predicates and M-predicates, where the former denotes states of persons, the latter states of things, things elsewhere called primary qualities, or simply “quantitative.” It draws back on the notion of outer perception not quite reaching inner states. Strawson discusses this in a semantic sense, where the meaning of “pain” must include the outer sense, the behavioral aspect, for it to carry meaning. The behavior that leads one to ascribe to a person the predicate “is in pain” is thus the criteria for that logical category. Strawson is unraveling the language involved in the mind-body problems and the problem regarding the existence of other minds. To clear up the language here will lead to the discussions being far more fruitful. These are powerful distinctions, even if they do not solve the problem automatically, it might even show how the problem is impossible to resolve. If all we view from other mind’s are the signs or behavior of inner states, that we discover only in the analogous behavior we ourselves partake in while in these inner states. For communicative purposes, this is a fundamental criteria for something like “pain” to have meaning. But in a genuine sense, getting close to the actual experience, is it possible to communicate various sensory states sufficiently? Are they inherently private, thus meaningless? If they are meaningless, are we meant to simply avert our gaze from these genuine states of being? It seems we fall into a disingenuous theory of meaning if we forgo these genuine first-hand experiences.

We base a lot of ascriptions of ourselves on how we ascribe it to others, Strawson emphasizes, but there are many times where our ascriptions do not share criteria in any kind of intersubjective or objective way, and we lose a crucial portion of our experience if we solely deal with the semantics of intersubjectivity. We’d be ignoring phenomena! Strawson knows this in that he explains how a self-ascriber always have a primary role in ascribing things for themselves and a supreme ability to correct the person ascribing things to others. So the solution, for Strawson, is to simply, in thinking about P-predicates, or states of a person (the nature of a person, or the definition of a person, is as of yet not decided upon in Strawson’s book), is to have self-ascription and other-ascribability both be considered, and have both be criteria for the understanding of these types of predicates. For them to be meaningful, they must have knowledge of the behavioral criteria and the inner criteria. “Feelings can be felt but not observed, and behavior can be observed but not felt,” is an important paraphrase, I believe, to illustrate this basic point. (p. 108)

Something like the concept of depression would be defined as: that which “is something, on and the same thing, which is felt, but not observed, by X, and observed, but not felt, by others than X.” This a beautiful deconstruction of problems of this kind, we simply find a fundamental different in how we view others and how we have a sovereign role in our self-ascription and self-knowledge. If we let either be primary in any sense, though, we seem to fall into logical gaps, as Strawson calls them. What exactly this means is uncertain, but there seems to be some kind of point involved. Strawson tries to get at the meaninglessness of something that is privately determined, as something like my feeling of depression, for instance. If this is only my definition, then it is nothing at all, it is non-communicative. This is a scary problem, because it does not seem to have an automatic resolution. Strawson seems to think that simply considering the two types of ascriptions will solve the problem of meaningfulness here, but between them there is a huge gap, no matter how you put it. We never go from one to the other properly speaking. We can only see behavior as signs of something, or as criteria in themselves, and we can only view feelings as something self-sufficient and invisible in themselves to an observer. We do not see the feeling of pain, we only see signs. We can feel feeling, but they cannot be observed, we can observe behavior, but we cannot feel it. The resolution seems to be to simply accept this as a fact and ascribe predicates to others based only on behavioral criteria, and self-ascribe through feelings, through testimony. It seems like a lackluster conclusion, but perhaps it’s the only genuine one there is as of now (TO MY KNOWLEDGE!). We just need to keep in mind the totality of the ways meaning can vary depending on the perspective of the observer, because meaning is not one or the other.

It becomes problematic when we try to create a single individual out of these disparate ascriptions, however. And it is the final problem of this section of Strawson’s book. He admits the impossibility of resolving this problem, but thinks a way to perhaps get closer to it is to view people as actors, as acting entities, with intentions that show themselves in the ascription of future behavior, or a future development of action. We know what people will do before they do it, sometimes, it is possible to predict the movement of people, based on inference from their intentions. Perhaps there is something to this, perhaps there is not. The question arises for me whether it is not simple enough to just accept the testimony of a conscious mind. “I am having thoughts, I am having inner experiences.” What right do you have to doubt this? And would your doubt be sensible? We can accept there is no connection that would allow you to experience my experiences, so why is my testimony not good enough in this matter? A testimony is by no means a perfect proof, to say or emit the sounds “I am conscious.” is not the same as being conscious, but is there sufficient reason to doubt it? Each person could simply view a definition of automata and explicate “I am not this.” It seems the skepticism towards this is based entirely in nonsensical conjecture about counterfactuals. Perhaps I am missing something.

Strawson has a tone I like a lot. I don’t entirely understand his project in this book, but I followed most of it, and never saw any problems with what he was doing in a severe sense. I write this discontinuously, so I may have contradicted myself in the above-written text, but I am not in the mood to check for any such contradictions. My ability to engage with philosophical writing is dwindling, I love it, I love the process, but my ability to focus at all sufficiently is disappearing. I hope something changes soon, I’ve lost track of everything.

William James and Radical Empiricism: A Glance

“Consciousness connotes a kind of external relation, and does not denote a special stuff or way of being. The peculiarity of our experiences, that they not only are, but are known, which their ‘conscious’ quality is invoked to explain, is better explained by their relations – these relations themselves being experiences – to one another.” (p. 25)

“Radical Empiricism” is something that appeals greatly to me. It’s a term I naturally came to call Deleuze’s philosophy, which naturally gave me a way into William James’ book “Essays in Radical Empiricism”. If anything, we get a much clearer justification on what leads one to denounce consciousness, or the ego, and so on. We see the similarities to Husserl as well in reading someone like William James. Consciousness is always consciousness of something, thus experience is never directed at “consciousness” as such, consciousness become a non-entity, a non-something, a nothing. Things and thoughts are equivalent to experience, although different, both are special types of somethings in an experience. William James talks less of “experience to a consciousness” than Husserl, however, and goes for the approach where experience, both mediated memory, retained actual experience, and perceptual experience, are both immediate in their particular forms.

To fully go into this mindset we have to figure out what it means to forgo consciousness and supplant with it the idea of relations, relations between what? If relations are always external, or only external-internal by way of concept-percept, can we explain all of the functions we otherwise attribute to consciousness? We explain the object of our experience strictly by the way they relate to other experiences. That is what the initial quote, as I take it, says. Experience is always in its peculiarity within an assemblage of other experiences, this is Deleuzian, and this is what William James seem to be getting at. Experience relates only to other experiences, concepts are experiences, flows, that converge and diverge with other experience, find relations and break away from others. I believe this thesis is a very good one to start with in philosophical matters.

This kind of radical empiricism rejects substance-philosophies, also akin to Deleuze in some sense, although he sometimes speak of matter in a very fleeting manner. James says: “there is no general stuff of which experience at large is made.” (p. 26) Who would in modern day buy this thesis? Experience comes from the material substance that make up our bodies, right? Is it not this straight forward? Experience, let’s say visual experience, is dependent on eyes, for instance. We have to ask ourselves if eyes, and everything else involved in a visual process, optic nerves, fovea, etc, are not also simply a part of experience, a relation within, where we find a dependency of the experience on these other parts of experience. Again, we find a relation of experience, when we find dependency, even when we consider things that make up the so called genesis of experience. This is something Derrida didn’t understand in his essay on the problem of Genesis in Husserl.

When we say there is no general stuff that experience is made up, however, you have to say what is actually there. James answers this by saying that what is there is exactly what we say there is, a heaviness, a brownness, an intensity, and so on. Always a specific particular relation or appearance. “Experience is only a collective name for all these sensible natures, and save for time and space there appears no universal element of which all things are made.” (p. 27)

In “World of Pure Experience”, the second essay of the book, solipsism is brought up, and James promptly criticizes it, as almost everyone does instinctively with the faintest arguments imaginable. James goes the Merleau-Ponty route, though, and it is fair. “Why do I postulate your mind? Because I see your body acting in a certain way. Its gestures, facial movements, words and conduct generally, are ‘expressive,’ so I deem it actuated as my own is, by an inner life like mine.” By a radical empiricist, however, this surely is not good enough. The inner life, like ours, in others, is not available to experience, the pure actual experience. There is always some kind of leap involved in acknowledging the mind of others. Not to say this makes solipsism true, instead it makes for an interesting springboard into questions of how to know that which is immediately unknowable. How do we work around this? Husserl did it by the material of objects, its most general directionality. We both point to an outline in space, this is our shared object, despite the phenomena of the two persons differing, sometimes greatly, sometimes disjunctively or incongruously. I would say this is a fair way to go about talking about shared objects, about conventional outlines, pointing, etc. As we know Quine would make this ostensive act problematic on some level, because to know another mind is in a way to break into a whole other language. The imprecision of translation in Quine’s thought experiments lies in the inability to get into the mind of the speaker, we do not know as outsiders their specific references, especially not if “reference” itself is not shared as cultural behavior. So what we are left with are objects shared, but objects unspecified, objects indefinite. Objects with non-overlapping phenomena, but with a shared directionality. If we want to make it more physical we can simply say that we do not in any way share nervous systems, thus making any shared experience in its minute precision and full purity impossible. This is von Wrights way of going about it.

William James is worth studying, he is a good thinker and a pleasant writer.

I can’t muster a single word past this.

Essays Critical and Clinical, Deleuze: My Lacking Vitality.

Today I’ll write with disillusion. I give many thinkers a pass, and I build up what I sense a lack in. If I am the one who creates an understanding out of ambiguity, what is it that actually is done in the act of writing philosophy, on the behalf of the philosopher. Is there always an aspect of this? That is, audience participation.

So to turn to the French thinkers, you have to endure a lot of ambiguity, propped up only on the moments of clarity, hidden deep within the quirkiness of eloquence. Writing, after all, is not a form imposed on the matter of lived experience, as Deleuze initiated his book “Essays Critical and Clinical” with. Literature is never finished, as philosophy, you could safely say, but is instead in a constant state of becoming, multiplicitous and changing, distinctive in its everlasting differentiation between various concepts.

“Writing is inseparable from becoming: in writing, one becomes-woman, becomes-animal or vegetable, becomes-molecule to the point of becoming-imperceptible.” (p. 1)

There is a specific type of becoming that Deleuze keeps in mind here. One does not become Man, he says, man is the supposed dominant form of writing, the imposing figure onto matter, a virtuality which twists the actual into its form. The conjecture of that is again to misrepresent Deleuze, but I suppose I can never quite solely present a thinker as they appear in themselves. In any case, woman, animal and molecule are not imposing, in Deleuze’s mind, they constitute lines of flight from the imposing figure of Man. This is how Man becomes, in moving from the confused idea of writing the lived into writing as experience, as becoming, as process, etc. Writing is a becoming-minor, you could say, a becoming indiscernible. But when deleuze says:

“To become is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or indifferentiation where one can no longer be distinguished form a woman, an animal, or a molecule – neither imprecise nor general, but unforeseen and nonpreexistent, singularized out of a population rather than determined in a form.” (ibid.)

Does he not stumble? To become is not to attain a form, but how is indistinction possible if that is the case? Is form not what makes possible an indiscernible quality? That is, a similarity? “Becoming is always between or among: a woman between women, or an animal among others.” What Deleuze is getting at, it seems to me, is the explication of the unique, the true becoming of an individual within a species. Literature makes this possible through the expressiveness of the author’s becoming of different beings, his movement in and out of characters and entities, from the movement of the insect to the seduction of a woman, none of which are the author, or lived experience as such, but a description of qualities and movements.

We describe in Deleuze’s literature entities which are not solid, which are not rigid, you could say. They are indefinite, always, always in a process of becoming, always incomplete. The animal is never an animal as properly defined and outlined, but animal as line of flight, as deterritorialized animal. What kind of animal is this? Have we not lost all semantic value here? What kind of woman is not a defined woman? Is woman the name of the entity we point to, “this woman here,” without actually saying anything about this woman in a holistic sense? Deleuze’s literature seems to be always open for any name to mean anything. But proximity implies a point to be proximate to, and how is that identified without a definite identity? We have to question this blabbering, it seems.

But there is undeniably sense in what Deleuze writes. What seems senseless is either a confusion on my end or on his end; it is unclear where the delirium lies, if not everywhere. “Language must devote itself to reaching these feminine, animal, molecular detours, and every detour is becoming-mortal. There are no straight lines, neither in things nor in language. Syntax is a set of necessary detours that are created in each case to reveal the life in things.” (p. 2) What is referred to here? Literature is becoming close to life, life as indefinite, life as impossible to universally or transcendentally describe. Life is amorphous, free even, to some extent, and it cuts through every definitive designator. Being mortal is life, here, or being mortal means there is a unique movement that escapes all territorial thinking. The Husserlian question would be to posit the same kind of argument Deleuze puts forth directed at the argument. How is this concept of a line of flight not just another territorialization, another rigid concept, another definition? Ambiguity is not fully equivalent to indiscernibility or the indefinite.

But there is an identity, however, it is de-oedipalized, it is ahistorical, in a way. It goes from “my father beats me” to “a child is being beaten.” The identifiers are always impersonal. This contradicts somewhat what was said above. The individuality explained in the concept of becoming is perhaps not that of a person, as in subjectivity or for an ego, but the individuality of traits, of the indefinite names of proximate entities. One have to ask what these refer to, in Deleuze, if not to actual entities with these traits of becoming-X and Y.

In this sense literature becomes symptomatology:

“We do not write with our neuroses. Neuroses or psychoses are not passages of life, but states into which we fall when the process is interrupted, blocked, or plugged up. Illness is not a process but a stopping of the process, as in ‘the Nietzsche case.’ Moreover, the writer as such is not a patient but rather a physician, the physician of himself and of the world. The world is the set of symptoms whose illnes merges with man. Literature then appears as an enterprise of health: not that the writer would necessarily be in good health, but he posses an irresistible and delicate health that stems from what he has seen and heard of things too big for him, too strong for him, suffocating things whose passage exhausts him, while nonetheless giving him the becomings that a dominant and substantial health would render impossible. The writer returns from what he has seen and heard with bloodshot eyes and pierced eardrums. What health would be sufficient to liberate life wherever it is imprisoned by and within man, by and within organisms and genera? It is like Spinoza’s delicate health, while it lasted, bearing witness until the end to a new vision whose passage it remained open to.”

What a writer thus finds in lived experience and brings to literature is not the lived experience itself, but the sense or affect of that lived experience. The symptoms of those experiences. It’s a meekly escape from the lived, you could say, a being overwhelmed that turns into a less intense and more organized syntax, a grammatology, through an effort of the weak, the shamed, the animal, etc. Writing sounds like cowardice, at this point, but I am aware that this is not Deleuze’s intended end-point (there is no such thing). Writing as escape, and the writer as schizophrenic escapologist, works very well in my mind. (Whose mind?)

“Literature is a disease, the disease par excellence, whenever it erects a race it claims is pure and dominant.” (p. 4) This is one of those points of clarity. But it is as revealing as it is confusing. We realize the illness in erecting races, that is, generalities. Health is the opposite of this, the continual and healthy process of becoming. Disease stagnates in the formation of races, too broad generalities, etc. This has always been my take on Deleuze’s writing, a fight against rigidity in a Bergsonian manner. Literature is part of this fight, clearly. Literature needs its health to create a healthy removed people, a minority separated from the people as such. This shows the absolute creativity of literature as well, that it is fabulation as such we are dealing with, not fabulation in its relation to a real people or the main people. The writer is always removed from this process and writes in solitude, creating a people that is nowhere.

This minorization of language is also what creates a language within a language, the idiolects of the writer, one might say. “Syntactic creation or style – this is the becoming of language.” Language is thus in a way limited to itself, in Deleuze, which is clear from other books of his, perhaps especially in The Logic of Sense. A distinction is always made between the expressive act and the intuitive act (as far as I can remember). It seems Deleuze is moving very close to a holism here, which is very interesting! “The creation of words or neologisms is worth nothing apart from the effects of syntax in which they are developed.” (p. 5) So language becomes dependent on the over all syntax and the general language for its distinction, a Saussurean notion as well.

Literature has two aspects, Deleuze says: “So literature already presents two aspects: through the creation of syntax, it brings about not only a decomposition or destruction of the maternal language, but also the invention of a new language within language.” And he quotes: “The only way to defend language is to attack it. . . . Every writer is obliged to create his or her own language. . .” (p. 5 quoting Proust).

The third aspect touches on something very strange:

“It stems from the fact that a foreign language cannot be hollowed out in one language without language as a whole in turn being toppled or pushed to a limit, to an outside or reverse side that consists of Visions and Auditions that no longer belong to any language. These visions are not fantasies, but veritable Ideas that the writer sees and hears in the interstices of language, in its intervals.”

Now what can be made from this? It seems as if Deleuze is here referring to not something beyond language, but something connected to but from the outside of language. Visions can mean a whole lot of things, but what kind of vision is this? It sounds naively referential at first glance, a reference to sense-data as some would say, a reference to a sense of movement or Idea that could be at the same time be seen as a writer’s Vision. Deleuze does not explain these terms, so what is there really to make of them? The important part is perhaps to realize that the writer seems to move as much inside language as outside, creating syntax with a coupling to Visions that are understood through the interstices of language. Where are these interstices? What are the intervals of language? Something mysterious is being referred to, and it can to my mind only be a brute experience of some kind, a sense for something as Deleuze would say. It’s not sense in the Fregean way, I do not think, nor the meaning of Husserl. “The writer as seer and hearer, the aim of literature: it is the passage of life within language that constitutes Ideas.” (ibid.) It seems to be a coupling here with sensual life and language, between life and its deep relation to language and literature. I fear it’s not so straight forward, but I have no way of getting around this ambiguity.

“We sometimes congratulate writers, but they know that they are far from having achieved their becoming, far from having attained the limit they set for themselves, which ceaselessly slips away from them. To write is to become something other than a writer. . . . we see that, among all those who make books with a literary intent, even among the mad, there are very few who can call themselves writers.” (p. 6)

All these becomings lead us to an impersonal, still, a non-imposing singularity without identity. We are doomed to perception, to perceive and to be perceived, and to perceive ourselves as perceived. We are identified and distinguished in this, and we are made virtual and spiritual, we are removed from our vitality, our life, and we become Platonic Ideas (p. 26), as Deleuze puts it. A writer is concerned with becoming that is impersonal, that is impossible to congratulate, it is not possible to apprehend. There is an imperceptibility to us, that is us, that is our life, it seems:

”When the character dies . . . it is because he has already begun to move in spirit. He is like a cork floating on a tempestuous ocean: he no longer moves, but is in an element that moves. Even the present has disappeared in its turn, in a void that no longer involves obscurity, in a becoming that no longer includes any conceivable change. The room has lost its partitions, and releases and atom into the luminous void, an impersonal yet singular atom that no longer has a Self by which it might distinguish itself from or merge with others. Becoming imperceptible is Life, “without cessation or condition” . . . attaining to a cosmic and spiritual lapping.” (ibid.)

Is Deleuze getting at an essence of existence here? One without perception, an attack on the Berkeleyean view that perception is essence. Is this imperceptibility immanent? Is this dark duration, this corkness in a moving element what constitutes our existence? Is this the ontology of Deleuze? The dark precursor, as he once put it. It seems like it. And it doesn’t seem transcendent, it seems to be immanent in that it is the perception of a non-perception. Is this not contradictory? We can say that “I do not see anything.” But is that to say that you see that you do not see anything? Language-confusions are arising very quickly at this point. At its core it seems to be a reference to something present before the clearcut perceptive qualities we impose on what appears in our experience.

To further go with this impersonality Deleuze says:

“The ego has a tendency to identify itself with the world, but it is already dead, whereas the soul extends the thread of its living ‘sympathies’ and ‘antipathies.’ Stop thinking of yourself as an ego in order to live as a flow, a set of flows in relation with other flows, outside of oneself and within oneself. Even scarcity is a flow, even drying up, even death can become one.” (p. 51)

Symbolism is apparently related to this flow of the living, as well. The sexual and symbolic are the life of forces and flows. The soul is going through a process of flows continually, passively, as is highlighted likewise in the essay on Kant in the book. “The inalienable part of the soul appears when one has ceased to be an ego; it is this eminently flowing, vibrating, struggling part that has to be conquered.” (p. 52)

We remove the ego to be supplanted by the flows of pure life. Is this not a radical phenomenological reduction, if there ever was one? The flows of life is what constitutes the qualities of literature and knowledge alike, these are what truly in and of themselves are what directs all other activity. These flows are what lead to conjunctions and disjunctions between flows, thus for relations of life, relations between the flow of symbols and the flow of experiences, for instance, the flow of love and the experience of the loved. “Artifices matter little. But whenever a physical relation is translated into logical relations, a symbol into images, flows into segments, exchanged, cut up into subjects and objects, each for each other, we have to say that the world is dead, and that the collective soul is in turn enclosed in an ego, whether that of the people or a despot.” (ibid.)

So when I skirt the line of flows being connected, the symbolic act being connected to the experience-act, it is with extreme carefulness, so as to not confuse them in their forms, in their quality or matter, as Husserl would say in the Logical Investigations. But they do coincide, they are connected flows of experience, all immanent, with perhaps an arbitrary connectivity, but a connectivity nonetheless. This connectivity does not mean equivalence or necessary correspondence, but it means recognizing and not being discouraged by a great difference of acts of the mind and receptivity of the mind.

The connectivity is not natural, per se. In the essay on Whitman we find the notion of fragmentation, the world is a patchwork of heterogeneous parts, none of which belong together necessarily, none of which are same, none of which are totalizeable. Whitman, according to Deleuze, claims all the writer does is explicate the specimens, the examples, the samples, of their worlds. “Spontaneous fragments constitute the element through which, or in the intervals of which, we attain the great and carefully considered visions and sounds of both Nature and History.” (p. 60)

The essay on Heidegger and phenomenology pushes this fragmented aspect of being further. Deleuze goes beyond Husserl in making phenomena not something for a consciousness, thus intentional, but a world showing itself, “a world made up of remarkable singularities, or a world that shows itself.” (p. 92) It is a pure Being that arises in the phenomena, and it is self-evident, self-showing. “The Being of the phenomenon is the ‘epiphenomenon’, nonuseful and unconscious, the object of pataphysics. The epiphenomenon is the Being of the phenomenon, whereas the phenomenon is only a being, or life.” It is not Being, but the phenomenon that is perception – it perceives or is perceived – whereas Being is thinking. No doubt Being, or the epiphenomenon, is nothing other than the phenomenon, but it differs from it absolutely: it is the self-showing of the phenomenon.” (ibid.)

What do we make of this nonsense? Why is there an assumption of what Being is, underlying, or co-present with phenomenon? If Being is the self-showing of the phenomenon, is Being ever self-showed? Why is it assumed to be in play? A phenomenon shows itself, it is self-showing and it is exactly that, it is not mediated through a consciousness in the sense that we’d otherwise say, it is simply self-present, self-showing, self-evidently what it is and nothing more. “Metaphysics is the error that consists in treating the epiphenomenon as another phenomenon, another being, another life.” We are to think of it as nothing, a non-being, this Being in itself that is the self-showing. But why think of it at all? There is no way to make sense of, to me, something like: “withdrawing or turning away is the only manner by which it [Being] shows itself as Being, since it is only the self-showing of the phenomenon or beings.” (ibid.) How do we know it turns away, how do we know it withdraws itself? What does it even mean to refer to such a thing as Being? It is absolutely senseless, and that begs the question of why it is discussed by people like Heidegger and those that want to partake in his kind of discourse.

This pure immanence is something Deleuze gets back to in the portion on Platonism, making the strange Heidegger references somewhat pointless:

“Every reaction against Platonism is a restoration of immanence in its full extension and in its purity, which forbids the return of any transcendence. The question is whether such a reaction abandons the project of a selection among rivals, or on the contrary, as Spinoza and Nietzsche believed, draws up completely different methods of selection. Such methods would no longer concern claims as acts of transcendence, but the manner in which an existing being is filled with immanence (the Eternal Return as the capacity of something or someone to return eternally). Selection no longer concerns the claim, but power: unlike the claim, power is modest. In truth, only the philosophies of pure immanence escape Platonism – from the Stoics to Spinoza or Nietzsche.” (p. 137)

This transcendence is the transcendence of judgment, putting the quality before the thing, before the experience, for instance. Having a transcendental sphere which is fulfilled by immanence, by immanent thing-experiences that only find their meaning in its relation to the transcendental judgment. This is the absolute enemy of all true and genuine philosophy, for Deleuze, and I think also, for me.

When Deleuze gets to Spinoza, things get awfully complex, but more lucid than normally. Signs are always effects, “the trace of one body upon another” (p. 138). We come into contact with these types of signs through sensations and perceptions, ideas. This sensual or perceptual contact with various states in duration are intensive, and move in gradients; differentiation comes from changing states, the movement from a preceding state to the current one, and so on. “These are passages, becomings, rises and falls, continuous variations of power that pass from one state to another. We will call them affects, strictly speaking, and no longer affections. They are signs of increase and decrease, signs that are vectorial (of the joy-sadness type) and no longer scalar like the affections, sensations or perceptions.” There is a difference between affections of bodies and affects on the duration, a change in the relation joy-sadness, hot-cold, more-less, and so on.

“Signs do not have objects as their direct referents.” (p. 141) Signs refer to signs, Deleuze says. Signs now in the sense of effects, effects in the sense of bodies interacting with bodies. Signs are again signs of bodies affecting other bodies. Is there room for language with its ordinary use here? What does it mean for epistemology? “We have knowledge of bodies only through the shadows they cast upon us, and it is through our own shadow that we know ourselves, ourselves and our bodies. Signs are effects of light in a space filled with things colliding with each other art random.” (ibid.) Does he mean this quite literally? A movement of things, a causality that always in current situation carries the sign of the preceding cause? The preceding casts a shadow on what follows from it, creating a sign. Do we find here a new type of causality as well, removed entirely from naivety and Humean skepticism? Bodies can only appear to us through their “casting of a shadow”, meaning the bodies as such are not what we experience. We experience affectations. This is right, it seems to me, but is it right to assume there is an object or body which casts a shadow? There is no Dark precursor, as Deleuze says as well, in Spinoza there is only light. It all is a matter of intensity, the degree of which we are affected by shadows.

Between signs and concepts lies an irreducible gap, Deleuze claims, an insurmountable distinction. The point is very fine, and hard to grasp for me. It all comes down to: “But insofar as concepts refer to concepts, or causes to causes, they follow what must be called an automatic chain, determined by the necessary order of relations or proportions, and by the determinate succession of their transformations and deformations.” (p. 143) What is this necessary order of relations? Relations involve all other relations, they are all immanent, the order of which varies with each relation, but relates to the rest nonetheless. That is the relation of all relations. The way we relate to various relations of bodies is through the passions, we come into agreement with a body, we find joy in our relation to a sign, it sparks or gives us a vitality, a life-force. Thus we come back to the notion of literature or signification as force, as joy and sadness, as power and weakness. This is the same idea explored in Proust and Signs, where we were as spiders in the web when dealing with language, a small touch in one way or another jolts us into action, into attempted discourse, into material cries.

Deleuze is a thinker that draws me in and puts me in a perpetual state of confusion. I follow a thought, then I am spun around and I land on my head; there is no way to make sense in such a state of spinning and nausea. I have no way of apprehending or even criticize a thinker like Deleuze in a consistent manner, I falter again and again in being critical, I am carried away by a great vital force, but don’t go all the way. I am left in the middle; inadequate. Funnily Deleuze ends with “The Exhausted”:

“Being exhausted is much more than being tired. “It’s not just tiredness, I’m not just tired, in spite of the climb.” The tired person no longer has any (subjective possibility at his disposal; he therefore cannot realize the slightest (objective) possibility. . . . The exhausted person can no longer possibilize.” (p. 152)

I’m a perpetual failure. Exhausted at this point, philosophically, societally, without future. To keep writing even in misunderstanding, to further nonsense, to not kill it as it sprouts, that is contemptible. To attempt the again and again, to take up again and again the effort to do something, to produce, to become-machine. I use Deleuzian terminology without any grasp of its nuance. I talk shit. I produce shit. This writing is pure and rigidly pigshit, and not much else. Hopefully one day I can be done with it, I can’t make sense of anything as of yet.

Merleau-Ponty’s Primacy of Perception, a short commentary on a short essay

Merleau-Ponty was one of the earliest philosophers I found tried to get at the core of the history of metaphysical problems philosophy have dealt with. He didn’t fully get into either the postmodern French school of thought proper – although I believe he was part of its foundation – nor the analytic tradition of going fully into language philosophy. In general I think Merleau-Ponty could be described as an incredible moderate, he never quite falls into transcendentalism nor pure immanence as Deleuze, for instance, did. He had a clear guide, and this guide was perception, as our true interaction with being and existence, as in itself a showcasing of existence and being. Perception is always “in the world”, it is part of the world, it is the world. Thus, as human beings, perception becomes primary.

“The perceived world is always the presupposed foundation of all rationality, all value and all existence. This thesis does not destroy either rationality or the absolute. It only tries to bring them down to earth.” (p. 13)

There are endless complications within perception, however. Object-synthesis is a huge problem, as it was in Husserl, it is again in Merleau-Ponty. When we see one perspective of an object, the others become dormant. What is this mechanism, what is our relation to the unseen? Since they can be apprehended again, and experienced fully, they are not as such mere representations. Perhaps we can see them as such if we imagine them, but then they are imaginations, not experience, thus not objects in the world. This is a distinction Husserl was less worried about, but that Merleau-Ponty gave a lot of time to. The unseen side is exactly what it is, as we experience it, it is in our vicinity, it is in the horizon, it is in the moving of the lamp, the turning of the cube, etc. (p. 14) Our interaction with objects unseen is entirely practical, it is present in a sense that is more or less immediate (maybe that makes it not immediate, but close enough). This unseen is apprehended through a setting, an environment.

Something very interesting is said on page 15:

“We observe at once that it is impossible, as has often been said, to decompose a perception, to make it into a collection of sensations, because in it the whole is prior to the parts – and this whole is not an ideal whole. The meaning which I ultimately discover is not of the conceptual order. If it were a concept, the question would be how I can recognize it in the sense data, and it would be necessary for me to interpose between the concept and the sense data certain intermediaries, and then other intermediaries between these intermediaries, and so on. It is necessary that meaning and signs, the form and matter of perception, be related from the beginning and that, as we say, the matter of perception be ‘pregnant with its form.’”

Can we make sense of this? Is there truth in it? Merleau-Ponty certainly gives way to the whole many times, to a kind of holism. A perception cannot be reduced to its sense data, since there is not necessarily something that lets us recognize in the silent sense data something conceptual or linguistic. It is very often the case when we look at items that they are recognized immediately as their setting, as their different modes immediately available. But how is such an availability of the object built up in the first place? Why could this not be a gradual process founded in the sense data? Or in the experiences of perspectival part-objects. We learn of a setting through experience, right? Is Merleau-Ponty trying to refer to something more mysterious here? Or he simply referring to the atomistic aspect of perception? That we cannot decompose a perception simply means that we cannot reduce it, it is immediately exactly whole and what it is. To decompose would be to go outside of experience, thus to no longer be faithful to its primacy.

I believe he is simply saying that the synthesis of perspectives that make up the setting of objects in the world is a passive synthesis. “What prohibits me from treating my perception as an intellectual act is that an intellectual act would grasp the object either as possible or as necessary. But in perception it is ‘real’; it is given as the infinite sum of an indefinite series of perspectival views in each of which the object is given but in none of which is it given exhaustively.” (p. 15) There is no completion of the object, thusly, and no objectivity in a true sense. There are only modes of an object, a directedness and its variations, perspectives on a point, a delimited object. And it cannot be intellectual, because it is immediate, and it is not grasping at the object itself as a real relation of the world. This is in part my conjecture.

This strictness of perception means that there cannot be such a thing as a thing in itself. It makes absolutely no sense for us to think it. “If I attempt to imagine some place in the world which has never been seen, the very fact that I imagine it makes me present at that place, I thus cannot conceive a perceptible place in which I am not myself present.” (p. 16)

So we are in some sense aware of the paradox of perception, as Merleau-Ponty calls it, that here is both an immanent aspect of it, and a transcendental aspect, objects appear and disappear, but we cannot necessarily say that the transcendental aspect doesn’t exist, since it is possible to re-apprehend it.

The world, then, becomes the “totality of perceptible things and the thing of all things, must be understood not as an object in the sense the mathematician or the physicist gives to this word – that is, a kind of unified law which would cover all the partial phenomena or as a fundamental relation verifiable in all – but as the universal style of all possible perceptions.” (ibid.)

If we follow this, we are finding that our worlds and thus our sensations become private in their most genuine form. How does our perceptions relate to other people’s perceptions? “If I treat them [perceptions] as acts of the intellect, if perception is an inspection of the mind, and the perceived object an idea, then you and I are talking about the same world, and we have the right to communicate among ourselves because the world has become an ideal existence and is the same for all of us – just like Pythagorean theorem.” (p. 17)

He continues:

“But neither of these two formulas accounts for our experience.” And this might just be a collection of quotes for a while.

“I will never know how you see red,” he says, “and you will never know how I see it; but this separation of consciousness is recognized only after a failure of communication, and our first movement is to believe in an undivided being between us.”

For this to work, Merleau-Ponty claims it is vital for us to see others as another “myself”, as another being whose world is available to us in the same way our world is available to them. “I espouse my thoughts because this other, born in the midst of my phenomena, appropriates them and treats them in accord with typical behaviors which I myself have experienced.” This is what constitutes the perceived world inhabited by intersubjective beings. We see ourselves in others, as they do in us. Our behavior is similar enough for recognition and ability to grasp the thought and directionality of objects that lead us to having practical and functional communication. This is a very pragmatic viewpoint, only it operates without neglecting the whole sphere of experience that people like Rorty sometimes do. The failure to communicate an experience is a failure in communication, not in the truthfulness of what is experienced. If two people are unable to experience the same truth, though, what do we make of such a situation? Is that simply due to an irreducible difference of perspectives or perhaps of physiology? Merleau-Ponty does not go into this in the current book. We confer on objects a new dimension, the dimension of intersubjectivity. These are “the elements of a description of the perceived world” (p. 18).

Another important aspect comes from the relationship between the notion of unreflected and reflected experience or thought. It seems closely related to intellectual and perceptual consciousness, it would be a different way of wording it. “It is true that we discover the unreflected. But the unreflected we go back to is not that which is prior to philosophy or prior to reflection. It is the unreflected which is understood and conquered by reflection. Left to itself, perception forgets itself and is ignorant of its own accomplishments.”(p. 19) This is the simple relationship of the reflected and unreflected, at the core level, they do not oppose each other, but the reflection is simply a directness towards the unreflected, as it always is in its pointedness towards the world. However that’s also in part my conjecture and completion of a thought solely for my own sake. Merleau-Ponty simply wants to point to the origins of reflection, which in genuine knowledge always lie in the perceptive acts and the unreflected aspects of our experience. The reflection serve mostly to add things to this experience and make it into something intersubjectively or subjectively knowable.

This reflection ultimately finds a cogito, a self, a self which Merleau-Ponty describes as: ”I am a thought which recaptures itself as already possessing an ideal of truth (which it cannot at at each moment wholly account for) and which is the horizon of its operations.” This self is in a constant progress of working itself out, it is not truly in touch with a truth, immediately, it creates it. The self feels itself as a thinking entity, it notices itself in its acts.

Such is the basic outline of the phenomenology of perception. There is much more depth to this idea, that shall be explored once more in the future, surely, if it comes.

Hope in place of Knowledge?

Another pragmatist book by Rorty. Truth becomes replaced by descriptions and warranted assertibility. It is justification which leads us in thought, because there is no final way to become satisfied, no way to end discussions and arguments, no way to finally prove the correspondence between knowledge and nature, or whatever else. It is difficult to disagree with this, because when we do study representationalism and correspondence theories and verificationist theories, there are always quite severe problems.

There are many ways to come to a pragmatist conclusion. One would be simply through defining truth, like Davidson seems to do, through its way of coming about. Truth is the process of coming to a true statement in regards to something. In that way, truth is always in the process. The process is more or less made up of justification. To replace truth with justification is to in a way make philosophy wholly atheistic, and do remove any notion of essentiality, which is another aspect to Rorty’s book. There is no essence in the world we can come across that cuts through the limitations of mankind in relation to a thoughtless universe. Instead there are people justifying things in a free democratic society, with only each other as judges, no Gods, no Nature, no correspondence to and fro man and object, or subject and object.

In a way there is a monism underlying this as well, buttressed entirely by intersubjectivity. The ridiculousness of pragmatism, in the way presented by Rorty, is that we have no way of knowing what it is that makes up justification, or what in us determined thinking a statement is justified or not. What exactly is there to guide us in this endeavor, if we have nowhere to look for security? What assumptions operate under this philosophy? An object’s variability between people does not matter to a pragmatist, since the description of it will be what guides our relation to it. We suspend the will to know it in itself. It seems to prop itself up on intuition, though, the intuitive way we relate to objects in our shared space. Knowledge of an objects is knowledge of what can be done with it, what kind of tool it can be, how it can be described, what kind of manipulations it allows for; all this is what Rorty calls relational. Our way of talking about objects is not truth-based or relating to a Nature in itself, or an Absolute way that thing are, but is simply talk about our way of relating to it and our ways of using those objects. Likewise, our talk of the objects is teleological in kind, it’s done with a specific purpose or function in mind. “I want food” is not some kind of attempt to describe the physicality of hunger, it is simply the description of a certain wish. Obviously the example is in some way slanted.

If we were to make a final justification our goal, a Rortyan pragmatism would end up calling it useless and hopeless. Mostly on the ground of past failures. It seems like Rorty is looking for some kind of happiness outside of the bitterness that philosophy harbors against the failures of epistemology. This same bitterness is what Rorty thinks fuels the fight against pragmatism. Perhaps a good way to turn pragmatism on itself is to look for its justifications. When Rorty uses pragmatism as a way to get away from epistemology, he doesn’t as such solve anything, he simply devolves to quietism, in a beautiful way, but nonetheless in a dissatisfying manner. Is happiness an automatically justifiable endeavor? Why not remain in the torture of an epistemological attitude? What justifies the absolute freedom of justifiable statements?

Objectivity was described as the ease of which somebody can agree to something, or the degree of agreeability of something. That which has a lesser degree is more subjective, that which has a higher degree of objectivity holds a higher chance of being accepted universally, or at least with more ease. But is objectivity even an ideal for a pragmatist? Is science something to hold dear in this pragmatist sense, where all it does is create a way of walking, unveil ways of using things, and a method of justification. Justification does not seem detached from epistemology, it seems the same problems remain, with the sole difference being that useless terms like “truth” have been curtailed.

What is it that we should hope for in the future? What is this “happiness”? Is it material contentness we are speaking of? Intellectual satisfaction? Pragmatism again operates through some kind of pleasure principle. I really don’t quite understand what fuels it. Does this reflect poorly on the state of my mental health? Or is it simply not a good justification for a move to hope, where certainty and knowledge become jettisoned?

The hope for the future is indeed a hope to gain tools where we can approach the inapproachability of certain off-limit aspects of reality. This hope is put on science, I imagine, since it is the only methodical approach that seems to attempt knowledge of a non-human kind, an entirely machinic-objective approach. An approach that claims to unveil the reality of nature itself. But what is the point in hoping for such a future, and not participating in it actively, alongside science, if need be, but in reality simply through an epistemology? Why shut down the enterprise? Who do we leave it to? I don’t understand the usefulness of hope.

But I think it’s easy to agree with the pragmatist denial of essences of certain kinds. Pragmatism seem to stand for an openness to a changing variety of justifications, or a becoming. It moves along with the new. It denies the Greek notions of a human essence (p. 39) and leaves humanity indefinite, always “improving”, developing, gaining more and more pleasure, happiness, freedom, and whatever other value is highlighted and held as important in pragmatism.

A thing I really agree with however is the notion that there is no essence, as should be clear. Our relational way of being in the world without any necessary way of telling which relation is “correct” or the most true makes it so that relationality is something characterized by a great amount of freedom. That which we know of objects is made up of our descriptions of them. This relationality itself is infinite, says Rorty, but to say “indefinite” would be more accurate in this sense, since we know nothing of infinitude, we know only a limitlessness. In this sense I do not think Rorty’s attempt to appeal to numbers in showing how nonessentialist thinking works, since all you have to do is ask the essentialist “where is the essence, and what constitutes it?” You will find their answer is never going to be satisfactory, since it will be entirely arbitrary without any sliver of self-awareness, thus not justified, thus not necessarily true in any conceivable sense, either, if we are to remain in that mindset.

Relationism is not simply descriptive, in my mind, but it holds true for an empirical or phenomenological approach as well. That all experiential relationships are at their core non-hierarchical, they are all immanent and to some extent differ perhaps mostly in how much they can inform what is said about the object, or inform the descriptive statements. This is something lacking in Rorty, which I am not sure I like.

Because we have to ask ourselves, what does a relational description refer to? It surely is referential, so what is referred to here? Is each relation not an essence, as it is in Husserl? This kind of essence would then what a description refers to. But this is not an essence in the sense of being the one true essence of an object, but simply the essence of a descriptive act, the foundation of a descriptive statement. It is simply the grounding of a description in something other than itself, in something other than the syntactical structure, it is grounded by its linkage to an essential relation betwen word and experience. Without this I would say a description is senseless, but it still maintains the democratic and non-hierarchical view of knowledge or relations that Rorty seems to value.

If we want to explore the world, or explore the way we explore the world, what does pragmatism suggest? Science is one description among many, it seems, according to Rorty. But how do we explain our descriptive behavior? How do we explore what constitutes a referential act, and so on? What would pragmatism allow for? Everything? Everything is open in the war of ideas, and they will live and die in that war, through some kind of historical dialecticism. I have no way of navigating this kind of space.

“We seem to have become more than human, to have distanced ourselves from our own humanity and viewed ourselves from nowhere.” (p. 49)

This is a very important aspect, in this case in regards to psycho-physical explanations of the world. We should always be wary of describing the world from outside of our own human groundedness and our needs. I mostly stand for such a statement in an epistemological sense, that we are never not human, our concepts are never devoid of a body, etc. We are always human, no matter how much we try to think the inhuman. What “human” in this sense means to me simply the experiencing entity we can see ourselves as, the way things appear to us, and how we interact with things with a particular directness and relationality. This is very important to realize, and to not lose track of in the psycho-physical scientific world explanations. All our scientific concepts are constructions, a constructivist social order.

“Is this description useful to show whether or not something is true?” could be the pragmatic epistemological questions. “Is this useful if we want to know this object?” In a way that is already how anyone interested in these questions operate, we’d spot it right away if something was not fruitful. But does “truth” have utility in itself? For philosophers like Descartes it was the starting point for a whole geometrical edifice, a ground from certainty that could build almost anything, in a mathematical manner, a move from axiom to elaborate proofs, and so on. Is this not still possible? Have we absolutely forsaken this notion? Obviously there is no need to follow in the footsteps of mathematics, but would it not be possible to build proofs based on core truth-concepts. If there is a truth such that “when we see X we say ‘Z’”, is that not something we could work with? A solid knowledge of a predictable behavior. Or are we to skeptically approach this as well? Could there really be an axiomatic theory of truth with appeal to the self-evident? Whatever it could be it would be subject to the same pragmatist view of justification-based discourse, and I don’t see that as necessarily a problem, it simply displaces the goal of philosophy, a goal I don’t think is actually active in the mind of anyone doing philosophy, since all philosophy involves itself with is textual analysis and argumentation, even when it exlaims to unveil truth, the former is its actual societal act.

Pragmatism does seem to be liberating to a large extent, however, especially the therapeutic kind that Rorty posits, but it seems equally a simple acceptance of failure, or an attempt to avoid hardship for the sake of comfort or happiness. Perhaps it is strange to want to remain in a state of discomfort or intellectual torture, but it seems more interesting to stumble and fail than to accept a non-satisfying arbitrary set of descriptions and justifications based on nothing but the propositions that constitute them. Pragmatism doesn’t do enough for me, but that is not to say that it couldn’t. I suppose we shall see, but not yet.