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TYPES OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY and Alternative Reality Images

ULRICH DE BALBIAN

Meta-Philosophy Research Center

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CONTENTS
PREFACE 3
INTRODUCTION 18
SIGNS OF INTERSUBJECTIVITY ? 19
SUBJECTIVITY, INTER-SUBJECTIVITY, OBJECTIVITY 21
RATIONALE for, FUNCTIONS of INTERSUBJECTIVITY 62
INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND SPECIALIZED FIELDS 77
BIOLOGICAL, PHYSICAL AND PHYSIOLOGICAL

INTERSUBJECTIVITY 104

APPENDIX 151

DIALOGUE AS DISCOURSE AND INTERACTION 151

HABERMAS AND BRANDOM 159

DENNETT AND BRANDOM 165

HABERMAS AND BRANDOM 167

MANIFEST AND SCIENTIFIC IMAGE 195

DENNETT VIDEOS 198

DAVIDSON AND SELLARS – “TWO IMAGES” 199

NAGEL ON DENNETT – Is consciousness and illusion? Two 217

Images
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PREFACE

1 2 3 4 5
Types of Intersubjectivity and their constitutions of, perspectives on and
(specialized) images of reality..
1 Higher animal forms
(Both modern humans and Neanderthals share 98.8% of their DNA with their closest non-
human living relatives, the chimpanzees.)[14]

2 Pre-historic mankind
Neanderthals and modern humans share 99.7% of their DNA[14] and are hence closely related.[15][16

3 Homo Sapiens (wise man) Sapiens

4 Contemporary – more or less informed and educated humans
5 Specialized disciplines (sciences, arts, logic, critical thinking, humanities,
mathematics, theology, cognitive sciences and other interdisciplinary fields…)

The more developed types of intersubjectivity of 3 and 4 developed from 2.

The specialized intersubjectivities, 5, exist interwoven with and alongside that
of 4.
Traditionally Western philosophy was concerned with and developed on the
basis of 3 and 4, but as the specialized intersubjectivities of disciplines, 5,
developed, philosophers began to take note of them and increasingly employ
them as well in their philosophizing. Perhaps leading to mixed, 4 and 5, types of
intersubjectivities,
I am not going to attempt to reason for the existence or non-existence and the
types of intersubjectivities among animals, but a few examples will make one
wonder about the possible intersubjectivity. Examples, when birds ding etc and
others come to the place where there is food, hierarchies among lions, dogs and
many other animals, when dogs respond in different ways to howling and other
sounds made by other dogs at a distance, that dogs smell female on heat at a
great distance, etc. If these things could be called intersubjectivity then there is
case for non-verbal expressions of it. In the case of human non-verbal,visual
and aural signs, body language, someone’s clothe, car, house, titles, etc express
intersubjective sings that other individuals, group, cultures and sub-cultures
interpret correctly and respond to in different ways. For example hierarchies in
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gangs, among prison inmates, the names of celebrities in the art world, actors,
writers, politicians, restaurants and many other phenomena in the human world.
What I mean by intersubjectivity in this study? The umbrella-word has many
meanings. The intended meaning depends on the context, the level of
generalization or specificity, the dimension, the specialized discipline in which
it is used as well as many other factors. Here are a few definitions of the term or
different meanings of the notion (I do not necessarily agree with them, my
comments and specifications are placed in brackets) –
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intersubjectivity Intersubjectivity is a term used in
philosophy, psychology, sociology, and anthropology to represent the psychological relation
between people. It is usually used in contrast to solipsistic individual experience, emphasizing our
inherently social being…….

Social psychologists Alex Gillespie and Flora Cornish list at least six definitions of
intersubjectivity (and other disciplines have additional definitions).[1]

In its weakest sense, intersubjectivity refers to agreement. There is intersubjectivity between

people if they agree on a given set of meanings or a definition of the situation. Similarly,
Thomas Scheff defines intersubjectivity as "the sharing of subjective states by two or more
individuals."[2]

More subtly intersubjectivity can refer to the common-sense, shared meanings constructed
by people in their interactions with each other and used as an everyday resource to
interpret the meaning of elements of social and cultural life (and other aspects of reality,
reality for the individual, groups, culture, sub-culture and their life-worlds.). If people share
common sense, then they share a definition of the situation.[3]

The term has also been used to refer to shared (or partially shared) divergences of meaning.
Self-presentation, lying, practical jokes, and social emotions, for example, all entail not a
shared definition of the situation but partially shared divergences of meaning. Someone who
is telling a lie is engaged in an intersubjective act because they are working with two different
definitions of the situation. Lying is thus genuinely intersubjective (in the sense of operating
between two subjective definitions of reality).

Intersubjectivity emphasizes that shared cognition and consensus is essential in shaping

our ideas and relations. Language, quintessentially, is viewed as communal rather than
private. Therefore, it is problematic to view the individual as partaking in a private world, one
whose meaning is defined apart from any other subjects. But in our shared divergence from a
commonly understood experience, these private worlds of semi-solipsism naturally emerge.

Intersubjectivity can also be understood as the process of psychological energy moving

between two or more subjects. In a room where someone is lying on their deathbed, for
example, the room can appear enveloped in a shroud of gloom for people interacting with the
dying person. The psychological weight of one subject comes to bear on the minds of others
depending on how they react to it, thereby creating an intersubjective experience that, without
multiple consciousnesses interacting with each other, would be otherwise strictly solitary.
5

Love (and empathy) is a prime example of intersubjectivity that implies a shared feeling of
care and affection, among others…

In philosophy

Contemporarily, intersubjectivity is a major topic in both the analytic and the continental
traditions of philosophy. Intersubjectivity is considered crucial not only at the relational level
but also at the epistemological and even metaphysical levels. For example, intersubjectivity is
postulated as playing a role in establishing the truth of propositions, and constituting the so-
called objectivity of objects.

A central concern in consciousness studies of the past 50 years is the so-called problem of
other minds, which asks how we can justify our belief that people have minds much like our
own and predict others' mind-states and behavior, as our experience shows we often can.[10]
Contemporary philosophical theories of intersubjectivity need to address the problem of other
minds.

In the debate between cognitive individualism and cognitive universalism, some aspects of
thinking are neither solely personal nor fully universal. Cognitive sociology proponents argue
for intersubjectivity—an intermediate perspective of social cognition that provides a
balanced view between personal and universal views of our social cognition. This approach
suggests that, instead of being individual or universal thinkers, human beings subscribe to
"thought communities"—communities of differing beliefs. Thought community examples
include churches, professions, scientific beliefs, generations, nations, and political
movements.[11] This perspective explains why each individual thinks differently from each
another (individualism): person A may choose to adhere to expiry dates on foods, but person
B may believe that expiry dates are only guidelines and it is still safe to eat the food days past
the expiry date. But not all human beings think the same way (universalism).

Intersubjectivity argues that each thought community shares social experiences that are
different from the social experiences of other thought communities, creating differing beliefs
among people who subscribe to different thought communities. These experiences transcend
our subjectivity, which explains why they can be shared by the entire thought community.
[12]
Proponents of intersubjectivity support the view that individual beliefs are often the
result of thought community beliefs, not just personal experiences or universal and
objective human beliefs. Beliefs are recast in terms of standards, (norms, values, attitudes,
etc) which are set (developed, maintained, transformed, institutionalized, socialized,
internalized, etc) by thought communities.

http://study.com/academy/lesson/intersubjectivity-definition-examples.html

A good way to think about intersubjectivity is to imagine how you relate to your family and
friends. Maybe your mother enjoyed playing tennis. She took you with her when she
practiced, and you always had a good time. Growing up, you decided to join the school tennis
team. If your mother had not played tennis with you growing up, you may not have grown to
like the sport. Your experience with tennis can be called intersubjective because it was
influenced by another person (your mother). In order to better understand intersubjectivity,
we first need to define a subject and an object. A subject is the person experiencing an action
or event. An object is what is being experienced.
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When we say something is objective, we mean that it is factually true. When we say that
something is subjective, we mean that it is based on an opinion, or a biased viewpoint, not on
hard facts. In literature, subjectivity means that the story is told from a biased viewpoint,
whether it is told by a character or an unnamed narrator. Everyone in the world has their own
subjective viewpoint. Intersubjectivity means that we all influence and are all influenced
by others to some degree. The principle of intersubjectivity can be applied to almost any
decision we make, big or small. We always have to consider how our actions will affect
others. We ourselves are constantly affected by the actions and words of the people around
us.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/intersubjective

 :  involving or occurring between separate conscious minds intersubjective

communication

 2 :  accessible to or capable of being established for two or more subjects :  objective

intersubjective reality of the physical world

https://tesisnetwork.wordpress.com/

TESIS — Towards an Embodied Science of InterSubjectivity — is an integrated Marie-Curie

ITN programme to investigate the foundations of human sociality. It brings together the
complementary expertise of 13 European research institutes, clinical centres and private
enterprises that span the biomedical sciences and the humanities. Thus, TESIS provides
critical mass in the fields of philosophy, cognitive neuroscience, developmental psychology,
psychiatry and societal outreach.

The network will advance our understanding of human intersubjectivity based on the
following research and training objectives:

(1) To investigate the neural underpinnings of affective exchange with others, of shared
action spaces and joint object relations, endorsing a novel interactive embodied neuroscience;

(2) To investigate the development of social skills in infants in the context of the awareness
of others during interaction, yielding an interactive concept of embodied social cognition;

(3) To investigate the inter-subjective factors affecting psychopathologies, especially

schizophrenia, autism and somatoform disorders and to draw implications for treatment;

(4) To investigate in toddlers and young children the understanding of toys, objects and
cultural artefacts and the links between materiality and sociality;

(5) To investigate cultural interactive patterns and shared practices such as group
learning, playing, teamwork, distributed cognition, creating applied knowledge for education,
management, and organizational development.

By integrating state of the art and novel approaches to studying interactive situations, TESIS
will significantly extend the individualistic and static paradigm still dominant in social
cognition research. The major breakthrough to be expected from TESIS is a comprehensive
framework for embodied inter-subjectivity applicable in the biomedical sciences, the
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humanities, and society in general, showing how we become human by embodied

interaction with others from the beginning.

Contact: waltraud.werkmann@med.uni-heidelberg.de

http://www.blackwellreference.com/public/tocnode?
id=g9781405124331_chunk_g978140512433115_ss1-69

Intersubjectivity refers to a shared perception of reality (or aspects of reality) between or

among two or more individuals. The term has been important in many aspects of sociology,
from positivist and postpositivist research methods to studies of the lived experiences of
individuals by ethnomethodologists and feminist scholars. The term presupposes that we,
as human beings, cannot know reality except through our own senses: sight, hearing, smell,
taste, or tactile feeling. Accordingly, each individual's reality is necessarily subjective. We
may extend and refine those senses through measuring devices such as telescopes, scales,
cameras, and myriad other technologies, but ultimately each person's understanding of reality
is individually subjective. One cannot see “blue” except through one's own senses. With
social reality, we have even less certainty. It is easier to know that the sky is blue than it is to
know that “James likes me.” However, most individuals also understand that we cannot
change reality simply by (personally or subjectively or as individual) thinking. Reality has an
(seemingly) “obdurate” (intransigent, inflexible, unyielding, unbending - obdurate. Middle
English, from Latin obduratus, past participle of obdurare to harden, from ob- against + durus
hard) (interpersonally developed and constituted) character ( Turner & Boynes 2002 ). If one
were to wake up and decide that “blue” is “yellow,” it would be clear that one could not
effect this change and make it real for many others. This is a duality of truths that presents a
problem for people interested in studying how people live their lives; neither objectivity nor
subjectivity is sufficient to ... log in or subscribe to read full text..

http://sk.sagepub.com/reference/research/n236.xml

Intersubjectivity refers to shared understanding. Drawing on the philosophical notion of

subjectivity (i.e., that meaning is necessarily colored by one's experiences and biases),
intersubjectivity recognizes that meaning is based on one's position of reference and is
socially mediated through interaction. In other words, knowing is not simply the product of
individual minds in isolation. In qualitative research, inter-subjectivity not only points to the
ways in which we share understanding with others but also indicates that meaning and
understanding lie along a continuum of mutual intelligibility. This notion is of particular
interest to researchers who study verbal social interactions in general. In various modes of
research on discursive processes, shared ways of knowing are of particular interest in trying
to reveal analytic positions on the….

Intersubjectivity Kate T. Anderson

In: The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods

Edited by: Lisa M. Given

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4135/9781412963909.n236

 The SAGE Glossary of the Social and Behavioral Sciences: Intersubjectivity

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 Dictionary of Existential Psychotherapy and Counselling: Intersubjectivity

 The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods: Indexicality

 The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods: Transana (Software)

 Vocal psychotherapy: Psychotherapy Approach: Intersubjectivity

 The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods: Aesthetics

 The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods: Audiorecording

 The SAGE Encyclopedia of Qualitative Research Methods: Bricolage and Bricoleur

(The above are a few of the many possible approaches to, perspectives on and interpretations
of the notion of intersubjectivity. One find ‘indications’ of the presence of, reference to and
implied (or more or less explicit statement of or reference to) or suggested by a number of
debates (such as that of Habermas and Brandom) and explorations (for example , Sellars,
Searle and Dennett).

Two points on those debates and explorations –

i) I add some of those positions in the Appendix, as they are

a) lengthy

b) only indirectly and partly relevant (as they might provide an already institutionalized and
familiar frame of reference and background information) to my own position and discussion.
Inclusion of them here will give the misleading and mistaken impression that I am involved
in and share their approaches, their problems, concerns, definitions, terminologies and the
problematics created by their work. I do not wish to saddle myself with problematics created
by them, and

c) the work, misleading, fabricated notions, contrived terminology and styles of writing of
those authors are unnecessarily complex and ambiguous.

ii) One of the reasons for these unnecessary, irrelevant and meaningless complexities and
problematics I have often found as that an individual did not identify and conceptualize
exactly what s/he attempts to investigate, that s/he is not clear about what s/he wishes to deal
with, say, think, express and communicate. Because of this lack of understanding of the
problem and lack of words to conceptualize it clearly s/he arrives at all sorts of unnecessary
complexities and problematics, expressed in bizarre neologisms, meaningless fabrications,
irrelevant notions and fabricated, whimsical opinions presented as seemingly profound
theoretical, technical vocabularies. In short, if you understand something, from personal
insights and experience, you can talk about it, express and communicate it in simple, ordinary
language, without the need for unnecessary, Habermasian, Germanic complexities.)

iii) I add articles on the discourse of philosophy and philosophers, another reason why I
refuse to be drawn into academic activities, publications, ideas and debates among so-called
professional philosophers, who live off the subject.
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http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/08/dennett-on-
normativity.html

One of Dennett’s most important claims is that most of what we and our fellow organisms do
to stay alive, cope with the world and one another, and reproduce is not understood by us or
them. It is competence without comprehension. This is obviously true of organisms like
bacteria and trees that have no comprehension at all, but it is equally true of creatures like us
who comprehend a good deal. Most of what we do, and what our bodies do—digest a meal,
move certain muscles to grasp a doorknob, or convert the impact of sound waves on our
eardrums into meaningful sentences—is done for reasons that are not our reasons. Rather,
they are what Dennett calls free-floating reasons, grounded in the pressures of natural
selection that caused these behaviors and processes to become part of our repertoire. There
are reasons why these patterns have emerged and survived, but we don’t know those reasons,
and we don’t have to know them to display the competencies to allow us to function.

Nor do we have to understand the mechanisms that underlie those competencies. In an

illuminating metaphor, Dennett asserts that the manifest image that depicts the world in
which we live our everyday lives is composed of a set of user-illusions,

like the ingenious user-illusion of click-and-drag icons, little tan folders into which files may
be dropped, and the rest of the ever more familiar items on your computer’s desktop. What is
actually going on behind the desktop is mind-numbingly complicated, but users don’t need to
know about it, so intelligent interface designers have simplified the affordances, making them
particularly salient for human eyes, and adding sound effects to help direct attention. Nothing
compact and salient inside the computer corresponds to that little tan file-folder on the
desktop screen.

He says that the manifest image of each species is “a user-illusion brilliantly designed by
evolution to fit the needs of its users.” In spite of the word “illusion” he doesn’t wish simply
to deny the reality of the things that compose the manifest image; the things we see and hear
and interact with are “not mere fictions but different versions of what actually exists: real
patterns.” The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us or for other
creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific image—ultimately in the language
of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology. Thomas Nagel "Is
Consciousness an Illusion?" reviewing Daniel C. Dennet From Bacteria to Bach and Back:
The Evolution of Minds , in the The New York Review of Books, March 9, 2017 Issue

Nagel's generous review introduces two key conceptual innovations in Dennett's thought
early in the review, first that there is "competence without comprehension" and, second, that
there are "free-floating reasons, grounded in the pressures of natural selection that" can cause
"behaviors and processes to become part of our repertoire." But while Nagel nicely draws out
the significance of this for Dennett's familiar view on consciousness (although he misses that
for Dennett the the scientific image is also of real patterns (see 222)), Nagel misses the wider
implications of these two innovations: that they pave the way for a version of functional
explanation in social science.

Before I get to that, first a terminological point: in his review, Nagel attributes to Dennett
commitment to free-floating reasons (see above). But in Dennett's terminology these are free-
floating rationales. Nagel is not subsantively wrong, however, free-floating rationales are a
species of reasons, which are "tracked" by "evolution" (50). In context Dennett is describing
"the accumulation of function by a process that blindly tracks reasons, creating things that
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have purposes but don’t need to know them." (49) So, free-floating rationales are reasons that
do not require being represented for their existence: in particular, they are functions that are a
consequence of natural selection. (One way to understand a free-floating rationale is that it is
the answer to the why question of reverse engineering. (92))

http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/07/on-a-code-of-
conduct-in-philosophy.html

On a Code of Conduct in Philosophy

[THIS POST HAS BEEN REVISED TO CORRECT MY PRESENTATION OF THE

EDITORIAL SITUATION AT NOUS & PHILOSOPHY AND PHENOMONOLOGICAL
RESEARCH-ES.]

If professional philosophers were serious about a code of conduct they would focus on
tackling the conflicts of interests in the profession that are all too common standard operating
procedure not just in the relatively low status, albeit potentially lucrative  (by philosophers'
standards) corners of applied ethics, but also in the ways in which our journals and job-
searches (etc.) are run. Many of these conflicts of interests also generate the incentive-
structure in which senior scholars have career advancement opportunities to share; this makes
an environment of sexual harassment with a whole variety of temptations and blurry lines
more common. (I am not claiming they are solely responsible for this behavior!)

Let me explain.

Eleonore Stump and my former NewAPPS colleague, Helen De Cruz, created a petition to
call on "the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association to produce, by one
means or another, a code of conduct and a statement of professional ethics for the academic
discipline of philosophy." This petition was signed by 673 peers before it was closed. In
response, the American Philosophical Association (hereafter: "APA") "board of officers has
authorized a task force to explore whether such a code of conduct is warranted and, if so, to
develop one for board approval." [HT Dailynous.]

I am not hopeful about such standards because they tend to become check-lists that, in
practice, shield the powerful and well-connected from accountability and, worse, become a
tool of oppression against the already marginalized. (See this very important piece at
NewAPPS by Leigh M. Johnson and Edward Kazarian!) But if wisely crafted they might do
some modest good, especially in the area of sexual harassment and as Brian Leiter put it "on
recommending general expectations for faculty-student relations." So, until I see the working
drafts I will try to be constructive about the APA's efforts.

When I was still blogging at NewAPPS, I  reported on striking conflicts of interest and
editorial miscondust at a variety of applied ethics journals especially the American Journal of
Bioethics (see Leiter, and a bunch of my posts here, here, here, etc.) and Journal of Business
Ethics (recall here). These are not marginal journals in their areas. Or, what to say of those
professional philosopher that finds themselves on university ethics oversight committees and
that are incapable of bringing themselves to stop, well, a single instance of unethical research
(recall Lori Gruen's post). The attitude of many (not all -- and I apologize to the heroic
exceptions!) professional philosophers involved, often word-class-ethicists, can be best
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described as servile, 'do not rock the boat.' (And I promised myself to avoid delving into the
global justice gravy train today.)

Was that previous paragraph not civil enough for your taste? Then think about how
somebody who might feel personally aggrieved and angry will express themselves about the
injustices they have personally experienced (and then to be told to remain calm and civil--
Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins has explored these issues during the last few days). 

But, of course, this is not about applied ethics. Few philosophy journals live up to best
practices elsewhere. Often, the potential conflicts of interests are accompanied with total lack
of transparency about editorial procedures, editorial financial incentives, refereeing networks,
disclosure requirements, etc. Until quite recently, if not today, two of our most important
journals, Philosophical Review and Journal of Philosophy, were in effect, in-house journals
that generate very exclusionary publication, citation, and topic patterns. Folk that operate
close to these journals claim that they have become less clubby, but the jury is still out.
Obviously, 'journal capture' is not unusual in academia, and other important titles in
philosophy (fill in your favorite example) seem to have been captured by their own factions.
Once I called out Brian Weatherson, an insider at Phil Review, for publicly trying to
influence the editorial policy of JPhil. What mattered was not the clumsy attempt, but the
thinking behind it unintentionally revealed.

Ernest Sosa (now at Rutgers), is the editor of Nous, Philosophical Issues, and Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research. Nous and PPR are both very important and very good journals,
and I think most people would argue that Sosa has maintained high quality at both. (Let's
leave aside the submission moratoriums in the past). Professor Sosa has edited these journals
with impressive integrity Nous since 1999 and PPR since 1983. (I have never heard a
complaint!) Even so, it is very bad for the profession that one person has so much editorial
influence at the top of our journal-chain for so long already.

Conflicts of interest and the accompanying systematic patterns of exclusion are so routine in
our profession that even when they are discussed critically the 'powers at be' simply do not
respond knowing full well that they will blow over.* 

And for just naming Weatherson and Sosa in this context (and I reiterate: I admire them both
as philosophers and I think they represent what's best in the profession), I'll catch so much
grief and even my friends will ask me what the 'back-story' is (none!) and a chorus will
pontificate, 'how dare you mention Sosa?' And, if I point to the myriad injustices embedded in
the Healy-data (which, by the way, also includes Nous, but, it's too impolite to mention that?
[for analysis]), well, I'll be told 'of course' a 'code of conduct shouldn't be about journal
practices;' we wouldn't want to pollute our pure, disembodied pursuit of truth with ethical
concerns!

trust greases the machinery of the discipline (letters of recommendation, referee reports, even
hiring decisions); we rely on judgments of others to guide us in some such decision. - See more at:
http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/05/trust-and-its-
absence-among-philosophers.html#sthash.GpZ5Tlxu.dpuf

As I have said before, trust greases the machinery of the discipline (letters of
recommendation, referee reports, hiring decisions, etc.); we rely on judgments of others to
guide in our professional decisions. But, to stammer: our incentives and institutional
12

structures do not promote merited trust; they promote clan behavior, and I see many of us
struggle to maintain our integrity, if we wish, in light of these.

PS I sent my post to Ernest Sosa. He responded as follows:

I thank you for the kind words, and I understand your concern. 

That is why last year, we changed the editorial structure at both journals. Now there is a team of
editors at each journal, and each editor has full discretion on the papers that they handle. 

Here are the lists:

PPR Editors: Helen Beebee, Kirk Ludwig, Wlodek Rabinowicz, Carolina Sartorio, Mark Schroeder,
Ernest Sosa, James Van Cleve

Nous Editors: Earl Conee, Julia Driver, Mark Richard, Susanna Siegel, Ernest Sosa, Scott Sturgeon

It should be clear that we have aimed for balance of various sorts, such as subdisciplinary, gender,
institutional, and geographical.

I apologies to Sosa and my readers for presenting a partially out-of-date-analysis of the

situation at Nous and PPR.

*Did any journal editor respond to McPherson's charge that "many journals can be expected
to continue rewarding pursuits that are unfriendly, in effect, to inquiries more likely to
interest many black philosophers?"

Thanks for this post. As I've said before, the problems are structural. The profession is too
top-heavy. The stars are put in moral danger by the very system that gives them their exalted
positions -- I don't know whether I could resist all those temptations, were I in their position.
I'm not saying that the majority of stars don't resist; but the discipline is small enough that a
few people can make a big impact.

The issue of brute financial rewards illustrates another problem with a top-heavy academic
culture. The ranking obsession, as you pointed out in a recent post, has increased salaries at
the top. Maybe academic hiring isn't exactly a zero sum game, but it seems plausible that
administrators are happy to divert resources to the top and adjunctify at the bottom -- after all
this chimes with neoliberal ideology about "top talent". One problem here is that the people
with clout are the ones who benefit most from this system, so that it's hard to argue
authoritatively against it. Perhaps we need to drive a wedge between our perceptions of skill
in philosophy and our perceptions of skill in how philosophy should be run as a profession.
13

When it comes to publication, I think a simple practical step would be to have more triple-
blind journals, i.e. conceal the author's identity from the editors as well as from referees.
That's what we implemented at the European Journal of Political Theory, which I just started
co-editing. It's actually pleasant and refreshing to look at a paper with less implicit bias
baggage.

Posted by: Enzo Rossi | 07/08/2014 at 02:57 PM

Thanks for this, Eric. I'm reproducing below my comment from your FB feed. I hope it's not
*too* out of context.

I'm unconvinced that adding even more levels of anonymity to the journal review-process
will do much to remedy the problems that Eric (and others) have noted. And, tbh, I'm also
unsure how one could formulate a Code of Ethics "rule" to ensure that blind-reviews are
*really* blind. The systematic exclusion and underrepresentation of certain groups that we
see in professional Philosophy is, of course, a cultural problem, and the interpretation of
whatever rules govern our community will always be filtered through its dominant cultural
norms. (See: the last two years of SCOTUS rulings.) So,making a rule that says "journal
editors must be neutral, not show favoritism, avoid Googling, etc" is more likely to reinforce
the claims of journal editors that they are already doing so than it is to empower those whose
"voices" (or arguments, or positions, or traditions) are currently unheard/unseen, because the
(alleged) perpetrators are their own judges and juries in this case. That is to say, there's no
real separation of powers between our legislative and judicial branches.

And that's just leaving aside for the moment the more important question, I think, which is
really about the merits **and demerits** of blindness/neutrality in determining who is seen,
heard or read in Philosophy.

This is part of what Ed Kazarian and I were getting at in our post about tone-policing: the
danger with codifying norms like these is that it might only further entrench the influence of
those who already determine the cultural landscape of our profession, who interpret its
governing norms/rules, and who may be unable to see the more broadly deleterious effects of
their judgments, which inevitably tend toward maintaining their own privileged positions. To
wit, I like Ed's idea of "curatorship" a lot, and I think the various initiatives we've seen over
the last couple of years to promote inclusiveness in conference programming, keynote
addresses, speaking invitations, etc also provide a really good model for thinking about how
blindness/neutrality has its limits as a good.

Posted by: Leigh M Johnson | 07/08/2014 at 08:48 PM

"'It should be clear that we have aimed for balance of various sorts, such as subdisciplinary,
gender, institutional, and geographical.'"
14

I was about to respond to the quote you cite with: That's nice, truly, though it's also clear
what is missing both in the statement and in the lists of editors.

Then I got to your asterisked query at the end. Your "blow over" surmise was correct. I
certainly got no response, nor have I encountered any in the blogosphere (even when I
directly countered comments from a former editor of Phil Review). At NA and LR I have
explored some of the reasons why practical indifference of this sort prevails in a profession
that looks and comfortably acts stuck in a Jim Crow time warp.

Posted by: LK McPherson | 07/11/2014 at 02:31 AM

You are mistaken about Brian Weatherson. Brian was once at the Sage School and therefore
an 'insider' at Phil Review. But he had long since moved on when he wrote the post you
mentioned.

Posted by: Neil Levy | 07/11/2014 at 06:33 AM

Neil, what mistake have I made?

Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 07/11/2014 at 08:57 AM

Lionel, agreed. I regret the misstatement in the post, but I don't see anything in Prof. Sosa's
letter that makes me change my mind about the substance of the post.

Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 07/11/2014 at 09:10 AM

"Once I called out Brian Weatherson, an insider at Phil Review, for publicly trying to
influence the editorial policy of JPhil "

That clearly implies that when Brian tried to influence the editorial policy at JPhil - if indeed
that's a good description of what he did - he was an insider at Phil Review. But he had by
then long since been gone from Cornell.

Posted by: Neil Levy | 07/11/2014 at 09:31 AM

15

Neil, when I wrote the original NewAPPS post, I was aware that Brian had left Cornell and I
assume most of my readers were, too. I didn't claim he was still on the editorial Board at Phil
Review. Why is it inappropriate to call him an "insider"?
As I point out in my post, you're not allowed to mention the high status men; your response
(gotcha fact-checking, but ignoring the substance of the post) illustrates the point I make, and
I think of you as one of the folk that at least worries about the issues I raise.

Posted by: Eric Schliesser | 07/11/2014 at 09:42 AM

http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/01/is-professional-
philosophy-pseudo-philosophy.html Is Professional Philosophy Pseudo-Philosophy?
I adore being a professional philosopher; I teach undergraduates and advanced students in
courses that I get to design; some of my students have gone on to improve the world in all
kinds of important ways. I get to write and publish a lot of research on topics that I find
interesting. Academic institutions and various taxpayers have treated me very generously
with good working conditions and even grants to fund my own PhD students. Through my
research and professional status, I have met fascinating scientists, lots of terrific economists,
musicians, and novelists. My peers have given me more recognition than I ever imagined
when I contemplated committing to the profession. Much to my amusement I have even
been interviewed on film (in Dutch) because I am a "philosopher." All in all, there is no doubt
that I am a lucky winner in a very unfair lottery.
 
But what if professional philosophy, while honorable in lots of ways, is not really philosophy?
By this I do not just mean that in general it is far removed from the study or love of wisdom
traditionally associated with philosophy. I also do not mean to focus entirely on the complaint
that it fails to connect our technical apparatus to matters of existential import (although
sometimes it does). Nor do I mean by this anguish that too much of what we do seems to
reinforce -- for lack of better words  -- existing ideology. 
 
What if professional philosophy today is essentially a kind of pseudo-philosophy? Rather
than offer rambling autobiography here, I have an alternative opportunity. For, remarkably
enough, this (that professional philosophy is now pseudo-philosophy) is the very well-
worked-out-view of a fellow professional philosopher (if you are impatient for evidence for
this claim, you can skip to the last two sentences in the quote below):
So, in summary, what is Carnap’s accusation against Heidegger? He accuses him of trying
to use assertions where only expression is appropriate—and where, given the danger
involved, even expression ought to be limited to brief hints. He accuses him, in particular, of
putting himself (or leaving himself) in a position where he must treat religious dread as if it
revealed a being, an object—accuses him, that is, of idolatry, or (what comes to the same
thing from a Kantian point of view) of putting a theoretical dogmatics before ethics. This is a
very serious criticism indeed. [snip] This, I think, is enough to establish what I set out to here:
not an attack on or defense of either Carnap or Heidegger, but simply a case for taking the
one as a serious reader of the other.
16

If we don’t end up in a position to takes sides in Heidegger and Carnap’s debate, however—
and surely, philosophy having moved on, it is far too late for that—then what philosophical
good is our conclusion? We cannot take sides in this debate in part because it has changed
from a debate into a fundamental structural fact about the philosophical world as we have
inherited it. Here in the English-speaking part of that world, in particular, the stamp of
Carnap’s will is everywhere present. The way we “do philosophy”—the way we speak, write,
publish; the way we divide our field into disciplines; the way we arrange requirements and
syllabi for our students—none of this, of course, is the product of Carnap’s influence alone.
But there is nevertheless no corner in which his influence is not felt... [snip]. If we can
understand Carnap as having chosen among alternatives, and, more importantly, as having
chosen for a reason, then we are on the road to once more attempting philosophy’s always-
repeated task of relating to (knowing) itself and thus becoming free. In other words, we are
on the road to once again becoming philosophers. --Abraham Stone, "Heidegger and
Carnap on the Overcoming of Metaphysics."
In this passage, Stone re-actives an old trope: 'the road to true philosophy.' For example, in
his History of England, David Hume describes Bacon, Kepler, Galileo, Boyle, Newton, and
(more subtly) himself as being on the road to to true philosophy (here and here). In Hume
there is only "one road" to true philosophy. Presumably, Hume thinks there is quite a bit of
traveling on roads that lead to false philosophy or philosophies.*
 
On the tropological view presupposed by Stone, an associate professor of philosophy at The
University of California, Santa Cruz, nearly all of professional philosophy is, not really
philosophy. It's not involved in its true task.++ In fact, Stone's view implies that even if we
(my professional peers and I) would deliberately aim at being true philosophers we wouldn't
be in the position to do so because most of us would never imagine that to do so, we would
have to try to understand Carnap's choices. Philosophy today is simply not in the business of
preparing us to make judgments of character.
 
Stone's account treats Carnap as a kind of (Nietzschean) philosophical legislator that in
virtue of his conceptual and institutional choices created, in part, a framework** that other
professional philosophers inherited even after professional philosophers stopped reading
Carnap himself. It matters to Stone's enterprise to show that Carnap understood himself in
this fashion, but nothing is lost if we would find Carnap's diary saying, "I never intended to be
a philosophical legislator." To avoid misunderstanding, one can be an enduring,
philosophical legislator even if most of one's doctrines and beliefs are now discarded. For,
what is at stake here is more closely associated to style and practices of the sort studied by
sociologists of knowledge. That is to say, Carnap bequeathed us a way of thinking about
philosophy that allow its practitioners to flourish within modern universities. This involves --
among other things -- an embrace of an intellectual division of labor with specialization, a
problems/puzzle-solving-oriented approach, the embrace of formal methods, grant-making,
and the embrace of the journal article as preferred medium of communication (etc.). All of
this is, of course, how lots of disciplines have adapted to the bureaucratic university after the
rise of the Weberian state. Through the important work of David Lewis, cost-benefit analysis
has become the norm while evaluating competing philosophical projects (recall this post).
 
To be clear, Carnap's framework for us is not opportunistic (while it may be that, too); it's
fundamentally a moral one in the double sense that (i) it embraces philosophy as a
17

Weberian vocation and (ii) it allows one to avoid certain systematic sins (associated with
Heidegger in the Heidegger/Carnap debate). Note that Stone recognizes and respects
Carnap's probity and possibly respects his judgment, while still being very critical of Carnap's
legacy for philosophy today.

Carnap's framework for philosophy is essentially forward-looking; even if one does not
embrace his particular account of conceptual engineering, professional philosophy
understands itself as  being in the business of providing means toward solving problems on
the way of understanding the truth or society's (mankind's) problems. Understanding
Carnap's constrained actions is, perhaps, a worthy activity for some scholar (who is a
specialist in, say, 'early analytic philosophy'), but it is not really at the core of today's
philosophy. 
 
Stone could easily pass as some such scholar of early analytic philosophy; yet, by his own
lights, his historical project is the means toward preparing philosophy for its self-recovery.
Thus understood, Stone's project is not modest; it involves preparing the way for a new
philosophical legislator (this, too, is a Nietzschean project). And note that it follows from
Stone's analysis that there is no guarantee that a future framework does any better than
Carnap in avoiding the roads to false philosophy.
 
Now, there is no need to offer satire on Stone's paper; it has been cited a mere ten times in
the decade since it has been published. Even so, we should not underestimate Stone's
project--he is clearly playing a long-game.
 
One sign that Stone may have discerned the winds of change before the rest of us is that
since he wrote his piece there has been an explosion of interest in methodological self-
reflection and so-called meta-philosophy among professional philosophers (including the
most accomplished ones) during the last decade. Such a period of methodological self-
examination can (but need not) be the stage that leads to a more general philosophical
revolution. Of course, it is quite possible that the renewal of philosophy that Stone wishes to
prepare comes from the periphery of professional philosophy, or, perhaps, from the desert
beyond, if at all.
 
  
*Scholars have noted this tropological opposition.
 
++ Some other time I explore Stone's account of philosophy's task.
 
** I am using 'framework' as a homage to Carnap, although what I have in mind is closer to a
Kuhnian 'paradigm' than a Carnapian framework.

INTRODUCTION
18

‘Where’ does intersubjectivity epistemologically come from or what are its

socio-cultural, evolutionary and even biological origins? Why do and did any
species, for example the human species find it useful, functional and necessary?
Or did it develop in an automatic and unintentional manner? What can we say
about its functions, its purposes, goals and values?
I also indicated in the Preface the possibility of the existence of intersubjectivity
among animals, as well as non-verbal, aural, visual or other ways of expressing
and indicating signs and non-verbal messages among humans that are usually
interpreted correctly.
We see the results, the effects, consequences and implications of it, we might
even identify how it works, some of its functions, but what is its nature? What,
if anything can we say about it in the most general or universal sense? And what
can we say about it in a personal sense, on the level of the embodied individual,
concerning the subjective, if anything like that do exist, the private (‘external’
and ‘inner’) language, worlds, life-worlds and realities of the embodied person?
And, what can, if anything, we identify about the functions of intersubjectivity
for groups of individuals, communities, organizations, institutions,
communities, cultural and social groups, sub-cultures and sub-groups, everyday,
common sense language tools such as conversations and more specialized
disciplines, such as the arts, sciences, humanities, theology, inter-disciplinary
fields, etc?

SIGNS OF INTERSUBJECTIVTY
19

I already indicated in the Preface and mentioned in the Introduction that there
exist all sorts of ways to indicate, express, present or communicate phenomena
that can be and are successfully interpreted by other people, animals, bird, etc as
intersubjective.
I suggested that this is present not merely among educated and informed people
but among all human beings, regardless of their level of education, intelligence,
socio-economic class, etc.
I also expressed the possibility that phenomena do not have to be verbal or
being expressed verbally so as to have an intersubjective meaning and function.
I for example mentioned sound, aural signs, smell, color, fashion or clothes, all
kinds of objects such as houses and cars, peoples’ titles, names, socio-cultural
position, someone’s work, and hierarchies in the same profession for example
juniors, seniors, temporary, permanent, tenured or not, etc.
My points being that intersubjectivity are not merely restricted to human beings,
modern or contemporary human beings and homo sapiens sapiens, but animals
also employ, express, communicate and can interpret signs intersubjectively and
correctly. And, that such signs does not need to be verbal.
I am not concerned with the existence or non-existence among animals, birds,
etc. Neither am I interested in the exploration and development of the origins
and archaeology of intersubjectivity from chimpanzees, different forms of early
humans, Neanderthals, pre-historic mankind to modern mankind.
In the development of humans from the stage of newborn , to toddlers, young
children, teenagers, young adults, mature adults and the elderly different types
of intersubjectivity are employed, functioning and mastered. In previous books
and articles I cited some work from psychology dealing with these stages, and
especially among babies and young children.
https://www.academia.edu/32436580/PHILOSOPHERS_Thinking_vol6_INSIG
HT_UNDERSTANDING_MEANING_COMMUNICATION_INTERSUBJEC
TIVITY_.docx and
https://www.academia.edu/32531947/INTERSUBJECTIVITY_continued_
In this short section I merely wish to suggest that –
Intersubjectivity might be present, can be meaningfully indicated or signalled,
communicated, correctly interpreted and meaningfully responded to, not merely
by educated, more intelligent, higher socio-economic class human beings, but
by all humans, in all societies or cultures, in developed or undeveloped
countries, of all ages, all classes, all levels of intelligence, etc.
20

That some forms of differentiated intersubjectivity are present among all people
regardless of class, culture, education, etc is one general ‘rule. However there
are many different factors that could influence the kind, the level, complexity or
simplicity and type of the intersubjectivity being institutionalized, internalized,
socialized and employed. Some of the factors are age, status, education, culture,
class, every day and common sense existence, specialized disciplines, different
communities and sub-cultures for example visual art, music, performance art,
different sciences, humanities, theology, religions and churches, politics, the age
of an individual, gender, education, etc.
These factors can influence the type of intersubjectivity, both general and more
specialized forms of intersubjectivity, the greater complexity or simplicity of it
etc. Dogs or birds might for example be able to express, communicate, interpret
intersubjectivities that humans do not and even cannot employ, express or use.
People from different societies, ages, genders, classes, cultures, sub-cultures, etc
can express, receive, communicate, employ, interpret and respond to different
types of intersubjectivity. In other words there exist and could develop all kinds
of intersubjectivity, their nature (verbal, aural, visual, etc) could vary greatly
and they might be restricted to a certain species and sub-species, sub-culture or
culture, a particular socio-culture practice, specialized areas or institutions, etc.
Let us take religion as an example, among different religions alternative words,
signs, sounds could indicate and communicate different things, even among
sects or sub-groups or churches of one religion these things could vary. These
things can be correctly indicate, employed and communicated, interpreted and
responded to by members of that religion, sub-group, sect or church, but not by
outsiders.
The reason for these differentiations are nothing mysterious, cryptic or secret,
but the result of institutionalization, internalization and socialization. One could
of course investigate these things in greater detail, for example the attitudes, the
values, the norms, the functions and purposes of these things.

Subjectivity, Inter-subjectivity, Objectivity

21

I am not trying to make a case for the existence of subjective or objective,

subjectivity or objectivity, but merely employ these notions as they are being
used and have some degree of institutionalized meaning. I actually wish to say a
few words about personal and the individual and the possibility of the person or
individual to be able to develop some form of personal or subjective, or private
notions, a set of such notions or a private ‘language’, in spite of the fact that Mr.
Wittgenstein warned us against such a notion. My comment are in brackets.
The private language argument is a philosophical argument introduced by Ludwig Wittgenstein in
his later work, especially in the Philosophical Investigations. The argument was central to
philosophical discussion in the second half of the 20th century, and continues to arouse interest.

Private language argument - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument

Private Language (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/

Jul 26, 1996 - The idea of a private language was made famous in philosophy by Ludwig
Wittgenstein, who in §243 of his book Philosophical Investigations explained it thus: “The words of
this language are to refer to what can be known only to the speaker; to his immediate, private,
sensations.

1. Overview: Wittgenstein's ... · 2. The Significance of the Issue

Private language argument - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument

The private language argument is a philosophical argument introduced by Ludwig Wittgenstein in his
later work, especially in the Philosophical Investigations. The argument was central to philosophical
discussion in the second half of the 20th century, and continues to arouse interest.

Significance · Philosophical Investigations · Kripke's interpretation · Notes

Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wittgenstein_on_Rules_and_Private_Language

Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language is a 1982 book by philosopher of language Saul Kripke,
in which Kripke contends that the central argument of ...

The Private Language Argument | Issue 58 | Philosophy Now

https://philosophynow.org/issues/58/The_Private_Language_Argument

The private language argument appears as part of Wittgenstein's posthumous epic Philosophical
Investigations, part one of which consists of 693 numbered ...

Private Language Problem - Dictionary definition of Private Language ...

www.encyclopedia.com/humanities/encyclopedias...and.../private-language-problem

Definition of Private Language Problem – Our online dictionary has Private Language ...
Encyclopedia.com: English, psychology and medical dictionaries.
22

Private language definition and meaning | Collins English Dictionary

https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/private-language

Private language definition: a language that is not merely secret or accidentally limited to one user ,
but that... | Meaning, pronunciation, translations and ...

Wittgenstein's Private Language Argument

www.loyno.edu/~folse/WittPrivateLang.html

If one recognizes the foregoing crucial features of language, Wittgenstein would say, it should lead
to the rejection of even the possibility of a private language.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's private language argument in short ...

braungardt.trialectics.com/philosophy/philosophy-in.../wittgenstein-private-language/

LW stands for Ludwig Wittgenstein, PU for "Philosophische Untersuchungen".) The origin of the
private language argument 1. The meaning of a word is the.

Private Sensation and Private Language

wab.uib.no/agora/tools/alws/collection-9-issue-1-article-64.annotate

Abstract. The issue of private language raised by Wittgenstein in his late work Philosophical
Investigations 1953) is an important one open to long-term debating.

private language - Wiktionary

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/private_language

Noun[edit]. private language (plural private languages). Used other than as an idiom: see private,
language. [quotations ▽]. 1917, Edith Wharton, Summer, ch.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/private-language/

The idea of a private language was made famous in philosophy by Ludwig Wittgenstein, who
in §243 of his book Philosophical Investigations explained it thus: “The words of this
language are to refer to what can be known only to the speaker; to his immediate, private,
sensations. So another cannot understand the language.”[1] This is not intended to cover
(easily imaginable) cases of recording one's experiences in a personal code, for such a code,
however obscure in fact, could in principle be deciphered. What Wittgenstein had in mind
is a language conceived as necessarily comprehensible only to its single originator
because the things which define its vocabulary are necessarily inaccessible to others.

Immediately after introducing the idea, Wittgenstein goes on to argue that there cannot be
such a language. The importance of drawing philosophers' attention to a largely unheard-of
notion and then arguing that it is unrealizable lies in the fact that an unformulated
reliance on the possibility of a private language is arguably essential to mainstream
epistemology, philosophy of mind and metaphysics from Descartes to versions of the
representational theory of mind which became prominent in late twentieth century cognitive
science. (What about such a private language between two individuals? There are many cases
where twins and isolated individuals developed such discourse. Do this count or not?)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_language_argument

The private language argument is a philosophical argument introduced by Ludwig

Wittgenstein in his later work, especially in the Philosophical Investigations.[1] The argument
23

was central to philosophical discussion in the second half of the 20th century, and continues
to arouse interest. The argument is supposed to show that the idea of a language
understandable by only a single individual is incoherent.

In the Investigations Wittgenstein does not present his arguments in a succinct and linear
fashion; instead, he describes particular uses of language, and prompts the reader to
contemplate the implications of those uses. As a result, there is considerable dispute about
both the nature of the argument and its implications. Indeed, it has become common to talk of
private language arguments.

Historians of philosophy see precursors of the private language argument in a variety of

sources, notably in the work of Gottlob Frege and John Locke.[2] Locke is also a prominent
exponent of the view targeted by the argument, since he proposed in his An Essay
Concerning Human Understanding that the referent of a word is the idea it stands for.

Contents

 1 Significance
 2 Philosophical Investigations
o 2.1 What a private language is
o 2.2 The sensation S
o 2.3 Memory scepticism
o 2.4 Meaning scepticism
o 2.5 The Beetle in a box
o 2.6 Following a rule
 3 Kripke's interpretation
 4 Notes
 5 References
 6 External links

Significance

The private language argument is of central importance to debates about the nature of
language. One compelling theory about language is that language maps words to ideas,
concepts or representations in each person's mind. On this account, the concepts in my head
are distinct from the concepts in your head. But I can match my concepts to a word in our
common language, and then speak the word. You then match the word to a concept in your
mind. So our concepts in effect form a private language which we translate into our common
language and so share. This account is found for example in An Essay Concerning Human
Understanding, and more recently in Jerry Fodor's language of thought theory.

Wittgenstein argues, in his later work, that this account of private language is inconsistent. If
the idea of a private language is inconsistent, then a logical conclusion would be that all
language serves a social function. This would have profound implications for other areas of
philosophical and psychological study. For example, if one cannot have a private language, it
might not make any sense to talk of private experiences or of private mental states.

Philosophical Investigations
Main article: Philosophical Investigations
24

The argument is found in part one of the Philosophical investigations. This part consists of a
series of "remarks" numbered sequentially. The core of the argument is generally thought to
be presented in §256 and onward, though the idea is first introduced in §243.

What a private language is

If someone were to behave as if they understood a language which no-one else can make
sense of, we might call this an example of a private language.[3] It is not sufficient here,
however, for the language to simply be one that has not yet been translated. In order to count
as a private language in Wittgenstein's sense, it must be in principle incapable of translation
into an ordinary language - if for example it were to describe those inner experiences
supposed to be inaccessible to others.[4] The private language being considered is not simply a
language in fact understood by one person, but a language that in principle can only be
understood by one person. So the last speaker of a dying language would not be speaking a
private language, since the language remains in principle learnable. A private language must
be unlearnable and untranslatable, and yet it must appear that the speaker is able to make
sense of it.

The sensation S

Wittgenstein sets up a thought experiment in which someone is imagined to associate some

recurrent sensation with a symbol by writing S in their calendar when the sensation occurs.[5]
Such a case would be a private language in the Wittgensteinian sense. Furthermore, it is
presupposed that S cannot be defined using other terms, for example "the feeling I get when
the manometer rises"; for to do so would be to give S a place in our public language, in which
case S could not be a statement in a private language.[6]

It might be supposed that one might use "a kind of ostensive definition" for S, by focusing on
the sensation and on the symbol. Early in The Investigations, Wittgenstein attacks the
usefulness of ostensive definition.[7] He considers the example of someone pointing to two
nuts while saying "This is called two". How does it come about that the listener associates
this with the number of items, rather than the type of nut, their colour, or even a compass
direction? One conclusion of this is that to participate in an ostensive definition presupposes
an understanding of the process and context involved, of the form of life.[8] Another is that "an
ostensive definition can be variously interpreted in every case".[9]

In the case of the sensation S Wittgenstein argues that there is no criterion for the correctness
of such an ostensive definition, since whatever seems right will be right, 'And that only means
that here we can't talk about "right".'[5] The exact reason for the rejection of private language
has been contentious. One interpretation, which has been called memory scepticism, has it
that one might remember the sensation wrongly, and that as a result one might misuse the
term S . The other, called meaning scepticism, has it that one can never be sure of the
meaning of a term defined in this way.

Memory scepticism

One common interpretation is that the possibility exists that one might misremember the
sensation, and therefore one does not have any firm criterion for using S in each case.[10] So,
for example, I might one day focus on that sensation, and link it to the symbol S; but the next
day, I have no criteria for knowing that the sensation I have now is the same as the one
25

yesterday, except for my memory; and since my memory might fail me, I have no firm
criteria for knowing that the sensation I have now is indeed S.

However, memory scepticism has been criticized[by whom?] as being applicable to public
language, also. If one person can misremember, it is entirely possible that several people can
misremember. So memory scepticism could be applied with equal effect to ostensive
definitions given in a public language. For example, Jim and Jenny might one day decide to
call some particular tree T; but the next day both misremember which tree it was they named.
If they were depending entirely on their memory, and had not written down the location of
the tree, or told anyone else, then they would appear to be with the same difficulties as the
individual who defined S ostensively. And so, if this is the case, the argument presented
against private language would apply equally to public language.

This interpretation (and the criticism of Wittgenstein that arises from it) is based on a
complete misreading[citation needed], however, because Wittgenstein's argument has nothing to do
with the fallibility of human memory[citation needed], but rather concerns the intelligibility of
remembering something for which there is no external criterion of correctness. It is not that
we will not in fact remember the sensation correctly, but rather that it makes no sense to talk
of our memory being either correct or incorrect in this case. The point, as Diego Marconi puts
it[citation needed], is not so much that private language is "a game at which we can't win, it is a
game we can't lose".

Wittgenstein makes this clear in section 258: "A definition surely serves to establish the
meaning of a sign.—Well, that is done precisely by the concentrating of my attention; for in
this way I impress on myself the connexion between the sign and the sensation.—But "I
impress it on myself" can only mean: this process brings it about that I remember the
connexion right in the future. But in the present case I have no criterion of correctness." This
absence of any criterion of correctness is not a problem because it makes it more difficult for
the private linguist to remember his sensation correctly; it is a problem because it undermines
the intelligibility of such a concept as remembering the sensation, whether correctly or
incorrectly.

Wittgenstein explains this unintelligibility with a series of analogies. For example, in section
265 he observes the pointlessness of a dictionary that exists only in the imagination. Since the
idea of a dictionary is to justify the translation of one word by another, and thus constitute the
reference of justification for such a translation, all this is lost the moment we talk of a
dictionary in the imagination; for “justification consists in appealing to something
independent". Hence, to appeal to a private ostensive definition as the standard of correct use
of a term would be "as if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure
himself that what it said was true."

Meaning scepticism

Another interpretation, found for example in the account presented by Anthony Kenny[11] has
it that the problem with a private ostensive definition is not just that it might be
misremembered, but that such a definition cannot lead to a meaningful statement.

Let us first consider a case of ostensive definition in a public language. Jim and Jenny might
one day decide to call some particular tree T; but the next day misremember which tree it was
26

they named. In this ordinary language case, it makes sense to ask questions such as "is this
the tree we named T yesterday?" and make statements such as "This is not the tree we named
T yesterday". So one can appeal to other parts of the form of life, perhaps arguing: "this is the
only Oak in the forest; T was an oak; therefore this is T".

An everyday ostensive definition is embedded in a public language, and so in the form of life
in which that language occurs. Participation in a public form of life enables correction to
occur. That is, in the case of a public language there are other ways to check the use of a term
that has been ostensively defined. We can justify our use of the new name T by making the
ostensive definition more or less explicit.

But this is not the case with S. Recall that because S is part of a private language, it is not
possible to provide an explicit definition of S. The only possible definition is the private,
ostensive one of associating S with that feeling. But this is the very thing being questioned.
"Imagine someone saying: 'But I know how tall I am!' and laying his hand on top of his head
to prove it."[12]

A recurrent theme in Wittgenstein's work is that for some term or utterance to have a sense, it
must be conceivable that it be doubted. For Wittgenstein, tautologies do not have sense, do
not say anything, and so do not admit of doubt. But furthermore, if any other sort of utterance
does not admit of doubt, it must be senseless. Rush Rhees, in his notes on lectures given by
Wittgenstein, while discussing the reality of physical objects, has him say:

We get something similar when we write a tautology like "p → p". We formulate such
expressions to get something in which there is no doubt - even though the sense has vanished
with the doubt.[13]

As Kenny put it, "Even to think falsely that something is S, I must know the meaning of S;
and this is what Wittgenstein argues is impossible in the private language."[14] Because there
is no way to check the meaning (or use) of S apart from that private ostensive act of
definition, it is not possible to know what S means. The sense has vanished with the doubt.

Wittgenstein uses the further analogy of the left hand giving the right hand money.[15] The
physical act might take place, but the transaction could not count as a gift. Similarly, one
might say S while focusing on a sensation, but no act of naming has occurred.

The Beetle in a box

The Beetle in a Box is a famous thought experiment that Wittgenstein introduces in the
context of his investigation of pains.[16]

Pains occupy a distinct and vital place in the philosophy of mind for several reasons.[17] One
is that pains seem to collapse the appearance/reality distinction.[18] If an object appears to you
to be red it might not be so in reality, but if you seem to yourself to be in pain you must be so:
there can be no case here of seeming at all. At the same time, one cannot feel another
person’s pain, but only infer it from their behavior and their reports of it.

If we accept pains as special qualia known absolutely but exclusively by the solitary minds
that perceive them, this may be taken to ground a Cartesian view of the self and
consciousness. Our consciousness, of pains anyway, would seem unassailable. Against this,
27

one might acknowledge the absolute fact of one's own pain, but claim skepticism about the
existence of anyone else's pains. Alternatively, one might take a behaviorist line and claim
that our pains are merely neurological stimulations accompanied by a disposition to behave.
[19]

Wittgenstein invites readers to imagine a community in which the individuals each have a
box containing a "beetle". "No one can look into anyone else's box, and everyone says he
knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle."[16]

If the "beetle" had a use in the language of these people, it could not be as the name of
something - because it is entirely possible that each person had something completely
different in their box, or even that the thing in the box constantly changed, or that each box
was in fact empty. The content of the box is irrelevant to whatever language game it is used
in.

By analogy, it does not matter that one cannot experience another's subjective sensations.
Unless talk of such subjective experience is learned through public experience the actual
content is irrelevant; all we can discuss is what is available in our public language.

By offering the "beetle" as an analogy to pains, Wittgenstein suggests that the case of pains is
not really amenable to the uses philosophers would make of it. "That is to say: if we construe
the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of 'object and designation," the
object drops out of consideration as irrelevant."[16]

Following a rule

It is common to describe language use in terms of the rules that one follows, and Wittgenstein
considers rules in some detail. He famously suggests that any act can be made out to follow
from a given rule.[20] He does this in setting up a dilemma:

This was our paradox: no course of action could be determined by a rule, because every
course of action can be made out to accord with the rule. The answer was: if everything can
be made out to accord with the rule, then it can also be made out to conflict with it. And there
would be neither accord nor conflict here.[21]

One can give an explanation of why one followed a particular rule in a particular case. But
any explanation for rule following behaviour cannot be given in terms of following a rule,
without involving circularity. One can say something like "She did X because of the rule R"
but if you say "She followed R because of the rule R1" one can then ask "but why did she
follow rule R1?" and so potentially become involved in a regression. Explanation must have
an end.[22]

His conclusion:

What this shows is that there is a way of grasping a rule which is not an interpretation, but
which is exhibited in what we call "obeying the rule" and "going against it" in actual cases.[23]

So following a rule is a practice. And furthermore, since one can think one is following a rule
and yet be mistaken, thinking one is following a rule is not the same as following it.
Therefore, following a rule cannot be a private activity.[24]
28

Kripke's interpretation

In 1982 Saul Kripke published a new and innovative account of the argument in his book
Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language.[25] Kripke takes the paradox discussed in §201
to be the central problem of the Philosophical Investigations. He develops the paradox into a
Grue-like problem, arguing that it similarly results in skepticism, but about meaning rather
than about induction.[26] He proposes a new form of addition, which he calls quus, which is
identical with plus in all cases except those in which either of the numbers to be added is
greater than 57, thus:

He then asks if anyone could know that previously when I thought I had meant plus, I had not
actually meant quus. He claims that his argument shows that "Each new application we make
is a leap in the dark; any present intention could be interpreted so as to accord with anything
we may choose to do. So there can be neither accord, nor conflict".[27]

Kripke's account is considered by some commentators to be unfaithful to Wittgenstein,[28] and

as a result has been referred to as "Kripkenstein".

 What is I-language? - Chapter 1 of I-language: An Introduction to Linguistics as Cognitive

Science.
 Stanford Encyclopedia entry for the argument

 1. Overview: Wittgenstein's Argument and its Interpretations

o 1.1 Recent Developments and Their Consequences
o 1.2 Are Claims Affirming the Possibility of a Private Language False or Nonsense?
 2. The Significance of the Issue
 3. The Private Language Argument Expounded
o 3.1 Preliminaries
o 3.2 The Central Argument
o 3.3 Interlude: the Rejection of Orthodoxy
o 3.4 The Central Argument Continued
o 3.5 Are the Orthodox Objections Met?
 4. Kripke's Sceptical Wittgenstein
o 4.1 The Community View Revisited
 Bibliography
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

Individuals do not have to employ one general, all-inclusive, instutionalized

‘intersubjectivity’ (its norms, values, attitudes, objectives, etc) to become a
person, an individual or be individuated. They could employ or internalize or be
29

socialized in terms of the alternative intersubjectivities of different sub-cultures,

groups, specialized groups, such as disciplines, gangs, sports and peer groups,
primary groups such as their family, siblings and parents, etc. All these, as well
as numerous other factors could play a part in the creation of an individual or a
person and his/her particular and distinctive individuation, personal make-up or
constitution or so-called ‘subjectivity’.
I am attempting to depict an image, paint a picture, describe the outlines of a
notion or draw a sketch of the possibility of subjectivity, of the differentiated
and alternative subjectivities, personal lives, individual realities and depictions
or constitutions of reality. I will include in the appendix The Manifest Image and
the Scientific Image (1) Bas C. van Fraassen, Princeton University. It consists of
thoughts concerning the Scientific and the Manifest Images. That these things
do not exist and that notions such as reality, realities, world views, depictions of
reality, conceptions, conceptual frameworks, the very idea of images (as if they
are mental entities, things that exist in the mind) are misleading and mistaken.
Because they give the impression that humans do not deal with real objects or
real things but only with human analogical pictures, depictions, likenesses of
such things. I mention his objections because I myself here employ notions of
images, depictions, etc. The more general context of his discussions is that of
the rejection of Manifest Images as being mistaken and not precise when it is
compared to the Scientific image. He rejects the latter as being more precise or
meaningful and the perfect development and replacement for the common sense
or ordinary, everyday, Manifest Image. The latter being for him meaningful,
perfect, functional, relevant and suitable for the numerous purpose it has been
developed for and are employed for.

A quality of being based on or influenced by personal feelings, tastes, or opinions.

"he is the first to acknowledge the subjectivity of memories"

o the quality of existing in someone's mind rather than the external world.

"the subjectivity of human perception"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectivity

Subjectivity is a central philosophical concept, related to consciousness, agency, personhood,

reality, and truth, which has been variously defined by sources. Three common definitions
include that subjectivity is the quality or condition of:

 Something being a subject, narrowly meaning an individual who possesses conscious

experiences, such as perspectives, feelings, beliefs, and desires. [1]
 Something being a subject, broadly meaning an entity that has agency, meaning that it acts
upon or wields power over some other entity (an object).
30

 Some information, idea, situation, or physical thing considered true only from the
perspective of a subject or subjects.

These various definitions of subjectivity are sometimes joined together in philosophy. The
term is most commonly used as an explanation for that which influences, informs, and biases
people's judgments about truth or reality; it is the collection of the perceptions, experiences,
expectations, personal or cultural understanding, and beliefs specific to a person. It is often
used in contrast to the term objectivity,[1] which is described as a view of truth or reality
which is free of any individual's influence.

Contents

 1 Philosophical concept
 2 Society
 3 See also
 4 References
 5 Further reading
 6 External links

Philosophical concept

The rise of the notion of subjectivity has its philosophical roots in the thinking of Descartes
and Kant, and its articulation throughout the modern era has depended on the understanding
of what constitutes an individual. There have been various interpretations of such concepts as
the self and the soul, and the identity or self-consciousness which lies at the root of the notion
of subjectivity.[2]

Society

Subjectivity is an inherently social mode that comes about through innumerable interactions
within society. (In other words, intersubjectivity.) As much as subjectivity is a process of
individuation, (employing institutionalized, intersubjective and socio-cultural concepts and
other tools available to the individual or person.) it is equally a process of socialization, the
individual never being isolated in a self-contained environment, (really? In which ways?
Why? How is this occurring?) but endlessly engaging in interaction with the surrounding
world. Culture is a living totality of the subjectivity of any given society constantly
undergoing transformation. Subjectivity is both shaped by it and shapes it in turn, but also by
other things (factors, entities, phenomena. How does that work?) like the economy, political
institutions, communities, as well as the natural world.

Though the boundaries of societies and their cultures are indefinable and arbitrary, (really?
Give proof for this sttaements.) the subjectivity inherent (biologically, psychologically,
mentally, embodied?) in each one is palatable and can be recognized as distinct from others.
Subjectivity is in part a particular (personal) experience or organization of reality,
which includes how one views and interacts with humanity, objects, consciousness, and
nature, so the difference between different cultures brings about an alternate experience of
existence that forms life in a different manner. A common effect on an individual of this
disjunction between subjectivities is culture shock, (not merely between cultures also intra-
cultural, between members of different sub-cultures, classes and other factors, eg age, gender,
etc) where the subjectivity of the other culture (sub-culture, community, disciplines and their
31

discourses, classes, religions, etc) is considered alien and possibly incomprehensible or even
hostile.

Political subjectivity is an emerging concept in social sciences and humanities. Political

subjectivity is a reference to the deep embeddedness of subjectivity in the socially
intertwined systems of power and meaning. "Politicality," writes Sadeq Rahimi in Meaning,
Madness and Political Subjectivity, "is not an added aspect of the subject, but indeed the
mode of being of the subject, that is, precisely what the subject is."[3](the being of persons
and individuals can be constituted and defined by others as that or in terms of those things
and factors).

See also

 Philosophy portal

 Thinking portal

 Dogma
 Intersubjectivity
 Phenomenology (philosophy)
 Phenomenology (psychology)
 Political subjectivity
 Q methodology
 Subject (philosophy)
 Truth is Subjectivity, an existential interpretation of subjectivity by Søren Kierkegaard

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/personal
adjective

1.

of, relating to, or coming as from a particular person; individual; private:

a personal opinion.

2.

relating to, directed to, or intended for a particular person: a personal favor; one's personal life; a
letter marked “Personal.”.

3.

intended for use by one person:

a personal car.

4.

referring or directed to a particular person in a disparaging or offensive sense or manner, usually

involving character, behavior, appearance, etc.:

personal remarks.
32

5.

making personal remarks or attacks:

to become personal in a dispute.

6.

done, carried out, held, etc., in person:

a personal interview.

7.

pertaining to or characteristic of a person or self-conscious being:

That is my personal belief.

noun

13.

1. a short news paragraph in a newspaper concerning a particular person, as one who is

socially prominent, or a group of particular persons who are socially prominent.
2. a brief, private notice in a newspaper or magazine, often addressed to a particular person,
and typically bearing an abbreviated salutation and signature to preserve its confidentiality,
usually printed in a special part of the classified advertising section.
3. Also called personal ad. a similar notice, as in a newspaper or on a website, placed by a
person seeking companionship, a spouse, etc.
4. Usually, personals. a column, page, or section, as of a newspaper, magazine, or website,
featuring such notices or items.

personal

[pur-suh-nl]

 Examples
 Word Origin

See more synonyms on Thesaurus.com

adjective

1.

of, relating to, or coming as from a particular person; individual; private:

a personal opinion.

2.

relating to, directed to, or intended for a particular person: a personal favor; one's personal life; a
letter marked “Personal.”.

3.

intended for use by one person:

33

a personal car.

4.

referring or directed to a particular person in a disparaging or offensive sense or manner, usually

involving character, behavior, appearance, etc.:

personal remarks.

5.

making personal remarks or attacks:

to become personal in a dispute.

6.

done, carried out, held, etc., in person:

a personal interview.

7.

pertaining to or characteristic of a person or self-conscious being:

That is my personal belief.

noun

13.

1. a short news paragraph in a newspaper concerning a particular person, as one who is

socially prominent, or a group of particular persons who are socially prominent.
2. a brief, private notice in a newspaper or magazine, often addressed to a particular person,
and typically bearing an abbreviated salutation and signature to preserve its confidentiality,
usually printed in a special part of the classified advertising section.
3. Also called personal ad. a similar notice, as in a newspaper or on a website, placed by a
person seeking companionship, a spouse, etc.
4. Usually, personals. a column, page, or section, as of a newspaper, magazine, or website,
featuring such notices or items.
5. adjective
6. 1.
7. of or relating to the private aspects of a person's life: personal letters, a personal question
8. 2.
9. (prenominal) of or relating to a person's body, its care, or its appearance: personal hygiene,
great personal beauty
10. 3.
11. belonging to or intended for a particular person and no-one else: as a personal favour, for
your personal use
12. 4.
13. (prenominal) undertaken by an individual himself: a personal appearance by a celebrity
14. 5.
15. referring to, concerning, or involving a person's individual personality, intimate affairs, etc,
esp in an offensive way: personal remarks, don't be so personal
16. 6.
34

17. having the attributes of an individual conscious being: a personal God

18. 7.
19. of or arising from the personality: personal magnetism
20. 8.
21. of, relating to, or denoting grammatical person
22. 9.
23. (law) of or relating to movable property, such as money Compare real1(sense 8)
24. noun
25. 10.
26. (law) an item of movable property
27. Collins English Dictionary - Complete & Unabridged 2012 Digital Edition
© William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins
Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012
Cite This Source
28. Word Origin and History for personal
29. adj.

30. late 14c., "pertaining to the self," from Old French personal (12c., Modern French
personnel), from Late Latin personalis "pertaining to a person," from Latin persona
(see person ). Meaning "aimed at some particular person" (usually in a hostile
manner) first attested 1610s. The noun sense of "newspaper item about private
matters" is attested from 1888. As "a classified ad addressed to an individual," it is
recorded from 1861. Personal computer is from 1976.
31. Online Etymology Dictionary, © 2010 Douglas Harper
Cite This Source
OBJECTIVITY

the quality of being objective.

"the piece lacked any objectivity"

impartiality, absence/lack of bias, absence/lack of prejudice, fairness, fair-mindedness,

neutrality, evenhandedness, justice, open-mindedness, disinterest, detachment,
dispassion, neutrality

"the quest for total objectivity is unrealistic"

Objectivity vs. Subjectivity. "The ability to perceive or describe something without being
influenced by personal emotions or prejudices." "Interpretation based on personal
opinions or feelings rather than on external facts or evidence."
synonyms:

1. General: Striving (as far as possible or practicable) to reduce or eliminate

biases, prejudices, or subjective evaluations by relying on verifiable data.
2. Accounting: Accountant's reliance on verifiable evidence (such as delivery
notes, invoices, orders, physical counts, paper or electronic trail) in the
measurement of financial results. Objectivity makes it possible to compare
financial statements of different firms with an assurance of reliability and
uniformity. Also called objective principle. See also accounting concepts.
35

Read more: http://www.businessdictionary.com/definition/objectivity.html

Objectivity and Subjectivity in Classical Sociology | The Practical ...

https://practicaltheorist.wordpress.com/.../objectivity-and-subjectivity-in-classical-
sociolo...

Objectivity and Subjectivity in Classical Sociology. ... In the realm of ontology, objective
things are mind-independent and subjective things are mind-dependent. In other words,
objective phenomena are those that exist outside of, or independently of, the human
mind.Mar 10, 2014

I.e. Researchers are not influenced by personal feelings and experiences. o Objectivity
means that all sources of bias are minimized and that personal or subjective ideas are
eliminated.

Psychology as a Science | Simply Psychology

https://www.simplypsychology.org/science-psychology.html

Objectivity in social research is the principle drawn from positivism that, as far as is
possible, researchers should remain distanced from what they study so findings depend
on the nature of what was studied rather than on the personality, beliefs and values of
the researcher (an approach not accepted by researchers ...Jan 1, 2011

Objectivity - SAGE Research Methods

methods.sagepub.com/book/key-concepts-in-social-research/n32.xml

http://www2.cedarcrest.edu/academic/bio/hale/biostat/session2links/objsubj.html
Objectivity vs. Subjectivity
Is It Really That Important???
Encarta Dictionary

Objectivity
"The ability to perceive or describe something without being influenced
by personal emotions or prejudices."

Subjectivity
"Interpretation based on personal opinions or feelings rather than on
external facts or evidence."

 Things to ponder...
            1. Are olives truly divine?
            2. Does a particular model of smoke stack scrubber improve
36

air quality?
                [It may depend on who you are asking.]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Objectivity_(philosophy)

Objectivity is a central philosophical concept, related to reality and truth, which has been
variously defined by sources. Generally, objectivity means the state or quality of being true
even outside of a subject's individual biases, interpretations, feelings, and imaginings. A
proposition is generally considered objectively true (to have objective truth) when its truth
conditions are met without biases caused by feelings, ideas, opinions, etc., of a sentient
subject. A second, broader meaning of the term refers to the ability in any context to judge
fairly, without partiality or external influence. This second meaning of objectivity is
sometimes used synonymously with neutrality.

Contents

 1 Objectivism
 2 Objectivity in ethics
o 2.1 Ethical subjectivism
o 2.2 Ethical objectivism
 3 See also
 4 Further reading
 5 External links

Objectivism

"Objectivism" is a term that describes a branch of philosophy that originated in the early
nineteenth century. Gottlob Frege was the first to apply it, when he expounded an
epistemological and metaphysical theory contrary to that of Immanuel Kant. Kant's
rationalism attempted to reconcile the failures he perceived in philosophical realism.

Stronger versions of this claim hold that there is only one correct description of this reality. If
it is true that reality is mind-independent, then reality might include objects that are unknown
to consciousness and thus might include objects not the subject of intensionality. Objectivity
in referring requires a definition of truth. According to metaphysical objectivists, an object
may truthfully be said to have this or that attribute, as in the statement "This object exists,"
whereas the statement "This object is true" or "false" is meaningless. For them, only
propositions have truth values. The terms "objectivity" and "objectivism" are not
synonymous, with objectivism being an ontological theory that incorporates a commitment to
the objectivity of objects.

Plato's idealism was a form of metaphysical objectivism, holding that the Ideas exist
objectively and independently. Berkeley's empiricist idealism, on the other hand, could be
called a subjectivism: he held that things only exist to the extent that they are perceived. Both
theories claim methods of objectivity. Plato's definition of objectivity can be found in his
epistemology, which takes as a model mathematics, and his metaphysics, where knowledge
of the ontological status of objects and ideas is resistant to change.
37

Plato considered knowledge of geometry a condition of philosophical knowledge, both being

concerned with universal truths. Plato's opposition between objective knowledge and doxa
(opinions) became the basis for later philosophies intent on resolving the problem of reality,
knowledge, and human existence. Personal opinions belong to the changing sphere of the
sensible, opposed to a fixed and eternal incorporeal realm that is mutually intelligible.

Where Plato distinguishes between what and how we know things (epistemology), and their
ontological status as things (metaphysics), subjectivism such as Berkeley's and a mind
dependence of knowledge and reality fails to distinguish between what one knows and what
is to be known, or at least explains the distinction superficially. In Platonic terms, a criticism
of subjectivism is that it is difficult to distinguish between knowledge, doxa, and subjective
knowledge (true belief), distinctions that Plato makes.

The importance of perception in evaluating and understanding objective reality is debated.

Realists argue that perception is key in directly observing objective reality, while
instrumentalists hold that perception is not necessarily useful in directly observing objective
reality, but is useful in interpreting and predicting reality. The concepts that encompasses
these ideas are important in the philosophy of science.

Objectivity in ethics
Ethical subjectivism
See also: David Hume, Non-cognitivism, and Subjectivism

The term, "ethical subjectivism", covers two distinct theories in ethics. According to
cognitive versions of ethical subjectivism, the truth of moral statements depends upon
people's values, attitudes, feelings, or beliefs. Some forms of cognitivist ethical subjectivism
can be counted as forms of realism, others are forms of anti-realism. David Hume is a
foundational figure for cognitive ethical subjectivism. On a standard interpretation of his
theory, a trait of character counts as a moral virtue when it evokes a sentiment of approbation
in a sympathetic, informed, and rational human observer. Similarly, Roderick Firth's ideal
observer theory held that right acts are those that an impartial, rational observer would
approve of. William James, another ethical subjectivist, held that an end is good (to or for a
person) just in the case it is desired by that person (see also ethical egoism). According to
non-cognitive versions of ethical subjectivism, such as emotivism, prescriptivism, and
expressivism, ethical statements cannot be true or false, at all: rather, they are expressions of
personal feelings or commands. For example, on A. J. Ayer's emotivism, the statement,
"Murder is wrong" is equivalent in meaning to the emotive, "Murder, Boo!"

Ethical objectivism
Main article: Moral realism

According to the ethical objectivist, the truth or falsehood of typical moral judgments does
not depend upon the beliefs or feelings of any person or group of persons. This view holds
that moral propositions are analogous to propositions about chemistry, biology, or history, in
so much as they are true despite what anyone believes, hopes, wishes, or feelings. When they
fail to describe this mind-independent moral reality, they are false—no matter what anyone
believes, hopes, wishes, or feels.
38

There are many versions of ethical objectivism, including various religious views of morality,
Platonistic intuitionism, Kantianism, utilitarianism, and certain forms of ethical egoism and
contractualism. Note that Platonists define ethical objectivism in an even more narrow way,
so that it requires the existence of intrinsic value. Consequently, they reject the idea that
contractualists or egoists could be ethical objectivists. Objectivism, in turn, places primacy on
the origin of the frame of reference—and, as such, considers any arbitrary frame of reference
ultimately a form of ethical subjectivism by a transitive property, even when the frame
incidentally coincides with reality and can be used for measurements.

See also

 Philosophy portal

 Factual relativism
 Journalistic objectivity
 Naïve realism
 Objectivity (science)

http://host.uniroma3.it/progetti/kant/field/suob.htm

1. Introduction

Many philosophical issues concern questions of objectivity and subjectivity. Of these

questions, there are two kinds. The first considers whether something is objective or
subjective; the second what it means for something to be objective or subjective—
questions that inquire as to the very essence of objectivity and subjectivity. I call
questions of the first kind "questions of application" and questions of the second kind
"questions of constitution".

Examples of questions of application include (but are not limited to) the following. Is
it possible for science to be objective, or are the claims of science inextricably bound
up with subjective points of view? If science is indeed objective, is there anything
that escapes its grasp in virtue of being essentially subjective (as some have claimed
for consciousness)? Are the things that comprise the subject matter of scientific and
folk theories things that exist objectively or are they instead the subjective results of
the way our ways of thinking and talking carve up the world? Must all physical things
exist objectively and vice versa?

Examples of questions of constitution include (but are not limited to) the following. Is
objectivity an unachievable ideal that can only be approximated by degrees of
intersubjectivity? How deep is the common analogy between objectivity and
subjectivity on the one hand and the literary conventions of third-person and first-
person points of view on the other? Are subjectivity and objectivity ways that things
exist (mind-dependently vs. mind-independently) or are they ways of representing
things (from a particular perspective or point of view vs. from no particular
perspective or point of view)? If subjectivity and objectivity are ways of representing,
then what are the proper roles of notions of truth and indexicality in a theory of
objectivity and subjectivity?
39

Most if not all of the above questions should strike the philosophical reader as
familiar. Each of the above questions has been explored individually by many
philosophers, though few have explored them conjointly. I mention these questions
to preview terrain I plan to traverse. I mention them also to call to mind concepts that
will be key in my discussion of objectivity and subjectivity—notions such as
representation, truth, perspective, point of view, mind-independence, and indexical. I
turn now to delve a bit deeper into these notions, and the questions framed in terms
of them.

2. Objective and subjective judgments

One common use of the notions of objectivity and subjectivity is to demarcate kinds
of judgement (or thought or belief). On such a usage, prototypically objective
judgements concern matters of empirical and mathematical fact such as the moon
has no atmosphere and two and two are four. In contrast, prototypically subjective
judgements concern matters of value and preference such as Mozart is better than
Bach and vanilla ice cream with ketchup is disgusting. I offer these examples not to
take sides on whether such judgements actually are objective or subjective, but only
to call attention to a typical way of using "objective" and "subjective". The question
arises as to what it means in this context to call these respective judgements
"objective" and "subjective". Some have proposed that the difference hinges on truth.
Objective judgements are absolutely true, whereas the truth of subjective
judgements is relative to the person making the judgement: my judgements are true
for me, your judgments are true for you. You and I can each utter "vanilla tastes
great" but in your mouth this may constitute a truth and in my mouth it may constitute
a falsehood. Subjective judgments are subject relative. Some philosophers have
noted an analogy between this kind of subject relativity and a kind that obtains for
indexical expressions. You and I can both utter "I am here" and thereby express
different propositions. Some philosophers have construed indexicality as an instance
of subjectivity and some others have even gone so far as to argue that subjectivity
just is indexicality.

I will postpone taking sides on these issues, but let me spell out further what I take
the importance of the above remarks to be. I call attention to the precedent of
labeling judgements (and beliefs etc.) objective and subjective. In this discussion, it
is representations that have propositional or sentential structure that are the first and
foremost instances of objective (and subjective) things. The question arises, then, of
what it is about these representations that makes them subjective. One suggestion is
that the subjective/objective distinction marks a distinction in ways of assigning truth
values to these representations, ways that are relativist and absolutist, respectively.
Another suggestion is that the subjective/objective distinction marks a distinction in
ways of assigning representational content to these representations, ways that
are indexical and non-indexical, respectively. Yet another approach seeks to classify
representational schemes in terms of the degree to which they reflect a particular
perspective or point of view in the literal sense that pictorial representations
represent the visual appearance of objects from a point of view. On this suggestion,
pictures are the prototypically subjective representations and objective
representations are to be defined in contrast. Among the issues to be sorted out in
considering the "truth", "indexical", and "picture" suggestions are those concerning
whether they constitute distinct viable alternatives, and if so, whether they are
40

compatible. Such sorting will have to wait for another occasion, however. I turn now
to consider a different way of construing the distinction between the objective and
the subjective.

3. Objective and subjective existence

I again call attention to the precedent of calling judgements (and beliefs etc.)
objective and subjective such a usage contrasts against a usage whereby it is not
judgements but things themselves that are either objective or subjective. An
example of this alternate usage would not call the judgement that the earth has an
atmosphere objective, but instead it is the property of having an atmosphere that is
objective. Such prototypical examples of objective properties are those that do not
depend on the existence of minds for their instantiation. The idea of this kind of
objectivity can be extended to include the existence of objects as well as the
instantiations of properties. Objects exist objectively if they do not depend on minds
to do so. In contrast, subjective properties and objects are mind-dependent. The
central issues to be examined concerning this sense of the objective/subjective
distinction concern the most theoretically useful and tractable way to construe mind-
dependence. Does subjectivity as mind-dependence require only the existence of
minds or does it instead require being represented by a mind? I return to such
questions later. I close this section with some terminological remarks. I adopt the
convention of calling the sense of the objectivity/subjectivity distinction that
hinges on mind-dependence "metaphysical objectivity/subjectivity" and the
sense of the distinction that hinges on kinds of representations discussed in the
section above "epistemic objectivity/subjectivity". One set of questions that I am
especially interested in concern the relation between epistemic and metaphysical
objectivity. For example, as I will discuss further below, one way that theories of
epistemic objectivity differ is over the issue of whether epistemically objective
representations must be about metaphysically objective things.

4. The subjectivity of conscious experience

Thomas Nagel (1986) argues that conscious experience is subjective, and thus,
permanently recalcitrant to objective scientific understanding. Nagel invites us to ask
the question of "what it is like to be a bat" and urges the intuition that no amount of
scientific knowledge can supply an answer. Nagel sees the subjectivity of
consciousness (what does he mean by conscuious/ness?) as posing a special
challenge to physicalism.

Before saying more about physicalistic responses to that challenge, I turn to examine
Nagel’s characterizations of objectivity and subjectivity. According to Nagel, objective
facts are the concern of science: the observer independent features of things, the
way things are in and of themselves. For Nagel, scientific and objective
characterizations are arrived at by abstracting away from any subject’s
perceptions or viewpoints. In contrast, subjective facts differ from objective facts
by being essentially tied to a point of view. Thus, for Nagel, conscious experience is
the paradigm of subjectivity. Facts about phenomenology, conscious experience,
what it is like for a certain entity to be that entity do not exist independently of a
particular subject’s point of view. Another way Nagel characterizes the
objective/subjective distinction is by saying that only the former admits of a
41

distinction between appearance and reality. Objective phenomena have a

reality independent of appearances but subjective phenomena just are
appearances. Consider the phenomenon of lightning, which can be characterized by
the way it seems as well as the way it really is. It has the objective feature of being
an electrical discharge, and this feature can be apprehended by multiple points of
view. The same phenomenon has a particular subjective nature as well, perhaps its
appearance to some subject as a bright flash of light.. In contrast, subjective
phenomena and conscious experience have no existence independent of their
appearance to some subject. Nagel wonders what would be left of what it was like to
be a bat if one removed the point of view of the bat (1979a, p. 173). Nagel claims
that science stands little chance of providing an adequate third person account of
consciousness because there is no objective nature to phenomenal experience.
Phenomenal experience cannot be observed from multiple points of view.

The alleged tension between the subjective knowledge of consciousness and the
objective knowledge of science may be further fleshed out as follows.

I know what it is like to be me, but I do not know what it is like to be a bat. This is
because I do not know what it is like to have sonar experiences. In order for me to
know what it is like to have sonar experiences, I would have to have sonar
experiences. Thus sonar experiences are subjective or perspectival. I must adopt a
particular point of view or perspective to know what it is like to have sonar
experiences. This is part of what it means for experiences to be subjective.

In contrast, consider knowing that the square root of 144 is 12 or knowing that table
salt is a compound of sodium and chlorine (Tye 1995).. Having such bits of
mathematical and scientific knowledge does not require having any particular kind of
experience. This is not to deny that it may require having experience: maybe every
one who has knowledge must also have experiences. But what makes a bit of
mathematical and scientific knowledge objective is that it does not require having
any particular kind of experience the way that know what iti is like to see red does.
Knowing what it is like to see red entails having a particular kind of experience,
namely, the experience of seeing red.

This difference between objective and subjective knowledge is at the heart of the
famous ‘knowledge argument’ against physicalism (Nagel 1974, Jackson 1980).
(See Torin Alter's article in this Guide.) The gist of the argument is as follows. A
person that has never had any experiences as of seeing a red thing may
nonetheless have exhaustive knowledge of the physical goings on in the nervous
system of an individual seeing red. Such a knowledgeable person, may know all the
physical facts about see red without having a red experience. But suppose this
knowledgeable individual were to finally have a red experience. Many find it intuitive
to suppose that such a individual would learn something new, namely, they would
learn what it is like to see red. Anti-physicalistic conclusions are supposed to follow
on the supposition that learning what it is like to see red involves learning some new
fact. Prior to having the experience, the subject new all the physical facts, thus in
learning a new fact post red experience, the subject learns a non-physical fact. Thus,
allegedly, physical facts do not exhaust all the facts, since they do not include certain
facts about experience.
42

For the purposes of this article, the key aspect of the knowledge argument is the
distinction between objective knowledge and subjective knowledge. I turn now to the
question of what this distinction might consist of. What is it about knowing that salt
is sodium chloride that makes the knowledge objective? What is it about knowing
what (HOW) it is like to be a bat that makes the knowledge subjective? In both
cases, some suggest, it is the representational aspects of each that contribute to
their objectivity/subjectivity.

In Nagel’s discussion of the subjectivity of conscious experience, it often seems that

the notion of subjectivity employed is metaphysical in that he discusses objective
things in terms of their existing independently of minds. At other times, Nagel
talks as if he intends the distinction to be epistemic: He writes that "It is beliefs and
attitudes that are objective in the primary sense" (1986: 4). Some have suggested
that Nagel’s challenge to physicalism depends on trying to make the subjective a
special metaphysical category, but that the challenge is met (or dissolved) by
treating the subjectivity of experience as epistemic. The general strategy of this
physicalistic response (i) notes that experiences are representational (ii) supplies an
account of how representations can be objective and subjective and (iii) indicates
how representational properties in general can be incorporated into a physicalistic
framework.

One such physicalistic response to Nagel is due to the philosopher William Lycan
(1996) (Similar accounts are advocated by Tye (1995) and Rey (1997)). Lycan's
account of subjectivity is as follows. Experiences are representations. My visual
experience of my blue coffee mug is a mental representation of the mug as being
blue. When I introspect my experience, I form a second-order representation of the
first-order representation of the coffee mug. Other people may form syntactically
similar second-order representations, but those representations will be about their
first-order states, not my own. The crucial analogy here is to the use of indexicals
in speech. When I say "my leg hurts" I am referring to my leg, and only I can refer to
my leg by using that utterance. You may use a syntactically similar construction: you
may utter the words "my leg hurts", but in doing so, you would be representing your
leg, not mine. Analogously, only I can represent my first-order states by the
introspective application of self-referential indexical concepts. And this,
according to Lycan, is the ultimate explication of subjectivity. The relevance of
indexicals to the knowledge argument is supposed to be the following. Upon having
a red experience for the first time, one can finally correctly apply the indexical
thought "I am experiencing red and is what it is like" to the events in question. Prior
to actually having the experience, the very same physical thoughts could be thought
of, just not using the right indexicals. Analogously, you can think of my house without
ever visiting it, but only after you arrive can you correctly think of it as "here".

Lycan’s indexical analysis of the subjectivity of experience is open to criticism both

internal and external to issues of consciousness. One internal line of criticism
concerns the viability of accounts that require higher-order thoughts for the
subjectivity of consciousness. One external line of criticism concerns the degree to
which Lycan’s suggestion is able to answer questions raised above concerning the
objectivity and subjectivity of judgments. What, if anything, does the higher-order
application of self-referential indexicals in introspection have to do with the
subjectivity of the judgement that Mozart is better than Bach? I leave the discussion
43

of consciousness and turn to briefly consider scientific applications of

objectivity/subjectivity.

5. Objectivity and subjectivity in cognitive scientific explanation

Cognitive scientific explanations commonly quantify over representations. A version

of the epistemic objective/subjective distinction appears in explanations of cognition
under the guise of a distinction between allocentric and egocentric representations.

Several philosophers and psychologists interested in the topic of spatial

representation have identified a distinction between egocentric and allocentric
representations of space and described this distinction as one between subjective
and objective ways of representing space (see, for example, Brewer 1996; Campbell
1996; Evans 1982, O'Keefe 1996).

For one example of egocentric and allocentric representations, consider certain

kinds of receptive fields uncovered in single cell physiology studies. Fiegenbaum and
Ross (1991) recorded the electrical activity of individual neurons in the hippocampus
of macaque monkeys. In their study, they look for neurons that were maximally
responsive the particular spatial location of a visual stimulus. They then changed the
spatial relation of the monkey with respect to the stimulus so that, although the
stimulus had not moved, it projected to a different part of the monkey's retina. Cases
in which activity in neurons was still maximally responsive to stimuli in that location
regardless of what part of the retina the stimulus projected to were regarded as
allocentric representations of that spatial location. In contrast, neural activity
maximally responsive to a spatial location defined relative to the site of retinal
projection is regarded as an egocentric representation of that location.

The notions of allocentric and egocentric representations also surface in accounts of

navigation. The Morris water maze is an apparatus filled with water in which rats can
swim. Objects such as small platforms can be placed in this arena. Milk powder can
be added to the water to make it opaque, and the level of the water can be adjusted
so that when a platform is submerged it is not visible to rats swimming in the maze.
In Eichenbaum et al. (1990) a water maze was set up such that rats had to swim to a
platform visible during training trials, but occluded by the opaque water in the testing
trials. Varied visual stimuli were positioned around the maze to serve as orientation
cues. The experimenters trained intact and hippocampal-system damaged rats to
swim to the platform from a given start location. During test trials, both the intact and
damaged rats were able to swim to the platform if they were started from the same
location as in the learning trials. However, the performances of the intact and
damaged rats diverged widely when they were started from novel locations in the
water maze. During test trials, intact rats were able to navigate to the platform from
novel start locations, whereas the hippocampal damaged rats required much longer
to find the platform, sometimes never finding it during the test trial. Many researchers
follow O’Keefe and Nadel (1978) in hypothesizing that the hippocampus serves to
create a "cognitive map": an allocentric representation of the spatial layout, whereas
rats with damaged hippocampi must rely on egocentric representations of the route.

Navigation based allo/egocentricity may be connected with the notions of

perspective dependence in the following way. Cussins (1990) asks us to imagine two
44

different abilities employed to arrive at some destination in a city. The first,

perspective dependent, ability would allow you to get to that destination, but only if
you started at a particular point and then proceeded to follow a particular path. If
your ability were maximally perspective dependent, then you would be unable to
arrive at the destination if for some reason you were to deviate from the original
course or begin from a different starting location. The second, perspective
independent ability would allow you to get to your destination from any starting
location.

Given the notion of perspective dependent and independent abilities, we can now
begin to make sense of the notion of perspective dependent and independent
representations or representational abilities. Imagine, then, that the representational
repertoire of the perspective dependent urban navigator is something akin to the list
of directions one might be told for getting to a party. They would be on the order of
"starting at Moe’s tavern, go about five blocks down Green Street and turn left down
the alley that has a blue van parked near its entrance".. If this were the only
representation of the area that you had, such a representation would be quite
useless to you if you started anywhere other than at Moe’s tavern. The
representation employed by the other navigator, however, might be something akin
to a map of the entire city. This map represents all the relations that the destination
bears to all other locations in the city, allowing the map user to get to the party from
alm ost anywhere in the city. Let us contrast, then, the way the list of directions and
the map represent the location of the party. The perspective dependent
representation of the party is a representation from the Moe’s tavern perspective.
The map user, on the other hand, can represent the party from the Moe’s tavern
perspective, but may also represent the location of the party from many other
perspectives as well.

Note that in the discussion of the notions of egocentric and allocentric

representations of space, notions employed in the previous discussions of objectivity
and subjectivity reemerge. Key among theses notions are the notions of perspective
dependence and independence. The role of indexicals in analyzing these notions
again suggests itself: in the "Moe’s Tavern" account of perspective dependent
representations, the directions to the party from the Tavern employed indexical
terms. The question arises of how seriously to take this suggestion in pursuing an
analysis of egocentric and allocentric representations as employed in explanations of
the function of hippocampal and non-hippocampal neural representations of space.
Does it make sense to think of neurons with egocentric receptive fields as indexical
representations of spatial locations? Exploring an answer to this question, be it
negative or positive, is a line for further research perhaps not best explored here.

6. Theories of Objectivity

In the previous sections I have indicated how the notions of objectivty and subjectivty
have figured in philosophical discussion, especially those pertaining to the
philosophy of mind and cognitive science. In this section, I briefly gloss some
theories of objectivity/subjectivity that have been explored in the literature.

Above I mentioned that the objective/subjective distinction has two senses: a

metaphysical sense and an epistemic sense. At the heart of the metaphysical
45

notion of objectivity is the notion of mind-independent existence (where

metaphysical subjectivity just is mind-dependent existence). What lies at that heart of
the epistemic notion of objectivity is difficult to specify without describing a particular
theory of epistemic objectivity--a task I postpone until later in this section.

For now I indicate the gist of the epistemic sense by way of contrast with the
metaphysical sense. The difference between the epistemic and metaphysical
senses hinges on the different sorts of things that may be said to be either objective
or subjective. Only intentional phenomena--things that have aboutness (e.g.,
knowledge, beliefs, fears, judgments, theories, sentences, mental
representations, and news reports)--are epistemically objective or subjective.
So, for example, one might consider my judgment that the moon has no
atmosphere an epistemically objective judgment. In contrast, my judgment that
vanilla is the best ice cream flavor may be regarded as epistemically subjective.

The metaphysically objective and subjective are broader categories than the
epistemically objective and subjective. All things, in the broadest sense of the word
"thing" (e.g., objects, properties, events, etc.) are either metaphysically objective
or subjective. Something is subjective in the metaphysical sense if it requires
a mind, or more specifically, being represented by a mind, for its existence or
instantiation. Something is metaphysically objective if it may exist or be instantiated
without being represented. If beauty is in the eye of the beholder and truth is what
ever I believe to be the case and nothing is good or bad but thinking make it so, then
beauty, truth, and goodness would be metaphysically subjective.

It may be worth noting that something can be both epistemically subjective and
metaphysically objective. My belief that vanilla is better than chocolate may be
epistemically subjective. But whether I have the belief may not depend on the
belief itself being represented. That is, the belief may be a representation, but it need
not be about itself nor need any other representation be about it. Thus, the original
representation, the belief, may be metaphysically objective. Likewise, something can
be both epistemically objective and metaphysically subjective. Suppose that I believe
that frogs are amphibians only if someone believes that I believe that frogs are
amphibians. In that case my belief would be metaphysically subjective. But it would
be epistemically objective since whether frogs are amphibians isn't a mere matter of
idiosyncratic opinion or something. As mentioned above, it is hard to say much about
epistemic objectivity without describing some theory or other. I turn, then, to the
theories.

Three kinds of theories of epistemic objectivity include consensus theories, indexical

theories, and correspondence theories. (See Rorty (1979) and Gauker (1995) for
discussion of the difference between objectivity as consensus and objectivity as
correspondence. For discussion of indexical theories see Bell (1992), Lycan (1996),
and McGinn (1983).) Consensus theories define as objective representations
that are agreed to be true. Indexical theories define as objective
representations devoid of indexical constituents. Correspondence theories
define as epistemically objective representations that are about
metaphysically objective things. Here I will discuss only correspondence theories
and use them to develop my own account of epistemic objectivity.
46

The core notion of correspondence theories is that an epistemically objective belief

or sentence must be in some sense about something metaphysically objective. Rorty
describes this notion of objectivity as "mirroring" for it is a notion of objectivity that
involves the notion of representing things as they really are, that is, the way
they are independent of the way they are represented. (Note that neither Gauker nor
Rorty are advocates of the correspondence theory of epistemic objectivity.) A
description of something as being a hunk of titanium would be epistemically
objective, according to the correspondence theory, because something can be a
hunk of titanium independently of any one's representing it as such. In contrast, my
belief that Brussels sprouts are disgusting is epistemically subjective because being
disgusting requires being mentally represented as disgusting. To contort a cliché:
Being disgusting is in the mouth of the taster.

Gauker notes that since a judgment may be objective while false, since on a
correspondence theory an objective belief need only purport to describe the way
things really are (1995: 160). Thus, the aim of correspondence theories of objectivity
is to reconcile (i) the requirement that the objectivity of a belief consists in its
corresponding with metaphysically objective things and (ii) the possibility of a belief
being both objective and false.

A natural, but I think incorrect, way of cashing out the correspondence theory is by
defining as subjective any thing that depicts a metaphysically subjective state of
affairs. On such an account, the sentence "a is F" is epistemically objective just in
case the subject term and the general term both pick out things that are
metaphysically objective. (For simplicity's sake, I consider only atomic sentences
with monadic predicates (and later, atomic sentences with binary predicates), but I
intend the points made to generalize beyond these simple cases.) This comports
with the intuitions that the sentence "Jane is a mammal" is epistemically objective
while "Jane is beautiful" is epistemically subjective. However, this version of the
correspondence theory has the unintuitive consequence that the sentence "Beauty is
a subjective property" is epistemically subjective. This seems unintuitive because,
while beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, whether beauty is in the eye of the
beholder n eed not itself be in the eye of the beholder.

On a correspondence theory, the difference between "John Smith is ugly" and "John
Smith is a mammal" in virtue of which the former is epistemically subjective and the
latter epistemically objective does not consist in the fact that the latter is true. This is
because the correspondence theorist wants to allow that the former may be true as
well. Nor does the difference hinge on whether the individual named by the subject
term is metaphysically objective, since the cases do not vary in that regard. I offer,
then, that the proper explication of a correspondence notion of objectivity requires
only that the predicate correspond to something metaphysically objective.
Metaphysically objective objects need not be referred to in singular sentences nor
quantified over in quantified sentences in order for the sentences to be epistemically
objective. Instead, I offer, what makes a singular sentence of the form "a is F"
epistemically objective is that the property F named by the predicate term "F" is
metaphysically objective. Thus I call the correspondence theory of epistemic
objectivity that I advocate the predicational theory of epistemic objectivity. (See
Mandik 1998 for further discussion).                         
47

[To be continued in subsequent drafts. . .]

http://www.iep.utm.edu/objectiv/

The terms “objectivity” and “subjectivity,” in their modern usage, generally relate to a
perceiving subject (normally a person) and a perceived or unperceived object. The object is
something that presumably exists independent of the subject’s perception of it. In other
words, the object would be there, as it is, even if no subject perceived it. Hence, objectivity is
typically associated with ideas such as reality, truth and reliability.

The perceiving subject can either perceive accurately or seem to perceive features of the
object that are not in the object. For example, a perceiving subject suffering from jaundice
could seem to perceive an object as yellow when the object is not actually yellow. Hence, the
term “subjective” typically indicates the possibility of error.

The potential for discrepancies between features of the subject’s perceptual impressions and
the real qualities of the perceived object generates philosophical questions. There are also
philosophical questions regarding the nature of objective reality and the nature of our so-
called subjective reality. Consequently, we have various uses of the terms “objective” and
“subjective” and their cognates to express possible differences between objective reality
and subjective impressions. Philosophers refer to perceptual impressions themselves as being
subjective or objective. Consequent judgments are objective or subjective to varying degrees,
and we divide reality into objective reality and subjective reality. Thus, it is important to
distinguish the various uses of the terms “objective” and “subjective.”

Table of Contents

1. Terminology
2. Epistemological Issues
1. Can We Know Objective Reality?
2. Does Agreement Among Subjects Indicate Objective Knowledge?
3. Primary and Secondary Qualities: Can We Know Primary Qualities?
4. Skepticism Regarding Knowledge of Objective Reality
5. Defending Objective Knowledge
6. Is There No Escape From the Subjective?
3. Metaphysical Issues
4. Objectivity in Ethics
1. Persons in Contrast to Objects
2. Objectivism, Subjectivism and Non-Cognitivism
3. Objectivist Theories
4. Can We Know Moral Facts?
5. Major Historical Philosophical Theories of Objective Reality
6. References and Further Reading

1. Terminology

Many philosophers would use the term “objective reality” to refer to anything that exists as it
is independent of any conscious awareness of it (via perception, thought, etc.). Common mid-
sized physical objects presumably apply, as do persons having subjective states. Subjective
48

reality would then include anything depending upon some (broadly construed) conscious
awareness of it to exist. Particular instances of colors and sounds (as they are perceived) are
prime examples of things that exist only when there are appropriate conscious states.
Particular instances of emotions (e.g., my present happiness) also seem to be a subjective
reality, existing when one feels them, and ceasing to exist when one’s mood changes.

“Objective knowledge” can simply refer to knowledge of an objective reality. Subjective

knowledge would then be knowledge of any subjective reality.

There are, however, other uses of the terminology related to objectivity. Many philosophers
use the term “subjective knowledge” to refer only to knowledge of one’s own subjective
states. Such knowledge is distinguished from one’s knowledge of another individual’s
subjective states and from knowledge of objective reality, which would both be objective
knowledge under the present definitions. Your knowledge of another person’s subjective
states can be called objective knowledge since it is presumably part of the world that is
“object” for you, just as you and your subjective states are part of the world that is “object”
for the other person.

This is a prominent distinction in epistemology (the philosophical study of knowledge)

because many philosophers have maintained that subjective knowledge in this sense has a
special status. They assert, roughly, that knowledge of one’s own subjective states is direct,
or immediate, in a way that knowledge of anything else is not. It is convenient to refer to
knowledge of one’s own subjective states simply as subjective knowledge. Following this
definition, objective knowledge would be knowledge of anything other than one’s own
subjective states.

One last prominent style of usage for terms related to objectivity deals with the nature of
support a particular knowledge-claim has. “Objective knowledge” can designate a
knowledge-claim having, roughly, the status of being fully supported or proven.
Correspondingly, “subjective knowledge” might designate some unsupported or weakly
supported knowledge-claim. It is more accurate to refer to these as objective and subjective
judgments, rather than knowledge, but one should be on guard for the use of the term
“knowledge” in this context. This usage fits with the general connotation for the term
“objectivity” of solidity, trustworthiness, accuracy, impartiality, etc. The general connotation
for many uses of “subjectivity” includes unreliability, bias, an incomplete (personal)
perspective, etc.

“Objective judgment or belief” refers to a judgment or belief based on objectively strong

supporting evidence, the sort of evidence that would be compelling for any rational being. A
subjective judgment would then seem to be a judgment or belief supported by evidence that is
compelling for some rational beings (subjects) but not compelling for others. It could also
refer to a judgment based on evidence that is of necessity available only to some subjects.

These are the main uses for the terminology within philosophical discussions. Let’s examine
some of the main epistemological issues regarding objectivity, presuming the aforementioned
definitions of “objective reality” and “subjective reality.”
49

2. Epistemological Issues
a. Can We Know Objective Reality?

The subjective is characterized primarily by perceiving mind. The objective is characterized

primarily by physical extension in space and time. The simplest sort of discrepancy between
subjective judgment and objective reality is well illustrated by John Locke’s example of
holding one hand in ice water and the other hand in hot water for a few moments. When one
places both hands into a bucket of tepid water, one experiences competing subjective
experiences of one and the same objective reality. One hand feels it as cold, the other feels it
as hot. Thus, one perceiving mind can hold side-by-side clearly differing impressions of a
single object. From this experience, it seems to follow that two different perceiving minds
could have clearly differing impressions of a single object. That is, two people could put their
hands into the bucket of water, one describing it as cold, the other describing it as hot. Or,
more plausibly, two people could step outside, one describing the weather as chilly, the other
describing it as pleasant.

We confront, then, an epistemological challenge to explain whether, and if so how, some

subjective impressions can lead to knowledge of objective reality. A skeptic can contend that
our knowledge is limited to the realm of our own subjective impressions, allowing us no
knowledge of objective reality as it is in itself.

b. Does Agreement Among Subjects Indicate Objective Knowledge?

Measurement is allegedly a means to reach objective judgments, judgments having at least a

high probability of expressing truth regarding objective reality. An objective judgment
regarding the weather, in contrast to the competing subjective descriptions, would describe it
as, say, 20°C (68°F). This judgment results from use of a measuring device. It is unlikely that
the two perceiving subjects, using functioning thermometers, would have differing judgments
about the outside air.

The example of two people giving differing reports about the weather (e.g., “chilly” vs.
“pleasant”) illustrates that variation in different subjects’ judgments is a possible indicator of
the subjectivity of their judgments. Agreement in different subjects’ judgments (20°C) is
often taken to be indicative of objectivity. Philosophers commonly call this form of
agreement “intersubjective agreement.” Does intersubjective agreement prove that there is
objective truth? No, because having two or three or more perceiving subjects agreeing, for
example, that it is very cold does not preclude the possibility of another perceiving subject
claiming that it is not at all cold. Would we have a high likelihood of objective truth if we had
intersubjective agreement among a large number of subjects? This line of reasoning seems
promising, except for another observation from Locke about the possible discrepancies
between subjective impressions and objective reality.

c. Primary and Secondary Qualities: Can We Know Primary Qualities?

According to Locke’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities, some of our
subjective impressions do not correspond to any objective reality in the thing perceived. Our
perception of sound, for example, is nothing like the actual physical vibrations that we know
are the real cause of our subjective experience. Our perception of color is nothing like the
complex combinations of various frequencies of electromagnetic radiation that we know
50

cause our perception of color. Locke asserts that we can, through science, come to know what
primary characteristics the object has in itself. Science teaches us, he says, that sound as we
perceive it is not in the object itself whereas spatial dimensions, mass, duration, motion, etc.
are in the object itself.

In response to this point, one can assert that, through science, we discover that those
subjective impressions corresponding to nothing in the object are nonetheless caused by the
truly objective features of the object. Thus, Locke’s approach leads to optimism regarding
objective knowledge, i.e., knowledge of how things are independent of our perceptions of
them.

d. Skepticism Regarding Knowledge of Objective Reality

In response to Locke’s line of thinking, Immanuel Kant used the expression “Ding an sich”
(the “thing-in-itself”) to designate pure objectivity. The Ding an sich is the object as it is in
itself, independent of the features of any subjective perception of it. While Locke was
optimistic about scientific knowledge of the true objective (primary) characteristics of things,
Kant, influenced by skeptical arguments from David Hume, asserted that we can know
nothing regarding the true nature of the Ding an sich, other than that it exists. Scientific
knowledge, according to Kant, is systematic knowledge of the nature of things as they appear
to us subjects rather than as they are in themselves.

Using Kant’s distinction, intersubjective agreement would seem to be not only the best
evidence we can have of objective truth but constitutive of objective truth itself. (This
might require a theoretically perfect intersubjective agreement under ideal conditions.)
Starting from the assumption that we can have knowledge only of things as they appear in
subjective experience, the only plausible sense for the term “objective” would be judgments
for which there is universal intersubjective agreement, or just for which there is
necessarily universal agreement. If, alternately, we decide to restrict the term “objective” to
the Ding an sich, there would be, according to Kant, no objective knowledge. The notion of
objectivity thus becomes useless, perhaps even meaningless (for, say, a verificationist).

Facing any brand of skepticism regarding knowledge of objective reality in any robust sense,
we should note that the notion of there being an objective reality is independent of any
particular assertion about our prospects for knowing that reality in any objective sense. One
should, in other words, agree that the idea of some objective reality, existing as it is
independent of any subjective perception of it, apparently makes sense even for one who
holds little hope for any of us knowing that there is such a reality, or knowing anything
objectively about such a reality. Perhaps our human situation is such that we cannot know
anything beyond our experiences; perhaps we are, each one of us individually, confined to
the theater of our own minds. Nonetheless, we can conceive what it means to assert an
objective reality beyond the stream of our experiences.

e. Defending Objective Knowledge

Opposing skepticism regarding objective reality, it is conceivable that there are “markers” of
some sort in our subjective experiences distinguishing the reliable perceptions of
objective truth from the illusions generated purely subjectively (hallucinations,
misperceptions, perceptions of secondary qualities, etc.). Descartes, for example, wrote of
“clear and distinct impressions” as having an inherent mark, as it were, attesting to their
51

reliability as indicators of how things are objectively. This idea does not have many
defenders today, however, since Descartes asserted certainty for knowledge derived from
clear and distinct ideas. More acceptable among philosophers today would be a more modest
assertion of a high likelihood of reliability for subjective impressions bearing certain marks.
The marks of reliable impressions are not “clear and distinct” in Descartes’ sense, but have
some connection to common sense ideas about optimal perceptual circumstances. Thus,
defenders of objective knowledge are well advised to search for subjectively accessible
“marks” on impressions that indicate a high likelihood of truth.

A defender of the prospects for objective knowledge would apparently want also to give
some significance to intersubjective agreement. Assertions of intersubjective agreement are
based, of course, on one’s subjective impressions of other perceiving subjects agreeing with
one’s own judgments. Thus, intersubjective agreement is just one type of “mark” one might
use to identify the more likely reliable impressions. This is simple common-sense. We have
much more confidence in our judgments (or should, anyway) when they are shared by
virtually everyone with whom we discuss them than when others (showing every sign of
normal perceptual abilities and a sane mind) disagree. A central assumption behind this
common pattern of thought, however, is that there are indeed many other perceiving subjects
besides ourselves and we are all capable, sometimes at least, of knowing objective reality.
Another assumption is that objective reality is logically consistent. Assuming that reality is
consistent, it follows that your and my logically incompatible judgments about a thing cannot
both be true; intersubjective disagreement indicates error for at least one of us. One can also
argue that agreement indicates probable truth, because it is unlikely that you and I would both
be wrong in our judgment regarding an object and both be wrong in exactly the same way.
Conversely, if we were both wrong about some object, it is likely that we would have
differing incorrect judgments about it, since there are innumerable ways for us to make a
wrong judgment about an object.

f. Is There No Escape From the Subjective?

Despite plausible ways of arguing that intersubjective disagreement indicates error and
agreement indicates some probability of truth, defenses of objective knowledge all face the
philosophically daunting challenge of providing a cogent argument showing that any
purported “mark” of reliability (including apparent intersubjective agreement) actually does
confer a high likelihood of truth. The task seems to presuppose some method of determining
objective truth in the very process of establishing certain sorts of subjective impressions as
reliable indicators of truth. That is, we require some independent (non-subjective) way of
determining which subjective impressions support knowledge of objective reality before
we can find subjectively accessible “markers” of the reliable subjective impressions. What
could such a method be, since every method of knowledge, judgment, or even thought seems
quite clearly to go on within the realm of subjective impressions? One cannot get out of one’s
subjective impressions, it seems, to test them for reliability. The prospects for knowledge of
the objective world are hampered by our essential confinement within subjective impressions.

3. Metaphysical Issues

In metaphysics, i.e., the philosophical study of the nature of reality, the topic of objectivity
brings up philosophical puzzles regarding the nature of the self, for a perceiving subject is
also, according to most metaphysical theories, a potential object of someone else’s
perceptions. Further, one can perceive oneself as an object, in addition to knowing one’s
52

subjective states fairly directly. The self, then, is known both as subject and as object.
Knowledge of self as subject seems to differ significantly from knowledge of the self as
object.

The differences are most markedly in evidence in the philosophy of mind. Philosophers of
mind try to reconcile, in some sense, what we know about the mind objectively and what we
know subjectively. Observing minded beings as objects is central to the methods of
psychology, sociology, and the sciences of the brain. Observing one minded being from the
subjective point of view is something we all do, and it is central to our ordinary notions of the
nature of mind. A fundamental problem for the philosophy of mind is to explain how any
object, no matter how complex, can give rise to mind as we know it from the subjective point
of view. That is, how can mere “stuff” give rise to the rich complexity of consciousness as we
experience it? It seems quite conceivable that there be creatures exactly like us, when seen as
objects, but having nothing like our conscious sense of ourselves as subjects. So there is the
question of why we do have subjective conscious experience and how that comes to be.
Philosophers also struggle to explain what sort of relationship might obtain between mind as
we see it embodied objectively and mind as we experience it subjectively. Are there cause-
and-effect relationships, for example, and how do they work?

The topic of seeing others and even oneself as an object in the objective world is a
metaphysical issue, but it brings up an ethical issue regarding the treatment of persons. There
are, in addition, special philosophical issues regarding assertions of objectivity in ethics.

4. Objectivity in Ethics
a. Persons in Contrast to Objects

First, the dual nature of persons as both subjects (having subjective experience) and objects
within objective reality relates to one of the paramount theories of ethics in the history of
philosophy. Immanuel Kant’s ethics gives a place of central importance to respect for
persons. One formulation of his highly influential Categorical Imperative relates to the dual
nature of persons. This version demands that one “treat humanity, in your own person or in
the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end”
(Groundwork, p. 96). One may treat a mere object simply as a means to an end; one may use
a piece of wood, for example, simply as a means of repairing a fence. A person, by contrast,
is marked by subjectivity, having a subjective point of view, and has a special moral status
according to Kant. Every person must be regarded as an end, that is as having intrinsic value.
It seems that the inherent value of a person depends essentially on the fact that a person has a
subjective conscious life in addition to objective existence.

This ethical distinction brings out an aspect of the term “object” as a “mere object,” in
contrast to the subjectivity of a person. The term “objectivity” in this context can signify the
mere “object-ness” of something at its moral status.

Despite widespread agreement that being a person with a subjective point of view has a
special moral status, there is a general difficulty explaining whether this alleged fact, like all
alleged moral facts, is an objective fact in any sense. It is also difficult to explain how one
can know moral truths if they are indeed objective.
53

b. Objectivism, Subjectivism and Non-Cognitivism

Philosophical theories about the nature of morality generally divide into assertions that
moral truths express subjective states and assertions that moral truths express objective
facts, analogous to the fact, for example, that the sun is more massive than the earth.

So-called subjectivist theories regard moral statements as declaring that certain facts hold,
but the facts expressed are facts about a person’s subjective states. For example, the
statement “It is wrong to ignore a person in distress if you are able to offer aid” just means
something like “I find it offensive when someone ignores a person in distress….” This is a
statement about the subject’s perceptions of the object, not about the object itself (that is,
ignoring a person in distress). Objectivist theories, in contrast, regard the statement “It is
wrong to ignore….” as stating a fact about the ignoring itself.

Subjectivist theories do not have to regard moral statements as statements about a single
subject’s perceptions or feelings. A subjectivist could regard the statement “Torture is
immoral,” for example, as merely expressing the feeling of abhorrence among members of a
certain culture, or among people in general.

In addition to objectivism and subjectivism, a third major theory of morality called non-
cognitivism asserts that alleged moral statements do not make any claim about any reality,
either subjective or objective. This approach asserts that alleged moral statements are
just expressions of subjective feelings; they are not reports about such feelings. Thus the
statement “Torture is immoral” is equivalent to wincing or saying “ugh” at the thought of
torture, rather than describing your feelings about torture.

c. Objectivist Theories

Among objectivist theories of morality, the most straightforward version declares that is it an
objective fact, for example, that it is wrong to ignore a person in distress if you are able to
offer aid. This sort of theory asserts that the wrongness of such behavior is part of objective
reality in the same way that the sun’s being more massive than the earth is part of objective
reality. Both facts would obtain regardless of whether any conscious being ever came to
know either of them.

Other objectivist theories of morality try to explain the widespread feeling that there is an
important difference between moral assertions and descriptive, factual assertions while
maintaining that both types of assertion are about something other than mere subjective
states. Such theories compare moral assertions to assertions about secondary qualities. The
declaration that a certain object is green is not merely a statement about a person’s subjective
state. It makes an assertion about how the object is, but it’s an assertion that can be
formulated only in relation to the states of perceiving subjects under the right conditions.
Thus, determining whether an object is green depends essentially on consulting the
considered judgments of appropriately placed perceivers. Being green, by definition, implies
the capacity to affect perceiving humans under the right conditions in certain ways. By
analogy, moral assertions can be assertions about how things objectively are while depending
essentially on consulting the considered judgments of appropriately placed perceivers. Being
morally wrong implies, on this view, the capacity to affect perceiving humans under the right
conditions in certain ways.
54

d. Can We Know Moral Facts?

For either sort of objectivist approach to morality, it is difficult to explain how people come
to know the moral properties of things. We seem not to be able to know the moral qualities of
things through ordinary sense experience, for example, because the five senses seem only to
tell us how things are in the world, not how they ought to be. Nor can we reason from the
way things are to the way they ought to be, since, as David Hume noted, “is” does not
logically imply an “ought.” Some philosophers, including Hume, have postulated that we
have a special mode of moral perception, analogous to but beyond the five ordinary senses,
which gives us knowledge of moral facts. This proposal is controversial, since it presents
problems for verifying moral perceptions and resolving moral disputes. It is also problematic
as long as it provides no account of how moral perception works. By contrast, we have a
good understanding of the mechanisms underlying our perception of secondary qualities such
as greenness.

Many people assert that it is much less common to get widespread agreement on moral
judgments than on matters of observable, measurable facts. Such an assertion seems to be an
attempt to argue that moral judgments are not objective based on lack of intersubjective
agreement about them. Widespread disagreement does not, however, indicate that there is no
objective fact to be known. There are many examples of widespread disagreement regarding
facts that are clearly objective. For example, there was once widespread disagreement about
whether the universe is expanding or in a “steady state.” That disagreement did not indicate
that there is no objective fact concerning the state of the universe. Thus, widespread
disagreement regarding moral judgments would not, by itself, indicate that there are no
objective moral facts.

This assertion is apparently an attempt to modify the inference from widespread

intersubjective agreement to objective truth. If so, it is mistaken. Assuming that the inference
from intersubjective agreement to probable objective truth is strong, it does not follow that
one can infer from lack of intersubjective agreement to probable subjectivity. As previously
indicated, intersubjective disagreement logically supports the assertion that there is an error
in at least one of the conflicting judgments, but it does not support an assertion of the mere
subjectivity of the matter being judged. Further, the vast areas of near-universal agreement in
moral judgments typically receives too little attention in discussions of the nature of morality.
There are seemingly innumerable moral judgments (e.g., it is wrong to needlessly inflict pain
on a newborn baby) that enjoy nearly universal agreement across cultures and across time
periods. This agreement should, at least prima facie, support an assertion to objectivity as it
does for, say, judgments about the temperature outside.

5. Major Historical Philosophical Theories of Objective Reality

Any serious study of the nature of objectivity and objective knowledge should examine the
central metaphysical and epistemological positions of history’s leading philosophers, as well
as contemporary contributions. The following very brief survey should give readers some
idea of where to get started.

Plato is famous for a distinctive view of objective reality. He asserted roughly that the
greatest reality was not in the ordinary physical objects we sense around us, but in what he
calls Forms, or Ideas. (The Greek term Plato uses resembles the word “idea,” but it is
preferable to call them Forms, for they are not ideas that exist only in a mind, as is suggested
55

in our modern usage of the term “idea.”) Ordinary objects of our sense experience are real,
but the Forms are a “higher reality,” according to Plato. Having the greatest reality, they are
the only truly objective reality, we could say.

Forms are most simply described as the pure essences of things, or the defining
characteristics of things. We see many varied instances of chairs around us, but the essence of
what it is to be a chair is the Form “chair.” Likewise, we see many beautiful things around us,
but the Form “beauty” is the “what it is to be beautiful.” The Form is simply whatever it is
that sets beautiful things apart from everything else.

In epistemology, Plato accordingly distinguishes the highest knowledge as knowledge of the

highest reality, the Forms. Our modern usage of the terms “objective knowledge” and
“objective reality” seem to fit in reasonably well here.

Aristotle, by contrast, identifies the ordinary objects of sense experience as the most objective
reality. He calls them “primary substance.” The forms of things he calls “secondary
substance.” Hence, Aristotle’s metaphysics seems to fit better than Plato’s with our current
understanding of objective reality, but his view of objective knowledge differs somewhat. For
him, objective knowledge is knowledge of the forms, or essences, of things. We can know
individual things objectively, but not perfectly. We can know individuals only during
occurrent perceptual contact with them, but we can know forms perfectly, or timelessly.

Descartes famously emphasized that subjective reality is better known than objective reality,
but knowledge of the objective reality of one’s own existence as a non-physical thinking
thing is nearly as basic, or perhaps as basic, as one’s knowledge of the subjective reality of
one’s own thinking. For Descartes, knowledge seems to start with immediate, indubitable
knowledge of one’s subjective states and proceeds to knowledge of one’s objective existence
as a thinking thing. Cogito, ergo sum (usually translated as “I think, therefore I am”)
expresses this knowledge. All knowledge of realities other than oneself ultimately rests on
this immediate knowledge of one’s own existence as a thinking thing. One’s existence as a
non-physical thinking thing is an objective existence, but it appears that Descartes infers this
existence from the subjective reality of his own thinking. The exact interpretation of his
famous saying is still a matter of some controversy, however, and it may not express an
inference at all.

We have already looked at some of John Locke’s most influential assertions about the nature
of objective reality. Bishop Berkeley followed Locke’s empiricism in epistemology, but put
forth a markedly different view of reality. Berkeley’s Idealism asserts that the only
realities are minds and mental contents. He does, however, have a concept of objective
reality. A table, for example, exists objectively in the mind of God. God creates objective
reality by thinking it and sustains any objective reality, such as the table, only so long as he
continues to think of it. Thus the table exists objectively for us, not just as a fleeting
perception, but as the totality of all possible experiences of it. My particular experience of it
at this moment is a subjective reality, but the table as an objective reality in the mind of God
implies a totality of all possible experiences of it. Berkeley asserts there is no need to
postulate some physical substance underlying all those experiences to be the objective reality
of the table; the totality of possible experiences is adequate.

We have looked briefly at some of Kant’s claims about the nature of objective reality. More
recent philosophy continues these discussions in many directions, some denying objectivity
56

altogether. Detailed discussion of these movements goes beyond the purview of this essay,
but interested readers should specially investigate Hegel’s idealism, as well as succeeding
schools of thought such as phenomenology, existentialism, logical positivism, pragmatism,
deconstructionism, and post-modernism. The philosophy of mind, naturally, also continually
confronts basic questions of subjectivity and objectivity.

6. References and Further Reading

 Alston, William P. “Yes, Virginia, There is a Real World.” Proceedings and Addresses of the
American Philosophical Association 52 (1979): 779-808.
 Descartes, Rene. Meditations (1641). In The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, eds. J.
Cottingham, R. Stoothoff and D. Murdoch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975).
 Kant, Immanuel. Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics (1783). Trans. James W. Ellington
(Indianapolis: Hackett, 1977).
 Locke, John. Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689). Ed. Peter Nidditch (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1975).
 Moser, Paul. Philosophy After Objectivity. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
 Nagel, Thomas. The View From Nowhere. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
 Quine, W. V. Word and Object. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1960).
 Rorty, Richard. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1979).
 Rorty, Richard. Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1991).
 Wright, Crispin. Realism, Meaning, and Truth. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1987).

Author Information

Dwayne H. Mulder
Email: mulderd@sonoma.edu
Sonoma State University
U. S. A.

An objective perspective is one that is not influenced by emotions, opinions, or personal feelings - it
is a perspective based in fact, in things quantifiable and measurable. A subjective perspective is one
open to greater interpretation based on personal feeling, emotion, aesthetics, etc.

What is the difference between objective and subjective? - Quora

https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-objective-and-subjective

Subjectivity is a central philosophical concept, related to consciousness, agency, personhood,

reality, and truth, which has been variously defined by sources. ... Something being a subject,
narrowly meaning an individual who possesses conscious experiences, such as perspectives, feelings,
beliefs, and desires.

Subjectivity - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectivity
57

Subject (philosophy) - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_(philosophy)

Jump to Subjectivity in analytic philosophy - This concept is especially important in

continental philosophy, where 'the Subject' is a central term in debates over human
autonomy and the nature of the self. ... In critical theory and psychology, subjectivity is also
the actions or discourses that produce individuals or 'I'—the 'I' is the subject.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/
4.4 Subjectivity

Subjectivity is another notion sometimes equated with the qualitative or the phenomenal
aspects of consciousness in the literature, but again there are good reason to recognize it, at
least in some of its forms, as a distinct feature of consciousness—related to the qualitative
and the phenomenal but different from each. In particular, the epistemic form of subjectivity
concerns apparent limits on the knowability or even the understandability of various facts
about conscious experience (Nagel 1974, Van Gulick 1985, Lycan 1996).

On Thomas Nagel's (1974) account, facts about what it is like to be a bat are subjective in the
relevant sense because they can be fully understood only from the bat-type point of view.
Only creatures capable of having or undergoing similar such experiences can understand their
what-it's-likeness in the requisite empathetic sense. Facts about conscious experience can be
best incompletely understood from an outside third person point of view, such as those
associated with objective physical science. A similar view about the limits of third-person
theory seems to lie behind claims regarding what Frank Jackson's (1982) hypothetical Mary,
the super color scientist, could not understand about experiencing red because of her own
impoverished history of achromatic visual experience.

Whether facts about experience are indeed epistemically limited in this way is open to debate
(Lycan 1996), but the claim that understanding consciousness requires special forms of
knowing and access from the inside point of view is intuitively plausible and has a long
history (Locke 1688). Thus any adequate answer to the What question must address the
epistemic status of consciousness, both our abilities to understand it and their limits
(Papineau 2002, Chalmers 2003). (See the entry on self-knowledge).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subject_(philosophy)

A subject is a being who has a unique consciousness and/or unique personal experiences, or
an entity that has a relationship with another entity that exists outside of itself (called an
"object"). A subject is an observer and an object is a thing observed. This concept is
especially important in continental philosophy, where 'the Subject' is a central term in debates
over human autonomy and the nature of the self.[citation needed]

The sharp distinction between subject and object corresponds to the distinction, in the
philosophy of René Descartes, between thought and extension. Descartes believed that
thought (subjectivity) was the essence of the mind, and that extension (the occupation of
space) was the essence of matter.[1]
58

In the modern continental tradition, debates over the nature of the Subject play a role
comparable to debates over personhood within the distinct Anglo-American tradition of
analytical philosophy.

In critical theory and psychology, subjectivity is also the actions or discourses that produce
individuals or 'I'—the 'I' is the subject.[citation needed]

Contents

 1 The subject in German idealism

 2 Subjectivity in Continental philosophy
 3 Subjectivity in analytic philosophy
 4 See also
o 4.1 Philosophers
 5 Notes
 6 Bibliography

See also

 Philosophy portal

 Cognitive linguistics
 Ethics and meta-ethics
 Donald Davidson's swamp man thought experiment (in "Knowing One Own's Mind", 1987
paper)
 Michel Foucault's critique of the subject and the oxymoron "Historical subject"
 List of ethics topics
 Moral relativism
 Neo-Kantianism
 Paramatma
 Subjective experience
 Personhood theory
 Soul

Philosophers

 Rudolf Carnap
 Descartes
 Husserl
 David Hume
 C. L. Stevenson
 Søren Kierkegaard
 Daniel Kolak

https://www.jstor.org/stable/185689

Subjectivity in Philosophy
59

Philip Chapin Jones

Philosophy of Science

Vol. 16, No. 1 (Jan., 1949), pp. 49-57

https://physicalspace.wordpress.com/human-subjectivity/

Human Subjectivity

We are starting our enquiry from the premise that everything in the universe responds to a
universal order which is independent from our thought (see metaphysics). Nature is a
physical order in an objective physical reality. It is in the physical world, which is both
external and immanent to us, where we find the elements that reflect the invariable,
transcendent, unitary and universal qualities of Nature (these, in contrast to the elements of
thought, imagination or fancy which are subjective, circumstantial and transitory
constructions of our mind).

The problem is that the physical world is not immediately known to us. The world that we
know, is the world that appears to us from perception and that we integrate through
conception. So we live in two worlds. One is the objective real world, and the other is our
subjective mental world.

Our mental world is subjective in many ways. The main ones are:
. Human natural subjectivity
. Cultural subjectivity
. Personal subjectivity
. and Developmental subjectivity

. Natural subjectivity is related to the subjectivity inherent to our human nature. We didn’t
evolve to see the world objectively, but we evolved to satisfy a nature of self-preservation;
and our interpretation of the world adjusts to this nature. There are two forms of natural
subjectivity: subjectivity on our perception and subjectivity on our conception.
. Cultural subjectivity is related to the subjectivity on the values, ideals and beliefs that
we learn from others. These change in time, and differ among social groups, like among
nations, social classes or family groups.
. Personal subjectivity is related to the subjectivity of world views that adjust to our
individual needs, inclinations and personalities.
. and Developmental subjectivity is related to the unique learning experiences that we have in
life. (developing and changing during stages of development of the individual)

(AND – what about the development of the species, socio-culturally as well?)

Each one of us live in a world of our own; with our own beliefs, values, joys, problems and
priorities. What is important for one is irrelevant for another. What is truthful for one is false
for another. And what is inspiring for one is indifferent for another. Yet, we all exist in the
same objective reality. We might conceive, value and appreciate it in different ways. But
independently of our thought, the world is one and the same for us all.
60

We are confined, by nature, to see the world from a subjective point of view. But subjectivity
is relative. Some point of views are more subjective than others. More objective point of
views are more independent from culture, character, the particularities of development and
our nature of self-preservation. In other words, more objective point of views are more
independent from place and time. They are points of views that adjust better to the
universal and invariable reality of the world. Objectivity is not given to us by nature, but it
can only be gained through a developmental process (for more on this subject see The
relativity of truth).

Human natural subjectivity

 Perception
 Conception
 Three common definitions include that subjectivity is the quality or condition of: Something
being a subject, narrowly meaning an individual who possesses conscious experiences, such
as perspectives, feelings, beliefs, and desires.

 Subjectivity - Wikipedia
 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subjectivity

http://metapsychology.mentalhelp.net/poc/view_doc.php?type=book&id=2716

Self and Subjectivity is a collection of seminal essays with commentary that traces the development
of conceptions of 'self' and 'subjectivity' in European and Anglo-American philosophical traditions,
including feminist scholarship, from Descartes to the present.

Kim Atkins, the editor of the book Self and Subjectivity is herself one of the leading
figures and a central force in the philosophical discussions of the subjectivity. This collection
of seminal essays with commentaries traces the development of conceptions of "self" and
"subjectivity" in European and Anglo-American philosophical traditions, including feminist
scholarship, from Descartes to the present. It starts with Descartes' account of self-
consciousness in the Meditations which represents the rise of the philosophy of the subject
and continues with texts from both analytic and continental thinkers covering topics such as
its crisis in post-modernity and the re-articulation of selfhood, agency and personal identity in
very recent times.

The volume features essays by almost all prominent philosophers in the field such as
Descartes, Hume, Locke, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger,
Strawson, Frankfurt, Shoemaker, Williams, Parfit, Freud, Foucault, Ricoeur, de Beauvoir,
Butler, Irigaray and Mackenzie. A common theme in the accounts of subjectivity in this
collection is the idea that the reflective activity constitutive of philosophy must be grounded
in one way or another, for example, in God, spirit, nature, society, body, the brain or some
combination of these. The different conceptions of the grounds of self-reflection accordingly
emphasize different aspects and give rise to different kinds of questions.

Kim Atkins aptly thinks that "our contemporary ideas concerning self and subjectivity
stem from Descartes' problematic description of the human situation in terms of both natural
philosophy and rationalism... Descartes' characterization of the human subject in terms of the
mutual exclusivity of matter and thought was expressive of his twin commitments: science
61

and religion. Consequently, the history of the philosophy of subjectivity is also the history of
the negotiation of these twin concerns" (p. 2). She organizes the selection of essays
accordingly, in six chapters, the first two of which are devoted early and later modern
philosophy, third is phenomenology and existentialism, fourth is analytic philosophy, fifth is
post-structuralism and the last is feminist philosophy.

Descartes regards subjectivity as the direct expression of God, and consequently his is
a philosophy oriented to questions of truth and perception. Locke puts science, in the form of
empiricism, to the service of God via an account of personal identity shaped around moral
responsibility. Hume, taking up Locke's empiricism, tries to dispense with God once and for
all, only to fall prey to skepticism, and in doing so, provides the opportunity for Kant to play
the ball straight into God's court through his idea of the noumenal self.

Atkins' selection of essays constitutive of continental philosophy tends to encompass a

broad range of metaphysical outlooks, from the theologically informed views of Hegel,
Heidegger and Ricoeur, to emphatically atheistic, romantically influenced accounts of
Nietzsche, Freud and Foucault. Philosophers in the phenomenological tradition such as
Beauvoir, Merleau-Ponty and Butler highlight the active powers of embodiment in
structuring perception and consciousness. The insights and implications of this view have
only recently infiltrated analytical philosophy, but promise a productive encounter.

Whether one is oriented to philosophy by way of conceptual analysis or a descriptive

philosophy, or both, one cannot avoid a direct confrontation with the question of subjectivity
within moral philosophy. Typically this concerns questions of moral responsibility and
autonomy, represented in this collection by Frankfurt and Mackenzie.

This collection offers a diverse range of historical and philosophical sources, and
promises to provide useful for understanding current as well as past controversies pertaining
to those most troublesome of creatures: persons, subjects, and selves. It provides a
comprehensive, accessible and high-quality text that introduces the reader to various ideas of
self and subjectivity in relation to their historical, ethical, epistemological and metaphysical
contexts.

What makes this book a really invaluable and useful text for students and teachers
across a range of disciplines from philosophy to human sciences is Kim Atkins' informative,
clear and concise commentaries on each essay. An intelligent and informative general reader
may go through the essays especially with the help of the useful commentaries of Tim Atkins.
But, I believe, it should be noted that since the selection contains only the extracts from the
works of prominent philosophers in the field, even with very useful introductions of Kim
Atkins, its scope is nevertheless limited to teachers, researchers and students who are
acquainted with the ideas and theories of these philosophers.  

© 2005 Kamuran Godelek

 Kamuran Godelek, Ph.D., Mersin University, Department of Philosophy, Mersin, TURKEY

RATIONALE for, FUNCTIONS of INTERSUBJECTIVITY

62

First of all a clarification – all the following topics deal with human beings and
(aspects of) their reality or realities. This may appear anthropocentric. I am not
a follower of anthropocentrism, but in the discussion of certain topics that point
of reference is unavoidable. For example when we deal with social, cultural and
other human created, maintained and practiced domains and socio-cultural
practices it is not possible to avoid anthropocentrism. I merely describe that
what I come across and do not attempt to affirm the ‘truth’ of anthropocentrism.
I am fully aware of movements such as speculative realism, object oriented
philosophy, etc.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropocentrism Anthropocentrism
(/ˌænθroʊpoʊˈsɛntrɪzəm/;[1] from Greek Ancient Greek: ἄνθρωπος, ánthrōpos, "human
being"; and Ancient Greek: κέντρον , kéntron, "center") the belief that considers human
beings to be the most significant entity of the universe and interprets or regards the world in
terms of human values and experiences.[2] The term can be used interchangeably with
humanocentrism, and some refer to the concept as human supremacy or human
exceptionalism. The mediocrity principle is the opposite of anthropocentrism.
Anthropocentrism is considered to be profoundly embedded in many modern human cultures
and conscious acts. It is a major concept in the field of environmental ethics and
environmental philosophy, where it is often considered to be the root cause of problems
created by human action within the ecosphere.

However, many proponents of anthropocentrism state that this is not necessarily the case:
they argue that a sound long-term view acknowledges that a healthy, sustainable environment
is necessary for humans and that the real issue is shallow anthropocentrism.[3][4]

Contents

 1 Origins
 2 Environmental philosophy
 3 Judeo-Christian tradition
 4 Human rights
 5 In popular culture
 6 See also
 7 References

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speculative_realism

Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary philosophy that defines itself loosely in

its stance of metaphysical realism against the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy (or
what it terms correlationism[1]). Speculative realism takes its name from a conference held at
Goldsmiths College, University of London in April 2007.[2] The conference was moderated
by Alberto Toscano of Goldsmiths College, and featured presentations by Ray Brassier of
American University of Beirut (then at Middlesex University), Iain Hamilton Grant of the
University of the West of England, Graham Harman of the American University in Cairo, and
Quentin Meillassoux of the École Normale Supérieure in Paris. Credit for the name
"speculative realism" is generally ascribed to Brassier,[3] though Meillassoux had already used
the term "speculative materialism" to describe his own position.[4]
63

A second conference, entitled "Speculative Realism/Speculative Materialism", took place at

the UWE Bristol on Friday 24 April 2009, two years after the original event at Goldsmiths.[5]
The line-up consisted of Ray Brassier, Iain Hamilton Grant, Graham Harman, and (in place
of Meillassoux, who was unable to attend) Alberto Toscano.[6]

Contents

 1 Critique of correlationism

 While often in disagreement over basic philosophical issues, the speculative realist
thinkers have a shared resistance to philosophies of human finitude inspired by the
tradition of Immanuel Kant.
 What unites the four core members of the movement is an attempt to overcome both
"correlationism"[7] and "philosophies of access". In After Finitude, Meillassoux
defines correlationism as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the
correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart
from the other."[8] Philosophies of access are any of those philosophies which
privilege the human being over other entities. Both ideas represent forms of
anthropocentrism.
 All four of the core thinkers within Speculative Realism work to overturn these forms
of philosophy which privilege the human being, favouring distinct forms of realism
against the dominant forms of idealism in much of contemporary philosophy.

 2 Variations
o 2.1 Speculative materialism

 In his critique of correlationism, Quentin Meillassoux finds two principles as the

locus of Kant's philosophy. The first of these is the Principle of Correlation itself,
which claims essentially that we can only know the correlate of Thought and Being,
that is to say, that what lies outside that correlate is unknowable. The second is termed
by Meillassoux the Principle of Factiality, which states that things could be otherwise
than what they are. This principle is upheld by Kant in his defence of the thing-in-
itself as unknowable but imaginable. We can imagine reality as being fundamentally
different even if we never know such a reality. According to Meillassoux, the defence
of both principles leads to "weak" correlationism (such as those of Kant and Husserl),
while the rejection of the thing-in-itself leads to the "strong" correlationism of
thinkers such as Wittgenstein and Heidegger. For such "strong" correlationists, it
makes no sense to suppose that there is anything outside of the correlate of Thought
and Being, and so the Principle of Factiality is eliminated in favour of a strengthened
Principle of Correlation.
 Meillassoux follows the opposite tactic in rejecting the Principle of Correlation for the
sake of a bolstered Principle of Factiality in his post-Kantian return to Hume. By
arguing in favour of such a principle, Meillassoux is led to reject the necessity not
only of all physical laws of nature, but all logical laws with the exception of the
Principle of Non-Contradiction (since eliminating the Principle of Non-Contradiction
would undermine the Principle of Factiality which claims that things can always be
otherwise than what they are). By rejecting the Principle of Sufficient Reason, there
can be no justification for the necessity of physical laws, meaning that while the
universe may be ordered in such and such a way, there is no reason it could not be
otherwise. Meillassoux rejects the Kantian a priori in favour of a Humean a priori,
64

claiming that the lesson to be learned from Hume on the subject of causality is that
"the same cause may actually bring about 'a hundred different events' (and even many
more)."[9]
o
o 2.2 Object-oriented philosophy

 The central tenet of object-oriented ontology (OOO) is that objects have been
neglected in philosophy in favor of a "radical philosophy" that tries to "undermine"
objects by saying that objects are simply superficial crusts to a deeper underlying
reality, either in the form of monism or a perpetual flux, or those that try to
"overmine" objects by saying that the idea of a whole object is a form of folk
ontology. According to Harman, everything is an object, whether it be a mailbox,
electromagnetic radiation, curved spacetime, the Commonwealth of Nations, or a
propositional attitude; all things, whether physical or fictional, are equally objects.
Expressing strong sympathy for panpsychism, Harman proposes a new philosophical
discipline called "speculative psychology" dedicated to investigating the "cosmic
layers of psyche" and "ferreting out the specific psychic reality of earthworms, dust,
armies, chalk, and stone".[10]
 Harman defends a version of the Aristotelian notion of substance. Unlike Leibniz, for
whom there were both substances and aggregates, Harman maintains that when
objects combine, they create new objects. In this way, he defends an a priori
metaphysics that claims that reality is made up only of objects and that there is no
"bottom" to the series of objects. For Harman, an object is in itself an infinite recess,
unknowable and inaccessible by any other thing. This leads to his account of what he
terms "vicarious causality". Inspired by the occasionalists of Medieval Islamic
Philosophy, Harman maintains that no two objects can ever interact save through the
mediation of a "sensual vicar".[11] There are two types of objects, then, for Harman:
real objects and the sensual objects that allow for interaction. The former are the
things of everyday life, while the latter are the caricatures that mediate interaction.
For example, when fire burns cotton, Harman argues that the fire does not touch the
essence of that cotton which is inexhaustible by any relation, but that the interaction is
mediated by a caricature of the cotton which causes it to burn.
o
o 2.3 Transcendental materialism / neo-vitalism

 Iain Hamilton Grant argues against what he terms "somatism", the philosophy and
physics of bodies. In his Philosophies of Nature After Schelling, Grant tells a new
history of philosophy from Plato onward based on the definition of matter. Aristotle
distinguished between Form and Matter in such a way that Matter was invisible to
philosophy, whereas Grant argues for a return to the Platonic Matter as not only the
basic building blocks of reality, but the forces and powers that govern our reality. He
traces this same argument to the post-Kantian German Idealists Johann Gottlieb
Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, claiming that the distinction between
Matter as substantive versus useful fiction persists to this day and that we should end
our attempts to overturn Plato and instead attempt to overturn Kant and return to
"speculative physics" in the Platonic tradition, that is, not a physics of bodies, but a
"physics of the All".
 Eugene Thacker has examined how the concept of "life itself" is both determined
within regional philosophy and also how "life itself" comes to acquire metaphysical
properties. Thacker's book After Life shows how the ontology of life operates by way
65

of a split between "Life" and "the living," making possible a "metaphysical

displacement" in which life is thought via another metaphysical term, such as time,
form, or spirit: "Every ontology of life thinks of life in terms of something-other-than-
life...that something-other-than-life is most often a metaphysical concept, such as time
and temporality, form and causality, or spirit and immanence"[12] Thacker traces this
theme from Aristotle, to Scholasticism and mysticism/negative theology, to Spinoza
and Kant, showing how this three-fold displacement is also alive in philosophy today
(life as time in process philosophy and Deleuzianism, life as form in biopolitical
thought, life as spirit in post-secular philosophies of religion). Thacker examines the
relation of speculative realism to the ontology of life, arguing for a "vitalist
correlation": "Let us say that a vitalist correlation is one that fails to conserve the
correlationist dual necessity of the separation and inseparability of thought and object,
self and world, and which does so based on some ontologized notion of 'life'.[13]
Ultimately Thacker argues for a skepticism regarding "life": "Life is not only a
problem of philosophy, but a problem for philosophy.[12]
 Other thinkers have emerged within this group, united in their allegiance to what has
been known as "process philosophy", rallying around such thinkers as Schelling,
Bergson, Whitehead, and Deleuze, among others. A recent example is found in Steven
Shaviro's book Without Criteria: Kant, Whitehead, Deleuze, and Aesthetics, which
argues for a process-based approach that entails panpsychism as much as it does
vitalism or animism. For Shaviro, it is Whitehead's philosophy of prehensions and
nexus that offers the best combination of continental and analytical philosophy.
Another recent example is found in Jane Bennett's book Vibrant Matter,[14] which
argues for a shift from human relations to things, to a "vibrant matter" that cuts across
the living and non-living, human bodies and non-human bodies. Leon Niemoczynski,
in his book 'Charles Sanders Peirce and a Religious Metaphysics of Nature,' invokes
what he calls "speculative naturalism" so as to argue that nature can afford lines of
insight into its own infinitely productive "vibrant" ground, which he identifies as
natura naturans.
o
o 2.4 Transcendental nihilism / methodological naturalism
o In Nihil Unbound: Extinction and Enlightenment, Ray Brassier maintains that
philosophy has avoided the traumatic idea of extinction, instead attempting to find
meaning in a world conditioned by the very idea of its own annihilation. Thus
Brassier critiques both the phenomenological and hermeneutic strands of
continental philosophy as well as the vitality of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze, who
work to ingrain meaning in the world and stave off the "threat" of nihilism. Instead,
drawing on thinkers such as Alain Badiou, François Laruelle, Paul Churchland, and
Thomas Metzinger, Brassier defends a view of the world as inherently devoid of
meaning. That is, rather than avoiding nihilism, Brassier embraces it as the truth of
reality. Brassier concludes from his readings of Badiou and Laruelle that the universe
is founded on the nothing,[15] but also that philosophy is the "organon of extinction,"
that it is only because life is conditioned by its own extinction that there is thought
at all.[16] Brassier then defends a radically anti-correlationist philosophy proposing
that Thought is conjoined not with Being, but with Non-Being.
 3 Controversy regarding the existence of a speculative realist "movement"
 4 Publications
 Speculative Realism has close ties to the journal Collapse, which published the proceedings
of the inaugural conference at Goldsmiths and has featured numerous other articles by
'speculative realist' thinkers; as has the academic journal Pli, which is edited and produced
by members of the Graduate School of the Department of Philosophy at the University of
66

Warwick. The journal Speculations, founded in 2010 published by Punctum books, regularly
features articles related to Speculative Realism. Edinburgh University Press publishes a book
series called Speculative Realism.
 5 Internet presence
 6 See also
 7 References
 8 External links

 Pierre-Alexandre Fradet and Tristan Garcia (eds.), issue "Réalisme spéculatif", in Spirale, no 255,
winter 2016 -- introduction here :
"https://www.academia.edu/20381265/With_Tristan_Garcia_Petit_panorama_du_réalisme_spécula
tif_in_Spirale_num._255_winter_2016_p._27-30_online_http_magazine-spirale.com_dossier-
magazine_petit-panorama-du-realisme-speculatif

 Collapse – a journal featuring contributions by "speculative realists"

 Quentin Meillassoux in English at the Speculative Realism Conference Recording of Quentin

Meillassoux's lecture in English at the inaugural Speculative Realism conference

 The Speculative Realism Pathfinder

  Post-Continental Voices - an edited collection of interviews that contains interviews with

speculative realists

Critique of correlationism

While often in disagreement over basic philosophical issues, the speculative realist thinkers
have a shared resistance to philosophies of human finitude inspired by the tradition of
Immanuel Kant.

What unites the four core members of the movement is an attempt to overcome both
"correlationism"[7] and "philosophies of access". In After Finitude, Meillassoux defines
correlationism as "the idea according to which we only ever have access to the correlation
between thinking and being, and never to either term considered apart from the other."[8]
Philosophies of access are any of those philosophies which privilege the human being over
other entities. Both ideas represent forms of anthropocentrism.

All four of the core thinkers within Speculative Realism work to overturn these forms of
philosophy which privilege the human being, favouring distinct forms of realism against the
dominant forms of idealism in much of contemporary philosophy.

Variations

While sharing in the goal of overturning the dominant strands of post-Kantian thought in both
Continental and Analytic schools of philosophy, there are important differences separating the
core members of the Speculative Realist movement and their followers.

So to return to my own discussion. I wish to mention a few domains, fields,

an phenomena that are related to, affected by or constituted, maintained and
developed by some form of intersubjectivity or intersubjective agreements.
67

One of the things that are enabled, maintained and developed by agreements
between subjects (although ‘individual subjects’ and ‘objects’ could play major
or minor roles in their creation, maintenance, development and transformation)
is ‘language’.

As a noun - the method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the
use of words in a structured and conventional way.

"a study of the way children learn language"

 any nonverbal method of expression or communication.

"a language of gesture and facial expression"

speech, writing, communication, conversation, speaking, talking, talk, discourse;

More
synonyms: words, vocabulary

"the structure of language"

 2.
the system of communication used by a particular community or country.

"the book was translated into twenty-five languages"

tongue, mother tongue, native tongue;

dialect, patois, slang, idiom, jargon, argot, cant;

synonyms:
informallingo

"the English language"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language

A mural in Teotihuacan, Mexico (c. 2nd century) depicting a person emitting a speech scroll from his
mouth, symbolizing speech
68

Cuneiform is the first known form of written language, but spoken language predates writing by at
least tens of thousands of years.

Two girls learning American Sign Language

Braille writing, a tactile variant of a writing system

Language is the ability to acquire and use complex systems of communication, particularly
the human ability to do so, and a language is
69

any specific example of such a system. The scientific study of language is called linguistics.
Questions concerning the philosophy of language, such as whether words can represent
experience, have been debated since Gorgias and Plato in Ancient Greece. Thinkers such as
Rousseau have argued that language originated from emotions while others like Kant have
held that it originated from rational and logical thought. (Mere speculation) 20th-century
philosophers such as Wittgenstein argued that philosophy is really the study of language.
Major figures in linguistics include Ferdinand de Saussure and Noam Chomsky.

Estimates of the number of languages in the world vary between 5,000 and 7,000. However,
any precise estimate depends on a partly arbitrary distinction between languages and dialects.
Natural languages are spoken or signed, but any language can be encoded into secondary
media using auditory, visual, or tactile stimuli – for example, in whistling, signed, or
braille. This is because human language is modality-independent. Depending on
philosophical perspectives regarding the definition of language and meaning, when used as a
general concept, "language" may refer to the cognitive ability to learn and use systems of
complex communication, or to describe the set of rules that makes up these systems, or the
set of utterances that can be produced from those rules. All languages rely on the process of
semiosis to relate signs to particular meanings. Oral, manual and tactile languages contain
a phonological system that governs how symbols are used to form sequences known as
words or morphemes, and a syntactic system that governs how words and morphemes are
combined to form phrases and utterances.

Human language has the properties of productivity and displacement, and relies entirely on
social convention and learning.(This is or are the insubjective aspect/s I wish to emphasize
concerning language.) Its complex structure affords a much wider range of expressions than
any known system of animal communication. Language is thought to have originated when
early hominins started gradually changing their primate communication systems, acquiring
the ability to form a theory of other minds and a shared intentionality.[1][2] This development
is sometimes thought to have coincided with an increase in brain volume, and many linguists
see the structures of language as having evolved to serve specific communicative and social
functions. (intersubjective). Language is processed in many different locations in the
human brain, but especially in Broca's and Wernicke's areas. Humans acquire language
through social interaction in early childhood, and children generally speak fluently when they
are approximately three years old. The use of language is deeply entrenched in human
culture. Therefore, in addition to its strictly communicative uses, language also has many
social and cultural uses, such as signifying group identity, social stratification, as well as
social grooming and entertainment.

Languages evolve and diversify over time, and the history of their evolution can be
reconstructed by comparing modern languages to determine which traits their ancestral
languages must have had in order for the later developmental stages to occur. A group of
languages that descend from a common ancestor is known as a language family. The Indo-
European family is the most widely spoken and includes languages as diverse as English,
Russian and Hindi; the Sino-Tibetan family, which includes Mandarin and the other Chinese
languages, and Tibetan; the Afro-Asiatic family, which includes Arabic, Somali, and
Hebrew; the Bantu languages, which include Swahili, and Zulu, and hundreds of other
languages spoken throughout Africa; and the Malayo-Polynesian languages, which include
Indonesian, Malay, Tagalog, and hundreds of other languages spoken throughout the Pacific.
The languages of the Dravidian family that are spoken mostly in Southern India include
Tamil and Telugu. Academic consensus holds that between 50% and 90% of languages
70

spoken at the beginning of the 21st century will probably have become extinct by the year
2100.

Contents

 1 Definitions
o 1.1 Mental faculty, organ or instinct
o 1.2 Formal symbolic system
o 1.3 Tool for communication
o 1.4 Unique status of human language
 2 Origin
 3 Study
o 3.1 Subdisciplines

 The study of language, linguistics, has been developing into a science since the first
grammatical descriptions of particular languages in India more than 2000 years ago,
after the development of the Brahmi script. Modern linguistics is a science that
concerns itself with all aspects of language, examining it from all of the theoretical
viewpoints described above.[36]
 Subdisciplines

 The academic study of language is conducted within many different disciplinary areas
and from different theoretical angles, all of which inform modern approaches to
linguistics. For example, descriptive linguistics examines the grammar of single
languages, theoretical linguistics develops theories on how best to conceptualize and
define the nature of language based on data from the various extant human languages,
sociolinguistics studies how languages are used for social purposes informing in
turn the study of the social functions of language and grammatical description,
neurolinguistics studies how language is processed in the human brain and allows the
experimental testing of theories, computational linguistics builds on theoretical and
descriptive linguistics to construct computational models of language often aimed at
processing natural language or at testing linguistic hypotheses, and historical
linguistics relies on grammatical and lexical descriptions of languages to trace their
individual histories and reconstruct trees of language families by using the
comparative method.[37]
o
o 3.2 Early history
o 3.3 Contemporary linguistics
 4 Physiological and neural architecture of language and speech
o 4.1 The brain
o 4.2 Anatomy of speech
 5 Structure
o 5.1 Semantics
o 5.2 Sounds and symbols
o 5.3 Grammar
 5.3.1 Grammatical categories
 5.3.2 Word classes
 5.3.3 Morphology
 5.3.4 Syntax
o 5.4 Typology and universals
71

 6 Social contexts of use and transmission

o 6.1 Usage and meaning
o 6.2 Acquisition
o 6.3 Culture
o 6.4 Writing, literacy and technology
o 6.5 Change
o 6.6 Contact
 7 Linguistic diversity
o 7.1 Languages and dialects
o 7.2 Language families of the world
o 7.3 Language endangerment
 8 See also
 9 Notes
o 9.1 Commentary notes
o 9.2 Citations
 10 Works cited
 11 External links

 The English word language derives ultimately from Proto-Indo-European

*dn̥ǵʰwéh₂s "tongue, speech, language" through Latin lingua, "language; tongue",
and Old French language.[3] The word is sometimes used to refer to codes, ciphers,
and other kinds of artificially constructed communication systems such as formally
defined computer languages used for computer programming. Unlike conventional
human languages, a formal language in this sense is a system of signs for encoding
and decoding information. This article specifically concerns the properties of natural
human language as it is studied in the discipline of linguistics.
 As an object of linguistic study, "language" has two primary meanings: an abstract
concept, and a specific linguistic system, e.g. "French". The Swiss linguist Ferdinand
de Saussure, who defined the modern discipline of linguistics, first explicitly
formulated the distinction using the French word langage for language as a concept,
langue as a specific instance of a language system, and parole for the concrete usage
of speech in a particular language.[4]
 When speaking of language as a general concept, definitions can be used which stress
different aspects of the phenomenon.[5] These definitions also entail different
approaches and understandings of language, and they inform different and often
incompatible schools of linguistic theory.[6] Debates about the nature and origin of
language go back to the ancient world. Greek philosophers such as Gorgias and Plato
debated the relation between words, concepts and reality. Gorgias argued that
language could represent neither the objective experience nor human experience, and
that communication and truth were therefore impossible. Plato maintained that
communication is possible because language represents ideas and concepts that exist
independently of, and prior to, language.[7](Perhaps prior to individuals that must still
acquire it? Where did ideas and conxcepts exist prior to language? Metaphysically
prior or merely prior in time before conceptualized and verbalized?)
 During the Enlightenment and its debates about human origins, it became fashionable
to speculate about the origin of language. Thinkers such as Rousseau and Herder
argued that language had originated in the instinctive expression of emotions, and that
it was originally closer to music and poetry than to the logical expression of rational
thought. Rationalist philosophers such as Kant and Descartes held the opposite view.
Around the turn of the 20th century, thinkers began to wonder about the role of
72

language in shaping our experiences of the world – asking whether language simply
reflects the objective structure of the world, or whether it creates concepts that it in
turn imposes on our experience of the objective world. This led to the question of
whether philosophical problems are really firstly linguistic problems. The resurgence
of the view that language plays a significant role in the creation and circulation of
concepts, and that the study of philosophy is essentially the study of language, is
associated with what has been called the linguistic turn and philosophers such as
Wittgenstein in 20th-century philosophy. These debates about language in relation to
meaning and reference, cognition and consciousness remain active today.[8]
 Mental faculty, organ or instinct

 One definition sees language primarily as the mental faculty that allows humans to
undertake linguistic behaviour: to learn languages and to produce and understand
utterances. This definition stresses the universality of language to all humans, and it
emphasizes the biological basis for the human capacity for language as a unique
development of the human brain. Proponents of the view that the drive to language
acquisition is innate in humans argue that this is supported by the fact that all
cognitively normal children raised in an environment where language is accessible
will acquire language without formal instruction. Languages may even develop
spontaneously in environments where people live or grow up together without a
common language; for example, creole languages and spontaneously developed sign
languages such as Nicaraguan Sign Language. This view, which can be traced back to
the philosophers Kant and Descartes, understands language to be largely innate, for
example, in Chomsky's theory of Universal Grammar, or American philosopher Jerry
Fodor's extreme innatist theory. These kinds of definitions are often applied in studies
of language within a cognitive science framework and in neurolinguistics.[9][10]
 Formal symbolic system

 Another definition sees language as a formal system of signs governed by

grammatical rules of combination to communicate meaning. This definition stresses
that human languages can be described as closed structural systems consisting of
rules that relate particular signs to particular meanings.[11] This structuralist view of
language was first introduced by Ferdinand de Saussure,[12] and his structuralism
remains foundational for many approaches to language.[13]
 Some proponents of Saussure's view of language have advocated a formal approach
which studies language structure by identifying its basic elements and then by
presenting a formal account of the rules according to which the elements combine in
order to form words and sentences. The main proponent of such a theory is Noam
Chomsky, the originator of the generative theory of grammar, who has defined
language as the construction of sentences that can be generated using transformational
grammars.[14] Chomsky considers these rules to be an innate feature of the human
mind and to constitute the rudiments of what language is.[15] By way of contrast, such
transformational grammars are also commonly used to provide formal definitions of
language are commonly used in formal logic, in formal theories of grammar, and in
applied computational linguistics.[16][17] In the philosophy of language, the view of
linguistic meaning as residing in the logical relations between propositions and reality
was developed by philosophers such as Alfred Tarski, Bertrand Russell, and other
formal logicians.
73

 Tool for communication

 Yet another definition sees language as a system of communication that enables

humans to exchange verbal or symbolic utterances. This definition stresses the social
functions of language and the fact that humans use it to express themselves and to
manipulate objects in their environment. Functional theories of grammar explain
grammatical structures by their communicative functions, and understand the
grammatical structures of language to be the result of an adaptive process by which
grammar was "tailored" to serve the communicative needs of its users.[18][19]
 This view of language is associated with the study of language in pragmatic,
cognitive, and interactive frameworks, as well as in sociolinguistics and linguistic
anthropology. Functionalist theories tend to study grammar as dynamic phenomena,
as structures that are always in the process of changing as they are employed by their
speakers. This view places importance on the study of linguistic typology, or the
classification of languages according to structural features, as it can be shown that
processes of grammaticalization tend to follow trajectories that are partly dependent
on typology.[17] In the philosophy of language, the view of pragmatics as being central
to language and meaning is often associated with Wittgenstein's later works and with
ordinary language philosophers such as J. L. Austin, Paul Grice, John Searle, and W.
O. Quine.[20]
 Unique status of human language
 Main articles: Animal language and Great ape language

 Human language is unique in comparison to other forms of communication, such as

those used by non-human animals. Communication systems used by other animals
such as bees or apes are closed systems that consist of a finite, usually very limited,
number of possible ideas that can be expressed.[21]
 In contrast, human language is open-ended and productive, meaning that it allows
humans to produce a vast range of utterances from a finite set of elements, and to
create new words and sentences. This is possible because human language is based
on a dual code, in which a finite number of elements which are meaningless in
themselves (e.g. sounds, letters or gestures) can be combined to form an almost
infinite number of larger units of meaning (words and sentences).[22] Furthermore,
the symbols and grammatical rules of any particular language are largely arbitrary, so
that the system can only be acquired through social interaction.[23] The known
systems of communication used by animals, on the other hand, can only express a
finite number of utterances that are mostly genetically determined.[24]
 Several species of animals have proved to be able to acquire forms of communication
through social learning: for instance a bonobo named Kanzi learned to express itself
using a set of symbolic lexigrams. Similarly, many species of birds and whales learn
their songs by imitating other members of their species. However, while some animals
may acquire large numbers of words and symbols,[note 1] none have been able to learn
as many different signs as are generally known by an average 4 year old human, nor
have any acquired anything resembling the complex grammar of human language.[25]
 Human languages also differ from animal communication systems in that they employ
grammatical and semantic categories, such as noun and verb, present and past, which
may be used to express exceedingly complex meanings.[25] Human language is also
unique in having the property of recursivity: for example, a noun phrase can contain
another noun phrase (as in "[[the chimpanzee]'s lips]") or a clause can contain another
74

clause (as in "[I see [the dog is running]]").[2] Human language is also the only known
natural communication system whose adaptability may be referred to as modality
independent. This means that it can be used not only for communication through one
channel or medium, but through several. For example, spoken language uses the
auditive modality, whereas sign languages and writing use the visual modality, and
braille writing uses the tactile modality.[26]
 Human language is also unique in being able to refer to abstract concepts and to
imagined or hypothetical events as well as events that took place in the past or may
happen in the future. This ability to refer to events that are not at the same time or
place as the speech event is called displacement, and while some animal
communication systems can use displacement (such as the communication of bees
that can communicate the location of sources of nectar that are out of sight), the
degree to which it is used in human language is also considered unique.[22]
 Origin
 Main articles: Origin of language and Origin of speech
 See also: Proto-Human language

Humans have speculated about the origins of language throughout history. The Biblical myth
of the Tower of Babel is one such account; other cultures have different stories of how
language arose.[27]

 Theories about the origin of language differ in regard to their basic assumptions about
what language is. Some theories are based on the idea that language is so complex
that one cannot imagine it simply appearing from nothing in its final form, but that it
must have evolved from earlier pre-linguistic systems among our pre-human
ancestors. These theories can be called continuity-based theories. The opposite
viewpoint is that language is such a unique human trait that it cannot be compared to
anything found among non-humans and that it must therefore have appeared suddenly
in the transition from pre-hominids to early man. (and the transition from pre-
hominids to early man was sudden, overnight? Ha ha) These theories can be defined
as discontinuity-based. Similarly, theories based on Chomsky's generative view of
language see language mostly as an innate faculty that is largely genetically encoded,
whereas functionalist theories see it as a system that is largely cultural, learned
through social interaction.[28]
 One prominent proponent of a discontinuity-based theory of human language origins
is linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky.[28] Chomsky proposes that "some random
mutation took place, maybe after some strange cosmic ray shower, and it reorganized
the brain, implanting a language organ in an otherwise primate brain."[29] (lol!!)
Though cautioning against taking this story too literally, Chomsky insists that "it may
be closer to reality than many other fairy tales that are told about evolutionary
processes, including language."[29]
 Continuity-based theories are held by a majority of scholars, but they vary in how
they envision this development. Those who see language as being mostly innate, for
example psychologist Steven Pinker, hold the precedents to be animal cognition,[10]
whereas those who see language as a socially learned tool of communication, such as
psychologist Michael Tomasello, see it as having developed from animal
communication in primates: either gestural or vocal communication to assist in
cooperation.[24] Other continuity-based models see language as having developed from
music, a view already espoused by Rousseau, Herder, Humboldt, and Charles Darwin.
75

A prominent proponent of this view is archaeologist Steven Mithen.[30] Stephen

Anderson states that the age of spoken languages is estimated at 60,000 to 100,000
years[31] and that:
 Researchers on the evolutionary origin of language generally find it plausible to
suggest that language was invented only once, and that all modern spoken languages
are thus in some way related, even if that relation can no longer be recovered ...
because of limitations on the methods available for reconstruction.[32]
 Because language emerged in the early prehistory of man, before the existence of any
written records, its early development has left no historical traces, and it is believed
that no comparable processes can be observed today. Theories that stress continuity
often look at animals to see if, for example, primates display any traits that can be
seen as analogous to what pre-human language must have been like. And early human
fossils can be inspected for traces of physical adaptation to language use or pre-
linguistic forms of symbolic behaviour. Among the signs in human fossils that may
suggest linguistic abilities are: the size of the brain relative to body mass, the presence
of a larynx capable of advanced sound production and the nature of tools and other
manufactured artifacts.[33]
 It is mostly undisputed that pre-human australopithecines did not have communication
systems significantly different from those found in great apes in general, but scholarly
opinions vary as to the developments since the appearance of the genus Homo some
2.5 million years ago. Some scholars assume the development of primitive language-
like systems (proto-language) as early as Homo habilis (2.3 million years ago) while
others place the development of primitive symbolic communication only with Homo
erectus (1.8 million years ago) or Homo heidelbergensis (0.6 million years ago), and
the development of language proper with Anatomically Modern Homo sapiens with
the Upper Paleolithic revolution less than 100,000 years ago.[34][35]

Some functions of intersubjectivity -

Enable languages, (visual, musical, AI, physical, etc..)

And other socio-cultural media

In these ways intersubjectivity enables directly or indirectly -

Communication, understanding, expressions, etc.

Intersubjectivity enables and are involved, directly or indirectly in -

Interaction, discourse, dialogue, etc.

Intersubjectivity plys a part in - the

development and existence of communities, cultures, sub-cultures, etc

76

for example in human civilization from hunters and gatherers, to agrarian life,
settlements, urban life, services= work, etc and the specialized domains and
institutions of for example the arts, religion, politics, economics, health,
education, etc. and other specialized disciplines (arts, humanities, sports,
sciences, theology etc).

Intersubjectivity has many functions in the existence of individuation,

individuals or persons as well as persons in different status positions, in
different institutions such as churches, mosques and monasteries, etc. It also
plays a part in the constant evolvement or development (in many ways,
disciplines, socially, sport etc) of individuals.

It allows existence and development of human civilization, for example the

industrial revolution, IA development, radio and television communication,
different forms of transport, etc, human existence and different aspects of
evolution, as well as the existence of animals their evolution.

INTERSUBJECTIVITY AND SPECIALIZED FIELDS:

ART (EG VISUAL ART) and ACDEMIC DISCIPLINES

In one sense, when viewing or employing a very specific level of generality,

generalization or specificity to view human beings as individuals, it could be
said that there are as many realities, worlds, or variations upon reality and
worlds as there are individuals.

On this level it could be said that each individual is able to employ the tools of
intersubjectivity, or enabled by intersubjectivity, such as language, bodies and
embodiment, human brains, emotions, feelings, thinking, imagination, reflection
etc, to constitute or develop his/her own variation on a life-world, world view or
77

reality. How this occurs is obviously very complex and requires investigation of
the individuation and development of different individual human beings.

If we move to a less specific and more general level of specificity or levele of

generalization : It may be possible to identify factors that play a part in such
individuation and factors that are involved in the different ways of individuation
of different classes and types of human beings (for example the so-called big
five personality types), individuation of person from different cultures, sub-
cultures, socio-economic classes, gender, etc.

Employing an even greater level of generalization to consider the individuation

of all human beings, we may be able to identify patterns and general factors that
play a part in the individuation of human beings of certain cultures, sub-cultures
and periods in history. An even more general level of generalization may assist
us identifying universal factors and functions associated with intersubjectivity
that are involved in the individuation of all human beings and universal aspects
of the constitution of personal life-worlds, realities or interpretations of reality
and variation on institutionalized world views.

What, if any, are the relationships between personal interpretations of reality

and constitutions of life-worlds and institutionalized ones shared by classes,
cultures, sub-cultures and communities of people? We might discover that
certain individuals or groups and classes of individuals have more informed and
others less informed, more specialized and other less specialized, more or less
advanced interpretations of reality and the worlds being constituted.

I mention the latter as specialized disciplines such as the arts, humanities,

sciences, religion, profession, work, etc could play a part in the creation and/or
development of more informed realities, or at least realities with areas, fields or
domains that are more informed, more developed and specified. Dennett, Sellars
and other refer to the latter as scientific images of reality. I do not contrast some
absolute form of a scientific image with an absolute, every day, common sense
image. Instead I wish to suggest that individuals with every day, common sense
life world or reality interpretations might have areas of those realities or worlds
that are more specialized, because of their involvement in certain specialized
disciplines, eg some science, professions, sport, art, religion, politics, economy
etc.

Imagine a number of people and their pets, the usual dogs, cats, parrots, etc as
well as monkeys, snakes, lions, and esoteric animals in a large garden with a
great variety of plants, almost the garden of Eden, but with more human
occupants.
78

The visual artists, a painter in oil and one in watercolor as well as a few
sculptures might be aware of certain phenomena that others are less aware of for
example colors, forms, etc.

The geologists present will be aware of terms to employ to the area, the
mountains in the background and what lies under the soil, eg gold, silver, oil,
etc.

The specialists in chemistry, physics, astrophysics, biochemistry etc will again

be able to conceptualize phenomena that the non-experts in those fields will not
be aware of, including visible and normally invisible entities, abstract ideas, etc.
The biologist, bio-semiotics specialist, neurologist, neuroscientist, cognitive
scientists, sociologist, psychologists, linguist, zoologist, etc will be able to
employ notions and technical terms that the other people present will not be
aware of or understand the meaning of.

All these individuals could be aware of different aspects, levels, dimensions,

specialized disciplines, fields, discourse etc that others present are unable to
conceive of or perceive.

All the above experts employ different intersubjectivities that enable them to –

Be aware of, conceive of and perceive and interact with phenonema that others
present are unable to do (unless they study the specialized discourse of others
present);

All individuals initially acquire socio-culturally more the more general and
institutionalized intersubjectivities of their culture/s, sub-cultures, social classes,
communities, etc. They differentiate fields or aspects, vocabularies, conceptual
systems and other things that constitute general intersubjectivities, by means of
the discourses, fields, aspects of reality, etc of their specialized disciplines.
Their differentiations by means of their of their particular specialized fields,
areas, discourses or disciplines of areas and perspectives of their general
intersubjectivity could exist as more or less integrated, depending on the
individual and other factors. Dennett, Searle, et al refer to aspects of the more
general intersubjectivities and the realities or world views conceived by them as
imaginary images of reality, the world, etc, while the differentiated, specialized
areas by means of the perspectives enabled by specialized disciplines, sciences,
arts, medicine, professions, religion, economics, politics, etc as the scientific
image (I included specialized areas they do not, so I stretch their meaning of the
scientific image).

I tried to suggest that individuals could employ undifferentiated areas, domains

or fields of general intersubjectivity as well as the areas or aspects, dimensions
79

of reality their particular specialized discipline differentiate and conceptualize

in greater detail. I also suggested that one individual could be in possession of
and employ both aspects of general types of intersubjectivity as well as one or
more specialized intersubjectivities and their differentiated, conceptualized
domains or areas of reality – and that side by side or integrated, depending on
the person.

In the following I cite a number of articles from specialized disciplines, that

differentiate and conceptualize aspects or features of reality that more general
intersubjectivities do not do.

https://aeon.co/ideas/science-has-outgrown-the-human-mind-and-its-limited-
capacities?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=b6752f0226-
EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2017_04_24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a8
2e59d-b6752f0226-68674481

The duty of man who investigates the writings of scientists, if learning the truth is his goal, is
to make himself an enemy of all that he reads and … attack it from every side. He should also
suspect himself as he performs his critical examination of it, so that he may avoid falling into
either prejudice or leniency. (To which cognitive biases do the writer refer?)

– Ibn al-Haytham (965-1040 CE)

Science is in the midst of a data crisis. Last year, there were more than 1.2 million new
papers published in the biomedical sciences alone, bringing the total number of peer-
reviewed biomedical papers to over 26 million. However, the average scientist reads only
about 250 papers a year. Meanwhile, the quality of the scientific literature has been in
decline. Some recent studies found that the majority of biomedical papers were
irreproducible. (This shows the difficulty or impossibility for anyone to be informed about all
aspects of his own specialized field or domain. A visual artist for example will not be aware
of all new developments of his filed, that of teaching, education, new media, art criticism, art
theories, the art market, collecting, galleries, etc.)

The twin challenges of too much quantity and too little quality are rooted in the finite
neurological capacity of the human mind. (Or brains restrict the quantity and the quality or
differentiations that humans are able to develop, conceive and meaningfully deal with?)
Scientists are deriving hypotheses from a smaller and smaller fraction (greatre microscopic
details dealt with by specialized disciplines and their intersubjective terms) of our collective
knowledge and consequently, more and more, asking the wrong questions, or asking ones that
have already been answered. Also, human creativity seems to depend increasingly on the
stochasticity of previous experiences (intersubjectively developed and available knowledge)
– particular life events that allow a researcher to notice something others do not. Although
chance has always been a factor in scientific discovery, it is currently playing a much larger
role than it should.
80

One promising strategy to overcome the current crisis is to integrate machines and artificial
intelligence in the scientific process. (Really? Humans need to develop and man those
machines and create programmes and perhaps need to deal with the data to see if their
programmes worked?) Machines have greater memory and higher computational capacity
than the human brain. Automation of the scientific process (Will this be independent from
humans and therefore irrelevant to humans?) completely could greatly increase the rate of
discovery. (Someone still needs to interpret and apply them or some theory about or aspects
of them?) It could even begin another scientific revolution. That huge possibility hinges on an
equally huge question: can scientific discovery really be automated?

I believe it can, using an approach that we have known about for centuries. The answer to this
question can be found in the work of Sir Francis Bacon, the 17th-century English philosopher
and a key progenitor of modern science.

The first reiterations of the scientific method can be traced back many centuries earlier to
Muslim thinkers such as Ibn al-Haytham, who emphasised both empiricism and
experimentation. However, it was Bacon who first formalised the scientific method and made
it a subject of study. In his book Novum Organum (1620), he proposed a model for discovery
that is still known as the Baconian method. He argued against syllogistic logic for scientific
synthesis, which he considered to be unreliable. Instead, he proposed an approach in which
relevant observations about a specific phenomenon are systematically collected, tabulated
and objectively analysed using inductive logic to generate generalisable ideas. In his view,
truth could be uncovered only when the mind is free from incomplete (and hence false)
axioms.

The Baconian method attempted to remove logical bias (and other cognitive biases – they
still exist and functuion) from the process/ES of observation and conceptualisation, by
delineating the steps of scientific synthesis and optimising each one separately. Bacon’s
vision was to leverage a community of observers to collect vast amounts of information about
nature and tabulate it into a central record accessible to inductive analysis. In Novum
Organum, he wrote: ‘Empiricists are like ants; they accumulate and use. Rationalists spin
webs like spiders. The best method is that of the bee; it is somewhere in between, taking
existing material and using it.’

The Baconian method is rarely used today. It proved too laborious and extravagantly
expensive; its technological applications were unclear. However, at the time the formalisation
of a scientific method marked a revolutionary advance. Before it, science was metaphysical,
accessible only to a few learned men, mostly of noble birth. By rejecting the authority of the
ancient Greeks and delineating the steps of discovery, Bacon created a blueprint that would
allow anyone, regardless of background, to become a scientist.

Bacon’s insights also revealed an important hidden truth: the discovery process is inherently
algorithmic. It is the outcome of a finite number of steps that are repeated until a meaningful
result is uncovered. Bacon explicitly used the word ‘machine’ in describing his method. His
scientific algorithm has three essential components: first, observations have to be collected
and integrated into the total corpus of knowledge. Second, the new observations are used to
generate new hypotheses. Third, the hypotheses are tested through carefully designed
experiments.
81

If science is algorithmic, then it must have the potential for automation. This futuristic dream
has eluded information and computer scientists for decades, in large part because the three
main steps of scientific discovery occupy different planes. Observation is sensual;
hypothesis-generation is mental; and experimentation is mechanical. Automating the
scientific process will require the effective incorporation of machines in each step, and in all
three feeding into each other without friction. Nobody has yet figured out how to do that.

Experimentation has seen the most substantial recent progress. For example, the
pharmaceutical industry commonly uses automated high-throughput platforms for drug
design. Startups such as Transcriptic and Emerald Cloud Lab, both in California, are building
systems to automate almost every physical task that biomedical scientists do. Scientists
can submit their experiments online, where they are converted to code and fed into robotic
platforms that carry out a battery of biological experiments.(and what happens to the results?)
These solutions are most relevant to disciplines that require intensive experimentation, such
as molecular biology and chemical engineering, but analogous methods can be applied in
other data-intensive fields, and even extended to theoretical disciplines.

Automated hypothesis-generation is less advanced, but the work of Don Swanson in the
1980s provided an important step forward. He demonstrated the existence of hidden links
between unrelated ideas in the scientific literature; using a simple deductive logical
framework, he could connect papers from various fields with no citation overlap. (someone
had to interpret the results?) In this way, Swanson was able to hypothesise a novel link
between dietary fish oil and Reynaud’s Syndrome without conducting any experiments or
being an expert in either field. Other, more recent approaches, such as those of Andrey
Rzhetsky at the University of Chicago and Albert-László Barabási at Northeastern
University, rely on mathematical modelling and graph theory. They incorporate large
datasets, in which knowledge is projected as a network, where nodes are concepts and links
are relationships between them. Novel hypotheses would show up as undiscovered links
between nodes.

The most challenging step in the automation process is how to collect reliable scientific
observations on a large scale. There is currently no central data bank that holds humanity’s
total scientific knowledge on an observational level. Natural language-processing has
advanced to the point at which it can automatically extract not only relationships but also
context from scientific papers. However, major scientific publishers have placed severe
restrictions on text-mining. More important, the text of papers is biased towards the
scientist’s interpretations (or misconceptions), and it contains synthesised complex
concepts and methodologies that are difficult to extract and quantify.

Nevertheless, recent advances in computing and networked databases make the Baconian
method practical for the first time in history. And even before scientific discovery can be
automated, embracing Bacon’s approach could prove valuable at a time when pure
reductionism is reaching the edge of its usefulness.

Human minds simply cannot reconstruct highly complex natural phenomena efficiently
enough in the age of big data. A modern Baconian method that incorporates reductionist
ideas through data-mining, but then analyses this information through inductive
computational models, could transform our understanding of the natural world. Such an
approach would enable us to generate novel hypotheses that have higher chances of turning
out to be true, to test those hypotheses, and to fill gaps in our knowledge. It would also
82

provide a much-needed reminder of what science is supposed to be: truth-seeking, anti-

authoritarian, and limitlessly free.

History of Science

History of Ideas

Automation & Robotics

https://aeon.co/essays/it-s-time-for-science-to-abandon-the-term-statistically-significant

The aim of science is to establish facts, as accurately as possible. It is therefore crucially

important to determine whether an observed phenomenon is real, or whether it’s the result of
pure chance. If you declare that you’ve discovered something when in fact it’s just random,
that’s called a false discovery or a false positive. And false positives are alarmingly common
in some areas of medical science. 

In 2005, the epidemiologist John Ioannidis at Stanford caused a storm when he wrote the
paper ‘Why Most Published Research Findings Are False’, focusing on results in certain
areas of biomedicine. He’s been vindicated by subsequent investigations. For example, a
recent article found that repeating 100 different results in experimental psychology confirmed
the original conclusions in only 38 per cent of cases. It’s probably at least as bad for brain-
imaging studies and cognitive neuroscience. How can this happen? 

The problem of how to distinguish a genuine observation from random chance is a very old
one. It’s been debated for centuries by philosophers and, more fruitfully, by statisticians. It
turns on the distinction between induction and deduction. Science is an exercise in inductive
reasoning: we are making observations and trying to infer general rules from them.
Induction can never be certain. In contrast, deductive reasoning is easier: you deduce what
you would expect to observe if some general rule were true and then compare it with what
you actually see. The problem is that, for a scientist, deductive arguments don’t directly
answer the question that you want to ask. 

What matters to a scientific observer is how often you’ll be wrong if you claim that an effect
is real, rather than being merely random. That’s a question of induction, so it’s hard. In the
early 20th century, it became the custom to avoid induction, by changing the question into
one that used only deductive reasoning. In the 1920s, the statistician Ronald Fisher did this
by advocating tests of statistical significance. These are wholly deductive and so sidestep the
philosophical problems of induction.

Tests of statistical significance proceed by calculating the probability of making our

observations (or the more extreme ones) if there were no real effect. This isn’t an assertion
that there is no real effect, but rather a calculation of what would be expected if there were no
real effect. The postulate that there is no real effect is called the null hypothesis, and the
probability is called the p-value. Clearly the smaller the p-value, the less plausible the null
hypothesis, so the more likely it is that there is, in fact, a real effect. All you have to do is to
decide how small the p-value must be before you declare that you’ve made a discovery. But
that turns out to be very difficult.

The problem is that the p-value gives the right answer to the wrong question. What we really
want to know is not the probability of the observations given a hypothesis about the existence
83

of a real effect, but rather the probability that there is a real effect – that the hypothesis is true
– given the observations. And that is a problem of induction. 

Confusion between these two quite different probabilities lies at the heart of why p-values are
so often misinterpreted. It’s called the error of the transposed conditional. Even quite
respectable sources will tell you that the p-value is the probability that your observations
occurred by chance. And that is plain wrong.

Suppose, for example, that you give a pill to each of 10 people. You measure some response
(such as their blood pressure). Each person will give a different response. And you give a
different pill to 10 other people, and again get 10 different responses. How do you tell
whether the two pills are really different?

The conventional procedure would be to follow Fisher and calculate the probability of
making the observations (or the more extreme ones) if there were no true difference between
the two pills. That’s the p-value, based on deductive reasoning. P-values of less than 5 per
cent have come to be called ‘statistically significant’, a term that’s ubiquitous in the
biomedical literature, and is now used to suggest that an effect is real, not just chance.

But the dichotomy between ‘significant’ and ‘not significant’ is absurd. There’s obviously
very little difference between the implication of a p-value of 4.7 per cent and of 5.3 per cent,
yet the former has come to be regarded as success and the latter as failure. And ‘success’ will
get your work published, even in the most prestigious journals. That’s bad enough, but the
real killer is that, if you observe a ‘just significant’ result, say P = 0.047 (4.7 per cent) in a
single test, and claim to have made a discovery, the chance that you are wrong is at least 26
per cent, and could easily be more than 80 per cent. How can this be so?Take the proposition
that the Earth goes round the Sun. It either does or it doesn’t, so it’s hard to see how we could
pick a probability for this statement

For one, it’s of little use to say that your observations would be rare if there were no real
difference between the pills (which is what the p-value tells you), unless you can say whether
or not the observations would also be rare when there is a true difference between the pills.
Which brings us back to induction.

The problem of induction was solved, in principle, by the Reverend Thomas Bayes in the
middle of the 18th century. He showed how to convert the probability of the observations
given a hypothesis (the deductive problem) to what we actually want, the probability that
the hypothesis is true given some observations (the inductive problem). But how to use his
famous theorem in practice has been the subject of heated debate ever since. 

Take the proposition that the Earth goes round the Sun. It either does or it doesn’t, so it’s hard
to see how we could pick a probability for this statement. Furthermore, the Bayesian
conversion involves assigning a value to the probability that your hypothesis is right before
any observations have been made (the ‘prior probability’). Bayes’s theorem allows that prior
probability to be converted to what we want, the probability that the hypothesis is true given
some relevant observations, which is known as the ‘posterior probability’. 

These intangible probabilities persuaded Fisher that Bayes’s approach wasn’t feasible.
Instead, he proposed the wholly deductive process of null hypothesis significance testing. The
84

realisation that this method, as it is commonly used, gives alarmingly large numbers of false
positive results has spurred several recent attempts to bridge the gap.  

There is one uncontroversial application of Bayes’s theorem: diagnostic screening, the tests
that doctors give healthy people to detect warning signs of disease. They’re a good way to
understand the perils of the deductive approach.

In theory, picking up on the early signs of illness is obviously good. But in practice there are
usually so many false positive diagnoses that it just doesn’t work very well. Take dementia.
Roughly 1 per cent of the population suffer from mild cognitive impairment, which might,
but doesn’t always, lead to dementia. Suppose that the test is quite a good one, in the sense
that 95 per cent of the time it gives the right (negative) answer for people who are free of the
condition. That means that 5 per cent of the people who don’t have cognitive impairment will
test, falsely, as positive. That doesn’t sound bad. It’s directly analogous to tests of
significance which will give 5 per cent of false positives when there is no real effect, if we
use a p-value of less than 5 per cent to mean ‘statistically significant’.

But in fact the screening test is not good – it’s actually appallingly bad, because 86 per cent,
not 5 per cent, of all positive tests are false positives. So only 14 per cent of positive tests are
correct. This happens because most people don’t have the condition, and so the false positives
from these people (5 per cent of 99 per cent of the people), outweigh the number of true
positives that arise from the much smaller number of people who have the condition (80 per
cent of 1 per cent of the people, if we assume 80 per cent of people with the disease are
detected successfully). There’s a YouTube video of my attempt to explain this principle, or
you can read my recent paper on the subject.

the number of false positives in the tests where there is no real effect outweighs the number
of true positives that arise from the cases in which there is a real effect

Notice, though, that it’s possible to calculate the disastrous false-positive rate for screening
tests only because we have estimates for the prevalence of the condition in the whole
population being tested. This is the prior probability that we need to use Bayes’s theorem. If
we return to the problem of tests of significance, it’s not so easy. The analogue of the
prevalence of disease in the population becomes, in the case of significance tests, the
probability that there is a real difference between the pills before the experiment is done – the
prior probability that there’s a real effect. And it’s usually impossible to make a good guess at
the value of this figure.

An example should make the idea more concrete. Imagine testing 1,000 different drugs, one
at a time, to sort out which works and which doesn’t. You’d be lucky if 10 per cent of them
were effective, so let’s proceed by assuming a prevalence or prior probability of 10 per cent. 
Say we observe a ‘just significant’ result, for example, a P = 0.047 in a single test, and
declare that this is evidence that we have made a discovery. That claim will be wrong, not in
5 per cent of cases, as is commonly believed, but in 76 per cent of cases. That is disastrously
high. Just as in screening tests, the reason for this large number of mistakes is that the number
of false positives in the tests where there is no real effect outweighs the number of true
positives that arise from the cases in which there is a real effect.

In general, though, we don’t know the real prevalence of true effects. So, although we can
calculate the p-value, we can’t calculate the number of false positives. But what we can do is
85

give a minimum value for the false positive rate. To do this, we need only assume that it’s not
legitimate to say, before the observations are made, that the odds that an effect is real are any
higher than 50:50. To do so would be to assume you’re more likely than not to be right before
the experiment even begins. 

If we repeat the drug calculations using a prevalence of 50 per cent rather than 10 per cent,
we get a false positive rate of 26 per cent, still much bigger than 5 per cent. Any lower
prevalence will result in an even higher false positive rate. 

The upshot is that, if a scientist observes a ‘just significant’ result in a single test, say
P = 0.047, and declares that she’s made a discovery, that claim will be wrong at least 26 per
cent of the time, and probably more. No wonder then that there are problems with
reproducibility in areas of science that rely on tests of significance.

What is to be done? For a start, it’s high time that we abandoned the well-worn term
‘statistically significant’. The cut-off of P < 0.05 that’s almost universal in biomedical
sciences is entirely arbitrary – and, as we’ve seen, it’s quite inadequate as evidence for a real
effect. Although it’s common to blame Fisher for the magic value of 0.05, in fact Fisher said,
in 1926, that P = 0.05 was a ‘low standard of significance’ and that a scientific fact should be
regarded as experimentally established only if repeating the experiment ‘rarely fails to give
this level of significance’.

The ‘rarely fails’ bit, emphasised by Fisher 90 years ago, has been forgotten. A single
experiment that gives P = 0.045 will get a ‘discovery’ published in the most glamorous
journals. So it’s not fair to blame Fisher, but nonetheless there’s an uncomfortable amount of
truth in what the physicist Robert Matthews at Aston University in Birmingham had to say in
1998: ‘The plain fact is that 70 years ago Ronald Fisher gave scientists a mathematical
machine for turning baloney into breakthroughs, and flukes into funding. It is time to pull the
plug.’

The underlying problem is that universities around the world press their staff to write whether
or not they have anything to say. This amounts to pressure to cut corners, to value quantity
rather than quality, to exaggerate the consequences of their work and, occasionally, to cheat.
People are under such pressure to produce papers that they have neither the time nor the
motivation to learn about statistics, or to replicate experiments. Until something is done about
these perverse incentives, biomedical science will be distrusted by the public, and rightly so.
Senior scientists, vice-chancellors and politicians have set a very bad example to young
researchers. As the zoologist Peter Lawrence at the University of Cambridge put it in 2007: 

hype your work, slice the findings up as much as possible (four papers good, two papers bad),
compress the results (most top journals have little space, a typical Nature letter now has the density
of a black hole), simplify your conclusions but complexify the material (more difficult for reviewers to
fault it!)

But there is good news too. Most of the problems occur only in certain areas of medicine and
psychology. And despite the statistical mishaps, there have been enormous advances in
biomedicine. The reproducibility crisis is being tackled. All we need to do now is to stop
vice-chancellors and grant-giving agencies imposing incentives for researchers to behave
badly.
86

Mathematics

Medical Research

History of Science

https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone-cannot-explain-the-riddle-of-consciousness

Materialism holds the high ground these days in debates over that most ultimate of scientific
questions: the nature of consciousness. When tackling the problem of mind and brain, many
prominent researchers advocate for a universe fully reducible to matter. ‘Of course you are
nothing but the activity of your neurons,’ they proclaim. That position seems reasonable and
sober in light of neuroscience’s advances, with brilliant images of brains lighting up like
Christmas trees while test subjects eat apples, watch movies or dream. And aren’t all the
underlying physical laws already known?

From this seemly hard-nosed vantage, the problem of consciousness seems to be just one of
wiring, as the American physicist Michio Kaku argued in The Future of the Mind (2014). In
the very public version of the debate over consciousness, those who advocate that
understanding the mind might require something other than a ‘nothing but matter’ position
are often painted as victims of wishful thinking, imprecise reasoning or, worst of all, an
adherence to a mystical ‘woo’.  

It’s hard not to feel the intuitional weight of today’s metaphysical sobriety. Like Pickett’s
Charge up the hill at Gettysburg, who wants to argue with the superior position of those
armed with ever more precise fMRIs, EEGs and the other material artefacts of the materialist
position? There is, however, a significant weakness hiding in the imposing-looking
materialist redoubt. It is as simple as it is undeniable: after more than a century of profound
explorations into the subatomic world, our best theory for how matter behaves still tells us
very little about what matter is. Materialists appeal to physics to explain the mind, but in
modern physics the particles that make up a brain remain, in many ways, as mysterious as
consciousness itself.

When I was a young physics student I once asked a professor: ‘What’s an electron?’ His
answer stunned me. ‘An electron,’ he said, ‘is that to which we attribute the properties of the
electron.’ That vague, circular response was a long way from the dream that drove me into
physics, a dream of theories that perfectly described reality. Like almost every student over
the past 100 years, I was shocked by quantum mechanics, the physics of the micro-world. In
place of a clear vision of little bits of matter that explain all the big things around us, quantum
physics gives us a powerful yet seemly paradoxical calculus. With its emphasis on probability
waves, essential uncertainties and experimenters disturbing the reality they seek to measure,
quantum mechanics made imagining the stuff of the world as classical bits of matter (or
miniature billiard balls) all but impossible.

Like most physicists, I learned how to ignore the weirdness of quantum physics. ‘Shut up and
calculate!’ (the dictum of the American physicist David Mermin) works fine if you are trying
to get 100 per cent on your Advanced Quantum Theory homework or building a laser. But
behind quantum mechanics’ unequaled calculational precision lie profound, stubbornly
persistent questions about what those quantum rules imply about the nature of reality –
including our place in it.
87

Those questions are well-known in the physics community, but perhaps our habit of shutting
up has been a little too successful. A century of agnosticism about the true nature of matter
hasn’t found its way deeply enough into other fields, where materialism still appears to be the
most sensible way of dealing with the world and, most of all, with the mind. Some
neuroscientists think that they’re being precise and grounded by holding tightly to materialist
credentials. Molecular biologists, geneticists, and many other types of researchers – as well as
the nonscientist public – have been similarly drawn to materialism’s seeming finality. But
this conviction is out of step with what we physicists know about the material world – or
rather, what we don’t know.

Albert Einstein and Max Planck introduced the idea of the quantum at the beginning of the
20th century, sweeping away the old classical view of reality. We have never managed to
come up with a definitive new reality to take its place. The interpretation of quantum physics
remains as up for grabs as ever. As a mathematical description of solar cells and digital
circuits, quantum mechanics works just fine. But if one wants to apply the materialist position
to a concept as subtle and profound as consciousness, (WHAT OF THE MANY MEANINGS
IN DIFFERENT CONTEXTS AND ON MANY LEVELS AND IN A MULTIPLE OF
DIMENSIONS DO YOU MEAN HERE BY THE NOTION OF CONSCIOUSNESS?)
something more must clearly be asked for. The closer you look, the more it appears that the
materialist (or ‘physicalist’) position is not the safe harbor of metaphysical sobriety that many
desire.

For physicists, the ambiguity over matter boils down to what we call the measurement
problem, and its relationship to an entity known as the wave function. Back in the good old
days of Newtonian physics, the behaviour of particles was determined by a straightforward
mathematical law that reads F = ma. You applied a force F to a particle of mass m, and the
particle moved with acceleration a. It was easy to picture this in your head. Particle? Check.
Force? Check. Acceleration? Yup. Off you go.

The equation F = ma gave you two things that matter most to the Newtonian picture of the
world: a particle’s location and its velocity. This is what physicists call a particle’s state.
Newton’s laws gave you the particle’s state for any time and to any precision you need. If the
state of every particle is described by such a simple equation, and if large systems are just big
combinations of particles, then the whole world should behave in a fully predictable way.
Many materialists still carry the baggage of that old classical picture. It’s why physics is still
widely regarded as the ultimate source of answers to questions about the world, both outside
and inside our heads.

In Isaac Newton’s physics, position and velocity were indeed clearly defined and clearly
imagined properties of a particle. Measurements of the particle’s state changed nothing in
principle. The equation F = ma was true whether you were looking at the particle or not. All
of that fell apart as scientists began probing at the scale of atoms early last century. In a burst
of creativity, physicists devised a new set of rules known as quantum mechanics. A critical
piece of the new physics was embodied in Schrödinger’s equation. Like Newton’s F = ma,
the Schrödinger equation represents mathematical machinery for doing physics; it describes
how the state of a particle is changing. But to account for all the new phenomena physicists
were finding (ones Newton knew nothing about), the Austrian physicist Erwin Schrödinger
had to formulate a very different kind of equation.
88

When calculations are done with the Schrödinger equation, what’s left is not the Newtonian
state of exact position and velocity. Instead, you get what is called the wave function
(physicists refer to it as psi after the Greek symbol Ψ used to denote it). Unlike the
Newtonian state, which can be clearly imagined in a commonsense way, the wave function is
an epistemological and ontological mess. The wave function does not give you a specific
measurement of location and velocity for a particle; it gives you only probabilities at the root
level of reality. Psi appears to tell you that, at any moment, the particle has many positions
and many velocities. In effect, the bits of matter from Newtonian physics are smeared out
into sets of potentials or possibilities.

How can there be one rule for the objective world before a measurement is made, and another
that jumps in after the measurement?

It’s not just position and velocity that get smeared out. The wave function treats all properties
of the particle (electric charge, energy, spin, etc) the same way. They all become probabilities
holding many possible values at the same time. Taken at face value, it’s as if the particle
doesn’t have definite properties at all. This is what the German physicist Werner Heisenberg,
one of the founders of quantum mechanics, meant when he advised people not to think of
atoms as ‘things’. Even at this basic level, the quantum perspective adds a lot of blur to any
materialist convictions of what the world is built from.

Then things get weirder still. According to the standard way of treating the quantum calculus,
the act of making a measurement on the particle kills off all pieces of the wave function,
except the one your instruments register. The wave function is said to collapse as all the
smeared-out, potential positions or velocities vanish in the act of measurement. It’s like the
Schrödinger equation, which does such a great job of describing the smeared-out particle
before the measurement is made, suddenly gets a pink slip.

You can see how this throws a monkey wrench into a simple, physics-based view of an
objective materialist world. How can there be one mathematical rule for the external
objective world before a measurement is made, and another that jumps in after the
measurement occurs? For a hundred years now, physicists and philosophers have been
beating the crap out of each other (and themselves) trying to figure out how to interpret the
wave function and its associated measurement problem. What exactly is quantum mechanics
telling us about the world? What does the wave function describe? What really happens when
a measurement occurs? Above all, what is matter?

There are today no definitive answers to these questions. There is not even a consensus about
what the answers should look like. Rather, there are multiple interpretations of quantum
theory, each of which corresponds to a very different way of regarding matter and everything
made of it – which, of course, means everything. The earliest interpretation to gain force, the
Copenhagen interpretation, is associated with Danish physicist Niels Bohr and other founders
of quantum theory. In their view, it was meaningless to speak of the properties of atoms in-
and-of-themselves. Quantum mechanics was a theory that spoke only to our knowledge of the
world. The measurement problem associated with the Schrödinger equation highlighted this
barrier between epistemology and ontology by making explicit the role of the observer (that
is: us) in gaining knowledge.  

Not all researchers were so willing to give up on the ideal of objective access to a perfectly
objective world, however. Some pinned their hopes on the discovery of hidden variables – a
89

set of deterministic rules lurking beneath the probabilities of quantum mechanics. Others took
a more extreme view. In the many-worlds interpretation espoused by the American physicist
Hugh Everett, the authority of the wave function and its governing Schrödinger equation was
taken as absolute. Measurements didn’t suspend the equation or collapse the wave function,
they merely made the Universe split off into many (perhaps infinite) parallel versions of
itself. Thus, for every experimentalist who measures an electron over here, a parallel universe
is created in which her parallel copy finds the electron over there. The many-worlds
Interpretation is one that many materialists favor, but it comes with a steep price.

Here is an even more important point: as yet there is no way to experimentally distinguish
between these widely varying interpretations. Which one you choose is mainly a matter of
philosophical temperament. As the American theorist Christopher Fuchs puts it, on one side
there are the psi-ontologists who want the wave function to describe the objective world
‘out there’. On the other side, there are the psi-epistemologists who see the wave function as
a description of our knowledge and its limits. Right now, there is almost no way to settle the
dispute scientifically (although a standard form of hidden variables does seem to have been
ruled out).

This arbitrariness of deciding which interpretation to hold completely undermines the strict
materialist position. The question here is not if some famous materialist’s choice of the
many-worlds interpretation is the correct one, any more than whether the silliness of The Tao
of Physics and its quantum Buddhism is correct. The real problem is that, in each case,
proponents are free to single out one interpretation over others because … well … they like
it. Everyone, on all sides, is in the same boat. There can be no appeal to the authority of ‘what
quantum mechanics says’, because quantum mechanics doesn’t say much of anything with
regard to its own interpretation.

Putting the perceiving subject back into physics seems to undermine the whole materialist
perspective

Each interpretation of quantum mechanics has its own philosophical and scientific
advantages, but they all come with their own price. One way or another, they force adherents
to take a giant step away from the kind of ‘naive realism’, the vision of little bits of
deterministic matter, that was possible with the Newtonian world view; switching to a
quantum ‘fields’ view doesn’t solve the problem. It was easy to think that the mathematical
objects involved with Newtonian mechanics referred to real things out there in some intuitive
way. But those ascribing to psi-ontology – sometimes called wave function realism – must
now navigate a labyrinth of challenges in holding their views. The Wave Function (2013),
edited by the philosophers Alyssa Ney and David Z Albert, describes many of these options,
which can get pretty weird. Reading through the dense analyses quickly dispels any hope that
materialism offers a simple, concrete reference point for the problem of consciousness.

The attraction of the many-worlds interpretation, for instance, is its ability to keep the reality
in the mathematical physics. In this view, yes, the wave function is real and, yes, it describes
a world of matter that obeys mathematical rules, whether someone is watching or not. The
price you pay for this position is an infinite number of parallel universes that are infinitely
splitting off into an infinity of other parallel universes that then split off into … well, you get
the picture. There is a big price to pay for the psi-epistemologist positions too. Physics from
this perspective is no longer a description of the world in-and-of itself. Instead, it’s a
90

description of the rules for our interaction with the world. As the American theorist
Joseph Eberly says: ‘It’s not the electron’s wave function, it’s your wave function.’

A particularly cogent new version of the psi-epistemological position, called Quantum

Bayesianism or QBism, raises this perspective to a higher level of specificity by taking the
probabilities in quantum mechanics at face value. According to Fuchs, the leading proponent
of QBism, the irreducible probabilities in quantum mechanics tell us that it’s really a theory
about making bets on the world’s behaviour (via our measurements) and then updating our
knowledge after those measurements are done. In this way, QBism points explicitly to our
failure to include the observing subject that lies at the root of quantum weirdness. As Mermin
wrote in the journal Nature: ‘QBism attributes the muddle at the foundations of quantum
mechanics to our unacknowledged removal of the scientist from the science.’

. Putting the perceiving subject back into physics would seem to undermine the whole
materialist perspective . A theory of mind that depends on matter that depends on mind
could not yield the solid ground so many materialists yearn for.

It is easy to see how we got here. Materialism is an attractive philosophy – at least, it was
before quantum mechanics altered our thinking about matter. ‘I refute it thus,’ said the 18th-
century writer Samuel Johnson kicking a large rock as refutation to arguments against
materialism he’d just endured. Johnson’s stony drop-kick is the essence of a hard-headed
(and broken-footed) materialist vision of the world. It provides an account of exactly what the
world is made of: bits of stuff called matter. And since matter has properties that are
independent and external to anything having to do with us, we can use that stuff to build
a fully objective account of a fully objective world. This ball-and-stick vision of reality seems
to inspire much of materialism’s public confidence about cracking the mystery of the human
mind.

Today, though, it is hard to reconcile that confidence with the multiple interpretations of
quantum mechanics. Newtonian mechanics might be fine for explaining the activity of the
(PHYSICAL) brain. It can handle things such as blood flow through capillaries and chemical
diffusion across synapses, but the ground of materialism becomes far more shaky when we
attempt to grapple with the (non-existent, folk notion of ) more profound mystery of the
mind, meaning the weirdness of being an experiencing subject. In this domain, there is no
avoiding the scientific and philosophical complications that come with quantum mechanics.

First, the differences between the psi-ontological and psi-epistemological positions are so
fundamental that, without knowing which one is correct, it’s impossible to know what
quantum mechanics is intrinsically referring to. Imagine for a moment that something like the
QBist interpretation of quantum mechanics were true. If this emphasis on the observing
subject were the correct lesson to learn from quantum physics, then the perfect, objective
access to the world that lies at the heart of materialism would lose a lot of wind. Put another
way: if QBism or other Copenhagen-like views are correct, there could be enormous surprises
waiting for us in our exploration of subject and object, and these would have to be included in
any account of mind. On the other hand, old-school materialism – being a particular form of
psi-ontology – would by necessity be blind to these kinds of additions.

A second and related point is that, in the absence of experimental evidence, we are left with
an irreducible democracy of possibilities. At a 2011 quantum theory meeting, three
researchers conducted just such a poll, asking participants: ‘What is your favourite
91

interpretation of quantum mechanics?’ (Six different models got votes, along with some
preferences for ‘other’ and ‘no preference’.) As useful as this exercise might be for gauging
researchers’ inclinations, holding a referendum for which interpretation should become
‘official’ at the next meeting of the American Physical Society (or the American
Philosophical Society) won’t get us any closer to the answers we seek. Nor will stomping our
feet, making loud proclamations, or name-dropping our favourite Nobel-prizewinning
physicists.

Rather than trying to sweep away the mystery of mind by attributing it to the mechanisms of
matter, we must grapple with the intertwined nature of the two

Given these difficulties, one must ask why certain weird alternatives suggested by quantum
interpretations are widely preferred over others within the research community. Why does the
infinity of parallel universes in the many-worlds interpretation get associated with the sober,
hard-nosed position, while including the perceiving subject gets condemned as crossing over
to the shores of anti-science at best, or mysticism at worst?

It is in this sense that the unfinished business of quantum mechanics levels the playing field.
The high ground of materialism deflates when followed to its quantum mechanical roots,
because it then demands the acceptance of metaphysical possibilities that seem no more
‘reasonable’ than other alternatives. Some consciousness researchers might think that they are
being hard-nosed and concrete when they appeal to the authority of physics. When pressed on
this issue, though, we physicists are often left looking at our feet, smiling sheepishly and
mumbling something about ‘it’s complicated’. We know that matter remains mysterious just
as mind remains mysterious, and we don’t know what the connections between those
mysteries should be. Classifying consciousness as a material problem is tantamount to saying
that consciousness, too, remains fundamentally unexplained.

Rather than sweeping away the mystery of mind by attributing it to the mechanisms of
matter, we can begin to move forward by acknowledging where the multiple interpretations
of quantum mechanics leave us. It’s been more than 20 years since the Australian philosopher
David Chalmers introduced the idea of a ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Following work
by the American philosopher Thomas Nagel, Chalmers pointed to the vividness – the intrinsic
presence – of the perceiving subject’s experience as a problem no explanatory account of
consciousness seems capable of embracing. Chalmers’s position struck a nerve with many
philosophers, articulating the sense that there was fundamentally something more occurring
in consciousness ( Consciousness does not exist, it is an umbrella-word with many different
meanings, there is NOT a problem here.) than just computing with meat. But what is that
‘more’?

Some consciousness researchers see the hard problem as real but inherently unsolvable;
others posit a range of options for its account. Those solutions include possibilities that
overly project mind into matter. Consciousness might, for example, be an example of the
emergence of a new entity in the Universe not contained in the laws of particles. There is also
the more radical possibility that some rudimentary form of consciousness must be added to
the list of things, such as mass or electric charge, that the world is built of. Regardless of the
direction ‘more’ might take, the unresolved democracy of quantum interpretations means that
our current understanding of matter alone is unlikely to explain the nature of mind. It seems
just as likely that the opposite will be the case.
92

While the materialists might continue to wish for the high ground of sobriety and hard-
headedness, they should remember the American poet Richard Wilbur’s warning:

Kick at the rock, Sam Johnson, break your bones: 

But cloudy, cloudy is the stuff of stones.

Physics

History of Science

Quantum Theory

https://aeon.co/essays/materialism-alone-cannot-explain-the-riddle-of-consciousness

If consciousness is not a purely material problem, how can we best make sense of it?

Tony ReardonFollow

This article tries to relate quantum “weirdness” to issues of conscious arising purely from
interactions (intersubjectivity) of material things and suggests that, if there are issues with
one, there are similar issues with the other. I would suggest that this is a massive confusion
of levels.

As one examines any complex system, one chooses which levels to consider and the
properties of the lower levels tend to be either ignored or taken as a given. If you are
designing a house, you take it that the bricks have a certain strength, you don’t care about
their atomic structure; If you are writing software, you ignore the voltages used in the circuit
boards of the computer that will run the software.

If you are looking at consciousness at a material level, probably the lowest level that you
might consider would consist of neurons, axons, connections, synapses, etc. and how these
fire and interact (physical, biological or neurological or neurons’ intersubjectivity) although
you may well be concerned with higher levels such as the organisation and
communication of neurons. Just to make the point clear about the difference between the
atomic and the neuronal levels. A neuron is in the 4-100 micron size ( .004 - .1mm) whereas
atoms are around 30-300 pm (trillionths of a meter) meaning that there are in the order of 100
trillion atoms in a neuronal cell.

No-one suggests that this number of atoms are in any sense exhibiting quantum
indeterminacy and thus, regardless as to how physicists choose to interpret quantum
measurements, the relationship between this and consciousness is irrelevant. The behaviour
of the massively complex interlinked 100 million – 100 billion neurons in a brain is going
to be where we look for the material basis for consciousness.

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93

13 March 2017Mark TitusFollow

Clicking the “Like” button isn’t good enough for this comment.

I think I have never read a more succinct, clear, and detailed statement of what “levels of
complexity” means–especially as it applies to the emergence of consciousness in neural
systems.

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IQ

13 March 2017Iftikhar QayumFollow

No doubt, but how these atoms get together and stay together in neurons to create and
maintain consciousness needs to be explained just as well.

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https://aeon.co/essays/do-ripples-in-space-time-herald-a-new-theory-of-gravity

Billion years ago, two dancing black holes make a final spin, merge, and – in a matter of
seconds – release a cataclysmic amount of energy. Much as a falling pebble spreads waves on
the surface of a still lake, the merger initiates gravitational waves in the space-time
continuum. Fast-forward to planet Earth and the year 2015. After an immense journey, the
gravitational waves from the black-hole merger pass through our solar system. On the
morning of 14 September, they oh-so-slightly wiggle the arms of the twin Laser
Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory (LIGO) detectors in Louisiana and
Washington state. A pattern of light-waves shifts in a distinctive, long-sought way. A
computer sounds the alarm. 

Niayesh Afshordi at the University of Waterloo in Canada first heard of LIGO’s seminal
detection over lunch in a bistro. It was late 2015 and still weeks to go until the results were
officially released. But rumours were buzzing, and a colleague who had seen the unpublished
paper spilled the beans. Afshordi, an astrophysicist who also works at the Perimeter Institute
in Waterloo, instantly appreciated the importance of the news – both for the physics
community at large, and for his own unconventional theory about the construction of the
Universe. 

‘I had an existential crisis at some point. I thought all the problems in cosmology had been
solved,’ Afshordi recalled. ‘But then I came up with this idea that dark energy is made by
black holes.’ Studies of distant stellar explosions and other lines of evidence show that our
universe grows at an accelerating pace, but nobody knows the cause. Matter alone cannot
have this effect, so cosmologists blame the expansion on a peculiar type of energy, called
dark energy. Its origin and nature were, and are, a mystery.  
94

In 2009, Afshordi, together with his colleagues Chanda Prescod-Weinstein and Michael
Balogh, put forward a theory according to which black holes seed a long-range field that
mimics dark energy. The field spills out from black holes and spans through the Universe.
It’s an intriguing explanation for the origin of dark energy and, by Afshordi’s calculations,
the number of black holes estimated to exist should create just about the right amount of field
energy to fit the observations. 

But Afshordi’s idea overthrows what physicists believed they knew about black holes. In
Albert Einstein’s theory of general relativity, the event horizon of a black hole – the surface
beyond which there is no escape – is insubstantial. Nothing special happens upon crossing it,
just that there is no turning around later. If Afshordi is right, however, the inside of the black
hole past the event horizon no longer exists. Instead, a Planck-length away from where the
horizon would have been, quantum gravitational effects become large, and space-time
fluctuations go wild. (The Planck length is a minuscule distance: about 10-35 metres, or 10-20
times the diameter of a proton.) It’s a complete break with relativity. 

When he heard of the LIGO results, Afshordi realised that his so-far entirely theoretical idea
could be observationally tested. If event horizons are different than expected, the
gravitational-wave bursts from merging black holes should be different, too. Events picked
up by LIGO should have echoes, a subtle but clear signal that would indicate a departure
from standard physics. Such a discovery would be a breakthrough in the long search for a
quantum theory of gravity. ‘If they confirm it, I should probably book a ticket to Stockholm,’
Afshordi said, laughing. 

Quantum gravity is the missing unification of general relativity with the quantum field
theories of the standard model of particle physics. If just thrown together, the two theories
lead to internal contradictions, and fail to make sense. Black holes are one of the most studied
examples for such a contradiction. Use quantum field theory near the horizon and you find
that the black hole emits particles, slowly evaporating. Those particles carry away mass but,
as Stephen Hawking demonstrated in the 1970s, they cannot carry information about what
formed the black hole. And so, if the black hole evaporates entirely, all the information about
what fell in has been destroyed. In quantum field theory, however, information is always
preserved. Something in the mathematics, therefore, doesn’t fit correctly. 

The culprit, most physicists think, is that the calculation doesn’t take into account the
quantum behaviour of space and time because the theory for this – quantum gravity – is still
unknown. For decades, physicists thought that the quantum gravitational effects necessary to
solve the black-hole conundrum were hidden behind the event horizon. They thought that it is
only near the singularity, at the centre of the black hole, that the effects of quantum gravity
become relevant. But recently, they have had to rethink.

In 2012, a group of researchers from the University of California, Santa Barbara, found an
unexpected consequence of the currently favoured idea that information somehow escapes
with the radiation from a black hole. To make the idea work, large deviations from general
relativity are required, not only near the singularity but also at the event horizon. Those
deviations would create what the researchers dubbed a ‘black hole firewall’, a barrier of high
energy just outside the horizon. 

Such a firewall (if it exists) would become noticeable only for an infalling observer, and
would not emit observable signatures that could show up in our telescopes. However, the
95

firewalls lent support to Afshordi’s earlier idea that black holes create a field that acts as dark
energy. If that was so, then the near-horizon region of black holes should be very different
from what general relativity predicts; a firewall that solves the black hole information-loss
problem could be one effect of that deviation. Afshordi’s proposal for how to modify general
relativity might therefore hold the key to resolving the tension between quantum theory and
general relativity. It was an idea that wouldn’t let him go. 

Instead of a splash followed by dissipating ripples, the gravitational waves should come as
faint echoes of the original event

When he learned of LIGO’s first detection, Afshordi began to explore whether the
gravitational waves emitted from a black-hole merger could reveal intimate details about
what happens near the black-hole horizon. At first it seemed too much to hope for. ‘I didn’t
really think we could see quantum gravity effects in the gravitational-wave signal because we
had already looked in so many places,’ Afshordi said. ‘But I changed my mind about this.’ 

What made Afshordi reconsider was work by Vítor Cardoso and colleagues at the Instituto
Superior Técnico in Portugal on gravitational-wave echoes from black holes. Cardoso had
laid out on general grounds that a merger of two objects that are compact but do not have an
event horizon would produce gravitational waves very similar to those of black holes –
similar, but not identical. The key feature indicating the horizon’s absence, Cardoso argued,
would be a periodic recurrence in the signal from the merger. Instead of a single peak
followed by a ringdown (think a big splash on a pond, and then rapidly dissipating ripples),
the gravitational waves should come as a series of fading pulses – fainter echoes of the
original event. Afshordi found that the near-horizon modification described by his theory
would cause exactly such echoes. Moreover, he could calculate their recurrence time as a
function of the final black hole’s mass, allowing a precise prediction. 

Nobody had ever sought such a signal before, and finding it would not be easy. So far there
are only two public, well-defined gravitational-wave detections from LIGO. Together with a
collaborator, Afshordi analysed the LIGO data for traces of echoes. By comparing the openly
available recordings to random noise, they found an echo at the calculated recurrence time.
The statistical significance is not high, however. In scientific terms, it has an estimated
significance of 2.9 sigma. Such a signal can be caused by pure noise with a chance of about a
one-in-200. In physics, an event of such low confidence is interesting but does not amount to
a discovery.

The LIGO experiment is really just getting started, however. The most remarkable thing
about the first two gravitational wave events is that the facilities were able to record them at
all. The technological challenges were tremendous. Each site, both in Louisiana and in
Washington state, has an interferometer with two perpendicular arms about 4 kilometres long
in which a laser beam bounces back and forth between mirrors; when recombined, the beams
interfere with each other. Interference of the laser’s light-waves is sensitive to deformations
in the arms’ relative length as little as a thousandth the diameter of a proton. That is the level
of sensitivity required to pick up gravitational effects of colliding black holes. 

A gravitational wave passing through the interferometer deforms both arms at different times,
thereby skewing the interference pattern. Requiring an event to be recorded at both sites
provides protection against false alarms. By design, LIGO detects gravitational waves best at
wavelengths of hundreds to thousands of kilometres, the range expected for black-hole
96

mergers. Other gravitational-wave detectors are planned to cover different parts of the
spectrum, each tuned to different types of phenomena. 

Gravitational waves are an unavoidable prediction of general relativity. Einstein recognised

that space-time is dynamic – it stretches, it curves, and it wiggles in response to gravitational
disturbances. When it wiggles, the waves can travel freely into the far distance, carrying
away energy and manifesting themselves by a periodic expansion and contraction of space in
orthogonal directions. We have long had indirect evidence for gravitational waves. Because
they carry away energy, they cause a small but measurable decay in the mutual orbit of
binary pulsars. This effect was first observed in the 1970s, and was awarded a Nobel Prize in
1993. But until LIGO’s detection, we had no direct evidence for the existence of gravitational
waves.

This is basic research at its finest. What kind of black hole and compact stellar systems are
there? Where are they within the galaxies? 

LIGO’s first event – the September 2015 detection that so excited Afshordi – was
remarkable, and not only because it happened just a few days after a long-planned
instrumental upgrade. It stood out also because the merging black holes were so heavy, with
masses estimated at 29 and 36 times the Sun’s mass. ‘A lot of people expected the black hole
events to have lower masses,’ said Ofek Birnholtz, a member of the LIGO collaboration’s
group on compact binary coalescence and a physicist at the Max Planck Institute for
Gravitational Physics in Germany. The strikingly clean signal, together with the
collaboration’s openness in sharing the data, has been an inspiration for physicists in other
communities who, like Afshordi, are now exploring how to use the new observations for their
own work. 

On 26 December 2015, LIGO recorded a second event. The age of gravitational-wave

astronomy had officially begun, after many years of slow progress and false starts. ‘Some of
my PhD colleagues had left the field of gravitational-wave astronomy,’ Birnholtz said and
added, laughing, ‘but are returning because suddenly it’s hot again.’ This is uncharted
territory, basic research at its finest. What kind of black hole and compact stellar systems are
there? Where are they within the galaxies? What do the gravitational waves reveal about their
origins? If a neutron star merges with a black hole, what can be learned about matter in such
extreme conditions? Do black holes behave the way that our calculations predict? 

Afshordi’s theory of black holes and dark energy is just one example of the kinds of enquiries
that are now possible. A wealth of information is waiting to be explored, openly, around the
world.

A few days after Afshordi’s result appears on the open-access server arXiv.org, members of
the LIGO collaboration scrutinise the analysis. It takes only a few weeks until they publish a
reply, criticise the methodology, and call for different statistical tools. Birnholtz is one of the
authors of that criticism.  

‘The claim is surprising,’ said Birnholtz. ‘I have no prior as to whether or not there should be
echoes. That’s physics nobody can guess at. But I do have a strong intuition, working with
LIGO data, that the amplitude is probably not large enough to claim such a significance at
this stage.’ Birnholtz has suggestions for how to improve the analysis, but avoids making
statements about the chances of confirming the result. Alex Nielsen, another member of the
97

LIGO collaboration and one of Birnholtz’s co-authors, reiterates the need for caution: ‘As
members of the LIGO collaboration, we have to be very careful about what statements we
make in public, before we have full collaboration approval. But the data is public and people
can do with it what they want.’  

The LIGO collaboration has an open science centre, where data recorded for one hour around
the time of confirmed gravitational events is publicly available. ‘People are welcome to use it
and contact us for any questions,’ Birnholtz said. ‘If they find anything interesting, they can
share it with us, and we can work on it together. This is part of the scientific experience.’ 

The collaboration has several thousand members worldwide, distributed at more than a
hundred institutions. They meet twice a year; the most recent meeting was in March in
Pasadena, California. Some members of the collaboration are now trying to reproduce
Afshordi’s analysis. Birnholtz expects the effort to take several months. ‘The result might be
disappointing,’ he warned. ‘Not in that it says there are no echoes, but that we can’t say
whether there are echoes.’ Gravitational-wave astronomy is still a field in its infancy, though,
and much more data are on the way. The collaboration estimates that by the completion of the
third observing run in 2018, LIGO is likely to have made 40 high-quality detections of black-
hole mergers. Each will offer another opportunity to test Afshordi’s theory. 

Because they interact so weakly and deposit so little energy as they pass by, gravitational
waves are exceedingly difficult to measure. The deformation they cause is tiny, and
enormous care is necessary to extract a clean signal. The discovery threshold used by the
LIGO collaboration is 5 sigma, corresponding to a chance of less than one in 3 million that
the signal was coincidence, which is far above the significance level of Afshordi’s signal. The
weak interaction of gravitational waves, however, is also the reason why they are excellent
messengers. Unlike particles or light, they are barely affected on their way to us, carrying
with them pristine information about where and how they were generated. They allow
entirely new precision tests of general relativity in a regime that has never before been
explored.  

Cosmologists would also want to look much more closely at the implications of this new
explanation for dark energy

If black hole echoes should be confirmed, that would almost certainly indicate a stark
deviation from general relativity. Finding echoes would not uniquely confirm Afshordi’s
theory that black holes seed dark energy. But some truly novel idea would be needed to
explain it. ‘I don’t know of such echoes in any simulation that we have done to date,’
Birnholtz said. ‘If we were to confirm that there was an echo, that would be very interesting.
We would have to look into what could produce such an echo.’ 

Afshordi has research plans in case the statistical significance of his signal increases. He
wants to improve his model of black-hole mergers, and run a numerical simulation to support
the analytical estimate of what the echoes should look like. The next step would then be to
better understand the underlying theory of space-time that could give rise to such a behaviour
of the black-hole horizon. Cosmologists would also want to look much more closely at the
implications of this new explanation for dark energy.

Afshordi is aware just how speculative it is to alter general relativity so drastically. But he’s a
rebel with a mission: ‘I want to encourage people to keep an open mind and not to dismiss
98

ideas because they don’t match their preconceived notions.’ With LIGO exposing the
workings of the Universe in ways never before studied, a lot of preconceived notions may
soon be set aside.Cosmology

Astronomy

Physics

https://aeon.co/essays/do-ripples-in-space-time-herald-a-new-theory-of-gravity

Andrew RobinsonFollow

Wait a minute! Before I answer that question, this new discovery will not be the demise of
general relativity anymore than general relativity was the end of Kepler or Newton, it is just a
supplement to existing current and well established theories, the new discoveries only being
most useful or relevant at the very extremes of natural phenomenon. Outside of a black
hole, general relativity still works just perfectly fine, just like non-relativistically corrected
Kepler’s or Newtonian mathematics works perfectly fine for NASA to still be able to very
accurately calculate the vast majority of spacecraft trajectories without it. You are overstating
the potential effect that this discovery will actually have.

That isn’t to say it doesn’t feel like a huge Earth-shaking idea if it turns out to be true. It ties
in rather nicely with the recent article, Gravitational wave kicks monster black hole out of
galactic core. I can’t wait to read their paper in Astronomy and Astrophysics but I’m afraid I
will probably be disappointed when I do, because I know it is only a theoretical paper and
will not have any mechanically repeatable experiment as proof of the theory…yet. But still,
the facts it refers to establish their theory are very interesting to contemplate, especially
thinking about how gravity waves can combine to accelerate two huge bodies of matter (a
massive quasar and its massive galaxy) apart from each other in two different directions, as if
gravity were repellent instead of attractive. Why use or wait for echoes when you have
incredible things like that happening to test your theories by first? Afterall, both Afshordi and
Chiaberge (et al) are trying to perform the same exact calculations, so the question is, do their
mathematical models even match? If not, why not?

Anyway, to answer the question, no, we are not on the cusp of yet another age of great
discoveries in physics and cosmology, because those kinds of things only occur during a
Renaissance like psychological event, and the world is as far from having one of those again
as it is from stopping the current 6th Mass Extinction event from continuing to accelerate. All
the latest ideas in physics and cosmology are all still stuck in the theory stage, and a theory is
not a discovery. When Einstein came up with his theories, the vast majority of them were
immediately confirmable, albeit not as accurately or with a low margin of error in the earlier
days of Einstein’s life, as all scientists, even Einstein, desired in order to remove even the
slightest doubts about it. Einstien’s theories quickly became discoveries back then because
scientists actually practiced science back then, because back then science wasn’t driven by
profits within a business that owned them, a business that was mainly funded by taxpayer
money, which in turn was only to be dispersed by politicians with an agenda. Well, at least it
wasn’t nowhere near as being like that so much as it is today. And in case you didn’t notice,
politics is the direct opposite of science.

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JL

29 March 2017jacques lcvlFollow

Indeed, and so in accordance to your:

“…just like non-relativistically corrected Kepler’s or Newtonian mathematics works

perfectly fine for NASA to still be able to very accurately calculate the vast majority of
spacecraft trajectories without it.”

and as you probably noticed, we don’t fly anywhere any longer, regardless the invariability of
such theories, we are moving as far as possible from any truths, much like those first probes
we sent, by now accelerated to such unfathomable speeds and thus located so

https://aeon.co/ideas/pigs-parrots-and-people-the-problem-of-animal-personality

Earlier this year, in a warehouse in south London, I watched as a pair of pyjama-clad

musicians tried to entertain an audience of two placidly disinterested pigs. Of the human
performers, one wielded a double-bass, while the other sang in short bursts. They resorted to
pizzicato, falsetto, even an abrupt interruption by the director, who tried to course-correct the
flagging display. The porcine spectators were unmoved.

In the study of animal behaviour, researchers usually try to smooth out individual differences
by looking at large data sets. But this performance, staged as part of the Making Nature
exhibition at the Wellcome Collection in London, turned that method on its head. The
characteristic dispositions of pig-kind were not on display; the two pigs and their particular
responses were. The humans were invited to indulge the idiosyncrasies of their fellow
creatures, and to wonder if we could ever understand what makes them tick.

We tend to think of ‘good science’ as being all about samples, statistics and replicated
experiments. These are the fundamental tools with which we determine factual truth. But
most people outside the scientific community (and perhaps those who work on large farms)
believe that animals have personalities. Most of us never confront a statistically ordered
sample of animal behaviour. Putative claims such as ‘Dogs are more intelligent than cats’ – a
debatable proposition – are met not with scientific counter-evidence, but with ‘Ah, but you
have not met my cat.’

When it comes to humans, we readily turn a scientific lens on the individual. While
demography looks at whole societies and sub-populations, psychology attends to individual
minds. Because humans can talk and account for themselves, we have rich descriptions of the
kind of creatures we are, all the way from species to groups to families to individuals. With
other animals, though, it’s impossible to attain this level of insight. A lab rat will never be
able to describe its neuroses to us from the comfort of a tiny chaise longue.

But it’s important to maintain a scientific distinction between probability and possibility – the
difference between what can be expected of an animal drawn from a particular population,
100

and what a single creature might be capable of when stretched to its limits. For example, in a
lab in Oxford in 2002, a New Caledonian crow named Betty bent a piece of wire into a hook
to reach an otherwise inaccessible pot of food. She could do this consistently but, being an
individual crow, Betty did not, in herself, demonstrate that any New Caledonian crow will
make hooks when necessary. Alone, she suggested that some can make hooks in certain
situations.

Researchers expressed similar misgivings about the language skills of Alex, an African Grey
parrot who was trained for three decades by the American animal researcher Irene
Pepperberg. Alex was able to construct novel phrases from words he’d learnt in other
contexts, and could deploy concepts and numbers meaningfully. While the research was
applauded as an impressive example of one animal’s learning, it was also criticised for
dealing with only one bird.

As it happens, Betty and Alex did not turn out to be one-off marvels; other members of their
species showed similar levels of progress. But even if these birds had been singular prodigies,
their existence would tell us something about crows and parrots that a large sample size
might not. The distinction between these domains of knowledge need not be controversial. In
2012, for example, a male Goffin’s cockatoo in a lab in Vienna used a short stick to reach
through a mesh cage for a nut. He went on to demonstrate that ability several more times, and
to teach it to cockatoos observing him. In general, it’s still true to say that Goffin’s cockatoos
do not use tools. But Figaro’s behaviour absolutely happens – the capability exists, even if
it’s not activated very often – and seems to be available to other members of the species, even
if they haven’t innovated it for themselves.

Is it possible to move from an individual case study to the full-blown investigation of

animal personality? If specific animals perform tasks differently from one other, but
consistent with their own past performance, perhaps we can identify those patterns as a kind
of proto-personality. A good example is the bold/shy paradigm: some creatures are
audacious, and approach new objects or behaviours readily; some are timid, and more
reluctant to engage. In one example from 2004, individual fish known as three-spined
sticklebacks were shown to feed and grow at different rates according to how bravely they
returned to a meal after a simulated predator attack. Evolutionary theory and mathematical
modelling provide a possible explanation for such differences: variable behaviour in a
population is an adaptive advantage and gives you a better shot at survival. Bold fish can take
the risk of mating earlier, while shy ones might wait – with the upshot that each group can
commit to a strategy and try to optimise its trade-offs.

More daring studies have attempted to apply the psychological understanding of personality
in humans to other creatures – an approach that’s fascinating, if less convincing. The word
‘personality’ reveals the problem: the ‘person’ is a human-fitted concept, and of limited use
in explaining the internal motivations of animals.

Still, being able to describe consistent patterns of behaviour within an individual helps us to
capture and understand the variation that big samples try to smooth out. It also improves the
conclusions of those large experiments. Instead of pointing to outliers or noise in the data and
saying ‘thankfully our sample size overcame this messiness’, we can look at the underlying
cause of that messiness. Case studies, animal personality, and exceptional individuals all help
us see the different layers of truth that live within our generalisations.
101

At one point during the performance, the bassist accidentally knocked over a chair with a
loud clap; only then did one of the non-human observers perk up her ears. I don’t know if the
pigs knew that one artist was frustrated and the other delighted. But if those pigs could speak
and make a species-wide observation about us, I suspect it would be something along the
lines of: ‘Aren’t humans boring?’

Biology

Mood & Emotion

Personality

https://aeon.co/ideas/pigs-parrots-and-people-the-problem-of-animal-personality

Isa KocherFollow

The world expert on albatrosses confidently stated categorically her decades of research on
albotrosses showed no same sex mating. period. case closed.

To check her own veracity she went back and looked. she was certain. and guess what: in her
very own very detailed records she found she had systematically recorded several decades of
same sex mating and parenting as data noise, classifying anything and everything not
heterosexist as outside her data - irrelevant and beyond her focus on behavior clearly within
one standard deviation. or less deviation. she had systematically organized her data to
exclude any kind of same sex mating behavior even actual cases of same sex parenting of
chicks born of stolen eggs.

She then published an article based on several decades of same sex mating.

When you define some inquiry as unscientific a priori, than you have a set of data that proves
your premise.

No ifs no ands no buts about it, anybody who has lived with non-humans for any time in any
capacity knows with certainty that non-human individuals are individually different which
may not qualify them under the law as persons, but personality has long divorced itself in
psychology from its legal common law roots in the legal definition of person. and under 18th
centery law, “people” were not individual persons, but local authority, non-aristcratic local
authority. ‘person’ ‘people’ were legal terms with technical meanings in law. we all know
that today ‘personality’ refers to the function of individuality and individulization. all through
the mammalian and avian species there is individualization in social species. skinnerian
psychology, experimental psychology of the 50 and 60s denied human personality as an
unscientific concept, mysticism it said in my psychologuy 101 text.

So yes animals do have personalities. they bond with each other and across species with other
individuals. hence natural hybrids like wolf-coyotes - coyotes being food when a wolf is
hungry and an object of power and sexual exploitation when not hungry, another social
individual.

It is not a question of is or is not. but rather of what useful information is learned. (Physical,
biological intersubjectivty among animals, as well as among humans).
102

quibling over how representative Alex the parrot is is the hight of scientific absurdity. it
shows categorically indisputably that the idea of birds having no mind no intelligence no
ideas no personality is scientifically indefensible.

one is enough.

the question then becomes how much individuality how much intelligence what is their mind
like.

it’s like finding one human fossil 2 million years old. one is enough. that proves they existed,
because one human fossil is impossible. humans live in groups, exist in, come into existence
in groups. one human femur is a whole society. the alternative is time machines. one toe.

one lone parrot arguing in english with any human about anything is proof beyond all
conceivable quibble that birds think feel and have personal personalities. obviously

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7 April 2017paleologue OFollow

Absolutely! The one thing that jumps out at you when you look closely is that each
individual, whether animal or human, has its own distinct personality. Some are gregarious,
others shy and reticent. Some are aggressive, others the peacemakers. There are alpha males
and alpha females in every social species. And those who just have that troubled, bewildered
look.

Ethologists should look into just why and how that is so. The famous experiment this makes
me think of is the fellow out in Siberia who has raised foxes on a fox farm since the 1950s.
He started just separating the friendly ones from the wild ones. And found that he was
quickly breeding a whole new variety of hand-friendly foxes… ones that had adventitious
features, most strikingly, new color varieties like red, white and pinto. (BTW they don’t make
good house pets yet, but only because unlike cats they pee everywhere, without restraint.
Otherwise they’re great little pets.)

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TD

5 days agoT DavisFollow

That would be Dmitri Belyavev’s breeding experiment, and it’s probably the most adorable
science done in the study of domestication ever.
103

His team’s research suggests that the startling change in phenotypic variety - from pure black
or white in the wild specimens, to all sorts of colors and patterns in the domesticates
reminescent of the patterns found in dogs, cats, and horses - is the result of a shared
biochemical pathway between adrenaline and melanin. As the animals became more sociable
and developed diminished aggression responses, their physiologies became more susceptible
to variation in pigment expression due to greater melanin activity!

The tamest foxes also began sporting floppy ears, curly tails, and reduced musk.

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5 days agopaleologue OFollow

The theory makes sense, for all species. Have you ever noticed, domestic animals like cattle,
sheep, horses, cats come in a variety of colors and patterns? Their wild cousins normally just
come in a generic brown.

Cynics would have said that’s because in the wild, fancy colors just get eaten first. But
Belyaev’s work illustrates that that’s not the case. The same cluster of genes give rise to the
behavior and the novel coloration.

I notice factory farmed animals generally just come in the white.

104

BIOLOGICAL, PHYSICAL, PHYSIOLOGICAL INTERSUBJECTIVITY

Interaction and intersubjectivity do not have to occur only by means of verbal

means and ‘languages’ described in earlier sections. It could also occur on pre-
conceptual and non-verbal levels, for example on biological, intra- and inter-
biological levels and sub-levels, as well as physically, intra-physically and
different levels of ‘physical’ objects, organisms, fauna and flora.

Numerous different types of intersubjectivity can be identified for example in

sexual behaviour and intercourse, some of the dimensions are: physical,
emotional, verbal, tactile, aural, visual, taste, bio-chemical. While the contact
between more than one can be described as interpersonal, and occurs in many
dimensions and on many levels, masturbation of an individual can said to be
intra-personal although many intersubjective tools and ‘languages’ are being
employed, although most of the levels and dimensions of inter-personal sex are
present.

Other forms of physical interaction, where there is intersubjective forms of

communication are the following: crowds watching football or other sports
(among the players of one team, among the players of the opposing team,
between members of the two tems, with the umpire or referee, with the crowds
and supporters of either team, between supporters of different teams, the
commentators, radio, television, newspapers and other media, among the
viewers, listeners and readers, police, security and other guards, etc), such as
athletic games, tennies, horse racing, EFC, martial arts, swimming, motor
racing, boxing, fighting between two or more individuals, uprisings, protests,
battles, wars, rebellions, attacks (for example when you are in your home by
armed burglars), car hijackings, kidnapping (many people and different types of
people and groups could be involved creating, interpreting, responding to all
sorts of intersubjective interaction, communication, languages, signals and
signs,. There exist understanding, non-verbal communication in many of these
cases. For example in the case of a bank robbery, think of the bystanders,
SWAT squads and other individuals and types of groups and their interaction
and types of intersubjectivity.
105

Other forms of intersubjectivity that could be meaniungfully investigated and

described by means of the frameworks of Object Oriented Ontology (see later in
this section) for example someone wlaking in the rain, a few people caught in a
typhoon, Sunami or thunder and lightning storm, drowing in a river, dam or the
ocean, car accidents and pile ups (ambulance, police sirens – even the sounds
can be described by musically educated), road rage, omtions of the different
parties, the bio-chemistry and other bodily functions involved, fear, terror, grief.

One or more people, dehydrated and starving walking in the burning sun in th
desert (or part of a military expedition, in the forests of Vietnam being
attacked). Art exhibitions (viewers, the work, performance or new media art,
among the viewers, involvement of the viewers, even more so with tactile art at
The Tate, the critics, readers of the critics, collectors and their advisors,
curators, players in the art market, websites dealing with the art market, art
news, etc. Crowds watching bullfights and others involved, horses, bulls, being
attacked by animals, lions attacking other animals for food, being bitten by
snakes, the effect of the venom, the non-verbal communication involve, many
intra-personal reactions and messages of people being sick or dying from a
disease, viruses, etc. While being photographed ( camera and other objects
being employed0, by television crews, photographing models outdoors, in
landscapes, storms, interaction with nature. Between instructors, teachers and
learners, Conferences, verbal and non-verbal interactions and communication.

Interaction and communication between ants, flocks of birds, diners in a

restaurant, waiters, chefs, orchestra, food providing messages, an operation, the
instruments, the operation, the nurses, surgeons, anaesthetist and his apparatus,
etc. A boxing match, different types of interaction, communication, messages
and intersubjectivity between the boxers, referee, crowd, news, television crews,
reporters, commentators, the radio and television, the coaches, the judges
involved in scoring, pretty girls announcing the rounds, the physical objects, the
ring, blood, punches, etc.

To repeat, as an introduction to these paragraphs that follow: Interaction and

intersubjectivity do not have to occur only by means of verbal means and
‘languages’ described in earlier sections. It could also occur on pre-conceptual
and non-verbal levels, for example on biological, intra- and inter-biological
levels and sub-levels, as well as physically, intra-physically and different levels
of ‘physical’ objects, organisms, fauna and flora.

An example among flora is Cross-fertilization, also called Allogamy, the fusion of male
and female gametes (sex cells) from different individuals of the same species.Jul 20, 1998
106

https://global.britannica.com/science/cross-fertilization
Cross-fertilization, also called Allogamy, the fusion of male and female gametes (sex cells) from
different individuals of the same species. Cross-fertilization must occur in dioecious plants (those
having male and female organs on separate individuals) and in all animal species in which there are
separate male and female individuals. Even among hermaphrodites—i.e., those organisms in which
the same individual produces both sperm and eggs—many species possess well-developed
mechanisms that ensure cross-fertilization. Moreover, many of the hermaphroditic species that are
capable of self-fertilization also have capabilities for cross-fertilization.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allogamy

"Allogamy" (cross-fertilization) is a term used in the field of biological reproduction

describing the fertilization of an ovum from one individual with the spermatozoa of another.
By contrast, autogamy is the term used for self-fertilization. In humans, the fertilization event
is an instance of allogamy. Self-fertilization (also known as autogamy) occurs in
hermaphroditic organisms where the two gametes fused in fertilization come from the same
individual. This is common in plants (see Sexual reproduction in plants) and certain
protozoans.

(Are these exchanges examples of intra-interaction, or intra-personal intersubjectivity and

kinds of private or personal communication and ‘languages’?)

In plants, allogamy is used specifically to mean the use of pollen from one plant to fertilize
the flower of another plant and usually synonymous with the term "cross-fertilization" or
"cross-pollination" (outcrossing), though the latter term can be used more specifically to
mean pollen exchange between different plant strains or even different plant species (where
the term cross-hybridization can be used) rather than simply between different individuals.
[citation needed]

Parasites having complex life cycles can pass through alternate stages of allogamous and
autogamous reproduction, and the description of a hitherto unknown allogamous stage can be
a significant finding with implications for human disease.

This is merely one example of physical, botanical, zoological, biological and

physiological interaction between different organisms. There exist many
different types of interaction or intersubjectivity between different individuals
or subjects, be they micro-organisms, humans, plants or animals. Could we also
speak meaningfully about interactions and/or intra-actions on atomic and even
sub-atomic levels? Are messages and information exchanged, given received,
interpreted and responded to, or communication taking place? On that level we
talk about energy – another word for interaction and intra-action.

http://www.chem4kids.com/files/atom_intro.htm
Atoms are building blocks. If you want to create a language, you'll need an alphabet. If you want to
build molecules, you will need atoms of different elements. Elements are the alphabet in the
language of molecules. Each element is a little bit different from the rest.
107

Why are we talking about elements when this is the section on atoms? Atoms are the general term
used to describe pieces of matter. You have billions of billions of atoms in your body. However, you
may only find about 40 elements. You will find billions of hydrogen (H) atoms, billions of oxygen (O)
atoms, and a bunch of others. All of the atoms are made of the same basic pieces, but they are
organized in different ways to make unique elements.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atom

An atom is the smallest constituent unit of ordinary matter that has the properties of a
chemical element. Every solid, liquid, gas, and plasma is composed of neutral or ionized
atoms. Atoms are very small; typical sizes are around 100 picometers (a ten-billionth of a
meter, in the short scale).

Atoms are small enough that attempting to predict their behavior using classical physics – as
if they were billiard balls, for example – gives noticeably incorrect predictions due to
quantum effects. Through the development of physics, atomic models have incorporated
quantum principles to better explain and predict the behavior.

Every atom is composed of a nucleus and one or more electrons bound to the nucleus. The
nucleus is made of one or more protons and typically a similar number of neutrons. Protons
and neutrons are called nucleons. More than 99.94% of an atom's mass is in the nucleus. The
protons have a positive electric charge, the electrons have a negative electric charge, and the
neutrons have no electric charge. If the number of protons and electrons are equal, that atom
is electrically neutral. If an atom has more or fewer electrons than protons, then it has an
overall negative or positive charge, respectively, and it is called an ion.

The electrons of an atom are attracted to the protons in an atomic nucleus by this
electromagnetic force. The protons and neutrons in the nucleus are attracted to each other by
a different force, the nuclear force, which is usually stronger than the electromagnetic force
repelling the positively charged protons from one another. Under certain circumstances, the
repelling electromagnetic force becomes stronger than the nuclear force, and nucleons can be
ejected from the nucleus, leaving behind a different element: nuclear decay resulting in
nuclear transmutation.

The number of protons in the nucleus defines to what chemical element the atom belongs: for
example, all copper atoms contain 29 protons. The number of neutrons defines the isotope of
the element. The number of electrons influences the magnetic properties of an atom. Atoms
can attach to one or more other atoms by chemical bonds to form chemical compounds such
as molecules. The ability of atoms to associate and dissociate is responsible for most of the
physical changes observed in nature and is the subject of the discipline of chemistry.

Contents

 1 History of atomic theory

o 1.1 Atoms in philosophy
o 1.2 First evidence-based theory
o 1.3 Brownian motion
o 1.4 Discovery of the electron
o 1.5 Discovery of the nucleus
108

o 1.6 Discovery of isotopes

o 1.7 Bohr model
o 1.8 Chemical bonding explained
o 1.9 Further developments in quantum physics
o 1.10 Discovery of the neutron
o 1.11 Fission, high-energy physics and condensed matter
 2 Structure
o 2.1 Subatomic particles
o 2.2 Nucleus
o 2.3 Electron cloud
 3 Properties
o 3.1 Nuclear properties
o 3.2 Mass
o 3.3 Shape and size
o 3.4 Radioactive decay
o 3.5 Magnetic moment
o 3.6 Energy levels
o 3.7 Valence and bonding behavior
o 3.8 States
 4 Identification
 5 Origin and current state
o 5.1 Formation
o 5.2 Earth
o 5.3 Rare and theoretical forms
 5.3.1 Superheavy elements
 5.3.2 Exotic matter
 6 See also
 7 Notes
 8 References
 9 Sources
 10 Further reading
 11 External links

 www.sciencedaily.com

 Composite subatomic particles (such as protons or atomic nuclei) are bound states of two or
more elementary particles. For example, a proton is made of two up quarks and one down
quark, while the atomic nucleus of helium-4 is composed of two protons and two neutrons.

 Subatomic particle - Wikipedia

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subatomic_particle

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Subatomic_particle

In the physical sciences, subatomic particles are particles much smaller than atoms.[1] There
are two types of subatomic particles: elementary particles, which according to current
theories are not made of other particles; and composite particles.[2] Particle physics and
nuclear physics study these particles and how they interact.[3]
109

In particle physics, the concept of a particle is one of several concepts inherited from classical
physics. But it also reflects the modern understanding that at the quantum scale matter and
energy behave very differently from what much of everyday experience would lead us to
expect.

The idea of a particle underwent serious rethinking when experiments showed that light could
behave like a stream of particles (called photons) as well as exhibit wave-like properties. This
led to the new concept of wave–particle duality to reflect that quantum-scale "particles"
behave like both particles and waves (also known as wavicles). Another new concept, the
uncertainty principle, states that some of their properties taken together, such as their
simultaneous position and momentum, cannot be measured exactly.[4] In more recent times,
wave–particle duality has been shown to apply not only to photons but to increasingly
massive particles as well.[5]

Interactions of particles in the framework of quantum field theory are understood as creation
and annihilation of quanta of corresponding fundamental interactions. This blends particle
physics with field theory.

Contents

 1 Classification
o 1.1 By statistics
o 1.2 By composition
o 1.3 By mass
 2 Other properties
 3 Dividing an atom
 4 History
 5 See also
 6 References
 7 Further reading
 8 External links
110

Classification
By statistics

The Standard Model classification of particles

Any subatomic particle, like any particle in the 3-dimensional space that obeys laws of
quantum mechanics, can be either a boson (an integer spin) or a fermion (a half-integer spin).

By composition

The elementary particles of the Standard Model include:[6]

 Six "flavors" of quarks: up, down, bottom, top, strange, and charm;
 Six types of leptons: electron, electron neutrino, muon, muon neutrino, tau, tau neutrino;
 Twelve gauge bosons (force carriers): the photon of electromagnetism, the three W and Z
bosons of the weak force, and the eight gluons of the strong force;
 The Higgs boson.

Various extensions of the Standard Model predict the existence of an elementary graviton
particle and many other elementary particles.

Composite subatomic particles (such as protons or atomic nuclei) are bound states of two or
more elementary particles. For example, a proton is made of two up quarks and one down
quark, while the atomic nucleus of helium-4 is composed of two protons and two neutrons.
The neutron is made of two down quarks and one up quark. Composite particles include all
hadrons: these include baryons (such as protons and neutrons) and mesons (such as pions and
kaons).
111

By mass

In special relativity, the energy of a particle at rest equals its mass times the speed of light
squared, E = mc2. That is, mass can be expressed in terms of energy and vice versa. If a
particle has a frame of reference where it lies at rest, then it has a positive rest mass and is
referred to as massive.

All composite particles are massive. Baryons (meaning "heavy") tend to have greater mass
than mesons (meaning "intermediate"), which in turn tend to be heavier than leptons
(meaning "lightweight"), but the heaviest lepton (the tau particle) is heavier than the two
lightest flavours of baryons (nucleons). It is also certain that any particle with an electric
charge is massive.

All massless particles (particles whose invariant mass is zero) are elementary. These include
the photon and gluon, although the latter cannot be isolated.

Other properties

Through the work of Albert Einstein, Satyendra Nath Bose, Louis de Broglie, and many
others, current scientific theory holds that all particles also have a wave nature.[7] This has
been verified not only for elementary particles but also for compound particles like atoms and
even molecules. In fact, according to traditional formulations of non-relativistic quantum
mechanics, wave–particle duality applies to all objects, even macroscopic ones; although the
wave properties of macroscopic objects cannot be detected due to their small wavelengths.[8]

Interactions between particles have been scrutinized for many centuries, and a few simple
laws underpin how particles behave in collisions and interactions. The most fundamental of
these are the laws of conservation of energy and conservation of momentum, which let us
make calculations of particle interactions on scales of magnitude that range from stars to
quarks.[9] These are the prerequisite basics of Newtonian mechanics, a series of statements
and equations in Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, originally published in
1687.

https://physics.stackexchange.com/questions/129837/what-happens-at-the-subatomic-level-
when-energy-is-added-to-an-atom

What happens at the subatomic level when energy is added to an atom?

For the sake of simplicity I shall use the hydrogen atom. I know that adding energy to the
hydrogen atom means bombarding it with photons. I am curious about what happens to the
quarks and electron of the atom. Does the electron move to ever higher electron shells as
energy is added? Does the velocity of the electron increase? What happens to the quarks as
they continue to gain energy?

Here are many was to increase the energy of a system.

112

If you're meaning by form of electromagnetic radiation then the nucleus remains effectively
unchanged. The electron can theoretically increase to energy levels infinite in distance from
the nucleus however most of the time they disconnect from the atom due external forces. The
electrons don't exactly move as such. They are actually distributed around the atom so its
distribution around the atom would be across a much larger space.

One may also move an atom increasing its kinetic energy. From there we see all sorts of odd
effects of special relativity. If I were moving at the same rate as the atom (or if in fact I were
the atom) I would see no change in its mass. However if I were still the mass of the atom
would appear to increase so by logic the mass of every component would appear to increase.
[I can't properly explain this in great detail.]

I could also split the atom by firing a neutron at high speed into the nucleus. In this case we
see the weirdest things with the quarks as a top quark of a proton converts to a bottom quark
to make the proton a neutron and vice-versa. This happens as the quarks exchange a charged
boson. A charge boson could be said to 'carry' a third of the charge of the electron and so
swap a two third up to a one third down. This is called quark transmutation by the electro-
weak force. The same happens for fusion.

On another note you can't split quarks apart. The energy to split apart a quark pair is another
to create another two quarks so that they will always be in couples. Romantic aye?

The following citations from Object Oriented Ontology, Biological Semiotics,

Naturalism, the different types of Physicalism and Materialism indicates and
refers to the possibilities of the, the potential for and the realization or the
actuality of all kinds of interaction, interpersonal, biological, neurological, and
even sub-levels of these and physical organisms, objects and all sorts of things,
for instance in the human or other brains.

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short) puts
things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status, but that
everything exists equally–plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone, for example.Dec
8, 2009

What is Object-Oriented Ontology? | Ian Bogost

bogost.com/writing/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog/

Object-oriented ontology - Wikipedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Object-oriented_ontology

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a school of thought that rejects the privileging of human existence
over the existence of nonhuman objects.
113

Object-oriented ontology (OOO) is a school of thought that rejects the privileging of human
existence over the existence of nonhuman objects.[1] Specifically, object-oriented ontology
opposes the anthropocentrism of Kant's Copernican Revolution, whereby objects are said to
conform to the mind of the subject and, in turn, become products of human cognition.[2]
In contrast to Kant's view, object-oriented philosophers maintain that objects exist
independently of human perception and are not ontologically exhausted by their
relations with humans or other objects.[3] Thus, for object-oriented ontologists, all
relations, including those between nonhumans, distort their related objects in the same basic
manner as human consciousness and exist on an equal footing with one another.[4]

Object-oriented ontology is often viewed as a subset of speculative realism, a contemporary

school of thought that criticizes the post-Kantian reduction of philosophical enquiry to a
correlation between thought and being, such that the reality of anything outside of this
correlation is unknowable.[5] Object-oriented ontology predates speculative realism, however,
and makes distinct claims about the nature and equality of object relations to which not all
speculative realists agree. The term “object-oriented philosophy” was coined by Graham
Harman, the movement's founder, in his 1999 doctoral dissertation "Tool-Being: Elements in
a Theory of Objects."[6][7] In 2009, Levi Bryant rephrased Harman's original designation as
“object-oriented ontology,” giving the movement its current name.

Contents

 1 Founding of the movement

 2 Basic principles
o 2.1 Rejection of Anthropocentrism
o 2.2 Critique of correlationism
o 2.3 Rejection of undermining and "overmining"
o 2.4 Preservation of finitude
o 2.5 Withdrawal
 3 Metaphysics of Graham Harman
 4 Expansion
o 4.1 Onticology (Bryant)
o 4.2 Hyperobjects (Morton)
o 4.3 Alien phenomenology (Bogost)
 5 Criticism
 6 See also
 7 References
o 7.1 Bibliography

Founding of the movement

The term “object-oriented philosophy” was coined by speculative philosopher Graham

Harman in his 1999 doctoral dissertation "Tool-Being: Elements in a Theory of Objects"
(later revised and published as Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects).[8] For
Harman, Heideggerian Zuhandenheit, or readiness-to-hand, refers to the withdrawal of
objects from human perception into a reality that cannot be manifested by practical or
theoretical action.[9] Furthering this idea, Harman contends that when objects withdraw in this
way, they distance themselves from other objects, as well as humans.[1] Resisting pragmatic
interpretations of Heidegger's thought, then, Harman is able to propose an object-oriented
account of metaphysical substances. Following the publication of Harman's early work,
114

several scholars from varying fields began employing object-oriented principles in their own
work. Levi Bryant began what he describes as “a very intense philosophical email exchange”
with Harman, over the course of which Bryant became convinced of the credibility of object-
oriented thought.[1] Bryant subsequently coined the term "object-oriented ontology" in 2009
to distinguish those ontologies committed to an account of being composed of discrete beings
from Harman's object-oriented philosophy, thus marking a difference between object-
oriented philosophy (OOP) and object-oriented ontology (OOO).[10]

Basic principles

While object-oriented philosophers reach different conclusions, they share common precepts,
including a critique of anthropocentrism and correlationism and a rejection of "preservation
of finitude," "withdrawal," and philosophies that undermine or "overmine" objects.

Rejection of Anthropocentrism

Anthropocentrism is a general term used to refer to the privileging of humans as

"subjects" over and against nonhuman beings as "objects." The widespread tendency
frequently limits attributes such as mind, autonomy, moral agency, reason, and the like to
humans, while contrasting all other beings as variations of "object," or things obeying
deterministic laws, impulses, stimuli, instincts, and so on. Beginning with Kant's
epistemology, modern philosophers began articulating a transcendent anthropocentrism,
whereby the Kantian argument that objects are unknowable outside of the imposed, distorting
categories of the human mind in turn shores up discourses wherein objects frequently become
effectively reduced to mere products of human cognition.[2] In contrast to Kant's view, object-
oriented philosophers maintain that objects exist independently of human perception, and that
nonhuman object relations distort their related objects in the same fundamental manner as
human consciousness. Thus, all object relations, human and nonhuman, are said to exist
on equal ontological footing with one another.[4]

Critique of correlationism

Related to 'anthropocentrism,' object-oriented thinkers reject correlationism, which the

French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux defines as "the idea according to which we only
ever have access to the correlation between thinking and being, and never to either term
considered apart from the other."[11] Because object-oriented ontology is a realist philosophy,
it stands in contradistinction to the anti-realist trajectory of correlationism, which restricts
philosophical understanding to the correlation of being with thought by disavowing any
reality external to this correlation as inaccessible, and, in this way, fails to escape the
ontological reification of human experience.[12]

Rejection of undermining and "overmining"

Object-oriented thought holds that there are two principal strategies for devaluing the
philosophical import of objects.[13] First, one can undermine objects by claiming that they
are an effect or manifestation of a deeper, underlying substance or force.[14] Second, one can
"overmine" objects by either an idealism which holds that there is nothing beneath what
appears in the mind or, as in social constructionism, by positing no independent reality
outside of language, discourse or power.[15][16] Object-oriented philosophy rejects both
undermining and "overmining".
115

Preservation of finitude

Unlike other speculative realisms, object-oriented ontology maintains the concept of finitude,
whereby relation to an object cannot be translated into direct and complete knowledge of an
object.[17] Since all object relations distort their related objects, every relation is said to be an
act of translation, with the caveat that no object can perfectly translate another object
into its own nomenclature.[18] Object-oriented ontology does not restrict finitude to
humanity, however, but extends it to all objects as an inherent limitation of relationality.

Withdrawal

Object-oriented ontology holds that objects are independent not only of other objects, but also
from the qualities they animate at any specific spatiotemporal location. Accordingly, objects
cannot be exhausted by their relations with humans or other objects in theory or practice,
meaning that the reality of objects is always present-at-hand.[9] The retention by an object of a
reality in excess of any relation is known as withdrawal.

Metaphysics of Graham Harman

In Tool-Being: Heidegger and the Metaphysics of Objects, Graham Harman interprets the
tool-analysis contained in Martin Heidegger's Being and Time as inaugurating an ontology of
objects themselves, rather than the valorization of practical action or networks of
signification.[9] According to Harman, Heideggerian Zuhandenheit, or readiness-to-hand,
indicates the withdrawal of objects from both practical and theoretical action, such that
objectcal reality cannot be exhausted by either practical usage or theoretical investigation.[19]
Harman further contends that objects withdraw not just from human interaction, but also from
other objects. He maintains:

If the human perception of a house or a tree is forever haunted by some hidden surplus in the
things that never becomes present, the same is true of the sheer causal interaction between
rocks or raindrops. Even inanimate things only unlock each other's realities to a minimal
extent, reducing one another to caricatures...even if rocks are not sentient creatures, they
never encounter one another in their deepest being, but only as present-at-hand; it is only
Heidegger's confusion of two distinct senses of the as-structure that prevents this strange
result from being accepted.[1]

From this, Harman concludes that the primary site of ontological investigation is objects and
relations, instead of the post-Kantian emphasis on the human-world correlate. Moreover, this
holds true for all entities, be they human, nonhuman, natural, or artificial, leading to the
downplayment of dasein as an ontological priority. In its place, Harman proposes a concept
of substances that are irreducible to both material particles and human perception, and
"exceed every relation into which they might enter."[20]

Coupling Heidegger's tool-analysis with the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl,

Harman introduces two types of objects: real objects and sensual objects. Real objects are
objects that withdraw from all experience, whereas sensual objects are those that exist only in
experience.[21] Additionally, Harman suggests two kinds of qualities: sensual qualities, or
those found in experience, and real qualities, which are accessed through intellectual
probing.[21] Pairing sensual and real objects and qualities yields the following framework:
116

 Sensual Object/Sensual Qualities: Sensual objects are present, but enmeshed within a "mist
of accidental features and profiles." [22]
 Sensual Object/Real Qualities: The structure of conscious phenomena are forged from
eidetic, or experientially interpretive, qualities intuited intellectually. [23]
 Real Object/Sensual Qualities: As in the tool-analysis, a withdrawn object is translated into
sensual apprehension via a "surface" accessed by thought and/or action.[23]
 Real Object/Real Qualities: This pairing grounds the capacity of real objects to differ from
one another, without collapsing into indefinite substrata. [23]

To explain how withdrawn objects make contact with and relate to one another, Harman
submits the theory of vicarious causation, whereby two hypothetical entities meet in the
interior of a third entity, existing side-by-side until something occurs to prompt interaction.[24]
Harman compares this idea to the classical notion of formal causation, in which forms do not
directly touch, but influence one another in a common space "from which all are partly
absent." Causation, says Harman, is always vicarious, asymmetrical, and buffered:

'Vicarious' means that objects confront one another only by proxy, through sensual profiles
found only on the interior of some other entity. 'Asymmetrical' means that the initial
confrontation always unfolds between a real object and a sensual one. And 'buffered' means
that [real objects] do not fuse into [sensual objects], nor [sensual objects] into their sensual
neighbors, since all are held at bay through unknown firewalls sustaining the privacy of each.
from the asymmetrical and buffered inner life of an object, vicarious connections arise
occasionally...giving birth to new objects with their own interior spaces.[25]

Thus, causation entails the connection between a real object residing within the directionality
of consciousness, or a unified "intention," with another real object residing outside of the
intention, where the intention itself is also classified as a real object.[26] From here, Harman
extrapolates five types of relations between objects. Containment describes a relation in
which the intention "contains" both the real object and sensual object. Contiguity connotes
relations between sensual objects lying side-by-side within an intention, not affecting one
another, such that a sensual object's bystanders can be rearranged without disrupting the
object's identity. Sincerity characterizes the absorption of a real object by a sensual object, in
a manner that "takes seriously" the sensual object without containing or being contiguous to
it. Connection conveys the vicarious generation of intention by real objects indirectly
encountering one another. Finally, no relation represents the typical condition of reality,
since real objects are incapable of direct interaction and are limited in their causal influence
upon and relation to other objects.[27]

Expansion

Since its inception by Graham Harman in 1999, many authors in a variety of disciplines have
adapted and expanded upon Harman's ideas.

Onticology (Bryant)

Like Harman, Levi Bryant opposes post-Kantian anthropocentrism and philosophies of

access.[2] From Bryant's perspective, the Kantian contention that reality is accessible to
human knowledge because it is structured by human cognition limits philosophy to a self-
reflexive analysis of the mechanisms and institutions though which cognition structures
reality. He states:
117

For, in effect, the Copernican Revolution will reduce philosophical investigation to the
interrogation of a single relation: the human-world gap. And indeed, in the reduction of
philosophy to the interrogation of this single relation or gap, not only will there be excessive
focus on how humans relate to the world to the detriment of anything else, but this
interrogation will be profoundly asymmetrical. For the world or the object related to through
the agency of the human will becomes a mere prop or vehicle for human cognition, language,
and intentions without contributing anything of its own.[2]

To counter the form of post-Kantian epistemology, Bryant articulates an object-oriented

philosophy called 'Onticology', grounded in three principles. First, the Ontic Principle states
that "there is no difference that does not make a difference."[28] Following from the premises
that questions of difference precede epistemological interrogation and that to be is to create
differences, this principle posits that knowledge cannot be fixed prior to engagement with
difference.[29] And so, for Bryant, the thesis that there is a thing-in-itself which we cannot
know is untenable because it presupposes forms of being that make no differences. Similarly,
concepts of difference predicated upon negation—that which objects are not or lack when
placed in comparison with one another—are dismissed as arising only from the perspective of
consciousness, rather than an ontological difference that affirms independent being.[30]
Second, the Principle of the Inhuman asserts that the concept of difference producing
difference is not restricted to human, sociocultural, or epistemological domains, thereby
marking the being of difference as independent of knowledge and consciousness.[31] Humans
exist as difference-making beings among other difference-making beings, therefore, without
holding any special position with respect to other differences.[32] Third, the Ontological
Principle maintains that if there is no difference that does not also make a difference, then the
making of difference is the minimal condition for the existence of being. In Bryant's words,
"if a difference is made, then the being is."[33] Bryant further contends that differences
produced by an object can be inter-ontic (made with respect to another object) or intra-ontic
(pertaining the internal constitution of the object).[33][34]

Onticology distinguishes between four different types of objects: bright objects, dim objects,
dark objects, and rogue objects. Bright objects are objects that strongly manifest themselves
and heavily impact other objects, such as the ubiquity of cell phones in high-tech cultures.[35]
Dim objects lightly manifest themselves in an assemblage of objects; for example, a neutrino
passing through solid matter without producing observable effects.[35] Dark objects are
objects that are so completely withdrawn that they produce no local manifestations and do not
affect any other objects.[36] Rogue objects are not chained to any given assemblage of objects,
but instead wander in and out of assemblages, modifying relations within the assemblages
into which they enter.[37] Political protestors exemplify rogue objects by breaking with the
norms and relations of a dominant political assemblage in order to forge new relations that
challenge, change, or cast off the prior assemblage. Additionally, Bryant has proposed the
concept of 'wilderness ontology' to explain the philosophical pluralization of agency away
from human privilege.

Hyperobjects (Morton)

Timothy Morton became involved with object-oriented ontology after his ecological writings
were favorably compared with the movement's ideas. In The Ecological Thought, Morton
introduced the concept of hyperobjects to describe objects that are so massively distributed in
time and space as to transcend spatiotemporal specificity, such as global warming, styrofoam,
118

and radioactive plutonium.[38] He has subsequently enumerated five characteristics of

hyperobjects:

1. Viscous: Hyperobjects adhere to any other object they touch, no matter how hard an object
tries to resist. In this way, hyperobjects overrule ironic distance, meaning that the more an
object tries to resist a hyperobject, the more glued to the hyperobject it becomes. [39]
2. Molten: Hyperobjects are so massive that they refute the idea that spacetime is fixed,
concrete, and consistent.[40]
3. Nonlocal: Hyperobjects are massively distributed in time and space to the extent that their
totality cannot be realized in any particular local manifestation. For example, global warming
is a hyperobject that impacts meteorological conditions, such as tornado formation.
According to Morton, though, objects don't feel global warming, but instead experience
tornadoes as they cause damage in specific places. Thus, nonlocality describes the manner in
which a hyperobject becomes more substantial than the local manifestations they produce.
[41]

4. Phased: Hyperobjects occupy a higher dimensional space than other entities can normally
perceive. Thus, hyperobjects appear to come and go in three-dimensional space, but would
appear differently to an observer with a higher multidimensional view. [40]
5. Interobjective: Hyperobjects are formed by relations between more than one object.
Consequently, objects are only able to perceive to the imprint, or "footprint," of a
hyperobject upon other objects, revealed as information. For example, global warming is
formed by interactions between the Sun, fossil fuels, and carbon dioxide, among other
objects. Yet, global warming is made apparent through emissions levels, temperature
changes, and ocean levels, making it seem as if global warming is a product of scientific
models, rather than an object that predated its own measurement. [40]

According to Morton, hyperobjects not only become visible during an age of ecological
crisis, but alert humans to the ecological dilemmas defining the age in which they live.[42]
Additionally, the existential capacity of hyperobjects to outlast a turn toward less
materialistic cultural values, coupled with the threat many such objects pose toward organic
matter gives them a potential spiritual quality, in which their treatment by future societies
may become indistinguishable from reverential care.[43]

Alien phenomenology (Bogost)

Ian Bogost, a video game researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology and founding
partner of Persuasive Games,[44] has articulated an "applied" object-oriented ontology,
concerned more with the being of specific objects than the exploration of foundational
principles.[45] Bogost calls his approach alien phenomenology, with the term "alien"
designating the manner in which withdrawal accounts for the inviolability of objectal
experience. From this perspective, an object may not recognize the experience of other
objects because objects relate to one another using metaphors of selfhood.[46]

Alien phenomenology is grounded in three "modes" of practice. First, ontography entails the
production of works that reveal the existence and relation of objects.[47] Second, metaphorism
denotes the production of works that speculate about the "inner lives" of objects, including
how objects translate the experience of other objects into their own terms.[48] Third, carpentry
indicates the creation of artifacts that illustrate the perspective of objects, or how objects
construct their own worlds.[49] Bogost sometimes refers to his version of object-oriented
119

thought as a tiny ontology to emphasize his rejection of rigid ontological categorization of

forms of being, including distinctions between "real" and "fictional" objects.[45]

Criticism

Some commentators contend that object-oriented ontology degrades meaning by placing

humans and objects on equal footing. Matthew David Segall has argued that object-oriented
philosophers should explore the theological and anthropological implications of their ideas in
order to avoid "slipping into the nihilism of some speculative realists, where human values
are a fluke in an uncaring and fundamentally entropic universe.".[50] Other critical
commentators such as David Berry and Alexander Galloway have commented on the
historical situatedness of an ontology that mirrors computational processes and even the
metaphors and language of computation.[51][52]

Cultural critic Steven Shaviro has criticized object-oriented ontology as too dismissive of
process philosophy. According to Shaviro, the process philosophies of Alfred North
Whitehead, Gilbert Simondon, and Gilles Deleuze account for how objects come into
existence and endure over time, in contrast to the view that objects "are already there" taken
by object-oriented approaches.[53] Shaviro also finds fault with Harman's assertion that
Whitehead, Simondon, and Iain Hamilton Grant undermine objects by positing objects as
manifestations of a deeper, underlying substance, saying that the antecedence of these
thinkers, particularly Grant and Simondon, includes the "plurality of actually existing
objects," rather than a single substance of which objects are mere epiphenomena.[53]

See also

 Object Lessons
 Object-oriented programming

Founding of the movement · Basic principles · Metaphysics of Graham Harman

What Is Object-Oriented Ontology? A Quick-and-Dirty Guide to the ...

www.artspace.com/magazine/interviews.../a-guide-to-object-oriented-ontology-art

Apr 8, 2016 - In short, OOO (and its intertwined companion Speculative Realism) is dedicated to
exploring the reality, agency, and “private lives” of nonhuman (and nonliving) entities—all of which
it considers "objects"—coupled with a rejection of anthropocentric ways of thinking about and
acting in the world.

ECOLOGY WITHOUT NATURE: OOO - blogger

ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/p/ooo-for-beginners.html

miku said... Hi Tim, Having just 'got into' OOO, I was a bit dismayed to read that, 'the SR/OOO wave
has crested, crashed, and receded'. That was here:

What is Object-Oriented Ontology? | Ian Bogost

bogost.com/writing/blog/what_is_objectoriented_ontolog/

Dec 8, 2009 - “Object-Oriented Ontology is the study of existence with respect to *things*. It argues
that we can better understand our world and ourselves by ...
120

Recently I was speaking to a writer about my recent work. She’s doing a feature for a local
magazine on creativity research and design practice in the region. I’ve been fortunate to get a
lot of press over the years, and it’s become increasingly important to me to find ways to make
my work comprehensible and applicable to a general audience.

We talked about a number of projects, from games at the studio to my recent Atari work to
my forthcoming book on newsgames. But this was the first time I’d tried to talk to a
journalist about my new work in object-oriented ontology. It was challenging, and I didn’t do
a good job. I was unprepared. I don’t yet have an elevator pitch for OOO. But then again,
OOO doesn’t have one for itself either.

But wait, you might say, there’s a section about OOO in the Wikipedia entry for Speculative
Realism. True, but it’s not really meant for public consumption. When speaking to a general
audience, 500 words is too much. When speaking to the general public, terms like a priori,
Heidegger, correlationism and anti-realism ought to be avoided.

But wait, you might say, why would a discipline of philosophy need or want to explain itself
to a general population? This is the domain of specialists, and some will hold that we cannot
or should not “simplify” our nuanced positions for the unwashed masses. This is
wrongheaded. I’m of the general belief that academia has a responsibility to the public
interest, but more than any other philosophical movememt in recent memory, OOO stands to
benefit from the deep engagement of ordinary people, since it returns the attention of
philosophy to the real, everyday world.

So, I thought I’d try to work on a simple, short, comprehensible explanation of object-
oriented ontology so I don’t find myself in this bind in the future. My goal is to assume zero
knowledge whatsoever about the history of philosophy or its current trends, even if that
means massive oversimplifcation. I’ve also hoped to offer a characterization of the overall
approach of OOO rather than any one position within it. Here’s what I’ve come up with so
far:

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short)
puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status,
but that everything exists equally—plumbers, DVD players, cotton, bonobos, sandstone, and
Harry Potter, for example. In particular, OOO rejects the claims that human experience rests
at the center of philosophy, and that things can be understood by how they appear to us. In
place of science alone, OOO uses speculation to characterize how objects exist and interact.

This is tentative, and I’m posting it here to seek feedback and discussion, not to declare
myself victorious. So, have at it.

Update: Here’s an alternate version, crafted based on some of the excellent discussion
below. I’m sure I’ll go through a few of these before finding the right one.

Ontology is the philosophical study of existence. Object-oriented ontology (“OOO” for short)
puts things at the center of this study. Its proponents contend that nothing has special status,
but that everything exists equally–plumbers, cotton, bonobos, DVD players, and sandstone,
for example. In contemporary thought, things are usually taken either as the aggregation of
ever smaller bits (scientific naturalism) or as constructions of human behavior and society
(social relativism). OOO steers a path between the two, drawing attention to things at all
121

scales (from atoms to alpacas, bits to blinis), and pondering their nature and relations with
one another as much with ourselves.

Slavoj Žižek – Objects, Objects Everywhere: A Critique of Object ...

conversations.e-flux.com/t/slavoj...objects-objects...object-oriented-ontology/3284

Feb 24, 2016 - The core of object-oriented-ontology (ooo) developed by Levi Bryant can be summed
up by the formula from subject back to substance. And, in ...

The core of object-oriented-ontology (ooo) developed by Levi Bryant can be summed up by

the formula from subject back to substance. And, in so far as subject is correlative with
modernity (recall Lacan’s thesis about the Cartesian subject as the subject of modern
science), we can also say that ooo follows the premise rendered by the title of Bruno Latour’s
famous book, We Were Never Modern—it endeavors to bring back the premodern
enchantment of the world. The Lacanian answer to this should be a paraphrase of his
correction of the formula “god is dead” (god was always already dead, he just didn’t know
it): we were always already modern (we just didn’t know it). The main target of ooo is thus
not transcendental philosophy with its subject/object dualism, but modern science with its
vision of “gray” reality reduced to mathematical formalization: ooo tries to supplement
modern science with a premodern ontology which describes the “inner life” of things.

Bryant (who, before his engagement in ooo, was a Lacanian psychoanalyst) resorts to
Lacan’s“formulas of sexuation” to articulate the basic difference between traditional (or
modern) metaphysics and ooo: metaphysics follows the masculine side of universality
grounded in a transcendent exception (god or subject who grounds or constitutes objective
reality), while ooo follows the feminine side of nonall without exception (there is no
transcendent exception, reality is composed of objects who are all on the same ontological
level, and there is no way to totalize this multiverse of objects since they are withdrawn from
each other, with no overreaching object to totalize them).2 This is why, when Bryant speaks
about “the diference between ontologies of presence and transcendence and ontologies of
immanence and withdrawal,”3 he couples the four concepts in an unexpected way: instead of
bringing together immanence/presence and transcendence/withdrawal (which would be much
closer to our spontaneous intuition: Is presence not by definition immanent, is transcendence
not withdrawn from our reach?), he brings together presence and transcendence (the
transcendent ground of being is fully self-present) plus immanence and withdrawal (there is
no transcendent ground, all there is is the immanent multiverse of objects withdrawn from
each other).

In his deployment of the ontology of immanence/withdrawal, Bryant begins by asserting the

primacy of ontology over epistemology, and rejecting the modern subjectivist notion
according to which, before we proceed to analyze the structure of reality, we should critically
reflect upon our cognitive apparatus (how is our cognition possible in the first place, what is
its scope and limitation?). Following Roy Bhaskar, Bryant turns around the transcendental
question: How does reality have to be structured so that our cognition of reality is possible?
The answer is provided by the basic premise of ooo: “It is necessary to staunchly defend the
autonomy of objects or substances, refusing any reduction of objects to their relations,
whether these relations be relations to humans or other objects.”4 This is why there is no
place for subject in Bryant’s edifice: subject is precisely a nonsubstantial entity fully
reducible to its relations to other entities.
122

From the Hegelian–Lacanian standpoint, the tension between the epistemological and
ontological dimensions is resolved in a totally different way: the object is inaccessible, any
attempt to seize it ends up in antinomies, and so on; we reach the object in itself not by
somehow seeing through these epistemological distortions but by transposing epistemological
obstacles into the thing itself. Quentin Meillassoux does the same with regard to the
experience of facticity and/or absolute contingency: he transposes what appear to be
transcendental partisans of finitude as the limitation of our knowledge (the insight that we can
be totally wrong about our knowledge, that reality in itself can be totally different from our
notion of it) into the most basic positive ontological property of reality itself—the absolute
“is simply the capacity-to-be-other as such, as theorized by the agnostic. The absolute is the
possible transition, devoid of reason, of my state toward any other state whatsoever. But this
possibility is no longer a ‘possibility of ignorance,’ viz., a possibility that is merely the result
of my inability to know . . . —rather, it is the knowledge of the very real possibility”5 in the
heart of the In-itself:

We must show why thought, far from experiencing its intrinsic limits through facticity,
experiences rather its knowledge of the absolute through facticity. We must grasp in fact not
the inaccessibility of the absolute but the unveiling of the in-itself and the eternal property of
what is, as opposed to the perennial deficiency in the thought of what is.6

In this way, “facticity will be revealed to be a knowledge of the absolute because we are
going to put back into the thing itself what we mistakenly mistook to be an incapacity in
thought. In other words, instead of construing the absence of reason inherent in everything as
a limit that thought encounters in its search for the ultimate reason, we must understand that
this absence of reason is, and can only be the ultimate property of the entity.”7 The paradox
of this quasimagical reversal of epistemological obstacle into ontological premise is that “it is
through facticity, and through facticity alone, that we are able to make our way towards the
absolute”:8 the radical contingency of reality, this “open possibility, this ‘everything is
equally possible,’ is an absolute that cannot be de-absolutized without being thought as
absolute once more.”9

The uses and abuses of object-oriented ontology and speculative ...

conversations.e-flux.com/t/the-uses-and-abuses...object-oriented-ontology.../2105

Jul 17, 2015 - [image] In the summer issue of Artforum, Princeton professor Andrew Cole considers
the popularity and premises of object-oriented philosophy ...

In the summer issue of Artforum, Princeton professor Andrew Cole considers the popularity
and premises of object-oriented philosophy and speculative realism, two related theoretical
currents that have taken the art world by storm in recent years. Examining the writings of
Graham Harman, the founder of object-oriented philosophy, Cole argues that Harman's claim
to have overcome certain philosophical problems inherited from Kant is way overblown.
While object-oriented philosophy presents itself as a innovative philosophy that has left Kant
in the dust, Cole finds a thinly veiled repetition of Kant everywhere in Harman's work:

Amid all the excitement about object-oriented philosophy, no one has paused to work out
how talk about these new terms for relation is supposed to improve radically on the concept
of “relation” in the history of philosophy. The problem is that the original sins of “relation”
are not rendered entirely clear in Harman’s and his followers’ writing, apart from glib
123

remarks about poststructuralist relationality, systems theory, and human observation. There’s
really no need to overturn the concept of relation in the cursory manner of the object-oriented
ontologists, because there’s already plenty in the history of philosophy since Aristotle to
instruct us that relation is not always human or correlational, reciprocal, or even fixed or
permanent, or anything more than a “moment” of relating that’s always vanishing by dint of
becoming and decay. That’s why philosophers in the late Middle Ages commonly
distinguished between relationes reales, relations among all entities apart from human
perception, and relationes rationis, those relations we’ve reasoned out in our inspection of
the world. Kant, for his part, knew that relation is not only aesthetic (what Aristotle derided
as the “said-of” of relation; i.e., that relation is what we make of it). Rather, he understood
that the problem of relation is exactly the same as the problem of the thing-in-itself: There are
relations in the noumenal world, but we cannot think them directly because we have access
only to phenomenal relations, the imperfect representations of noumenal relations. The
human version of relation, in other words, isn’t the same as noumenal relation, and isn’t the
only kind of relation. This idea is all over Kant’s lectures in metaphysics, which none of the
object-oriented ontologists seem to know.

The epistemological gambit of object-oriented ontology is to say that object relations are
thinkable because they are real, even if withdrawn and unknowable. Realism is obviously
what you could call this philosophy—or, as Harman has it, “weird realism.” But realism
(weird or otherwise) is a point of view about the world—a human point of view that requires
the world to be accessible to us and structured in such a way that we can think it. It’s here
that Harman’s ten modes of relation reveal themselves to be equivalent to Kant’s forms of
“possible experience.” These ten modes guarantee in advance that, say, an object somewhere
will be “sincere” to another object at some point in time, or that an object somewhere will
“confront” another object three days from now. Even if we aren’t on the scene, somewhere in
Ohio, observing an object indifferently “theorizing” another object, we can know that objects
are doing things with other objects and will continue to do so behind our backs. Now, one
might say that Harman has simply extended the Kantian forms of possible experience to
objects, which thus experience other objects in multifarious ways. That would be partly right,
for—according to this philosophy—objects themselves have experiences, as you will see
below. But there’s more: The fact that we can also think these object relations means that the
relations are already thinkable—already correlated to our minds and thus already something
we know about the world. The much maligned “correlationism” that object-oriented ontology
hopes to expunge from its thinking is in fact its preeminent feature.

The Call of Things: A Critique of Object-Oriented Ontologies - MUSE

https://muse.jhu.edu › ... › Minnesota Review › Number 80, 2013 (New Series)

by A Cole - 2013 - Cited by 25 - Related articles

This essay is a critique of actor-network theory (ANT), vitalism, and object-oriented ontology (OOO,
or "speculative realism"), as advanced by Bruno Latour, Jane ...

This essay is a critique of actor-network theory (ANT), vitalism, and object-oriented ontology (OOO,
or "speculative realism"), as advanced by Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, and Graham Harman and his
colleagues. It focuses on the contradiction within these newer philosophies. Each holds that objects
interact with one another in their own hidden ways, that objects are mysteriously indifferent to the
human world, and that human subjectivity itself is just another object. Such a view is described as
124

"posthuman" and is often called "flat ontology" (after Manuel DeLanda). The problem, however, is
that each of these newer philosophies exhibits a very strong humanism and a rather traditional
ontology in that they claim to hear things "speak," recording things' voices, registering their
presence, and heeding their indifference. Indeed, this ontology is so traditional as to be just another
instance of logocentrism and ontotheology, those ancient traditions in which things speak their
being and call out yearningly to the observer. This essay contends that scholars working in these
areas would recognize these problems if they adopted a more inclusive conception of the history of
thought—a history more attentive to medieval philosophy and mysticism (Meister Eckhart and John
Duns Scotus) as well as certain strains of modern idealism (Fichte) and vitalism (Bergson)— in which
the resources of medieval mysticism are addressed. Failing to adopt a perspective genuinely open to
the Middle Ages, these areas sustain a humanism that is anything but posthuman.

Aesthetics Today: Is object-oriented ontology good for artists?

aestheticstoday.blogspot.com/2015/08/is-object-oriented-ontology-good-for.html

Aug 6, 2015 - I have read that many artists are intrigued by Graham Harman's object-oriented
ontology or object-oriented metaphysics. Having just read his ...

Introduction to Object Oriented Ontology | The DEW Lab

www.thedewlab.com/blog/2012/07/12/introduction-to-object-oriented-ontology/

Jul 12, 2012 - This introductory guide to Object Oriented Ontology is an on-going collection of central
theses and surrounding debates. If you'd like to submit a ...

This introductory guide to Object Oriented Ontology is an on-going collection of central

theses and surrounding debates. If you’d like to submit a text, blog, or discussion thread that
you think is particularly useful to the would-be OOO scholar you can post a link in the
comments or email me at steve[at]thedewlab.com

Introduction
to
Object
Oriented
Ontology
July 12, 2012 OOO 5

This introductory guide to Object Oriented Ontology is an on-going collection of central

theses and surrounding debates. If you’d like to submit a text, blog, or discussion thread that
you think is particularly useful to the would-be OOO scholar you can post a link in the
comments or email me at steve[at]thedewlab.com

If you’re interested in OOO then there are few scholars better equipped to guide you than
Levi Bryant, Ian Bogost and Timothy Morton. In 2010 all three scholars presented on a panel
at the RMMLA conference in Albuquerque, New Mexico. This 90 minute recording offers an
accessible  introduction to OOO (Bryant – 0-36:37), the influence of OOO philosophy on
scholarly practices (Bogost – 36:27-105:44), as well as the resonance between object oriented
ontology and climate change (Morton – 105:44-134:31)
125

If you’re interested in the fundamentals of OOO look at Bryant’s essay “The Ontic Principle”
found in The Speculative Turn (the free PDF version of which can be found here [Link]

Intrigued? Consider the books, blogs, and discussions below as a primer.

Accessible. That’s the one word I would use to describe Bryant’s comprehensive expansion of
OOO philosophy. Not only does Democracy of Objects make OOO accessible, Bryant even
presents lucid readings of Žižek, Deleuze & Guattari, and Luhmann. And he does so while clearly
distinguishing his own interpretations (Bryant’s attempt here is not to revise existing philosophy
but, similar to Harman in Tool-Being, he is primarily defining OOO by what it is similar but not
equal to). This past summer I read a number of OOO/speculative-realism texts  and I wish I’d
started here.
Tool-Being
by
Graham
Harman

Much of OOO scholarship attempts to demonstrate that philosophy (at least, the

phenomenological/ontological variety) moves much too fast. For at high-speeds, a simple
unexamined conclusion can propagate at an alarming rate. In such cases, the syllogism becomes
an enthymeme and the solution that follows solves a false problem. This is one way of
summarizing Harman’s Tool-Being, which claims that Heidegger committed an oversight early in
his career that then propagated throughout the rest of his work. Harman revisits the tool/broken-
tool dichotomy, reversing the enthymeme back into a syllogism to demonstrate just where
Heidegger veered off course. The result is a slowing down of ontological inquiry. This simple
change of pace suggests that other philosophers should look back, back towards the initial
premises that establish the relationship between vorhandenheit and zuhandenheit.

Bogost

One way to summarize this book would be to state that, in a way, Alien Phenomenology  is to the
everydayvisual experience as John Cage was to the everyday acoustic experience (bear with me!).
Bogost draws heavily on photography, specifically the work of Stephen Shore, in revisiting the
commonplace from the perspective of the objects themselves. Bogost uses Shore’s work to
deconstruct the artifice of the constructed photograph, demonstrating the pervasiveness of
meaning, as Cage did with his work on the fallacy of silence. Indeed, the fallacy that OOO wishes
to expose is that of correlationism and so Bogost focuses on mediations of the everyday, such as
McDonald’s packaging and the unique characteristics of light sensors in various digital cameras, in
order to propose alternative phenomenologies, thereby decentering that of the human. The book as
a whole challenges its readers not to adopt OOO wholesale but to become an explorer of the
everyday, an amateur carpenterof commonplace things.

OOO is one of those rare projects to unfold, one may even say gestate, in the open forum of
the world wide web. Below is an 
126

updated list of texts, blogs, articles, and interviews concerning the evolution of OOO.

Bryant is the most prolific of the OOO bloggers and so you might be a little overwhelmed by
the sheer amount of content on Larval Subjects. Here are a few points of entry I found
particularly inviting:

The Materiality of SR/OOO: Why Has It Proliferated?– Bryant looks at the rather rapid
spread of OOO, its place outside of academic journals, and its use of social media + the
blogosphere

Yellow Submarines and Operational Closure – OOO meets systems theory/autopoiesis

“Operational closure is not a happy thought. It presents us with a world in which

we’re entangled with all sorts of entities that we can hardly communicate with yet
which nonetheless influence our lives in all sorts of ways”

Is There a Politics of OOO? – The intersection between OOO and Ranciere’s political theory,
where OOO de-centers the human

“OOO, by contrast, makes the strange claim that humans are objects among other
objects (they have no ontologically privileged position and are not the crown of
existence) and proposes the strange idea ofactive objects (objects that aren’t merely
passive recipients of the acts of other entities but which are agencies in their own
right).”

Bogost has a rather diverse CV and while OOO seems to inform most, if not all, of his other
works, his blog is a hodge-podge of gaming, rhetoric, and philosophy. Here are some OOO-
specific posts that introduce you to Ian’s thought:

Seeing Things – A video and transcript covering OOO, ontography, and the everyday

“Object-oriented ontology is thus not only the name for an ontology oriented toward
objects, but a practice of learning how to orient toward objects ourselves. And,
mise-en-abyme-like, how to orient toward object-orientation.”

OOO and Politics – A pointed response to the criticism that OOO 1) downplays ethics,
especially human-centered ethical conundrums, and 2) that OOO scholars have failed to
grapple with human relationships

“Sometimes I regret having gotten back into the “traditional humanities” after
spending the last ten years in a weird hybrid of liberal arts and engineering at a
technical institute. For it deals with the greatest irony of conservatism: a
conservatism whose hallowed tradition is a purported progressive radicalism.
Things are changing in philosophy, and that change is terrifying to some and
liberating to others—perhaps it should be both”
127

+ 
]

Morton’s blog offers an immense amount of OOO content, so much in fact that this guide is,
in large part, an attempt to collate and organize large portions of that rich repository of
philosophical material. That said, Morton’s site is a veritable treasure trove with many hidden
gems, like past talks or links to free(!) ebooks. What’s more, its frequently updated and
includes past, present, and future talks from Morton, as well as previously taught grad
courses.

useful to observe any idea or philosophy taking root in someone’s thoughts, and that’s what
Andre Ling offers when he blogs about object oriented ontology:

Infra Being – Andre Ling: An Ode To OOO, Object-Process mashups, Toward an OO

Ontography of Intra-being

An Un-canny Ontology – Nate Gale: BwOs and Fractal Thinking

Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, and Jane Bennett discuss OOO and literature, all within
a single issue of The New Literary History. Special thanks to Kris Coffield over at Fractured
Politics [link] for collecting the articles.

+ 

Summary: In typical Harman fashion, OOO is discussed in terms of how it is similar to but
fundamentally distinct from three influential theories of literary criticism: New Criticism,
New Historicism, and Deconstructionism. Harman then proceeds to outline an OOO form of
literary criticism, advocating in the process a kind of understanding through deformation–that
is, a form of analysis where the critic actively distorts a text in various ways until it becomes
unrecognizable as that text. The point being that changing a single word (say, a typo) has
little impact on the identity of Moby-Dick (to borrow Harman’s example) but what about
changing the name of a character? The omission of a particular conversation? A complete
reorganization of events?  In other words, Harman proposes analyzing literature by
determining how much play we have with the parts before the whole constitutes a different
object entirely. [PDF]

+ 

Summary: Morton picks up Percy Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry in order to grapple with
literature as a unique, nonhuman object. For Morton it is crucial that objects are not
determined by a fixed frame or medium but rather they produce the frames in which they
exist–they frame themselves in their own space-time. The connection here with literature is
that poems, novels, biographies, etc. each create their own space-time through their unique
narrativization of events (which reminds me of Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique”) .  As with
all OOO writing, Morton is concerned with describing a different kind of relation between an
object and its parts. This begins by recalling that OOO steadfastly maintains that an object
cannot be reduced to (or strictly constituted by) its relations–it will always escape any and all
relationships, even from itself. Following this point Morton remarks that “We are too
accustomed, argues OOO, to seeing things as patterns and not as objects” (219) (a statement
128

that echoes Hayles’ pattern-over-presence argument in How We Became Posthuman). The

distinction Morton is making is between the poem as effect and the poem as cause–if each
text creates its own space-time, its existence as a unique object is overwritten or erased by
suggesting it is merely a cultural product. Both Harman and Morton seek to allow texts to
exists as  texts; that is, to explore the effects of an object rather than the object as the site of
inscription for the effects of other objects (namely, cultural, social, political, and
psychological systems). [PDF]

+ 

Summary: Here Bennett offers a rebuttal against the preceding essays, defending systems,
bodies, and relationism in general against OOO. Central to the debate here is where the
scholarly gaze should be directed. OOO maintains that for too long we have remained fixated
on relations, thereby denying the objects themselves their rightful ontological existence. In
other words, relationality denies what I would call, following McLuhan, the effects of
objects. Objects, like media, are often mistaken for their relations (i.e. content) and thus they
risk being figured as blank slates on which culture is inscribe. Bennett is very much aware of
this fear, this imbalance in scholarship, however, her response is to ensure that this  reaction
isn’t an over reaction. [PDF]

Here are some buzz words for you: speculative realism, object oriented ontology, new
materialism, new aesthetics, correlationalism, continental philosophy. A Venn diagram of
where these fields overlap would look more like a Rorschach test than anything else.  Below
is an on-going collection of conversations concerning OOO, its variants, detractors, and
outright deniers.

OOO U (as in university) is a collection of podcasts, videos, and conference papers on object-
oriented ontology. Think of it like a semester in the life of an object-oriented grad student,
minus the assignments.

In the Spring 2012 term Timothy Morton live-streamed and podcasted his grad course on
object-oriented philosophy. Below are the eight classes that cover a wide-range of topics in,
on, and around OOO. From armchair philosophers to dissertation drafters, the pacing and
accessibility of the material, as imparted by Morton and his students, is ideal for any
interested party.

A collection of conference papers presented on OOO. Unless otherwise stated, all recordings
were made and uploaded by Timothy Morton.

In this paper Harman takes us through the philosophical origins of speculative realism and
OOO, noting the shared frustration with continental philosophy and the inability to discuss
realism in the face of materialism and other forms of correlationism. If the border between
SR and OOO is at all fuzzy for you, Harman draws a clear distinction here. (Hello Everything
Symposium 2010)
129

In this playful paper Morton uses a children’s tale to preface his talk on rhetoric and OOO.
Here Morton proposes that OOO necessitates the inverse of Aristotle’s five-part structure of
rhetoric (invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery), thereby elevating delivery in
order to support the thesis that “rhetoric is what happens when there is an encounter between
any object, that is, between alien beings.” The target here is the privileging of style over
delivery and the limited role of rhetoric in philosophy. (McLuhanists will likely see this as a
privileging of content over medium). (Hello Everything Symposium 2010)

here by Bogost is an autobiographical sketch of a visually-impaired father and a young man’s

growing interest in quotidian objects. Over the course of the paper we encounter lives that
are, for lack of a better phrase, object-oriented. This history provides a basis for Bogost’s
object-oriented research, including this extended look at the Atari VCS (as discussed in detail
by Bogost and Nick Montfort in Racing the Beam). There’s not a lot of new OOO here but
Bogost’s self-reflection on his interest in the particularity of objects is refreshing and
definitely worth a listen. (Hello Everything Symposium 2010)

Graham presented this paper on the same day as his “History of Speculative Realism”
(above) and thus it’s more of an elaboration on those finer points of OOO not covered there.
(Hello Everything Symposium 2010)

Bryant extends the concept of Morton’s hyperobjects to readings of social classes, bringing
together Sartre (antipraxis) and Latour (sociology of the social). Hyperobjects inherently refer
to a scale of objects beyond human comprehension (in regards to their scope). The aim here
is to 1) address the existence of class (Bryant uses Margaret Thatcher’s claim that ‘there are
only individuals and families’ in order to counter that classes themselves are also individual
objects) and 2) articulate the role of classes as objects that cannot be the sum of their
technological/social/cultural parts but nevertheless influence and are influenced by these
other objects. (Hello Everything Symposium 2010)

In this talk Morton sets his sights on the ‘anthropocene’ as he attempts to convey the nearly
unfathomable reality that humans have profoundly altered the planet on a global, geological
scale. To that end Morton remarks on the coincidence of the anthropocene (an event marked
by a marked increase in carbon levels that began with the Industrial Revolution) with Kant’s
Copernican revolution (whereby the study of the real is rendered inaccessible by the
influence of the mind). Thus, just as human beings begin to alter their global environment,
human inquiry begins to study the world as it exists for humans alone. For Morton, the
‘Copernican revolution’ is incapable of addressing the large-scale implications of human
actions and thus “what is required then is a philosophy and a corresponding social ethics and
politics that can think the nonhuman.” For those searching for an ethics to OOO, Morton
makes a strong case that it meets this social and environmental exigency. (Lisbon 2012)

OOO and feminism seem like a perfect match. After all, OOO is about the irreducibility of an
object a single ‘reading,’ the plurality of meanings that risk being erased if one single model
overrides or underwrites all others. But you won’t find much Kristeva or Butler here. The
OOF panels tend to avoid overt references to feminist theory. That said, this panel is well
worth a listen. (SLSA 2012)
130

Graham breaks down aspects of this philosophy in a very well paced and lucid presentation.
More specifically, the origin of OOO in relation to ‘mathematism,’ ‘scientism,’ and
postmodernism is discussed here, as well as an explication of sensual and real
objects/qualities, in accordance with Harman’s Quadruple Object. (The Matter of
Contradiction: Ungrounding the Object 2012)

OOO

Onticology– A Manifesto for Object-Oriented Ontology Part I | Larval ...

https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/.../object-oriented-ontology-a-manifesto-part-i/

Jan 12, 2010 - Object-oriented ontology is not interested in Kant's specific epistemology per se— one
would be hard put to find many genuine Kantians today ...

https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2010/01/12/object-oriented-ontology-a-
manifesto-part-i/

We live in a world pervaded by objects of all kinds, yet nowhere do we have a unified theory
or ontology of objects. Whether we are speaking of technological objects, natural objects,
commodities, events, groups, animals, institutions, gods, or semiotic objects our historical
moment, far from reducing the number of existing objects as alleged by reductive
materialisms, has actually experienced a promiscuous proliferation and multiplication of
objects of all sorts. Moreover, this proliferation has caused massive upheaval and
transformation all throughout planetary, human, and collective life. Yet outside of a few
marginal, yet elite, disciplines such as science and technology studies, the investigation of
writing technologies, environmental theory and philosophy, media studies, as well as certain
variants of feminism and geographical studies, this explosion of objects barely provokes
thought or questioning, much less any sort of genuine or informed engagement at the level of
praxis.

In light of this situation one is reminded of the epigraph to Heidegger’s Being and Time:

‘For manifestly you have long been aware of what you mean when you use the expression
“being”. We, however, who used to think we understood it, have no become perplexed.’

This epigraph could just as easily be rephrased substituting the word “object” for “being”.
Where before we thought we understood what it means to be an object, now we are
perplexed. It is this perplexity that drives the questioning of object-oriented ontology.

1781: The Failure of Philosophy

If 1781 is a fateful watershed year for Western philosophy, then this is because it marks the
publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the devastating Copernican Revolution.
Object-oriented ontology is not interested in Kant’s specific epistemology per se— one
would be hard put to find many genuine Kantians today –but with the form of the Copernican
131

Revolution as it has persisted and undergone variations since the 18th century. For, in effect,
the Copernican Revolution will reduce philosophical investigation to the interrogation of a
single relation: the human-world gap. And indeed, in the reduction of philosophy to the
interrogation of this single relation or gap, not only will there be excessive focus on how
humans relate to the world to the detriment of anything else, but this interrogation will be
profoundly asymmetrical. For the world or the object related to through the agency of the
human will become a mere prop or vehicle for human cognition, language, and intentions
without contributing anything of its own. The Copernican spirit will thus consist in an
anthropocentric unilateralization of the human-world relation to the detriment of the world.
World, objects, will now become simple products of human cognition and philosophy
will become a transcendental anthropology that seeks to investigate the manner in
which this cognition forms or produces objects.

Kant sums up this inversion and its spirit early in the Critique of Pure Reason:

Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but all
attempts to find something about them a priori through concepts that would extend our
cognition have, on this presupposition, come to nothing. Hence let us once try whether we do
not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform
to our cognition, which would agree better with the requested possibility of an a priori
cognition of them, which is to establish something about objects before they are given to us.
This would be just like the first thoughts of Copernicus, who, when he did not make good
progress in the explanation of the celestial motions if he assumed that the entire celestial host
revolves around the observer, tried to see if he might not have greater success if he made the
observer revolve and left the stars at rest. (B xvi)

In beginning with the hypothesis that objects conform to mind rather than mind to objects,
Kant who genuinely sought a secure grounding for knowledge and freedom from the endless
debates of metaphysics, paradoxically rids us of the need to consult the world or objects. For
as Kant himself observes, this shift or inversion allows us discern how it is possible for
something to be given in advance. Yet if the world is given in advance, then there is no
longer any need to consult the world or objects. Rather, philosophy, at this point, becomes
self-reflexive, interrogating not being or the world, but interrogating rather the mind that
regards the world. While the Copernican turn will not deny that there is a world independent
of mind, it will nonetheless argue that this world, as it is in-itself, is forever beyond human
knowledge precisely because the world, for-us is everywhere and always structured by our
cognition. As such, philosophy will become an investigation of the mechanisms by which
cognition structures the world. However, what will be lost will be the ability for the world to
surprise us. And if the world no longer has the capacity to surprise us, then this is because the
world already conforms to the structuring agency of our cognition. The rabbit has already
been put into the hat.

Through the Copernican Revolution, philosophy is rescued of the obligation to investigate the
world and now becomes a self-reflexive investigation of how the human structures the world
and objects. It is in this respect that philosophy becomes a transcendental anthropology and
any discussion of the objects of the world becomes, ultimately, an anthropological
investigation. For the object and the world are no longer a place where humans happen to
dwell, but are rather mirrors of human structuring activity. It is this that Hegel will ultimately
attempt to show in The Phenomenology of Spirit with his famous “identity of identity and
difference” or “identity of substance and subject”. If Hegel is able to show that the object,
132

which appears to be so transcendent to and alien to the subject, is ultimately the subject, then
this is because the object is already a reflection of the sense-bestowing activity of the subject.

Avatars of Copernicanism

It is the form of Kant’s thesis, not its content that is important. Here, following Pauline
Biblical criticism, we can distinguish between the letter and the spirit of Kant’s thought. At
the level of the letter we will find very few thinkers that accept the Kantian epistemology as
developed in his three critiques. Before the ink is barely dry, disputes and competing
proposals begin to emerge. What goes almost completely uncontested is the general spirit of
the Copernican Turn, wherein the world is to be thought as conforming to the human, rather
than the human to the world. Thus, nearly all the major trends of contemporary philosophy
are direct descendants of the Kantian turn in one way or another. Whether the philosophy
proposes the structuration of the world by language, the symbolic, the signifier, or signs, or
whether it is proposed that the world is structured by social forces or power, the unquestioned
thesis is that the world conforms to humans rather than humans to the world. In short, what
we get is a universalized transcendental anthropology. The dispute is over the mechanisms by
which structuration takes place and whether these mechanisms are universal and pertain to a
“deep structure” as in the case of Kant, or whether these mechanisms are culturally and
individually variable. In all cases, however, philosophy remains self-reflexive and absolved
of the need to consult the world because the structures by which the world is given are
already given in advance. To consult the world is to fall prey to an illusion where it is
believed that these structures are “out there”, when, in fact, it is we who impose these
structures on the world.

It is precisely here that philosophy and theory loses its relevance. In a recent indictment of
the humanities, Ian Bogost writes:

The problem is not the humanities as a discipline (who can blame a discipline?), the problem
is its members. We are insufferable. We do not want change. We do not want centrality. We
do not want to speak to nor interact with the world. We mistake the tiny pastures of private
ideals with the megalopolis of real lives. We spin from our mouths retrograde dreams of the
second coming of the nineteenth century whilst simultaneously dismissing out of our
sphincters the far more earnest ambitions of the public at large—religion, economy, family,
craft, science.

While there are certainly psychological motives to this indifference about the world (the
desire for a comfortable mastery granted by the armchair and the self-reflexive turn), this
indifference to the world is already a structural effect of the core assumption that has guided
philosophy, theory, and the humanities since 1781: The thesis that the world conforms to the
human, rather than the human to the world. Insofar as the world conforms to the human there
is no need to speak of the world because the world, as Kant suggested, is always-already
given in advance.

The Copernican Turn has generated genuine advances in our understanding of social
phenomena of all kinds. These insights and discoveries should be retained in some form.
However, the anti-realist turn has foreclosed the possibility of asking all sorts of vital
questions. Within the framework of the anti-realist turn it is impossible to ask vital questions
about technology, the environment, social structure, political thought, etc., precisely because
the world is treated as being given in advance and is resulting from the agency of human
133

structuring activity. With its obsessive focus on the human-world relation or gap, it becomes
impossible to investigate networks of objects because objects are reduced to that which is
posited by human beings. As a consequence, philosophy, theory, and the humanities become
entirely irrelevant. An alternative is required that both retains the insights and discoveries of
the Copernican Turn, while escaping from this excessive focus on the human-world gap. This
alternative first requires a fourth blow to human narcissism, where man is dethroned from his
position of centrality in the order of being and situated in his proper place as one being
among others, no more or less important than these others.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Process_philosophy

Process philosophy (also ontology of becoming, processism,[1] or philosophy of

organism[2]) identifies metaphysical reality with change and development. Since the time of
Plato and Aristotle, philosophers have posited true reality as "timeless", based on permanent
substances, while processes are denied or subordinated to timeless substances. If Socrates
changes, becoming sick, Socrates is still the same (the substance of Socrates being the same),
and change (his sickness) only glides over his substance: change is accidental, whereas the
substance is essential. Therefore, classic ontology denies any full reality to change, which is
conceived as only accidental and not essential. This classical ontology is what made
knowledge and a theory of knowledge possible, as it was thought that a science of something
in becoming was an impossible feat to achieve.[3]

In opposition to the classical model of change as accidental (as argued by Aristotle) or

illusory, process philosophy regards change as the cornerstone of reality—the cornerstone of
Being thought of as Becoming. Philosophers who appeal to process rather than substance
include Heraclitus, Karl Marx,[4] Friedrich Nietzsche, Henri Bergson, Martin Heidegger,
Charles Sanders Peirce, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, R. G. Collingwood, Alan
Watts, Robert M. Pirsig, Charles Hartshorne, Arran Gare, Nicholas Rescher, Colin Wilson,
and Gilles Deleuze. In physics Ilya Prigogine[5] distinguishes between the "physics of being"
and the "physics of becoming". Process philosophy covers not just scientific intuitions and
experiences, but can be used as a conceptual bridge to facilitate discussions among religion,
philosophy, and science.[6][7]

Contents

 1 History
o 1.1 In ancient Greek thought
o 1.2 Twentieth century
 2 Whitehead's Process and Reality
o 2.1 Process metaphysics
 2.1.1 Whitehead's actual entities
 2.1.1.1 Time, causality, and process
 2.1.1.2 Atomicity
 2.1.1.3 Topology
 2.1.2 Whitehead's abstractions
 2.1.3 Relation between actual entities and abstractions stated in the
ontological principle
 2.1.4 Causation and concrescence of a process
 3 Commentary on Whitehead and on process philosophy
o 3.1 On God
134

 4 Legacy and applications

o 4.1 Medicine
o 4.2 Psychology
o 4.3 Mathematics
o 4.4 Botany
o 4.5 Biology
 5 See also
 6 References
o 6.1 Works cited
 7 External links

Biosemiotics (from the Greek bios meaning "life" and semeion meaning "sign") is a field of
semiotics and biology that studies the production and interpretation of signs and codes in the
biological realm.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosemiotics

Biosemiotics (from the Greek bios meaning "life" and semeion meaning "sign") is a field of
semiotics and biology that studies the production and interpretation of signs and codes[1] in
the biological realm. Biosemiotics attempts to integrate the findings of biology and semiotics
and proposes a paradigmatic shift in the scientific view of life, demonstrating that semiosis
(sign process, including meaning and interpretation) is one of its immanent and intrinsic
features. The term biosemiotic was first used by Friedrich S. Rothschild in 1962, but Thomas
Sebeok and Thure von Uexküll have implemented the term and field.[2] The field, which
challenges normative views of biology, is generally divided between theoretical and applied
biosemiotics.

Contents

 1 Definition
 2 Main branches
 3 History
 4 See also
 5 References
 6 Bibliography
 7 External links

Definition

Biosemiotics is biology interpreted as a sign systems study, or, to elaborate, a study of

 signification, communication and habit formation of living processes

 semiosis (changing sign relations) in living nature
 the biological basis of all signs and sign interpretation

Main branches

According to the basic types of semiosis under study, biosemiotics can be divided into
135

 vegetative semiotics (also endosemiotics , or phytosemiotics), the study of semiosis at the

cellular and molecular level (including the translation processes related to genome and the
organic form or phenotype);[3][4] vegetative semiosis occurs in all organisms at their cellular
and tissue level; vegetative semiotics includes prokaryote semiotics, sign-mediated
interactions in bacteria communities such as quorum sensing and quorum quenching.

 zoosemiotics or animal semiotics[5], or the study of animal forms of knowing[6]; animal

semiosis occurs in the organisms with neuromuscular system, also includes
anthroposemiotics, the study of semiotic behavior in humans.

According to the dominant aspect of semiosis under study, the following labels have been
used: biopragmatics, biosemantics, and biosyntactics.

 Ecosemiotics
 Mimicry
 Naturalization of intentionality
 Zoosemiotics

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_communication

Human communication, or anthroposemiotics, is the field dedicated to understanding how

humans communicate. Human communication is grounded in cooperative and shared
intentions.

Richmond and McCroskey (2009) state that "the importance of communication in human
society has been recognized for thousands of years, far longer than we can demonstrate
through recorded history."[1]:223 Humans have communication abilities that other animals do
not. Being able to communicate aspects like time and place as though they were solid objects
are a few examples. It is said that humans communicate to request help, to inform others, and
to share attitudes as a way of bonding.[2]

Contents

 1 Category of human communication

 2 Types of human communication
 3 Important figures
 4 See also
 5 References
 6 Further reading

Category of human communication

The current study of human communication can be branched off into two major categories;
rhetorical and relational. The focus of rhetorical communication is primarily on the study of
influence; the art of rhetorical communication is based on the idea of persuasion. The
relational approach examines communication from a transnational perspective; two or more
people coexist to reach an agreed upon perspective.[citation needed]

In its early stages, rhetoric was developed to help ordinary people prove their claims in court;
this shows how persuasion is key in this form of communication. Aristotle stated that
136

effective rhetoric is based on argumentation. As explained in the text,[which?] rhetoric involves a

dominant party and a submissive party or a party that succumbs to that of the most dominant
party. While the rhetorical approach stems from Western societies, the relational approach
stems from Eastern societies. Eastern societies hold higher standards for cooperation, which
makes sense as to why they would sway more toward a relational approach for that matter.
"Maintaining valued relationships is generally seen as more important than exerting influence
and control over others".[1]:227 "The study of human communication today is more diversified
than ever before in its history".[1]:229

Classification of human communication can be found in the workplace, especially for group
work. Co-workers need to argue with each other to gain the best solutions for their projects,
while they also need to nurture their relationship to maintain their collaboration. For example,
in their group work, they may use the communication tactic of "saving face".

Types of human communication

Human communication can be subdivided into a variety of types:

 Intrapersonal communication (communication with oneself)

 Body language
 Interpersonal communication (communication between multiple people)
 Group dynamics (communication within groups)
 Organizational communication (communication within organizations)
 Cross-cultural communication (communication across cultures)

WHAT ABOUT BIOLOGICAL, PHYSIOLOGICAL and PHYSICAL HUMAN

INTERACTION and/or communication?

http://www.biosemiotics.org/biosemiotics-introduction/

What is Biosemiotics?

“The study of signs, of communication, and of information in living organisms” (Oxford

Dictionary of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 1997. Oxford: Oxford University Press,
p. 72).

Below are few definitions of biosemiotics as taken from various authors.

“The process of message exchanges, or semiosis, is an indispensable characteristic of all

terrestrial life forms. It is this capacity for containing, replicating, and expressing messages,
of extracting their signification, that, in fact, distinguishes them more from the nonliving –
except for human agents, such as computers or robots, that can be programmed to simulate
communication – than any other traits often cited. The study of the twin processes of
communication and signification can be regarded as ultimately a branch of the life science, or
as belonging in large part to nature, in some part to culture, which is, of course, also a part of
nature.” (Sebeok 1991: 22) “The life sciences and the sign sciences thus mutually imply one
another.” (Sebeok 1994: 114)

“Biosemiotics proper deals with sign processes in nature in all dimensions, including (1) the
emergence of semiosis in nature, which may coincide with or anticipate the emergence of
137

living cells; (2) the natural history of signs; (3) the ‘horizontal’ aspects of semiosis in the
ontogeny of organisms, in plant and animal communication, and in inner sign functions in the
immune and nervous systems; and (4) the semiotics of cognition and language. Biosemiotics
can be seen as a contribution to a general theory of evolution, involving a synthesis of
different disciplines. It is a branch of general semiotics, but the existence of signs in its
subject matter is not necessarily presupposed, insofar as the origin of semiosis in the universe
is one of the riddles to be solved.” (Emmeche 1992: 78)

“In the biosemiotic conception ,the life sphere is permeated by sign processes (semiosis) and
signification. Whatever an organism senses also means something to it – e.g., food, escape,
sexual reproduction etc., and all organisms are born into a semiosphere, which is to say a
world of meaning and communication: sounds, odours, movements, colours, electric fields,
waves of any kind, chemical signals, touch etc. The semiosphere poses constraints or
boundary conditions upon species populations since these are forced to occupy specific
semiotic niches i.e. they will have to master a set of signs of visual, acoustic, olfactory, tactile
and chemical origin in order to survive in the semiosphere. And it is entirely possible that
these semiotic demands to populations are often a decisive challenge to success. For perhaps
more than anything else, organic evolution testifies to the development of ever more
sophisticated semiotic means for surviving in the semiosphere…for the most pronounced
feature of organic evolution is not the creation of a multiplicity of amazing morphological
structures, but the general expansion of ‘semiotic freedom’, that is to say the increase in
richness or ‘depth’ of meaning that can be communicated” (Hoffmeyer 1996: 61). “A modern
unification of biology has to be based on the fundamentally semiotic nature of life.”
(Hoffmeyer 1997)

“From a historical point of view, in the 1960s and 70s Thomas Sebeok, a linguist, launched
first the investigation of Zoosemiotics and later Biosemiotics with the goal of studying the
biological roots of human semiosis, the path taken by Nature to go from the organic world to
the world of signaling, signs, communication and language. In the following years, however,
some biologists started pointing out that there are semiotic mechanisms at the very heart of
organic life. On the face of this, many biologists would prefer to avoid the issue altogether,
which is hardly surprising. But some do not. There are a few of them, today, who believe that
the genetic code and the semiotics of life in general are genuine phenomena that can be
examined in their semiotic fullness, and who are actually studying the semantic mechanisms
of life. They are living in that small academic niche at the outskirts of biology that is known
as Biosemiotics, dedicated to building a bridge between biology, philosophy, linguistics and
communication studies. Today, its main challenge is to give a deeper scientific understanding
not only of biological information but also of biological meaning, in the belief that organic
codes and processes of interpretation are basic elements of the living world. Biosemiotics has
become in this way the leading edge of the research on the fundamentals of life, and is a
young exciting field on the move.” (Barbieri, 2005)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18365164

Biosemiotics is the idea that life is based on semiosis, i.e., on signs and codes. This idea has
been strongly suggested by the discovery of the genetic code, but so far it has made little
impact in the scientific world and is largely regarded as a philosophy rather than a science.
The main reason for this is that modern biology assumes that signs and meanings do not exist
at the molecular level, and that the genetic code was not followed by any other organic code
for almost four billion years, which implies that it was an utterly isolated exception in the
138

history of life. These ideas have effectively ruled out the existence of semiosis in the organic
world, and yet there are experimental facts against all of them. If we look at the evidence of
life without the preconditions of the present paradigm, we discover that semiosis is there, in
every single cell, and that it has been there since the very beginning. This is what
biosemiotics is really about. It is not a philosophy. It is a new scientific paradigm that is
rigorously based on experimental facts. Biosemiotics claims that the genetic code (1) is a real
code and (2) has been the first of a long series of organic codes that have shaped the history
of life on our planet. The reality of the genetic code and the existence of other organic codes
imply that life is based on two fundamental processes--copying and coding--and this in turn
implies that evolution took place by two distinct mechanisms, i.e., by natural selection (based
on copying) and by natural conventions (based on coding). It also implies that the copying of
genes works on individual molecules, whereas the coding of proteins operates on collections
of molecules, which means that different mechanisms of evolution exist at different levels of
organization. This review intends to underline the scientific nature of biosemiotics, and to
this purpose, it aims to prove (1) that the cell is a real semiotic system, (2) that the genetic
code is a real code, (3) that evolution took place by natural selection and by natural
conventions, and (4) that it was natural conventions, i.e., organic codes, that gave origin to
the great novelties of macroevolution. Biological semiosis, in other words, is a scientific
reality because the codes of life are experimental realities. The time has come, therefore, to
acknowledge this fact of life, even if that means abandoning the present theoretical
framework in favor of a more general one where biology and semiotics finally come together
and become biosemiotics.

PMID:

18365164

DOI:

10.1007/s00114-008-0368-x

http://zbi.ee/uexkull/biosem.htm

What is BIOSEMIOTICS?

(i) the study of signs, of communication, and of information in living organisms (Oxford Dictionary of
Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, 1997. Oxford: Oxford University Press, p. 72).

(ii) biology that interprets living systems as sign systems (Emmeche, Kull, Stjernfelt 2002: 26).

(iii) the scientific study of biosemiosis (Emmeche, Kull, Stjernfelt 2002: 9).

Go to an encyclopedia article 'Biosemiotics'.

The term biosemiotic was first used by F.S.Rothschild in 1962.

Go to Gatherings in biosemiotics

Below are few definitions of biosemiotics as taken from various authors.

"The process of message exchanges, or semiosis, is an indispensable characteristic of all terrestrial life forms. It
is this capacity for containing, replicating, and expressing messages, of extracting their signification, that, in
139

fact, distinguishes them more from the nonliving - except for human agents, such as computers or robots, that
can be programmed to simulate communication - than any other traits often cited. The study of the twin
processes of communication and signification can be regarded as ultimately a branch of the life science, or as
belonging in large part to nature, in some part to culture, which is, of course, also a part of nature." (Sebeok
1991: 22)
"The life science and the sign science thus mutually imply one another." (Sebeok 1994: 114)

"Biosemiotics proper deals with sign processes in nature in all dimensions, including (1) the emergence of
semiosis in nature, which may coincide with or anticipate the emergence of living cells; (2) the natural history of
signs; (3) the 'horizontal' aspects of semiosis in the ontogeny of organisms, in plant and animal communication,
and in inner sign functions in the immune and nervous systems; and (4) the semiotics of cognition and language.
/../ Biosemiotics can be seen as a contribution to a general theory of evolution, involving a synthesis of different
disciplines. It is a branch of general semiotics, but the existence of signs in its subject matter is not necessarily
presupposed, insofar as the origin of semiosis in the universe is one of the riddles to be solved." (Emmeche
1992: 78)

"A modern unification of biology /../ has to be based on the fundamentally semiotic nature of life." (Hoffmeyer
1997)
"The most pronounced feature of organic evolution is not the creation of a multiplicity of amazing
morphological structures, but the general expansion of 'semiotic freedom', that is to say the increase in richness
or 'depth' of meaning that can be communicated" (Hoffmeyer 1996: 61).
"The sign rather than the molecule is the basic unit for studying life." (Hoffmeyer 1995: 369)

"Sign processes penetrate the entire body of an organism. [...] Signification is the fundamental property of living
systems that can be taken as a definition of life. Hence, biosemiotics can be viewed as a root of both biology and
semiotics rather than a branch of semiotics." (Sharov 1998: 404-405)

"Biosemiotics can be defined as the science of signs in living systems. A principal and distinctive characteristic
of semiotic biology lays in the understanding that in living, entities do not interact like mechanical bodies, but
rather as messages, the pieces of text. This means that the whole determinism is of another type. /../ The
phenomena of recognition, memory, categorization, mimicry, learning, communication are thus among those of
interest for biosemiotic research, together with the analysis of the application of the tools and notions of
semiotics (text, translation, interpretation, semiosis, types of sign, meaning) in the biological realm." (Kull 1999:
386)

"With the discovery that a set of symbols has been used by nature to encode the information for the construction
and maintenance of all living things, semiotics - the analysis of languages and texts as sets of signs and symbols
- has become relevant to molecular biology. Semiotics has given students of the DNA text a new eye for
reading, allowing us to argue for the validity of a multiplicity of meanings, or even for the absence of any
meaning, in a stretch of the human genome." (Pollack 1994: 12)

References

Anderson M. (1990). Biology and semiotics. In: Semiotics in the Individual Sciences, Part I, W.A.Koch (ed.), 254-281. Bochum: Universitätsverlag
Dr. N. Brockmeyer.
Cariani P. (1998). Towards an evolutionary semiotics: The emergence of new sign-functions in organisms and devices. In: Evolutionary Systems:
Biological and Epistemological Perspectives on Selection and Self-Organization. G. van de Vijver, S.N.Salthe, M.Delpos (eds.), 359-376. Dordrecht:
Kluwer.
Emmeche C. (1992). Modeling life: A note on the semiotics of emergence and computation in artificial and natural living systems. In: Biosemiotics:
The Semiotic Web 1991. T.A.Sebeok and J.Umiker-Sebeok (eds.), 77-99. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Emmeche C. (1999). The biosemiotics of emergent properties in a pluralist ontology. In: Semiosis, Evolution, Energy: Towards a
Reconceptualization of the Sign. E.Taborsky (ed.), 89-108. Aachen: Shaker Verlag.
Emmeche C., Kull K., Stjernfelt F. (2002). Reading Hoffmeyer, Rethinking Biology. Tartu: Tartu University Press.
Hoffmeyer J. (1995). The semiotic body-mind. In: Essays in Honor of Thomas A. Sebeok. N.Tasca (ed.), 367-383. Porto.
Hoffmeyer J. (1996). Signs of Meaning in the Universe. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hoffmeyer J. (1997). Biosemiotics: towards a new synthesis in biology? European Journal for Semiotic Studies 9(2), 355-376.
Hoffmeyer J., Emmeche C. (1991). Code-duality and the semiotics of nature. In: On Semiotic Modeling. M.Anderson, F.Merrell (eds.) 117-166.
Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Kawade Y. (1996). Molecular biosemiotics: molecules carry out semiosis in living systems. Semiotica 111(3/4), 195-215.
Krampen M. (1981). Phytosemiotics. Semiotica 36(3/4), 187-209.
Kull K. (1993). Semiotic paradigm in theoretical biology. In: Lectures in Theoretical Biology: The Second Stage. K.Kull and T.Tiivel (eds.), 52-62.
Tallinn: Estonian Academy of Sciences.
Kull K. (1999). Biosemiotics in the twentieth century: a view from biology. Semiotica 127(1/4), 385-414.
Nöth W. (2001). Biosemiotica. Cybernetics and Human Knowing 8(1/2), 157-160.
Pattee H.H. (1997). The physics of symbols and the evolution of semiotic controls. In: Control mechanisms for complex systems: Issues of
140

measurement and semiotic analysis. M.Coombs and M.Sulcoski (eds.), 9-25. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico.
Pollack R. (1994). Signs of Life: The Language and Meanings of DNA. London: Viking.
Prodi G. (1988). Material bases of signification. Semiotica 69, 191-241.
Sebeok T.A. (1991). A Sign is Just a Sign. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sebeok T.A. (1994). Signs: An Introduction to Semiotics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Sebeok T.A. (1999). The sign science and the life science. Applied Semiotics 6/7, 386-393.
Sharov A. (1992). Biosemiotics: functional-evolutionary approach to the analysis of the sense of information. In: Biosemiotics: The Semiotic Web
1991. T.A.Sebeok and J.Umiker-Sebeok (eds.), 345-373. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Sharov A. (1998). From cybernetics to semiotics in biology. Semiotica 120(3/4), 403-419.
Uexküll T.v., Geigges, Herrmann J.M. (1993). Endosemiosis. Semiotica 96(1/2), 5-51.
Vehkavaara T. (1998). Extended concept of knowledge for evolutionary epistemology and for biosemiotics. In: Emergence, Complexity, Hierarchy,
Organization. G.L.Farre, T.Oksala (eds.), 207-216. Espoo.

Go to major publications in biosemiotics

Join biosemiotics discussion LIST (information about it also here)

Links:
Gatherings in biosemiotics
Biosemiotics Home Page
Zoosemiotics Home Page
Jakob von Uexküll Centre
Biosemiotica Slavica
Biosemiotics Directory
Theoretical biologists
Constructivism
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More links:
Biosemiotics - a glossary entry

Biosemiotics - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biosemiotics

Biosemiotics (from the Greek bios meaning "life" and semeion meaning "sign") is a field of semiotics
and biology that studies the production and interpretation of signs and codes in the biological realm.

Definition · Main branches · History · See also

You visited this page on 4/23/17.

international society for biosemiotic studies

www.biosemiotics.org/

Biosemiotics is an interdisciplinary research agenda investigating the myriad forms of

communication and signification found in and between living systems.

What is biosemiotics? - international society for biosemiotic studies

www.biosemiotics.org/biosemiotics-introduction/

“Biosemiotics proper deals with sign processes in nature in all dimensions, including (1) the
emergence of semiosis in nature, which may coincide with or ...

Biosemiotics - Springer
link.springer.com/journal/12304

Biosemiotics is dedicated to building a bridge between biology, philosophy, linguistics and the
communication sciences. If it is true that biosemiotics is "the study ...

Biosemiotics - Springer
www.springer.com › Home › New & Forthcoming Titles
141

Combining research approaches from biology, semiotics, philosophy and linguistics, the field of
biosemiotics studies semiotic processes as they occur in and ...

Introduction to Biosemiotics - The New Biological Synthesis | Marcello ...

www.springer.com/us/book/9781402048135

This book is addressed to students, researchers and academics who have barely heard of the
emerging young science of Biosemiotics, and who want to know.

Biosemiotics: a new understanding of life. - NCBI

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/18365164

by M Barbieri - 2008 - Cited by 142 - Related articles

Mar 26, 2008 - Biosemiotics is the idea that life is based on semiosis, i.e., on signs and codes. This
idea has been strongly suggested by the discovery of the ...

Biosemiotics - Introduction
zbi.ee/uexkull/biosem.htm

Introductory page and starting site of biosemiotics, with definition of biosemiotics, quotations and
bibliography.

What is biosemiotics? - Alexei Sharov

alexei.nfshost.com/biosem/geninfo.html

The term "biosemiotic" was first used by F.S.Rothschild in 1962. For a detailed history of
biosemiotics, see the paper of K. Kull. Kalevi Kull comipled a useful list .

BIOSEMIOTICS: A NEW SCIENCE OF BIOLOGY?

DUŠAN GÁLIK, Institute of Philosophy Slovak Academy of Sciences, Bratislava
GÁLIK, D.: Biosemiotics: A New Science of Biology?
FILOZOFIA 68, 2013, No 10, p. 859-867
Biosemiotics is a new approach to the explanation of living. The central thesis of
biosemiotics, “life is semiosis”, is a basis for a new science of living which should
replace contemporary (or traditional) biology. The reason is that biosemiotics reveals
new qualities of living, which are unaccessible through the methods of contemporary,
pure empirical biology. The paper outlines basic theses of biosemiotics, distinguishes
two main approaches, and challenges the central thesis with the focus upon its
interpretation in “scientific” biosemiotics.
Keywords: Biosemiotics – Biology – Semiosis – Semiotics – Sig
Theses on Biosemiotics: Prolegomena
to a Theoretical Biology
Theses on the semiotic study of life as presented here provide
a collectively formulated set of statements on what biology
needs to be focused on in order to describe life as a process
based on semiosis, or signaction. An aim of the biosemiotic
approach is to explain how life evolves through all varieties
of forms of communication and signification (including cellular
adaptive behavior, animal communication, and human
intellect) and to provide tools for grounding sign theories. We
introduce the concept of semiotic threshold zone and analyze
the concepts of semiosis, function, umwelt, and the like as the
basic concepts for theoretical biology.
Keywords
biosemiotics, communication, function, relations, semiosis,
142

Biosemiotics, Aboutness of Meaning and Bio-Intentionality. Proposal for an Evolutionary

Approach Christophe Menant-Bordeaux-France Proposed Abstract The management of
meaningful information by biological entities is at the core of biosemiotics [Hoffmeyer 2010].
Intentionality, the ‘aboutness’ of mental states, is a key driver in philosophy of mind.
Philosophers have been reluctant to use intentionality for non human animals. Some biologists
are in favor of such usage. J. Hoffmeyer has been using evolutionary intentionality and Peircean
semiotics to discuss a biosemiotic approach to the problem of intentionality [Hoffmeyer 1996,
2012]. Also, recent philosophical studies are bringing new openings on the subject.[Asma 2014].
We propose here to use an existing system approach to meaning generation to introduce a link
between biosemiotics and bio-intentionality at basic life level in an evolutionary perspective.
Meanings do not exist by themselves. They have to be generated for a given reason by a defined
entity. A system approach to meaning generation based on constraint satisfaction has been
developped to that end: the Meaning Generator System (MGS) [Menant 2003a]. It has been used
for biosemiotics in an evolutionary perspective [Menant 2003b, 2011]. In order to look at relating
biosemiotics to intentionality through meaning genaration we use the system structure of the
MGS with the agent that contains it. Meaning generation and agent interfacing with environment
make available components for the groundings of the generated meaning in terms of data, data
processing, interfacing and constraint [Menant, 2011]. These groundings of the meaning can be in
or out the agent containing the MGS. They display what the generated meaning is about. For
basic life the ‘aboutness’ of the generated meaning relies on a ‘stay alive’ constraint that has to be
satisfied (others constraints, like ‘live group life’, are to be introduced through the evolution of
life). Such ‘aboutness’ of a
generated meaning within basic life can be associated to an elementary biological intentionality,
to a ‘bio-intentionality’. As biosemiotics deals with meaning management by biological entities,
the relations introduced by the MGS between meaning generation and bio-intentionality introduce
a link between biosemiotics and bio-intentionality for basic life. We present and develop that
link. Besides making available a model usable for bio-intentionality, the proposed approach may
also provide an entry point to the concept of intentionality without having to take into account
human specificities like self-consciousness. It should also be noted that the approach takes life as
a given and that the‘stay alive’ constraint brings in a teleological component. Such presentation
of bio-intentionality calls for other developments and continuations. Some will be introduced.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism/

The term “naturalism” has no very precise meaning in contemporary philosophy. Its current
usage derives from debates in America in the first half of the last century. The self-
proclaimed “naturalists” from that period included John Dewey, Ernest Nagel, Sidney Hook
and Roy Wood Sellars. These philosophers aimed to ally philosophy more closely with
science. They urged that reality is exhausted by nature, containing nothing “supernatural”,
and that the scientific method should be used to investigate all areas of reality, including the
“human spirit” (Krikorian 1944; Kim 2003).

So understood, “naturalism” is not a particularly informative term as applied to contemporary

philosophers. The great majority of contemporary philosophers would happily accept
naturalism as just characterized—that is, they would both reject “supernatural” entities, and
allow that science is a possible route (if not necessarily the only one) to important truths
about the “human spirit”.

Even so, this entry will not aim to pin down any more informative definition of “naturalism”.
It would be fruitless to try to adjudicate some official way of understanding the term.
143

Different contemporary philosophers interpret “naturalism” differently. This disagreement

about usage is no accident. For better or worse, “naturalism” is widely viewed as a positive
term in philosophical circles—few active philosophers nowadays are happy to announce
themselves as “non-naturalists”.[1] This inevitably leads to a divergence in understanding the
requirements of “naturalism”. Those philosophers with relatively weak naturalist
commitments are inclined to understand “naturalism” in a unrestrictive way, in order not to
disqualify themselves as “naturalists”, while those who uphold stronger naturalist doctrines
are happy to set the bar for “naturalism” higher.[2]

Rather than getting bogged down in an essentially definitional issue, this entry will adopt a
different strategy. It will outline a range of philosophical commitments of a generally
naturalist stamp, and comment on their philosophical cogency. The primary focus will be on
whether these commitments should be upheld, rather than on whether they are definitive of
“naturalism”. The important thing is to articulate and assess the reasoning that has led
philosophers in a generally naturalist direction, not to stipulate how far you need to travel
along this path before you can count yourself as a paid-up “naturalist”.

As indicated by the above characterization of the mid-twentieth-century American

movement, naturalism can be separated into an ontological and a methodological component.
The ontological component is concerned with the contents of reality, asserting that reality has
no place for “supernatural” or other “spooky” kinds of entity. By contrast, the methodological
component is concerned with ways of investigating reality, and claims some kind of general
authority for the scientific method. Correspondingly, this entry will have two main sections,
the first devoted to ontological naturalism, the second to methodological naturalism.

Of course, naturalist commitments of both ontological and methodological kinds can be

significant in areas other than philosophy. The modern history of psychology, biology, social
science and even physics itself can usefully be seen as hinging on changing attitudes to
naturalist ontological principles and naturalist methodological precepts. This entry, however,
will be concerned solely with naturalist doctrines that are specific to philosophy. So the first
part of this entry, on ontological naturalism, will be concerned specifically with views about
the general contents of reality that are motivated by philosophical argument and analysis.
And the second part, on methodological naturalism, will focus specifically on methodological
debates that bear on philosophical practice, and in particular on the relationship between
philosophy and science.

 1. Ontological Naturalism
o 1.1 Making a Causal Difference
o 1.2 Modern Science and Causal Influence
o 1.3 The Rise of Physicalism
o 1.4 Reductive and Non-Reductive Physicalism
o 1.5 Physicalist Downwards Causation
o 1.6 Conscious Properties and the Causal Closure Arguments
o 1.7 Moral Facts
o 1.8 Mathematical Facts
 2. Methodological Naturalism
o 2.1 Philosophy and Science
o 2.2 Philosophical Intuitions: Analytic or Synthetic?
o 2.3 The Canberra Plan
o 2.4 A Priori Synthetic Intuitions?
144

o 2.5 The Role of Thought Experiments

o 2.6 Mathematical, Modal and Moral Knowledge
 Bibliography
 Academic Tools
 Other Internet Resources
 Related Entries

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naturalism_(philosophy)

In philosophy, naturalism is the "idea or belief that only natural (as opposed to supernatural
or spiritual) laws and forces operate in the world."[1] Adherents of naturalism (i.e., naturalists)
assert that natural laws are the rules that govern the structure and behavior of the natural
universe, that the changing universe at every stage is a product of these laws.[2]

"Naturalism can intuitively be separated into an ontological and a methodological

component."[3] "Ontological" refers to the philosophical study of the nature of reality. Some
philosophers equate naturalism with materialism. For example, philosopher Paul Kurtz argues
that nature is best accounted for by reference to material principles. These principles include
mass, energy, and other physical and chemical properties accepted by the scientific
community. Further, this sense of naturalism holds that spirits, deities, and ghosts are not real
and that there is no "purpose" in nature. Such an absolute belief in naturalism is commonly
referred to as metaphysical naturalism.[4]

Assuming naturalism in working methods as the current paradigm, without the unfounded
consideration of naturalism as an absolute truth with philosophical entailment, is called
methodological naturalism.[5] The subject matter here is a philosophy of acquiring knowledge
based on an assumed paradigm.

With the exception of pantheists—who believe that Nature and God are one and the same
thing—theists challenge the idea that nature contains all of reality. According to some theists,
natural laws may be viewed as so-called secondary causes of god(s).

In the 20th century, Willard Van Orman Quine, George Santayana, and other philosophers
argued that the success of naturalism in science meant that scientific methods should also be
used in philosophy. Science and philosophy are said to form a continuum, according to this
view.

Contents

 1 Origins and history

o 1.1 Etymology
 2 Metaphysical naturalism
 3 Methodological naturalism

 Methodological naturalism does not concern itself with claims about what exists, but
with methods of learning what nature is. It attempts to explain and test scientific
endeavors, hypotheses, and events with reference to natural causes and events. This
second sense of the term "naturalism" seeks to provide a framework within which to
145

conduct the scientific study of the laws of nature. Methodological naturalism is a way
of acquiring knowledge. It is a distinct system of thought concerned with a cognitive
approach to reality, and is thus a philosophy of knowledge. Studies by sociologist
Elaine Ecklund suggest that religious scientists in practice apply methodological
naturalism. They report that their religious beliefs affect the way they think about the
implications - often moral - of their work, but not the way they practice science.[19][20]
 In a series of articles and books from 1996 onward, Robert T. Pennock wrote using
the term "methodological naturalism" to clarify that the scientific method confines
itself to natural explanations without assuming the existence or non-existence of the
supernatural, and is not based on dogmatic metaphysical naturalism (as claimed by
creationists and proponents of intelligent design, in particular by Phillip E. Johnson).
Pennock's testimony as an expert witness[21] at the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School
District trial was cited by the Judge in his Memorandum Opinion concluding that
"Methodological naturalism is a 'ground rule' of science today":[22]
 Expert testimony reveals that since the scientific revolution of the 16th and 17th
centuries, science has been limited to the search for natural causes to explain natural
phenomena.... While supernatural explanations may be important and have merit, they
are not part of science." Methodological naturalism is thus "a paradigm of science." It
is a "ground rule" that "requires scientists to seek explanations in the world around us
based upon what we can observe, test, replicate, and verify.[23]

 4 Views
o 4.1 Alvin Plantinga
o 4.2 Robert T. Pennock
o 4.3 W. V. O. Quine
o 4.4 Karl Popper
 5 See also
 Daoism
 Deism
 Empiricism
 Epicureanism
 Hylomorphism
 Liberal naturalism
 Materialism
 Metaphysical naturalism
 Naturalistic pantheism
 Physicalism
 Religious naturalism
 Scientism
 Sociological naturalism
 Supernaturalism
 Alfred North Whitehead
 Vaisheshika
 Carvaka

 6 Notes
 7 References
 8 Further reading
 9 External links
o 9.1 Supportive
o 9.2 Neutral
146

o 9.3 Critical

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Materialism

Materialism is a form of philosophical monism which holds that matter is the fundamental
substance in nature, and that all phenomena, including mental phenomena and consciousness,
are results of material interactions.

Materialism is closely related to physicalism, the view that all that exists is ultimately
physical. Philosophical physicalism has evolved from materialism with the discoveries of the
physical sciences to incorporate more sophisticated notions of physicality than mere ordinary
matter, such as: spacetime, physical energies and forces, dark matter, and so on. Thus the
term "physicalism" is preferred over "materialism" by some, while others use the terms as if
they are synonymous.

Philosophies contradictory to materialism or physicalism include idealism, pluralism,

dualism, and other forms of monism.

Contents

 1 Overview
 2 History
o 2.1 Axial Age
o 2.2 Common Era
o 2.3 Modern era
o 2.4 New materialism
 3 Scientific materialists

 Many current and recent philosophers—e.g., Daniel Dennett, Willard Van Orman
Quine, Donald Davidson, and Jerry Fodor—operate within a broadly physicalist or
materialist framework, producing rival accounts of how best to accommodate mind,
including functionalism, anomalous monism, identity theory, and so on.[13]
 Scientific "Materialism" is often synonymous with, and has so far been described, as
being a reductive materialism. In recent years, Paul and Patricia Churchland have
advocated a radically contrasting position (at least, in regards to certain hypotheses);
eliminativist materialism holds that some mental phenomena simply do not exist at
all, and that talk of those mental phenomena reflects a totally spurious "folk
psychology" and introspection illusion. That is, an eliminative materialist might
believe that a concept like "belief" simply has no basis in fact—the way folk science
speaks of demon-caused illnesses would be just one obvious example. Reductive
materialism being at one end of a continuum (our theories will reduce to facts) and
eliminative materialism on the other (certain theories will need to be eliminated in
light of new facts), Revisionary materialism is somewhere in the middle.[13]

 4 Defining matter
 5 Physicalism

Physicalism

George Stack distinguishes between materialism and physicalism:

147

In the twentieth century, physicalism has emerged out of positivism. Physicalism restricts
meaningful statements to physical bodies or processes that are verifiable or in principle
verifiable. It is an empirical hypothesis that is subject to revision and, hence, lacks the
dogmatic stance of classical materialism. Herbert Feigl defended physicalism in the United
States and consistently held that mental states are brain states and that mental terms have the
same referent as physical terms. The twentieth century has witnessed many materialist
theories of the mental, and much debate surrounding them.[22]

Criticism and alternatives

Scientific objections

Some modern day physicists and science writers—such as Paul Davies and John Gribbin—
have argued that materialism has been disproven by certain scientific findings in physics,
such as quantum mechanics and chaos theory. In 1991, Gribbin and Davies released their
book The Matter Myth, the first chapter of which, "The Death of Materialism", contained the
following passage:

Then came our Quantum theory, which totally transformed our image of matter. The old
assumption that the microscopic world of atoms was simply a scaled-down version of the
everyday world had to be abandoned. Newton's deterministic machine was replaced by a
shadowy and paradoxical conjunction of waves and particles, governed by the laws of
chance, rather than the rigid rules of causality. An extension of the quantum theory goes
beyond even this; it paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by
weird excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. Quantum physics undermines
materialism because it reveals that matter has far less "substance" than we might believe. But
another development goes even further by demolishing Newton's image of matter as inert
lumps. This development is the theory of chaos, which has recently gained widespread
attention.

— Paul Davies and John Gribbin, The Matter Myth, Chapter 1

Davies' and Gribbin's objections are shared by proponents of digital physics who view
information rather than matter to be fundamental. Their objections were also shared by some
founders of quantum theory, such as Max Planck, who wrote:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of
matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as
such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an
atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must
assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the
matrix of all matter.

— Max Planck, Das Wesen der Materie, 1944


 6 Criticism and alternatives
148

Scientific objections

Some modern day physicists and science writers—such as Paul Davies and John Gribbin—
have argued that materialism has been disproven by certain scientific findings in physics,
such as quantum mechanics and chaos theory. In 1991, Gribbin and Davies released their
book The Matter Myth, the first chapter of which, "The Death of Materialism", contained the
following passage:

Then came our Quantum theory, which totally transformed our image of matter. The
old assumption that the microscopic world of atoms was simply a scaled-down version of the
everyday world had to be abandoned. Newton's deterministic machine was replaced by a
shadowy and paradoxical conjunction of waves and particles, governed by the laws of
chance, rather than the rigid rules of causality. An extension of the quantum theory goes
beyond even this; it paints a picture in which solid matter dissolves away, to be replaced by
weird excitations and vibrations of invisible field energy. Quantum physics undermines
materialism because it reveals that matter has far less "substance" than we might believe. But
another development goes even further by demolishing Newton's image of matter as inert
lumps. This development is the theory of chaos, which has recently gained widespread
attention.

— Paul Davies and John Gribbin, The Matter Myth, Chapter 1

Davies' and Gribbin's objections are shared by proponents of digital physics who view
information rather than matter to be fundamental. Their objections were also shared by some
founders of quantum theory, such as Max Planck, who wrote:

As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of
matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as
such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an
atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must
assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the
matrix of all matter.

— Max Planck, Das Wesen der Materie, 16.1 Scientific objections

o 6.2 Religious and spiritual views

o 6.3 Philosophical objections
 6.3.1 Idealisms
o 6.4 Materialism as methodology
 7 See also
 8 Notes
 9 References
 10 Further reading
 11 External links

Overview

Materialism belongs to the class of monist ontology. As such, it is different from ontological
theories based on dualism or pluralism. For singular explanations of the phenomenal reality,
materialism would be in contrast to idealism, neutral monism, and spiritualism.
149

Despite the large number of philosophical schools and subtle nuances between many,[1][2][3] all
philosophies are said to fall into one of two primary categories, which are defined in contrast
to each other: idealism and materialism.[a] The basic proposition of these two categories
pertains to the nature of reality, and the primary distinction between them is the way they
answer two fundamental questions: "what does reality consist of?" and "how does it
originate?" To idealists, spirit or mind or the objects of mind (ideas) are primary, and matter
secondary. To materialists, matter is primary, and mind or spirit or ideas are secondary, the
product of matter acting upon matter.[3]

The materialist view is perhaps best understood in its opposition to the doctrines of
immaterial substance applied to the mind historically, famously by René Descartes. However,
by itself materialism says nothing about how material substance should be characterized. In
practice, it is frequently assimilated to one variety of physicalism or another.

Materialism is often associated with reductionism, according to which the objects or

phenomena individuated at one level of description, if they are genuine, must be explicable in
terms of the objects or phenomena at some other level of description—typically, at a more
reduced level. Non-reductive materialism explicitly rejects this notion, however, taking the
material constitution of all particulars to be consistent with the existence of real objects,
properties, or phenomena not explicable in the terms canonically used for the basic material
constituents. Jerry Fodor influentially argues this view, according to which empirical laws
and explanations in "special sciences" like psychology or geology are invisible from the
perspective of basic physics. A lot of vigorous literature has grown up around the relation
between these views.

Modern philosophical materialists extend the definition of other scientifically observable

entities such as energy, forces, and the curvature of space. However philosophers such as
Mary Midgley suggest that the concept of "matter" is elusive and poorly defined.[4]

Materialism typically contrasts with dualism, phenomenalism, idealism, vitalism, and dual-
aspect monism. Its materiality can, in some ways, be linked to the concept of determinism, as
espoused by Enlightenment thinkers.

During the 19th century, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels extended the concept of materialism
to elaborate a materialist conception of history centered on the roughly empirical world of
human activity (practice, including labor) and the institutions created, reproduced, or
destroyed by that activity (see materialist conception of history). Later Marxists, such as
Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky developed the notion of dialectical materialism which
characterized later Marxist philosophy and method.

http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_materialism.html

Introduction Back to Top

Materalism holds that the only thing that can be truly proven to exist is matter. Thus, according to
Materialism, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the result of material
interactions, with no accounting of spirit or consciousness. As well as a general concept in
Metaphysics, it is more specifically applied to the mind-body problem in Philosophy of Mind.
150

In common use, the word "materialist" refers to a person for whom collecting material goods is an
important priority, or who primarily pursues wealth and luxury or otherwise displays conspicuous
consumption. This can be more accurately termed Economic Materialism.

With its insistence on a single basic substance, it is a type of Monism (as opposed to Dualism or
Pluralism), and it can also be considered a variety of Naturalism (the belief that nature is all exists,
and that all things supernatural therefore do not exist). It stands (like the related concept of
Physicalism) in contrast to Idealism (also known as Immaterialism) and Solipsism. Physicalism,
however, has evolved with the physical sciences to incorporate far more sophisticated notions of
physicality than just matter, for example wave/particle relationships and non-material forces
produced by particles.

History of Materialism Back to Top

The Carvaka school of Ancient Indian philosophy developed a theory of Materialism and Atomism as
early as 600 B.C.

Ancient Greek philosophers like Thales, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Democritus, and then, later,
Epicurus and Lucretius (99 - 55 B.C.) all prefigure later materialists, and contributed towards the
classic formulation of Materialism. Lucretius wrote "De Rerum Natura" ("The Nature of Things"),
the first masterpiece of materialist literature, around 50 B.C.

During the long reign of Christianity, denial of spirit as the basic reality was condemned by the
Church, and it was not until the 17th Century that interest in Materialism was revived by the scientist
Pierre Gassendi (1592 - 1655) and the political philosopher Thomas Hobbes, as well as other
French Enlightenment thinkers including Denis Diderot (1713 - 1784).

The second masterpiece of materialist literature was Baron Paul d'Holbach's anonymously
published "La Systeme de la Nature" ("The System of Nature"), which appeared in France in 1770,
although the Dualism of Descartes remained more popular, largely owing to it's compatibility with
Christianity. The German philosopher Ludwig Buechner's influential "Kraft und Stoff" ("Force
and Matter") followed in 1884.

With the triumphs of science in the 19th and 20th Century, (not least Charles Darwin's works on
evolution and advances in atomic theory, neuroscience and computer technology), a majority of
philosophers today would probably identify themselves as materialists of one kind or another.

Types of Materialism Back to Top

The various types of reductive and non-reductive Physicalism are discussed in that section, but
there are some other related concepts which can be mentioned briefly here:

 Dialectical Materialism is the philosophical basis of Marxism and Communism. The term,
which was never actually used by Marx himself, refers to the notion of a synthesis of Georg
Hegel's theory of Dialectics (the concept that any idea or event - the thesis - generates its
opposite - the antithesis - eventually leading to a reconciliation of opposites - a new, more
advanced synthesis) and Materialism (in the respect that Dialectics could also be applied to
material matters like economics).
The application of the principle of Dialectical Materialism to history and sociology, the main
context in which Marx used it, is known as Historical Materialism (see below).
 Historical Materialism (or the "materialist conception of history") is the Marxist
methodological approach to the study of society, economics and history which was first
articulated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1820 - 1895), and has been expanded and
refined by many academic studies since. It is essentially the application of the principle of
Dialectical Materialism (see above) to history and sociology.
According to Marx, for human beings to survive, they need to produce and reproduce the
151

material requirements of life, and this production is carried out through a division of labour
based on very definite production relations between people. These relations form the
economic base of society, and are themselves determined by the mode of production
which is in force (e.g. tribal society, ancient society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism), and
societies, and their cultural and institutional superstructures, naturally move from stage to
stage when the dominant class is displaced by a new emerging class in a social and political
upheaval.
Although Marx himself said that he was only proposing a guideline for historical research, by
the 20th Century the concept of Historical Materialism had become a keystone of modern
Communist doctrine.

APPENDIX

Introduction: Dialogue as Discourse and Interaction

Teun A. van Dijk

BACKGROUNDS AND CONCEPTS FOR A SOCIOLOGY OF TALK The historical backgrounds for the
current analysis of talk in its social context are as diverse as the actual orientations in this approach to
discourse. Although sociology and anthropology may be the overall disciplinary location for these
backgrounds, the differentiation in theoretical, methodological, and philosophical labels used to
identify these orientations suggests that the influences have been multiple. Phenomenology, qualitative
and cognitive sociology, microsociology, ethnomethodology, symbolic interactionism, the sociology of
everyday life, formal sociology, and the ethnography of speaking have been the inscriptions on the
signposts that have guided the various developments leading to a common interest in the study of
natural discourse. Obviously this introduction can neither sketch the full history of such antecedents
nor disentangle the complexity and variety of its present-day offspring. Rather, we must try to describe
the more general features of this work and sketch the outlines of a framework for the chapters that
appear in this volume. These few introductory pages only allow mention of some central concepts and
principles of research. How the analysis of dialogue actually works is shown by the chapters in this
volume and by the many references to past and current work in the field of conversational and
dialogical analysis.
152

One way to introduce the conceptual framework and the background of the analysis of natural talk is to
try to understand why sociologists or ethnographers would be interested in analyzing conversation,
institutional dialogues, stories, gossip, or jokes. This would require a detailed analysis

HANDBOOK OF DISCOURSE ANALYSIS, Vol. 3 Copyright © 1985 by Academic Press London.

rioh, nf renrnrim-finn in anv form reserved.

L Teun A. van Dijk

of their talk and writings and an explanation of their methods of inquiry into the social
world. Leaving that task to the increasing number of monographs about the analysis of
dialogue, we can only mention some of the central concepts.
.

A first rationale for studying talk in a sociological inquiry is the seemingly trivial
circumstance that people do it all the time. Talk is a prominent part of our everyday
activities, and such everyday activities are the basis of the social world, an insight
particularly stressed by Schutz (1970), one of the founders of phenomenological sociology.
That is, the sociologist should not only be engaged in the high-level analysis of social
systems and their abstract structures but also should focus on the mundane, everyday
reality of practical accomplishments at the microlevel of social life.

This means that talk, like other social activities, is seen in terms of the action and
interaction of participating social members, an orientation that also finds its origins in the
symbolic interactionism of Mead, Blumer, and others. One crucial condition for social
interaction in general and talk in particular is that people understand each other. This is
possible only if we assume that social members have socially shared interpretation
procedures for social actions, for example, categories, rules, and strategies. In a
conversation, this understanding of the other's communicative acts also becomes visible and
is displayed in the way a speaker routinely and adequately continues the talk by a coherent
next turn. The sociologist, then, wants to know how people do this, what kind of implicit or
intuitive methods they apply in such everyday routine tasks as talking to each other and
understanding each other. This is one of the reasons why Garfinkel (1967), in the footsteps of
Schutz, introduced the notion of `ethnomethodology', which became the label under which
much conversational analysis would take place in the decade to follow.

The routine nature of everyday practical activities suggests that the implicit methods
people use are taken-for-granted forms of social knowledge. Although they can be
problematic on occasion, they work well and are effective precisely because they are taken
for granted. In this respect a dialogue in everyday life is not much different from other
mundane encounters. This does not mean that we never have problems in the business of
having a talk with someone (e.g., about what to say and how to say it, depending on context),
but such problems can be subjected to intuitive analysis and be routinely solved. Some
sociologists, for example, Cicourel (1973), have compared this kind of intuitive social
knowledge with the implicit knowledge social members of a speech community have about
the grammar of their language, according to the views proposed by Chomsky. Much like
grammatical rules, the rules of interaction

1 Introduction: Dialogue as Discourse and Interaction 3

allow social members to perform their acts according to mutual expectations and to
understand each other by making sense of each feature of such acts. Hence it is one of the
153

tasks of sociology to reconstruct this shared social knowledge. Cicourel (1973) coined the
term 'cognitive sociology' to stress this fundamental aim.

We see that notions such as 'understanding', 'interpretation' or `making sense' play a

crucial role in these various but related ideas about the nature of social reality in general and
about everyday talk in particular. Part of this tradition goes back to Weber's emphasis on the
role of Verstehen in social interaction. The important methodological consequence of this
approach is that social reality is not to be analyzed in general and objective terms but rather
in terms of the interpretations of the social environment by the members themselves. Thus
sociál reality is a subjectively reconstructed reality. Yet these personal interpretations may
become shared so that intersubjective, common sense categories and rules can develop in
everyday talk. Similarly, people's socially shared subjective interpretations of actions and
their context, that is, of situations, provide definitions of such situations: Situations are real if
people define them as real, and this also holds for their consequences (a well-known
statement made by W. I. Thomas more than half a century ago).

This general interest for mundane social reality, everyday interaction, and interpretative
methods seems to transfer the point of view of the sociologist from without to within the
social actor. Sociologists describe people not only from the outside but also from the inside.
It is the task of the sociologist to reconstruct the actors' point of view: How do the actors
see the world? In talk, this means that the analyst tríes to reconstruct how the
communicative situation and previous contributions to the ongoing interaction are seen by
the participants and how they make sense of each expression or move in terms of their own
categories and rules.

Yet the question about how people communicate pertains not only to underlying methods,
social knowledge, common-sense procedures, or other cognitions. Strictly speaking these are
not directly observable and therefore are socially relevant—and sociologically interesting—
only as they appear in what is actually displayed. A relevant answer to a question in
conversation may signal to one participant that the other participant probably has
understood the question and drawn the necessary inferences from it. This means that a
serious understanding of everyday life and talk needs a detailed analysis of how people
observably go about their daily business. We need a systematic account of the forms of talk
(Goffman, 1981): intonation, pauses, hesitations, repairs, as well as the words, phrases, or
sentences that directly express content. The presupposition of such a formal analysis (and
hence of a formal sociology) is that in

4 Teun A. van Dijk

principle each of such details can be made meaningful for others. Hearers only have what they
can actually see and hear (together of course with their previous knowledge) and therefore may
need all such details in order to arrive at relevant interpretations necessary for competent
participation in verbal or other interaction.

For informal everyday conversation, such a formal analysis involves not only the details of
participant expressions but also the implications of the interactive nature of such
encounters. Sequences of contributions to such ongoing activities of several social
participants, for instance, can be articulated into speaker turns. Much work in the
ethnomethodological study of everyday conversation has been done on the methods people
use in the organization of turns in talk (Sacks, Schegloff, & Jefferson, 1974). Participants
may have or receive a turn, and they follow a number of expedient strategies for allocating
or appropriating such turns, using both verbal and nonverbal (gaze, gestures) cues. For
other types of dialogue the rules for turn taking may be different, for example, in a meeting
where the chair can exert control over turn allocation. Turn organization is of course just
one feature of talk. Larger turn sequences may become relevant units of exchange or may
constitute their own categories, such as opening (including greetings, presentation, etc.) or
closing (Schegloff & Sacks, 1973), side sequences during which other business or another
topic is attended to before the current topic is reintroduced (Jefferson, 1972), and so on.
154

People may do all kinds of other things in or by talk, for example, tell stories or argue (see
the chapters by Polanyi and Schiffrin in this volume).

Another important dimension of the interactive nature of discourse is its strategic

organization. Many dialogues have purposes that participants try to realize optimally
through a series of functionally related moves. Such strategic moves are constrained
globally by a purpose or overall goal and locally by moves of a previous speaker or by
expectations about moves of a next speaker. In other words, talk is organized both locally
and globally and both backward and forward. Each contribution in talk, then, is designed
such that the hearer will understand as intended by the speaker and will use and display
this understanding in the next turn (recipient design). One pervasive strategy in everyday
life, and hence also in dialogues, is the optima] display of one's social self for other
participants. The work of Goffman (1959, 1967, 1974, 1981) has had decisive influence on
this insight into the nature of talk as a means of self-presentation. Not only is the well-
known protection of self-esteem involved here, but also the presentation of preferred roles
or relationships. A doctor or a teacher signals in many ways, when going about the routine
activities of talking to patients or students, that he or she is talking as

1 Introduction: Dialogue as Discourse and Interaction 5

a doctor or a teacher. This implies, among other things, that such social roles are not given or
defined a priori but dynamically enacted and negotiated during the ongoing encounter. In this
sense, the dynamic and local accomplishment of roles in strategic encounters is rather
different from the abstract role definitions of a structural sociology.

Finally, everyday talk, as well as formal dialogues, does not take place in isolation. Each
turn or move of the ongoing discourse as well as the whole verbal exchange is an integral
part of a situation and inextricably connected with a relevant selection of social objects,
namely, the context. We have seen aboye that this context is not objective but is an
intersubjectively interpreted or constructed setting. In court, the classroom, or the doctor's
office, as well as on the bus or at breakfast, such settings and their elements are relevant for
the overall organization of the communicative events: their definition, the selection of
topics, style, or turn taking rules. In addition to timing, locality, physical environment, and
props, such settings are defined in terms of the strategic enactment of rules and roles, of
mutual expectations, and hence in terms of socially shared knowledge about what can or
should be done in such settings. Talk is indexical (Garfinkel, 1967) in the sense that it
indicates how it meshes with the setting, that is, with the relevant motives, purposes, or
histories of the participants. In this way, each expression-in-context can be assigned its
proper, situated, and unique meaning. Each verbal act can also be implicitly compared with
what would be typical for such a setting so that deviations, strangeness, or abnormality can
be observed and assessed. At the same time, discourse and action are reflexive (Garfinkel,
1967) in the sense that they may not only be about the social world or the setting, but also
are an integral part of it. A question may be about the future actions of a hearer but may be
heard also as an invitation and hence as part of the social moves of preparing or
accomplishing such an invitation. "'N

This brief reconstructive account of some principal concerns and concepts of a sociology of
discourse provides a partial answer to the question about why a sociological study of talk
may be relevant. It also suggests what such an inquiry will look for and how an inquiry
might be carried out. A central sociological motive for the analysis of conversation and other
dialogues appears to be their relevance as everyday activities of social members, their
interactive nature, the prominence of intersubjective, common sense interpretation
procedures, and their rule-governed and strategic, and hence orderly, conduct. In discourse
we see and hear displayed many of the pervasive principles that organize our social life. And
more than that, discourse not only reflexively organizes and defines its own role in social
interaction and indicates its relevant place in the
155

6 Teun A. van Dijk

social setting, it also may explicitly express social members' understanding of

social events. Talk thus becomes both data and method of analysis.

It shows both that people understand and how they do so.

156

SOCIOLINGUISTIC CONCERNS
What has been initiated in various branches of sociology, or at the boundaries with
social psychology and anthropology, has rapidly extended to other fields of
discourse analysis. In fact, linguists have rather quickly seen the relevance of this
sociological approach to actual language use. After all, some of the basic principles,
such as the rule-governed nature of talk of competent social members, is more than
reminiscent of Chomsky's basic tenet about the competence of ideal speakers to
know and apply the rules of grammar. Also, the sociolinguist found confirmation
and inspiration in this sociological approach for the concern with natural forms of
language use. More than written texts or institutional communication, everyday talk
was seen as the primary and elementary use of language in the social context. Soon,
therefore, the boundaries between sociolinguistics and the sociology of discourse
became blurred, although the perspectives of research were sometimes still different.
The linguist, for instance, may be more concerned with linguistic forms and
grammatical variation in talk than with turn taking, mover, or sequencing
phenomena.
And the analysis of laughter or applause, illustrated in the chapters by Jefferson and
Atkinson in this volume, seems more characteristic of a formal sociology of
paraverbal activities in dialogue than of a sociolinguistic analysis.
There are several reasons for this divergence in orientation. First, sociolinguistics
has long been closely related with a more functional paradigm of social research:
Correlations or dependencies were described between verbal (grammatical)
structures and the usual abstract categories of social structure such as class, ethnic
group, gender, status, or role. Social settings were not analyzed as such but were
seen as sets of factors that determine style, meanings, or speech acts. Sociolinguists
concentrated on the specific language variant or code associated with a social group
or category (talk of women, children, or blacks) or with a specific town or region.
Methodologically, such approaches were cast in statistical terms or in formal
methods using variable rules to account for linguistic variation. Part of the work of
Labov (1972a, 1972b) is associated with such an approach.
Second, many of the observations of the sociology of discourse could not readily
be translated into linguistic terminology or levels of description.
1 Introduction: Dialogue as Discourse and Interaction 7

Turns in talk are not just phonological, and moves are not just semantic or pragmatic;
sequence organization, as in openings or closings, cannot easily be mapped on the
usual levels of sentential grammar. Higher level macronotions become necessary, but
these are not familiar in traditional linguistics. Even a notion as elementary as the
topic of a conversation could not properly be defined in grammatical terms, let alone
the many strategies people use to maintain or change such a topic.
Third, the microsociologies described aboye seemed to display a rather benign
neglect, if not explicit refutation, of such familiar notions as `gender', `age', 'status', or
social 'class'. Maybe a detailed account was given of the strategies of talk between a
man and a woman in the course of a conversation, but no generalizations or
quantifications were made about how men and women interact verbally in general.
157

These and other discrepancies mark the boundaries between much sociolinguistic
and sociological work on discourse. The different historical and methodological
backgrounds in the two disciplines are partial explanation of the sometimes
conflicting positions. The sociologist of everyday life is little inclined to
systematically connect general features of discourse with general, preestablished
features of context. On the other hand, the sociolinguist is skeptical about notions such
as the competence of native speakers and is critical of any tacit acception of a
homogeneous speech community. The commonsense, shared methods and rules of
understanding and interaction studied by the sociologist may illustrate general
principles of interaction and discourse but do not seem to be captured in terms of
social groups, a generalization that many sociolinguists would be reluctant to
abandon. Recent approaches to constructing a bridge between macro and
microsociologies (Knorr-Cetina & Cicourel, 1981) may prove to be favorable for a
new integration.

CONTEXT AND CULTURE: THE ETHNOGRAPHY OF

COMMUNICATION
The third discipline engaged in the study of everyday talk and the analysis of
dialogue is anthropology. In the so-called ethnography of speaking, founded and
propagated by Hymes (1962), talk is systematically localized within its sociocultural
context. In this respect it parallels the concern in sociology to contextualize everyday
interaction, as we have outlined aboye. The obvious difference is that the
ethnographer is primarily interested in the communicative events in other societies
and cultures, often nonwestern ones, or in the subcultures of his or her own society.
Also, the ethnographer typically tries to collect a rich data base on the many
Teun A. van Dijk

relevant aspects of culture that may impinge on the structures and dynamics of speech events in
that culture. This practice recalls some of the sociolinguistic concerns we have sketched aboye.
Social class, ethnicity, age, gender, status, role, and other social factors are related to varieties of
grammatical, stylistic, rhetorical, narrative, or other discourse structures. Summarized
ethnographic findings are often of the following structure:
People of category x (men, women, elderly, leading persons, etc.), typically use form y
(intonation, pitch, lexical item, narrative form, code, etc.) in context z (with a given purpose,
speaking to a specific person, and in a given social event). The analysis of speech data may then
take two different directions. Either a given formal property of speech is examined for its
variations in different cultures, or some kind of speech event is studied in detail within a given
community or culture or compared across various cultures. In the first case we find studies
about, for example, different forms of address in various cultures or an analysis of narrative
structures or performances. This analysis may extend to a cross-cultural study of discourse
genres, as is shown in this volume by McDowell (Chap. 14) for verbal dueling, by Sherzer
(Chap. 15) for puns and jokes, and by Fine (Chap. 16) for rumors and gossip. Traditionally, and
in line with some of the goals of linguistics, such analyses were also aimed at the formulation of
universals, that is, general properties of narrative or rhetoric across cultures. A second line of
research demonstrates the context-bound nature of such genres or their properties by explicating
the specific structural or functional dimensions of discourse and by relating these to detailed
analyses of the cultural knowledge and practices of a community.
Although there are obvious similarities between the kinds of work done in sociolinguistics and
ethnography, there are also similarities between the aims of ethnography and qualitative,
cognitive microsociology as it was discussed aboye. Understanding the speech events of a
culture presupposes understanding the culture, that is, the meanings or values known and shared
by the members of a community or group. Just as in sociology, the principal task of the
ethnographer is to reconstruct and interpret this knowledge in terms of the categories or rules
used by the people themselves.
158

In addition to the collection of ethnographic facts about language forms and variation in
cultures or communities for a general theory and comparison of language and communication,
one of the most valuable contributions of ethnography is the detailed description of
communicative events in their full complexity. Linguists and sociologists often tend to isolate
one important aspect of discourse or interaction and pay detailed attention to one dimension of
analysis (often using one method). The ethnographer on the contrary is forced to be more
interdisciplinary and
1 Introduction: Dialogue as Discourse and Interaction 9

takes a broader focus. This is one of the reasons why the ethnographer has seldom followed the
prevailing interest of linguists in studying only grammatical (or only syntactic or phonological)
structures. The structure of communicative events is an interdependent, 'multilevel whole,
involving both textual and contextual features. A typical ethnographical analysis of speech events
features, for example, a description of the discourse genre, the overall delimitation, social
function, or label of the whole speech event, the topic (theme or reference), the setting (time and
physical environment), the different categories of participants, the purpose of the interaction, the
type of code (spoken, written, etc.), the lexicon and the semantics, the grammar (also at the
discourse level), the sequences of acts (both verbal and nonverbal), and the underlying rules,
norms, or strategies for the actions or the whole event. And even this enumeration is not
complete. Only in this way is it possible to make explicit the full constraints of the sociocultural
context on all the levels or dimensions of the discourse, and conversely, to specify the precise
effects of various discourse forms or meanings upon the context and the functions of the
discourse in its context.
The conceptual richness and the theoretical complexity of such an approach must of course have
its self-imposed limitations. We obtain highly articulated, multidisciplinary, and valid descriptions
of single communicative events, but generalizations about specific phenomena are more difficult
to assess. Also, the ethnographer in such analyses is dependent on the precise definition of
theoretical notions (e.g., of 'topic' or `setting') as they are provided by the linguist or sociologist.
Since the late 1970s cross-cultural studies of communication have paid increasing attention to
the specific problems involved in the cross-cultural or interethnic forms of communication within
Western society (Gumperz, 1982). The relevance of this work to sociolinguistic analyses of
language use is obvious. Besides the well-known insights about language variation for different
groups or situations, such a cultural, ethnographic approach will also provide more understanding
of the conflicts involved in communication. And instead of the explication of shared knowledge
and rules of action and discourse, this perspective will have an open eye for the heterogeneity of
our own society.
Finally, in sociology, sociolinguistics, and ethnography we find increasing attention for the
systematic analysis of discourse or discourse complexes in various sociocultural contexts.
Several of the contributions to this volume deal with language use, conversation, dialogues and
interaction in more or less formal situations: mass communication and the production of news
(Heritage), the classroom (Mehan), the courtroom (Drew), meetings (Cuff and Sharrock), or
political events (Atkinson). Such studies may
Teun A. van Dijk

focus upon the specific conversational accomplishment of the actions relevant for such
situations, such as providing testimony in court or giving political speeches. The analysis also
may be multilevel and pay attention to the full structure of a communicative event, such as the
internal structure of lessons (e.g., in terms of initiation, reply, and evaluation), cross-cultural
variation in lesson structures, turn taking, or sequential organization of classroom talk (as in
Mehan's chapter). Other dimensions, such as organizational constraints of the school or the
features of the setting, may also become relevant in such studies of discourse in-situation. Ervin-
Tripp and Strage, in their chapter on parent—child discourse, show that, for a specific type of
discourse, such a broader and more interdisciplinary approach also involves the study of social
networks and status of children, processes of socialization, cognitive competence of children,
strategies (e.g., of accommodation) by parents, and the overall cultural assumptions about the
appropriate ways to talk to children. Data for such studies may also come from developmental
and experimental psychology and need not be drawn from ethnographic description only.
159

In this section we have observed that the analysis of discourse and dialogue in the
sociocultural context follows a number of common aims and principles, such as the explanation
of implicit knowledge and rules (competence). There are, however, some differences in aims and
methods, such as attention to a selected feature of talk (e.g., turn taking or forms
of address), social and cultural variation of linguistic forms or communicative dimensions, the
full analysis of communicative events, or the systematic description of discourse in specific
social settings or within institutions. Within such diversity, the work on natural discourse and
communicative events in different directions can complement each other. As we have stressed
before, however, this is possible and fruitful only if interdisciplinary cooperation and integration
take place. If we want to make explicit the taken-for-granted, routine knowledge and rules of
social members, we enter the field of cognitive science. If we want serious insights into
developmental features of children's discourse, we may also need psychological results. The
study of variation in discourse as a function of social variables needs explanation in terms of
cognitive representations of social situations and strategies of speakers and also a detailed
ethnographic and microsociological description of the structures of the context and the detailed
forms and strategies of interactions in such contexts. Other mutual dependencies, interrelations,
and theoretical integration for this important area of research may be mentioned.
Despite the diversity in direction, conceptual frameworks, and methods, we witness that the
first steps have been made towards such an integration.
1 Introduction: Dialogue as Discourse and Interaction 11

The disciplinary boundaries between sociology (or different sociologies),

anthropology, and sociolinguistics have been blurred in favor of a common interest
for the detailed, ethnographical, multilevel analysis of actual language use, especially
spoken dialogues, in the sociocultural context. The chapters in this volume show in
detail how such analyses work and how the various approaches overlap, combine, and
mutually inspire each other.

SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
Cicourel, A. V. (1973). Cognitive sociology. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, Prentice Hall.
Goffman, E. (1959). Presentation of self in everyday life. New York: Anchor.
Goffman, E. (1967). Interaction ritual. New York: Anchor.
Goffman, E. (1974). Frame analysis. New York: Harper & Row.
Goffman, E. (1981). Forms of talk. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Gumperz, J. (Ed.). (1982). Language and social identity. London: Cambridge University Press.
Hymes, D. (1962). The ethnography of speaking. In T. Gladwin & W. C. Sturtevant (Eds.), Anthropology and
human behavior (pp. 13-53). Washington, DC: Anthropological Society of Washington.
Jefferson, G. (1972). Side-sequences. In D. Sudnow (Ed.), Studies in social interaction (pp. 294-338). New
York: Free Press.
Knorr-Cetina, K., & Cicourel, A. V. (Eds.). (1981). Advances in social theory and methodology. Towards an
integration of micro- and macrosociologies. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Labov, W. (1972a). Language in the inner city. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Labov, W. (1972b). Sociolinguistic patterns. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Sacks, H., Schegloff, E., & Jefferson, G. (1974). A simplest systematic for the organization of turntaking for
conversation. Language, 50, 696-735.
Schegloff, E., & Sacks, H. (1973). Opening up closings. Semiotica, 8, 289-327.
Schutz, A. (1970). In H. R. Wagner (Ed.). On phenomenology and social relations. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press.
160

Habermas and Brandom, Facts and Norms

3 Comments Posted by N Pepperell on October 29, 2007

Interview with Robert Brandom on "Making It Explicit" Part 1 - YouTube▶ 10:01

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WdIPuERVjk0

Nov 13, 2008 - Uploaded by GodlessPhilosopher

This is an interview with University of Pittsburgh professor of philosophy, Robert Brandom, on his
1994 book ...

What would something unlike us--a chimpanzee, say, or a computer--have to be able to do to

qualify as a possible knower, like us? To answer this question at the very heart of our sense
of ourselves, philosophers have long focused on intentionality and have looked to language as
a key to this condition. Making It Explicit is an investigation into the nature of language--the
social practices that distinguish us as rational, logical creatures--that revises the very terms of
this inquiry. Where accounts of the relation between language and mind have traditionally
rested on the concept of representation, this book sets out an alternate approach based on
inference, and on a conception of certain kinds of implicit assessment that become explicit in
language. Making It Explicit is the first attempt to work out in detail a theory that renders
linguistic meaning in terms of use--in short, to explain how semantic content can be
conferred on expressions and attitudes that are suitably caught up in social practices.

At the center of this enterprise is a notion of discursive commitment. Being able to talk--and
so in the fullest sense being able to think--is a matter of mastering the practices that govern
such commitments, being able to keep track of one's own commitments and those of others.
Assessing the pragmatic significance of speech acts is a matter of explaining the explicit in
terms of the implicit. As he traces the inferential structure of the social practices within which
things can be made conceptually explicit, the author defines the distinctively expressive role
of logical vocabulary. This expressive account of language, mind, and logic is, finally, an
account of who we are.

Bernhard Weiss, Jeremy Wanderer (eds.)

Reading Brandom: On Making It Explicit

Bernhard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer (eds.), Reading Brandom: On Making It Explicit,
Routledge, 2010, 371pp., $45.00 (pbk), ISBN 9780415380379.

Reviewed by James R. O'Shea, University College Dublin

Anyone interested in Robert Brandom's influential magnum opus in the philosophy of

language, Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment
(Harvard, 1994), will want to own this fine collection of new critical essays on Brandom's
work by prominent philosophers along with clarifying replies by Brandom. By now most
philosophers are aware, at least in general terms, of why Brandom's work is as controversial
as it is important. Making It Explicit (hereafter 'MIE') is arguably the first fully systematic
and technically rigorous attempt to explain the meaning of linguistic items in terms of their
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socially norm-governed use ('meaning as use', to cite the Wittgensteinian slogan), thereby
also giving a non-representationalist account of the intentionality of thought and the
rationality of action (?) as well. Brandom attempts to accomplish these goals by providing a
fully worked out inferentialist as opposed to classical representationalist or truth-conditional
semantics for natural languages, and then providing on that inferentialist basis an explanation
of the expressive and explicitating role of logic and of traditional semantic vocabulary such as
'true', 'refers' and 'represents'. So, beginning with practical normative attitudes and
corresponding statuses of commitment and entitlement to claims -- norms that are implicit in
our practices of giving and asking for reasons -- Brandom's thick book attempts to chart a
"Social Route from Reasoning to Representing" (chapter eight of MIE).

Bernhard Weiss and Jeremy Wanderer have assembled an outstanding group of philosophers
to probe and criticize or amend and extend Brandom's project. Part I on "Normative
Pragmatics" includes chapters by Allan Gibbard (reprinted from 1996), Charles Taylor,
Daniel Dennett, Sebastian Rödl, John MacFarlane, Wanderer, Mark Lance and Rebecca
Kukla (co-authors), John McDowell, and Rowland Stout. Part II, "The Challenge of
Inferentialism", reprints an important exchange from 2007 between Brandom and his sharp
critics Jerry Fodor and Ernie Lepore (co-authors). Part III on "Inferentialist Semantics"
features Danielle Macbeth, Michael Dummett, Michael Kremer, Weiss, Kevin Scharp, and
Bob Hale and Crispin Wright (co-authors). Brandom's responses in Part IV then occupy a
substantial sixty-eight pages. This organization nicely recapitulates the logical development
of MIE, from issues concerning Brandom's normative pragmatics, through the inferentialist
and expressivist semantics, to the culminating issues pertaining to representation and
objectivity. In their helpful introduction to the volume (pp. 1-11), Weiss and Wanderer
appropriately highlight four central themes from Brandom's MIE: 1. linguistic rationalism, 2.
the sociality of norms, 3. inferentialism and representationalism, and 4. language entries and
exits (i.e., perceptual observations and intentional actions). Here the editors do not shirk the
hard work of providing useful overview commentaries relating substantial themes from each
of the chapters to one or more of those four topics. Overall I think it would be hard to
improve upon the organization and execution of the book, which fulfils its aims admirably.

The editors characterize Brandom's 'linguistic rationalism' as consisting in his explicit

prioritization of the linguistic act of propositional assertion over all other linguistic acts, as
the "downtown" of language:

The linguistic rationalist affirms both that it is possible for there to be a linguistic
practice involving practitioners capable only of asserting, and that any social practice
involving practitioners lacking the ability to assert is not a linguistic practice (p. 3).

Strictly speaking, on Brandom's view the characterization of 'linguistic rationalism' ought to

include the distinctively rationalist idea that, as he put the thesis in his subsequent shorter
version of MIE's project, Articulating Reasons (Harvard, 2000, p. 189),

a performance deserves to count as having the significance of an assertion only in the

context of a set of social practices with the structure of (in Sellars's phrase) a game of
giving and asking for reasons… .This inferentialist idea might be called 'linguistic
rationalism'.

However, the editors are rightly concerned to stress that several of the critics in the volume
specifically object to the particular way in which Brandom privileges the act of assertion over
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all other pragmatic aspects of discursive practice, as opposed to objecting to the inferentialist
semantics per se (though some of the critics do that as well). Such critics argue that there are
additional necessary conditions of linguistic practice that cannot intelligibly be regarded as
optional or be abstracted from in the way that Brandom's assertion-based account, they
contend, attempts to do. This is a general style of criticism that runs throughout many of the
chapters and in relation to all four of the topic areas highlighted by the editors above. In his
replies to this and other criticisms in the volume, Brandom frequently charges that his critics
have misunderstood various subtle methodological aspects of his approach in MIE, and this is
the angle I will focus my discussion on here.

Gibbard, in 'Thought, Norms, and Discursive Practice', finds Brandom's expressivist account
of normativity and meaning to be promising in general, but he does not find convincing
arguments for the view that the norms of meaning and thought are essentially social rather
than being conceivably private or grounded in an individual's thoughts. In his reply Brandom
takes the opportunity to provide a helpful sketch for the reader of the Kantian grounds of his
views on normativity in general and the normativity of intentional content in particular.
(Brandom's summary of his views in this case reflects the rich historical discussions to be
found in his recent book, Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas, Harvard 2009.) When it
comes to the question, "is normativity in general and as such social?", Brandom's reply
includes the methodological remark that his own "suggestions on this general point … are
meant in an open-minded, irenic, experimental spirit" (p. 298). He grants, for example, that
while he holds that normativity and hence meaning must be cashed out in social terms, in a
way that reflects and builds upon his interpretation of well-known arguments of the later
Wittgenstein, one might alternatively attempt to go with Dennett or Ruth Millikan and seek to
naturalize normativity via considerations pertaining to optimality of design or proper
biological function. For Brandom himself, however, the key source of the normativity that
makes possible conceptual content is the 'I-Thou' interpretive difference in social perspective
between, in the terms of his 'deontic scorekeeping' semantics, "acknowledging a
commitment (oneself) and attributing a commitment (to someone else)" (p. 298). Gibbard
usefully presses a variety of questions concerning animal cognition (orangutans) as well as
the possibility of 'Crusoe'-type cognition across perspectives constituted by different time-
slices of a single inner mental life. Here again Brandom clarifies the precise status of his
claim concerning the sociality of normativity and content, doing so in a way that will perhaps
strike some Wittgensteinian readers as surprising: "if creatures can take up the different
perspective to time-slices of themselves," he grants, "then the relation among those time-
slices is social in the sense that it must admit of the distinction of perspectives between the
attitude of attributing a commitment (or other normative status) and the attitude of
acknowledging it" (p. 299).

The article by Lance and Kukla, 'Perception, Language, and the First Person', is among other
things a helpful gateway into the perspective of their new book, 'Yo!' and 'Lo!': The
Pragmatic Topography of the Space of Reasons (Harvard, 2009), which they acknowledge to
be strongly influenced by Brandom's normative pragmatic semantics in general. They argue,
however, that with respect to perception and action Brandom's account severs "the agent-
relative, voiced dimensions of linguistic practice," in particular the richly first-person
experiential yet concept-laden "recognitives" ("Lo, a rabbit!") and "vocatives" ('Yo, Emma!'),
which they argue are "constitutive of any language with the expressive capacity to make
meaningful empirical assertions" (p. 127). By contrast they contend that "Brandom makes the
remarkable claim that it is merely a contingent matter that discourse is bounded by perception
and action, and that in principle it could exist without them (MIE, p. 234)" (p. 115). If one
163

follows up the page they cite from MIE, one can see grounds for this attribution to Brandom.
Brandom accounts for our non-inferential 'language entries' (i.e., empirical observations) and
'language exits' (intentional actions) in MIE chapter four, i.e., only after having given an
account of the propositional contentfulness of inferentially articulated assertion in general in
the previous chapters. (As Brandom notes in his reply, however, chapter four falls within Part
One rather than Part Two of MIE.) On the cited page Brandom writes:

The three structures of authority that the model of assertion … comprises are mutually
irreducible, but not all are equally fundamental. The inferential authority invoked by
justification and the testimonial authority invoked by deference are intelligible apart
from the default authority of noninferential reports; but inferential and deferential
practice are two sides of one coin, apart from which the authority of noninferential
reports is not intelligible. (MIE, p. 234)

Brandom does hold, then, that the basic normative-pragmatic inferentialist account "of
assertional commitments and their contents can be understood in advance of the enrichment"
by the accounts of perceptual observation and rational action (ibid.). However, he also says
further down the same page:

The empirical and practical involvements of claims … make a fundamental

contribution to their contents. Only a model that incorporates both of these not purely
inferential dimensions of discursive articulation has any prospect of generating
propositional contents that resemble those expressed by the declarative sentences of
natural languages (ibid.).

So are Lance and Kukla correct to attribute to Brandom the view that "discourse" in principle
"could exist without" such empirical and practical involvements? In his reply to Lance and
Kukla, Brandom again begins by highlighting the general methodological character of the
project in MIE:

When I am vandalizing Neurath's boat, and so trying to specify the absolutely

minimal conditions on a practice deploying propositional contents (being a practice in
which something can be said, so thought), the one and only speech act that must be
present is asserting. According this sort of unique, defining significance to asserting is
a bold and antecedently implausible conjecture. I think it is often useful to adopt a
Popperian philosophical methodology: developing and defending the strongest, most
easily falsifiable not-yet-falsified hypothesis. We learn a lot from seeing for what
reasons, and to what extent, such a hypothesis needs to be qualified and amended. But
even then, it is important that the bit where one takes it back be preceded by a bit
where one actually says it. (p. 316)

In this respect Brandom thinks that Lance and Kukla are doing the right thing by asking, with
respect to his "assertionalism", just "what such an approach must overlook or leave out"
(ibid.). In the present case, however, Brandom argues that his assertional scorekeeping model
already does accommodate the points raised by Lance and Kukla. For instance, the first-
personal nature of "recognitives", he contends, is accommodated by his view of perceptual
judgments as acknowledgments of commitments by perceivers themselves; only as such
acknowledgings would such responses be endorsed as reliable by scorekeepers (pp. 318-9).
Brandom's further clarifications on this issue again bring out an underlying methodological
distinction:
164

Of course perception and agency are necessary features of any autonomous discursive
practice… . My remarks in passing (intended in a 'for all I know' spirit) about the
possible intelligibility-in-principle of conceptual content isolated or insulated from
inferential connections to language entries and language exits is a gesture toward the
possibility of a non-autonomous region of discourse, for instance some pure
mathematics, in which such contents might live. (p. 318)

So the 'independently intelligible', 'minimal conditions' on discursive propositional

contentfulness noted above apparently do not entail 'autonomy' of discourse in the relevant
sense. Although Brandom's reply to Lance and Kukla occupies only four pages, additional
clarifying distinctions of this kind are made along the way. For example, although Brandom
grants that for any autonomous language "it is always possible to introduce explicit locutions
and speech acts" corresponding to the authors' "recognitive" and "vocative" speech acts, he
claims that such normative statuses could in principle be practically distinguished in
scorekeeping practices without the scorekeeper having the expressive resources to say this
(pp. 318-9).

Similarly delicate and clarifying methodological distinctions are involved in many of

Brandom's other replies to the contributors. It will of course be up to the reader to judge in
each case whether with such distinctions Brandom is in some cases presenting a moving
target to his critics or whether, to the contrary, he is correctly highlighting distinctions that
have been overlooked by his critics. There is no doubt, however, that Brandom's clear and
brief replies will be exceptionally helpful to readers engaging with Making It Explicit. Brief
mention of a few more examples will have to suffice here.

In 'Brandom on Observation' McDowell argues that Brandom's attribution of a 'two-ply'

account of observation to Wilfrid Sellars is both wrong about Sellars and deeply implausible
in itself. According to McDowell such an account entirely eliminates the fundamental role of
sensory experience in perception, whether the latter is understood as Sellars does or as
McDowell does. Reliable chicken-sexers, McDowell argues, have everything that Brandom
attributes to our 'perceptual observations', yet unlike ordinary perception the chicken-sexers
are not able to appeal to their own experiences as what justifies their reports. Brandom grants
that in his account of observation "perceptual experiences, if any, are only contingently
involved" (p. 323). After a complex discussion of McDowell and Sellars that merits more
attention than I can give it here (my own view is that the truth lies somewhere in between
McDowell and Brandom on the interpretive issue concerning Sellars), Brandom closes by
again emphasizing that his stripped down view of observation has been offered "in the spirit
of vandalizing Neurath's boat," in this case by asking: "Could the responsiveness to reality of
some discursive practitioners -- no doubt, ones quite different from us -- be 'chicken-sexing
all the way down'? I do not see why not. McDowell, as I understand him, thinks the answer
must be 'No'" (p. 325). The details of McDowell's article and Brandom's reply are terrain that
would be well worth exploring further than I can here.

Kremer's compelling article, 'Representation or Inference: Must We Choose? Should We?',

like McDowell's piece, also raises objections to Brandom's account of our perceptual contact
with or sensory intuition of objects in the world. Kremer does this in a particularly elegant
way by arguing that "Brandom's anti-representationalist arguments are salutary insofar as
they remind us that representation without inference is blind; but taken as arguments for
inferentialism, they lead us astray, causing us to forget the equally important insight that
inference without representation is empty" (p. 244). Brandom's reply here again points to
165

several pertinent methodological distinctions (pp. 348, 349, 352), but in the end, as in his
reply to Lance and Kukla, he argues that his stripped down inferentialist account does have
the resources, contra Kremer, to account for a sufficiently robust notion of representing
particular encountered objects. Kremer's argument that inferentialism and representationalism
should be conceived as mutually interdependent dimensions of meaning and cognition might
usefully be compared with MacFarlane's equally careful analysis in 'Pragmatism and
Inferentialism'. MacFarlane argues that Brandom's pragmatism about the relation between
semantics and pragmatics is consistent with both inferentialism and representationalism
(particularly with Davidson's pragmatist version of truth-conditional semantics), contrary to
what Brandom seems to suggest is the case with his tight connection between normative
pragmatics and inferentialist semantics. In reply Brandom argues that a pragmatist in his
sense need not be an inferentialist: there is not a definitional connection between the two, but
rather "one can say in a pragmatic vocabulary what it is one needs to do in order thereby to
make semantic concepts applicable to one's performances" (p. 314). This is one of several
places in his replies where Brandom indicates how the distinctions developed in his more
recent book, Between Saying and Doing (Oxford, 2008), can help to clarify the structure of
the project in MIE.

Brandom's response to Fodor and Lepore's vigorous objections to his inferentialist semantics
('Brandom Beleaguered') again features, inter alia, a methodological point: namely, that his
brand of inferentialism, according to which all the inferences that essentially involve a given
expression are treated as bearing on that expression's 'meaning', is self-consciously "a radical
policy, which requires giving up many things we have become accustomed to say about
conceptual content"; in fact, "in a certain sense" it "involves in the end giving up the idea of
conceptual content" (p. 333). Accordingly, he grants that less radical inferentialist approaches
are possible, including Sellars' own approach to meaning and conceptual content. As
Brandom says in this connection in his reply to Macbeth's rich discussion in 'Inference,
Meaning, and Truth in Brandom, Sellars, and Frege', "the principal issue for me is not the
extent to which the MIE account [of inferentialism] is antecedently plausible, but how
workable and powerful it is" (p. 340). Brandom's reply to Fodor and Lepore also includes a
useful brief synopsis of his 'incompatibility semantics' account of compositionality in
Between Saying and Doing (chapter five and appendix). Central to Brandom's reply in
general is a distinction between formal semantics and philosophical semantics, one of several
distinctions that are also mobilized in Brandom's friendly "conjecture" as to how Dummett
('Should Semantics be Deflated?') "does not see that we have no quarrel here" -- including in
particular a distinction "between explanatory and expressive deflationism" (p. 344). Brandom
argues that he is not 'deflating semantics' in the sense that Dummett is concerned to reject.

Space prohibits a discussion of all of the articles in this collection, but all, in the opinion of
this reviewer, are of high philosophical calibre, including the contributions by each of the
editors themselves: Weiss's 'What is Logic?' and Wanderer's 'Brandom's Challenges'. There
will no doubt be wide interest in the substantial contributions in the collection made by
famous philosophers who have not been discussed above: for example, Taylor on 'Language
Not Mysterious?', Dennett on 'The Explanation of "Why?"', and Hale and Wright on
'Assertibilist Truth and Objective Content: Still Inexplicit?' Stout's contribution, 'Being
Subject to the Rule To Do What the Rules Tell you To Do', offers an interesting criticism of
Brandom's account of intentional action, within a shared Kantian framework, while
simultaneously displaying some of the virtues of Stout's own analysis of rational action as
developed in several recent books. Rödl's 'Normativity of Mind versus Philosophy as
Explanation: Brandom's Theory of Mind' argues forcefully that MIE's
166

methodology requires that the normative concepts its account deploys be logically
independent of intentional concepts. Its rejection of the Myth of the Given requires
that they be irreducible to non-normative concepts. These conditions cannot be
satisfied simultaneously (p. 66).

Brandom counters in reply that explicitating accounts, in his sense, are not reductive
explanations (p. 311). Scharp's 'Truth and Expressive Completeness' argues that "Brandom's
commitment to producing an expressively complete theory of meaning is incompatible with
his choice of a broadly Kripkean approach to the liar paradox" (p. 273), a point which
Brandom partially accepts while contending that it does not disable the role that truth plays
within the project of MIE.

The contributions by the philosophers in this volume whose graduate work was originally in
Pittsburgh over the last three decades -- Kremer, Macbeth, MacFarlane, Scharp, Lance and Kukla --
range insightfully across topics from Kant and Frege to Davidson and Kripke, spanning the full range
from the history of philosophy to the latest disputes in philosophical logic, philosophy of language,
and epistemology, and with no holds barred in their constructive criticisms of Brandom's work. One
of the side-effects of the volume is thus to display the merits and the diverse products of that
particular philosophical proving ground. The quality of the engagement by all of the philosophers in
this collection indicates that Brandom's Making It Explicit is achieving its wider goal of stimulating
vigorous critical reflection upon the possibility of a normative pragmatic and systematic inferentialist
conception of our rational nature.

https://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/dennett/papers/Brandom.pdf

Essay on Robert Brandom, Making it Explicit Daniel Dennett

Making it Explicit: Reasoning,

Representing, and Discursive Commitment

Contents
Toward a Normative Pragmatics 3

From Intentional Interpretation to Original Intentionality 55

Toward an Inferential Semantics 67

Linguistic Practice and Discursive Commitment 141

Deontic Status and Deontic Attitudes 157

The Conferral of Empirical 199

to Practical Commitments 243

167

Expressive Not Explanatory 322

to Functional Derivation of Categories 404

The Structure of Token Repeatables 413

Donkeys and Quantificational Antecedents 490

Interpretation Communication and De Re Ascriptions 508

Conclusion 614

HI We Have Met the Norms and They Are Ours 639

Abbreviations 653

Index 717

What Are Singular Terms and Why Are There Any? 334

Substitution Sentential Embedding and Semantic Roles 346

Copyright

Update: This piece has subsequently been revised into a conference paper. The revised
version is available online, (POSTED ASFTER THIS ONE. I make comments on the
SECOND improved article only) and the comments section there includes a very good
discussion and debate about the conference paper. We recommend that readers interested in
this piece, consult the revised version and the subsequent discussion to see the further
development of the thoughts originally outlined here.
168

Habermas and Brandom, Facts and Norms

In spite of the obvious difficulties of joint-authoring a paper with a fictional collaborator, NP
and I have decided to submit a presentation for the upcoming Australasian Society for
Continental Philosophy conference entitled Dialogues in Place. This comes on the back of a
welcome return to the Reading Group, which has been in temporary hiatus. It’s been a while
since I’ve been in a position to blog or comment here, but notwithstanding… NP has
exhorted invited me to initiate a discussion around some aspects of our proposed
presentation. The conference itself

will focus on the conception of dialogue

in philosophy, but with particular emphasis on the opening
up of philosophical dialogue between traditions and cultures
especially between east and west and on the way the happening
of dialogue in place sheds light on both the nature of dialogue
as well as on the place in which such dialogic engagement
takes place.

Our own presentation is somewhat tangential to these concerns, but closely enough related: it
aims to examine the work of Habermas and Brandom in relation to the question of normative
ideals. The purpose of the following discussion is to outline, in suitably rough and tentative
fashion, some thoughts in relation to a recent interchange between Habermas and Brandom,
following on from the publication of Brandom’s Making It Explicit. Significant caveat lector:
both NP and I are still slowly progressing through the substantive portions of Making It
Explicit, and the following remarks should be interpreted in the light of an as-yet incomplete
reading of Brandom’s work. I’ll start with an overview of the exchange, and an all-too-brief
synopsis of Brandom’s account, followed by a break-down of Habermas’ objections and
Brandom’s replies.

Habermas’ interest in Brandom can be seen as an extension of his engagement with the
Anglo-American pragmatist tradition, which began in the 70’s, and forms a cornerstone of his
own magnus opus, The Theory of Communicative Action. Two distinct strains of this tradition
concern Habermas: on the one hand, linguistic pragmatics, through the work of J L Austin
and John Searle; and on the other, the philosophical pragmatism which runs through, most
explicitly, James, Dewey and Rorty, but which can also be found in Wittgenstein, Quine and
Davidson. It is therefore not surprising that he would be particularly interested in a major
work which in part aims to marry together the two. Brandom summarises the project of
Making it Explicit in a precis to a volume of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research
dedicated to that work:

The book is an attempt to explain the meanings of linguistic expressions in terms of their use.
The explanatory strategy is to begin with an account of social practices, to identify the
particular structure they must exhibit in order to qualify as specifically linguistic practices,
and then to consider what different sorts of semantic contents those practices can confer on
states, performances, and expressions caught up in them in suitable ways. The result is a kind
of conceptual role semantics that is at once firmly rooted in actual practices of producing
and consuming speech acts, and sufficiently finely articulated to make clear how those
practices are capable of conferring a rich variety of kinds of content. [my emphases in bold]
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The privileging of use over meaning, pragmatics over semantics, and social practices over
cognitive states in the order of explanation marks Brandom’s account as avowedly pragmatist
in both of the senses described above. Throughout the nuanced passages of Making It
Explicit, the overarching gambit is that of bringing the finely tuned semantic analyses of
language characteristic of much Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century within
the broader rubric of societised and historicised linguistic users which is the substance of a
social theoretic account like Habermas’. Nevertheless Brandom stops far short of a
commitment to the kind of social quasi-transcendental categories employed by Habermas,
using terms like the ‘social’ as simple ‘unexplained explainers’. This is not necessarily a
weakness of his approach; however it forms an important point of aporetic disagreement
between Habermas and Brandom in what follows.

Writing in 2000, in an article entitled From Kant to Hegel: On Robert Brandom’s Pragmatic
Philosophy of Language, Habermas  begins with high praise:

Making it Explicit is a milestone in theoretical philosophy just as A Theory of Justice was a

milestone in practical philosophy in the early 1970’s. Displaying a sovereign command of the
intricate discussion in the analytic philosophy of language, Brandom manages successfully to
carry out a programme within the philosophy of language that has already been sketched by
others [note: Habermas footnotes a number of prior pragmatist accounts, including his own],
without losing sight of the vision inspiring the enterprise in the important details of his
investigation. The work owes its exceptional rank to its rare combination of speculative
impulse and staying power. It painstakingly works out an innovative connection of formal
pragmatics with inferential semantics, articulating a self-understanding that was already
available as a tradition but in need of renewal. Using the tools of a complex theory of
language Brandom succeeds in describing convincingly the practices in which the reason and
autonomy of subjects capable of speech and action are developed.

The remainder of the article is in two parts: the first is largely an articulation of Brandom’s
position, though phrased in idioms more familiar to Habermas. The second part adopts a
more critical tone, through a series of objections to which Brandom, in turn, replies in Facts,
Norms, and Normative Facts: A Reply to Habermas (also published in the European Journal
of Philosophy, 2000). As Brandom’s title highlights, at the heart of the exchange is the
conceptual status of facts and norms in their respective frameworks. Habermas states three
key objections, respectively, in sections 4, 5 and 6 of his paper. I will try to provide a
simplified explanation of these objections here, along Brandom’s replies; however the
differing idioms make this a difficult exercise in terms of explication.

The problem of ‘conceptual realism’

In Habermas’ recitation of Brandom’s thesis, Brandom wants firstly to avoid the naturalist
account of language, in which words designate objects in some real world. This entails a
number of corresponding arguments: that of semantic atomism, in which words, rather than
sentences, are prior in the order of explanation of linguistic meaning; of representationalism,
in which the correspondence between words and objects is taken as given, or at any rate, non-
problematic; of verificationalism, in which truth, rather than inference, plays the primary
functional role of language. Brandom avowedly wants to submit an account that is normative
rather than naturalistic; semantically holistic rather than atomistic; inferentialist rather than
representationalist; and oriented firstly towards use-via-inference, rather than meaning-via-
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truth. For Habermas, what is just as distinctive about Brandom is his desire to retain an
Enlightenment commitment to objectivity, without the trappings (in Brandom’s terms) of its
Cartesian overtones. So:

Brandom, who is evidently not prepared to tolerate anti-realist consequences, cannot accept a
transcendentalised linguistic approach, whether this be given a culturalist turn (MacIntyre),
an onto-historical one (Derrida) or a pragmatist one (Rorty).

Such a position – both realist and pragmatist – could be brought about by referral to a social
grounding which gives linguistic participants its conceptual tools ready-made in the form of
concretised facts; but in this event there would be no availability of critical ‘kick-back’ from
those participants. The first problem for Habermas then is that Brandom must be committed
to either circularity or contradiction:

How is it possible at all to conceive of the sedimentation of world-knowledge in linguistic

knowledge as the checking of linguistic knowledge through world-knowledge? Semantically
relevant learning processes would have to explain how empirical contact with things and
events can trigger off a revision of the ("world-disclosing") linguistic categories and
conceptual norms that have been supplied in advance. Brandom rejects a naturalist
explanation. However, as I show in (1), a pragmatist one, which would suit the construction
of his theory, cannot be developed solely from the phenomenalist viewpoint of an interpreter
who understands a language. For this reason, as I show in (2), Brandom sees himself
compelled to adopt a conceptual realism that, with its propositions about the structure ‘in
itself’, undermines his discourse-theoretically based analysis of a reality that ‘appears’ in
language.

Further on:

In perceiving an unsuccessful action, the actor ‘rubs up’ against a disappointing reality that,
as it were, terminates its hitherto proven willingness to play along in an action-context that no
longer functions. The objective world can register this ‘protest’ only performatively by
refusing to ‘go along with’ targeted interventions in a world of causally interpreted sequences
of events. This explains why Brandom, who has committed himself to a phenomenalist
analysis of language, does not take into consideration the pragmatist explanation of
semantically learning processes… Only when agents distance themselves from their practical
dealings with the world and enter argumentation or rational discourse, objectifying the
situation ‘ready to hand’ in order to reach understanding with one another about something in
the world, does a perception that challenges reality and shakes up behavioural certainties
become a ‘reason’ that as a criticism gains entry into the conceptual balance and the semantic
reservoir of potential inferences attached to existing views, setting in motion revisions, if
necessary.

And finally:

In this way Brandom’s investigation can proceed unwaveringly in a linear fashion from
perception to action without taking any notice of how perceptions are embedded in contexts
of action and without paying attention to the revisionary power that accrues to peceptions
only through their feedback relation to ‘coping’ – to the success-controlled practice of
dealing with problems.
171

For Habermas, Brandom’s pragmatism is a strangely quietist one. It allows for only a one-
way entry of phenomena into discourse, at an initial point of perception. Thereafter linguistic
practice takes its course, without providing further feedback via a loop of subsequent
perception-action, which Habermas would like to foreground.

Thus Brandom’s hard-fought gain of reality is a hollow one, in which "both our discursively
won thoughts as well as the world grasped in thoughts are inherently of a conceptual nature –
that is, are made of the same stuff – grants to experience no more than a passively mediating
role". Habermas then locates Brandom’s position as a reaction to forms of naturalism,
hermeneuticism and pragmatism expounded by his predecessors, and terminates this line of
critique with a contrastive positioning of Brandom and Wittgenstein:

Together with the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus Brandom conceives of the world as the
totality of facts… In constrast to Wittgenstein, however, Brandom does not understand this
formulation in the sense of a transcendental linguistic idealism according to which the limits
of our language are the limits of our world. He finds an objective linguistic idealism more
congenial: because facts, in which the world consists, are essentially what can be stated in
true sentences, the world itself is of this kind – namely, of a conceptual nature. For this
reason the objectivity of the world is not attested to by contingencies that we experience
through being affected by the senses and in our practical dealings [with the world] but only
through the discursive resistances of stubborn objections.

One of the governing impulses of The Theory of Communicative Action is the potential for
human agency within the overwhelmingly system-regulated character of capitalist modernity.
While Habermas would applaud Brandom’s rigorous dissection of linguistic practice and
overarching argument on the locus of rationality within linguistic practice, what he sees as
the inevitable result of Brandom’s turn from naturalism leads to an untenable "semantic
passivity". For both Habermas and Brandom, as it turns out, this is an objectionable stance;
though for Habermas it is objectionable both on epistemological grounds – it gives
insufficient space for the dialectical relationship between perception and action in acquiring
knowledge – and on moral grounds – it rules out precisely the possibility for "communicative
action". Since this is related to Habermas’ third line of critique (and Brandom’s reply), I’ll
return to it shortly.

 The essence of Brandom’s response to this objection is, I think, to emphasise that his
distinctive brand of realism is one of priority, an emphasis upon a given "order of
explication". Hence he can say: "I agree with all of these criticisms of epistemological
theories that present knowers as passive spectators. But I deny that seeing our cognitive job
as getting the facts right – commiting ourselves to claims that were in many cases already
true independently of our activities – implies any such passive conception". As preparation
for his more forceful rebuttal, he states:

This claim about order of explication in ontology reflects a more fundamental asymmetry
between the conceptions of sentence and of singular term. Object-based ontologies suffer by
comparison to fact-based ones in the same ways and for the same reasons that nominalistic
semantics suffers by contrast to sentential semantics.

Objects are not, however, dispensed with: they simply are secondary in the "order of
explication" to facts. "The conceptual articulation of facts is such that the most basic ones
172

must have the structure of attributing properties and relations to objects". The nub of
Brandom’s response is articulated a little further on:

Here is a diagnosis: Habermas seems to take it that my attempt at securing objectivity

intersubjectively (as the product of the orthogonal distinctions on the one hand between the
two sorts of deontic status, commitment and entitlement, and on the other between the two
sorts of deontic attitude, acknowledging and attributing) either fails to underwrite anything
recognizable as, or cannot be the whole story about objectivity. Given that, it then seems
natural to assume that I look elsewhere to get what I cannot procure socially – namely to an
objective, already conceptually structured reality… But my intent is just the other way
around. The recognition of an independent, conceptually structured objective reality is a
product of the social (intersubjective) account of objectivity, not something that is either prior
to or a substitute for that account… If this diagnosis is correct – that Habermas takes my talk
of facts as something that is supposed to explanatory work, rather than (as intended) just as
something that is to be explained in social practical terms – then the point that will turn out to
bear the most weight must be the social-perspectival account of objectivity, that is, of the
nature of the auhority (according to Making It Explicit, always a social category) of how
things can be discovered to be (the facts).

It is in fact extremely difficult to know to what extent the "diagnosis is correct" here. A
sympathetic view of Habermas’ objection sees Brandom as hedging between a naturalistic
realism and transcendental idealism, with the consequence of a "conceptual realism" that
permits no place for improvement on the pre-given conceptual structures given to us by
language. A sympathetic view of Brandom’s reply (and broader enterprise) sees a social and
dialogical process (idiomatically expressed as the "giving and asking for reasons") as
foundational to his account – the "feedback loop" between perception and action required for
verification is still available to this process, but downstream in the order of explanation from
the essentially normative character of the process itself.

There are two points which are striking here however:

1. If Habermas’ criticism here is deemed to hold, it is somewhat fundamental in its

implications for Brandom’s overall account. It is therefore surprising to see this in the context
of an overall positive appraisal of Making It Explicit. More specifically, the last few
paragraphs of section 4 of Habermas’ essay conclude in surprisingly ambiguous terms. The
nature of Habermas’ criticism is far from the minor point-scoring objection it appears to be in
context.

2. On a superficial reading it would appear that a social-theoretically oriented, pragmatist,

inferentialist and holist account of meaning is not so very far from that described at length in
Theory of Communicative Action. The problematic of how to describe meaning in ways that
are neither naturalist-realist nor conceptualist-idealist would elicit greater sympathy from
Habermas (this in turn could well be the response to the first point – that for its deficiencies
Making It Explicit at least makes a number of the right kinds of moves).

 
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The problem of speakers: "I-You", "I-We",

"I-Them"
The second objection Habermas raises concerns the focus of Making It Explict on forms of
discursive practice which are intersubjective only in narrowest sense – dialogue between two
participants, between a "I" and "you":

Brandom wants to grant priority to symmetric ‘I-you relations’ between first and second
persons over asymmetric ‘I-we relations’ in which the individual is, so to speak,
overwhelmed by the collectivity. But does he redeem this claim?

To the collectivist picture of a linguistic community that commands ultimate authority

Brandom opposes the individualist picture of single pairs of interpersonal relationships, but
he does not give its due to the horizon of meaning of a linguistically disclosed world that is
shared intersubjectively by all members. 

In other words, Brandom’s notion of discursive practice is limited to an idealised case of the
‘social’, which does not faithfully represent the rough-and-tumble world of communication
between first, second and third persons, singularly and plurally. Of course Brandom follows
conventional practice within the analytical tradition (echoed by Wittgenstein, Austin, Quine
and Davidson among others) of using simplistic exemplars, to isolate minimalist cases
precisely to avoid the complications of real-world dialogical interactions. But Habermas
further charges that Brandom does not even remain faithful to this minimalist case:

On closer examination, however, it becomes evident that the act of attributing, which is of
fundamental importance for discursive practice, is not really carried out by a second person…
It is no accident that Brandom prefers to identify the interpreter with a public that assesses the
utterance of a speaker – and not with an addressee who is expected to give the speaker an
answer. 

Not only does Brandom miss the importance of the ‘I-we relation’; he subverts the ‘I-you
relation’ into an ‘I-they relation’, which misses the essential character of communication:
‘Evidently Brandom assumes that the result of communication consists in the simplest case in
an epistemic relation – a relation between what the speaker says about something in the world
and the attribution of what is said undertaken by the interpreter’. This would seem to be
bourn about in the central position Brandom accords to the ‘de re’/’de dicta’ distinction.

Furthermore, Brandom’s individualistic emphasis belie what for Habermas is the central
communicative function:

Communication is not a self-sufficient game with which the interlocutors reciprocally inform
each other about their beliefs and intentions. It is only the imperative of social integration –
the need to coordinate the action-plans of independently deciding participants in action – that
explains the point of linguistic communication.

Where Brandom has repeatedly emphasised, in Making It Explicit and Articulating Reasons,
the value derived from adopting a position of semantic holism, here Habermas accuses him of
being socially atomistic. Rather communication belongs to the social whole, to the need to
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integrate individuals within a social structure. Habermas takes aim too at Brandom’s central
metaphor of the "score-keeping" that happens in the game of "giving and asking for reasons":

However, in the case of a strategic team game such as baseball, it is a matter of a calculated
adjustment to the reactions of others and not of a consensual co-operation that can satisfy the
requirements of social integration… [According to this view] discursive practive emerges on
the basis of reciprocal observation from inferences drawn by individual participant, each of
them for herself. This picture falls short of establishing that the participants can converge in
their intersubjective recognition of the same validity claim and can share knowledge in the
strict sense of the verb.

Brandom has some sympathy with the starting point of this objection, although he soon states
in reply "I believe that the conceptual raw materials provided are entirely sufficient to
characterize such interactions". But the brunt of his response is directed towards the broader
target Habermas outlines as that of the communicative function. For Brandom, it is
meaningless to talk about some overriding function at all in this way:

Linguistic practice is not for something. It does not, as a whole, have an aim or a goal. It may
and does, of course, fulfill many functions. But none of them is its raison d’etre. Language is
certainly not a tool for the expression of thoughts intelligible as such apart from their relation
to such a means of expression, as Locke, in the company of most of the Cartesian tradition
thought. For that conception of thoughts is mythological.

Brandom in turn accuses Habermas of an unsustainable reductionism here. For Brandom

language is the multi-purpose tool that allows for a switching of many means to many ends,
within a paradigmatically rationalist rubric. Put more elegantally: "For discursive practice is a
mighty engine for the envisaging and engendering of new ends – thereby transforming the
very concept of an end or goal, giving it for the first time its proper, practical-rational, sense".
To treat linguistic practice instead as merely a form of socially-binding adhesive is to
assimilate it to a host of related social-functional practices – preparing meals, conducting
rituals or sharing artifacts, for example. Whereas Brandom wants to insist upon the difference
of specifically linguistic practice, namely, in that it enables a form of rationalised engagement
with others unavailable by other means.

Brandom concludes his second response by emphasising another reason why he cannot
condone the social integration functionalist account – in that it relies ultimately upon
psychologistic conceptions, like "belief, intention and expectation". A key feature of his
account is again that "assertional practice" comes earlier in the order of explanation of
meaning. Habermas’ implicit premise in turns requires just these kinds of "representalist"
conceptions – language functions to "express" beliefs, intentions and so on – and thus
succumbs, implicitly, to the very same charge of out-dated "mythologism".

As with the first objection, despite the sometimes ambivalent and courteous phrasing, both
objection and reply point to substantive differences between Habermas and Brandom. For
Habermas, Brandom is mistakenly individualist and socially atomist; for Brandom, Habermas
suffers from the fallibilism of functional representationalism. These are large chasms to
navigate if one wanted to find means to marry Brandom’s pragmatic-semantic project to
Habermas’ social-theoretic one.

 
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The Problem of Facts and Norms

Habermas’ third objection concerns the pivotal concepts of facts and norms in Brandom’s
work. For Habermas, facts and norms are differentiated at a "metatheoretical" level. Thus
Brandom makes something like a category error in collapsing the fact/norm distinction:

Brandom himself uses the vocabulary with the help of which we, in the horizon of our world,
distinguish between facts and norms, events and action. However, he conceives of everything
we do in applying concepts as action in a broader sense. Unlike Kant, Brandom reduces
practical and theoretical reason to the common denominator of rational activity. According to
this view, judgements and beliefs are guided by norms just as much as the intentions to act,
with the result that they cannot be differentiated according to descriptive and prescriptive
relations to action.

And:

All communicative practices – even those that, like expressive, aesthetic, ethical, moral or
legal discourses, do not refer to the stating of facts – are supposed to be able to be analysed
on the basis of assertions.

And finally:

On the one hand, Brandom relativises the metatheoretical distinction between facts and
norms with respective to the normative language within which this distinction has to be
made. On the other, he treats normative states of affairs as facts on the assumption that we
have always to use a normative language when we make statements.

Brandom’s response to this series of charges involves a justification of a different use of the
terms, ‘facts’ and ‘norms’. These are operationalised within Brandom’s system in a
fundamentally different way to how Habermas uses them within his theory in Theory of
Communicative Action. For Habermas, facts belong to a realm of instrumental reason: the
sorts of statements which are produced in rationalised systems, like science, technology and
the economic market. Norms contrast with facts; they are produced within the moral-judicial
sphere that stands opposed to rationalised systems. Blurring this "metatheoretical" distinction
is thus a critical category error. Brandom does not however want to deny this Kantian
distinction. Rather, his prototypical use of "facts" and "norms" is in some sense pre-spherical
– they are constituents of the general linguistic framework required for the production of
specific kinds of statements. Put crudely (indeed this general discussion obscures the more
precise and systematic exposition Brandom supplies in Making It Explicit): facts are the
matter which are crafted and shaped in social discourse to produce agreement between
agents. Agreement is what for Brandom brings an irrevocably normative dimension to this
kind of social practice. That is, by proceeding to make factual claims, agents are attempting
to "normalise" eachother’s beliefs and attitudes, regardless of the content of such claims.
Thus Brandom can say:

The difference in question shows up in the systematically central distinction between

nonnormative facts and normative facts. Using ‘fact’ in such a way as to acknowledge that
there are normative facts does not require blurring this distinction. One important way of
distinguishing regions of facts is by the vocabulary needed to state them. This is how we pick
176

out physical facts, mathematical facts, intentional facts, the problematic category of semantic
vocabulary, and so on. Normative facts are those whose statements require normative
vocabulary. 

Unfortunately Brandom’s own use of "normative" here contravenes his use elsewhere – here
he means something like what Habermas would expect, moral or ethical edicts of some kind.
But the general use of "norm" by Brandom is in a linguistic (and derivatively) functional
sense: the function of a given assertion, paradigmatically, is bring about agreement through a
normalising of beliefs and attitudes. Brandom does however have equivalent terms to what
Habermas means in his fact/norm distinction:

Statements expressing practical commitments have a normative force that is a close analog
(in my somewhat different system) to prescriptve force: indicating, for instance, what
someone is committed to doing, rather than how things simply are. Of course, that someone is
committed to act in a certain way is also a fact about how things are. But it is a different kind
of fact from those formulable using nonnormative vocabulary. 

Earlier Brandom has characterised this distinction as that of doxastic commitments

(corresponding to a belief in a given state of affairs) and practical commitments
(corresponding to an intention to do something). If it is accepted that the criticism is founded
only on the basis of a mistranslation or misconstrual of Brandom’s terms – if, for instance,
Habermas’ facts and norms are substituted for Brandom’s doxastic and practical
commitments  – then naturally the criticism vanishes, or at least must take a different form.
However Habermas wants to make a stronger case. Brandom’s retention of distinctions is
insufficient from the point of view of proper adherence to Kantian kinds of rationality.
Regardless of merit, for Habermas Brandom still collapses a vital qualitative difference
between the purposive-rational sphere of facts and the practical-moral sphere of norms:

From a Kantian point of view a practical project is all the more rational the more the agent’s
will is determined by rational considerations. An agent acts autonomously to the extent that
he frees himself from arbitrary determinations, that is, from mere preferences or from
conventional considerations of status and tradition… Only moral reasons, however, bind the
wills of agents unconditionally, that is, independently even of the value-orientations of a
given community.

In Habermas’ view Brandom’s account does not allow for something like universal morality
to emerge from the game of "giving and asking for reasons". And yet, this is what a properly
Kantian account must do, or lapse again into contradiction:

The deontological understanding of morality, which Brandom himself also favours, does not
fit the conceptual-realist understanding of the moral vocabulary he proposes in order to
anchor the objective content of our concepts (of all concepts, including evaluative and moral
ones) in the conceptual structures of the universe. In other words, a Kantian conception of
autonomy does not sit well with a picture that levels the discontinuity between facts and
norms…. under the contingent restrictions of an objective world from which they can obtain
no normative guidance for their dealings with one another, they have to reach agreement in
common on which norms they want in order to regulate their co-existence legitimately.

The title of Habermas’ paper catches up this final, and most problematic of objections: ‘From
Kant to Hegel’. For all Brandom’s rigorous explication of inferential semantics couched
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within a normative pragmatics, there is ground for the positing of valid norms that do not
emerge naturalistically from discourse within traditional constraints. This is to repeat the
Hegelian turn from a universal categorical imperative towards an endless dialectical process,
which in a secular context has neither moral foundation nor teleological endpoint. 

Brandom is alive to the moral ambivalence of his account, although he wants to emphasise
that "practical commitments… should not be assimilate to the doxastic commitments". He
closes his reply with the provision of two possible moral-theoretic inflections, introduced
with the following caveat:

The words ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ (like ‘experience’) do not so much as occur in this long
book. Such an omission may seem strange in a work that takes normativity as one of its
principal guiding themes. It is, of course, not inadvertent. Its approach is motivated in part by
the thought that the understanding of conceptual normativity has been hampered by the fact
that theorists of normativity have typically focussed on moral norms.

The two options are "natural kind skepticism" or "a trancendental moral theory". In the first
view, moral reasons are justly undifferentiated from other kinds of reasons – they are reasons
for action, but qualitatively indistinct. Here, "one might even suspect that the concept of
distinctly moral reasons is a historical relic, an artifact (as one might think the concept of
distinctively aesthetic reasons i) of a philosophical outlook and project that belong to an age
we have rightly moved beyond". Brandom is characterising, perhaps with a hint of parody,
the kind of "Hegelian-Brandomism" Habermas is conplaining about. Conversely, in the
second view, "one would look to ground one’s ethics in commitments that turn out to be
implicit in engaging in discursive practices at all". Thus a ethical orientation would be found
to underwrite the entire "giving and asking for reasons" project, as a kind of meta-level
"stance", perhaps stated in social-contractual terms, which permits dialogue to proceed.
Brandom connects such a theory with Hegel’s project:

Since in this way making explicit what is implicit in concept-use generally is precisely the
expressive role distinctive of logical vocabulary, it would follow that the road to ethics is
paved by logic. I take it that this thought is one of the central structures animating Hegel’s
approach to ethical concepts and commitments.

Thus Brandom concludes with the animating thought that the ethical dimension to linguistic
practice remains underdetermined rather than undermined by his account.  

This may be insufficient to counter Habermas’ objections, since after all the role of the
analysis of pragmatics within Theory of Communicative Action is to bolster an overarching
analysis of society within modernity, to give impetus to the potentials for transformation of
an overly rationalised and systematised world. To leave open the very issue of ethical
grounds for discursive practice is therefore to erect a hollow, if elegantly baroque, theoretical
apparatus. An inverted form of this dilemma remains, which has prompted some discussion
between NP, myself and others: to what extent does a more fleshed-out, analytically capable
account of discursive practice like Brandom’s serve to strengthen, or alternatively undermine,
a social-theoretical framework like Habermas’? This is one of the points our presentation is
likely to revolve around, and a key motive for exposing these otherwise fragmentary remarks.

I mentioned at the outset that the discussion seems, however respectful, ultimately aporetic.
Yet there is a sense among some of the secondary literature that succeeded this debate that
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Brandom can represent an updated and more forceful pragmatist cornerstone to Habermas’
social theory – or conversely, something like Habermas’ theory is required to supplement the
‘unexplained explainer’ of the ‘social’ in Brandom’s work. The (highly) preliminary "results"
suggest that this would be difficult to arrive at, without some systematic re-wiring of either or
both accounts. 

Transforming Communication: Habermas

and Brandom in Dialogue
Preliminary Remarks

This presentation focuses on Jürgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action, Robert

Brandom’s Making It Explicit, and a brief debate that took place between the two authors
over Making It Explicit that was collected and published in the European Journal of
Philosophy in 2000. Our original intention when we proposed this paper was to discuss the
implications for Habermas’ social theoretic project, of Brandom’s quite sophisticated
philosophical investigation of speech acts oriented to asking for and giving reasons.
Superficially, both authors appear to arrive at rather similar conclusions about communicative
practice as the practical origin point for certain kinds of critical ideals of rationality, and we
were therefore intrigued by the debate that broke out between them, interested particularly in
whether and in what ways Brandom’s much more intricate philosophical analysis of the tacit
structures of communicative practice might pose a challenge to Habermas’ social theoretic
claims.

When we started working on this project, we expected, I think, that we would quickly resolve
the terms of the debate itself, grasping the key points of conflict that each author identified,
and then making our own assessment as to the implications of these skirmishes: we expected
to grasp fairly quickly whether the mutual criticisms that arose within the debate hit their
targets and, if so, what the theoretical consequences of these criticisms might be. We then
expected to move on from our analysis of this debate, into our own theoretical concerns
related to the potential limitations of approaches that attempt to ground critical ideals solely
in a theory of communicative practices.

What we discovered as we worked through the material, however, was that certain key issues
at stake in the debate refused to come more clearly into focus as we tried to work them out.
On the one hand, we came to feel that there were some key miscommunications at play –
places where Habermas in particular seemed to find claims in Brandom’s work that we
ourselves couldn’t find. On the other hand, we also came increasingly to feel that Habermas
comes by at least some of these miscommunications honestly: that certain elements in
Brandom’s project refused to come into focus for us, even after a careful attempt to get to the
bottom of his system. We came to understand a bit better why such an argument might break
out, and to feel that the presence of the argument does point to key issues that we, along with
Habermas, have not quite been able to resolve in Brandom’s project. We therefore present
this piece still in a moment of intense uncertainty, with a great deal of work still to be done to
achieve our own goal of understanding the implications and potentials for critical social
theory of Brandom’s philosophical work.
179

In the spirit of “making it explicit”, we’ve decided to expose this unresolved uncertainty
openly in this paper. This piece is, in the strongest sense possible, a work in progress, in
which we are trying out claims that we hope we will be able to improve in the future, so that
we can bring more of Brandom’s theoretical project simultaneously into focus, and resolve
what currently still appear to us to be tensions or ambiguities in his work. At the same time,
in and through this uncertainty, we have developed a broad appreciation for Brandom’s
theoretical strategy, and a sense of certain implications Brandom’s project likely has for
Habermas’ work – and, by comparing the two projects, we have also come a bit closer to
being able to articulate some of our own concerns with attempts to ground a critical social
theory in potentials for rationality understood to be embedded in communicative practices.

To express the collaborative aspect of our research, and to give you a chance to hear more
than one voice in the presentation, we have divided the talk into sections. I will confess that I
have by far the easier task, which is to open the discussion by providing a broad brush stroke
account of both theoretical projects, intended to highlight what we hope is a relatively
uncontroversial overview of the similarities and potential points of difference between the
two sets of work.

Liam then gets the hard task of diving into a couple of aspects of the debate between
Habermas and Brandom, exploring some more technical points that arise in this context – and
discussing some of the aspects of the debate that have made both of us feel that, while we
perhaps don’t fully support Habermas’ specific lines of critique, we nevertheless have come
to feel that Habermas is tugging on threads that plausibly do relate to frayed elements of the
theoretical fabric Brandom has woven.

Note that the purpose of this presentation is essentially exegetical: we are seeking here to do
no more than workshop our current working understanding of what these authors are trying to
do. We therefore will not address directly how this analysis fits into the context of our own
broader critical projects. To avoid confusion, however, I do want to flag that we are exploring
these theorists with a critical intention, rather than with the aim of simply applying one or the
other to our own theoretical projects. We see their work as the best contemporary expression
of a particular approach to critical social theory, and we therefore see the critique of their
work as a productive step in opening up the possibility for very different approaches.

Overview

With that prolegomenon out of the way, I want to begin by drawing attention to some of the
common elements of Habermas and Brandom’s projects.

First, and most significantly, both Habermas and Brandom take up the challenge of
accounting for the emergence of critical ideals from within social practice. They each reject
the appeal to a “god’s eye point of view” from which the theorist might purport to gaze down
“objectively” on social practice, analysing it from some standpoint outside the society being
criticised. This socially immanent approach to critique potentially carries both philosophical
and practical advantages. Philosophically, such an approach can claim to be adequate to a
post-metaphysical commitment to draw its ideals from a secular, non-transcendent, practical
“ground”, and can also claim reflexively to account for the possibility for a critical theory to
emerge as one aspect of the very context being criticised. Practically, such an approach can
potentially tie the theory’s critical ideals very directly to social practice, reducing the leap
between the critical ideals to which the theory appeals, and analyses of how and why
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conflicts might arise “on the ground” in everyday practical settings (whether either Habermas
or Brandom takes full advantage of this practical potential is a question I’ll leave to one side
for the present paper).

A socially immanent approach to critique, however, also imposes a complex set of

argumentative burdens. From the standpoint of an immanent critical theory, there is no
simple way to reject competing theoretical positions as “mere” errors, by appealing to
conventional (?) notions of truth or falsehood, since there is no objective standpoint outside
society (intersubjectivity?) from which such a determination could be made. Instead, the
theory must become reflexive – it must explain how competing theoretical approaches might
plausibly arise, as expressions of some determinate feature of a particular aspect of the social
context being analysed, and it must also explain how the theory itself might plausibly arise as
an expression of some other determinate feature of social practice. The theory must therefore
somehow explain itself as an immanently-available perspective, generated alongside other
immanently-available perspectives of which it is critical – all of this while avoiding the
relativistic conclusion that immanently-generated perspectives are all equally defensible,
because we lack an Archimedean point from which to pass “objective” judgment on them.
Somehow, the theory has to assemble all of its critical resources without stepping outside the
dispositions generated by the very practices it wishes to criticise.

Habermas and Brandom both understand their theories as immanent, reflexive critiques in
this sense. They therefore both place at the centre of their analyses the question of how the
possibility for their own theory is suggested by the social practices they are analysing, how
determinate aspects of those practices also render plausible the emergence of competing
forms of theory (so you wil develop competing theories from your own perspective and its
assumptions?), and how they can justify the claim that the perspective their theory expresses
is nevertheless more adequate (?) than the perspectives expressed by competing approaches.

Habermas and Brandom share more, however, than just this broad commitment to immanent,
reflexive critique within a practice-theoretic framework. They also share a common interest
in a particular kind of practice – practices associated with communication. They both
reflexively grasp their own theories as part of a process whereby potentials for rationality that
are implicit in communicative practice, are rendered explicit and therefore become available
for application in rationally defensible critique and contestation. Finally, both authors share a
counter-factual understanding of the critical ideals they are trying to explain: rather than
trying to ground some particular substantive vision – for example, of a form of social life that
should be realised – both Habermas and Brandom seek instead to cast light on abstract
ideals to which social actors can then appeal to call into question any existent social
institution, practice, disposition, or belief. Habermas and Brandom thus both share a notion of
critique as an open-ended and restless process, which enables rational contestation to
unfold via appeals to shared ideals grounded in the common practical experience of
communication, without, however, foreclosing in advance the substantive decisions a
particular human community might make about how it wishes to organise its collective life.

Such similarities in approach are all the more striking, given the radically different theoretical
contexts for the two projects. Habermas, as is well known, sees his work as forging a new
path forward, after the impasse reached by the first generation Frankfurt School theorists,
which led them to declare contemporary society “one dimensional” – to declare, in other
words, that an immanent theory for the genesis of critical ideals was no longer possible.
Habermas confronts this impasse by arguing that it derived from the first generation
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Frankfurt School focus on labour as a social practice related to the instrumental manipulation
of an object world. He argues, in effect, that the first generation Frankfurt School focussed in
a one-sided manner on the potentials and forms of rationality implicit in only one particular
set of social practices, failing to understand how such practices are themselves situated within
a much more complex internally differentiated social context. Habermas’ “linguistic turn” –
his interest in the implicit logic of communicative practices – is thus motivated by the
desire to find a practical locus for the generation of critical sensibilities, to serve as an
alternative to the practices associated with labour or instrumental activity.

In what he famously describes as a “second attempt to appropriate Max Weber in the spirit of
Western Marxism”, Habermas embeds a theory of capitalism within a theory of world-
historical rationalisation. He presents a sweeping reconstructive historical narrative that
posits that traditional societies precluded the realisation of rational potentials embedded in
communicatively-structured lifeworlds, by imposing ritual restrictions on speech and by
engaging in collective practices that conflated subjective, objective and intersubjective
dimensions of practical experience – preventing social actors from becoming aware of
rational potentials embedded in communicative practice, which could be released only with
the differentiation of these distinctive realms of practical activity.

As traditional societies dissolved, in Habermas’ account, what should have happened was a
release of rational potential associated with the explicit differentiation of these three realms
of practical experience, which, for the first time, should have given social actors explicit
access to logics immanent to each practical sphere. What should have happened was the
collective (intellectuals? Classes of owners of power wealth control?) recognition and
development of several differentiated sets of critical ideals and associated forms of
rationality, each appropriate to a particular dimension of practical experience: roughly –
authenticity, as the ideal guiding practices that a subject orients to its own interior experience;
truth, as the ideal guiding practices that a subject orients to an object world; and the good, as
the ideal of practices that a subject orients to other subjects. Through the critical exploration
of practice against the standards provided by such ideals, the potentials of differentiated
forms of rationality (aesthetic, instrumental, and communicative) should have been released.

What did happen, in Habermas’ account, was instead the emergence of a new, post-traditional
abridgement of the communicatively-structured lifeworld, which distorted the release of
rational potentials, resulting in a one-sided development of instrumental forms of rationality,
at the expense of communicative rationality. The cause of this one-sided development, for
Habermas, was capitalism (arguments for this?)– and then the technocratic state that emerged
in response to capitalism’s own crisis tendencies. These two elements of what Habermas calls
the “systems world”, associated in his account with material reproduction and therefore
validly with instrumental reason, have overstepped their proper practical boundaries,
infringing into dimensions of social practice that, in a post-traditional lifeworld, ought to
have been differentiated and freed to develop according to their own immanent logics.
Instead, a new form of post-traditional conflation of practical spheres has constrained the
realisation of the potentials of non-instrumental forms of rationality, generating its own
symptomatic crisis tendencies in the form of crises of meaning and of legitimation.

It is from this strongly social theoretic foundation, and driven by the concern to ground the
potential for a particular kind of political practice, that Habermas then attempts to reconstruct
an immanent logic of communicative rationality(meaning?), expressive of the rational (why
rational intersubjective?) potentials(?) of intersubjective communication. In this
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reconstructive analysis Habermas seeks to locate core democratic ideals,(such as? Equality?
To give equality to one or some or some groups imply inequality to someone else, other
groups, there is no absolute equality for all) And?) unfolding these from the practical
experience of communication oriented to understanding another subject, which for Habermas
“primes” all social actors who engage in communication with the experiential capacity to
grasp what would be required for an “ideal speech situation” (non-coercion, action oriented
to mutual understanding, etc.). This commonly shared counter-factual ideal then provides a
framework to which social actors can appeal in order to contest any actual speech situation,
based on the failure of that actual situation to conform to the ideal. In a post-traditional
setting, only those forms of collective life negotiated through processes aimed at achieving
mutual understanding and consensus, through means adequate to these immanent
potentials for communicative rationality, can enjoy legitimacy. (so who will be the new
Messiah who preaches this sermon on the mount to all? A German social scientist?)

While there is much that can potentially be said for and against this perspective, what matters
for our immediate goal of understanding Habermas’ dispute with Brandom, is that Habermas
sees his analysis of communicative rationality as (1) enabled by a social theory that posits a
functionally differentiated society as a precondition (so Habermas will first create this
society? Or is it an imagined experiment?) for the release of communicative rationality,
(2) reliant on the practical differentiation of several functional spheres in which social
actors are understood to learn experientially that subject-object relations are properly
governed by a different form of rationality and a different set of normative ideals, than
subject-subject or subject-self relations, and where the boundaries between these spheres are
understood not to be “merely” conventional, but instead to reflect practical ontological
distinctions that come to be properly recognised in collective practice in a post-traditional
context, ( ha ha – how will Habermas transform people like this? By educational institutions?
Capitalism>? In the home? He must first convince those in control to accept and subscribe to
HIS ideals) and (3) laying the foundation for a claim that shared frameworks of meaning
must be (enforced?) constituted by social actors in a post-traditional lifeworld through
practices adequate to communicative ideals, in order to secure crisis-free symbolic
reproduction.

While Brandom may converge in some significant respects on Habermas’ conclusions, his
starting point lacks any of Habermas’ explicit concern with understanding the potentials
generated within a specific society at a particular historical juncture. Brandom’s work,
situated largely on the terrain of the analytic philosophy of language, provides a “social
theory” only in the sense that it analyses the structure and implications of a particular
kind of social interaction: speech acts that place social actors into the frame of the linguistic
game of giving and asking for reasons. (why reasons?) Brandom’s theory is nevertheless
immanent to social practice: he rigorously derives all of his core theoretical categories from
the communicative practices he analyses, and consistently rejects the adoption of an
“Archimedean point” that steps outside social interaction. He also attempts to be reflexive,
explaining the philosophical positions with which he disagrees by invoking the
Wittgensteinian notion of false extrapolation from plausible metaphors in natural language,
and attempting to account for the possibility of his own theory through his analysis of the
potentials (not the existence of) of communicative practice. I’ll leave aside for the moment
the question of whether his approach to these issues is fully adequate, and just give a broad
brush strokes sense of the movement of his argument.
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The analysis Brandom unfolds is nothing short of extraordinary in its scope and nuance, and I
can treat the argument gesturally at best here. He sets himself the question of understanding
how it might be possible to derive critical ideals (he calls them “norms”) from social
practices, while remaining loyal to the notion that these are norms: principles that are binding
on us to the extent that we consent to be governed by reason, (ag please ‘reason”?) as
opposed to sociologically-observed regularities of practice that are causally compelling or
statistically discernible, but not rationally compelling. Brandom is interested here in
capturing, not what we do, or even what we believe, but the conditions of possibility for our
being able to discover principles that we ought to follow,(ought? Says who? On whose
authority?) even in circumstances in which, in practice, we fail to follow – or even to be
aware of – these principles. Brandom wants to capture the possibility for a kind of norm that
cannot be reduced back to the actual behaviour of an individual, a group, or even an entire
society: he wants to hold out the possibility for a kind of norm that could enable us to
recognise that we have all been wrong about some collective practice or belief. (ha ha
collective self-reflection and self-understanding?? The tools for this state of self-
understanding?) He wants to assert the objectivity of norms, our “liability” to norms or the
capacity of our norms (even when presently unknown) to carry implications that can react
back on collective practice – and he wants to do this while also asserting that norms never
arise anywhere else but within collective practice itself.

To unfold this argument, Brandom mobilises an intricate argumentative apparatus, to which I

cannot do justice in this presentation. For our purposes, the most important concept to
understand is Brandom’s notion of “deontic scorekeeping”, which is a model he proposes for
understanding how each social actor engaged in communication is constantly keeping, as
Brandom describes it, “two sets of books” on their interlocutor. One set of books tracks
commitments and entitlements to which a listener believes their interlocutor thinks
themselves to be committed. (a kind of understanding of another’s introspection and self-
knowledge?) The other tracks commitments and entitlements to which a listener believes
their interlocutor is in reality committed (from the perspective of the listener), regardless
of the interlocutor’s subjective self-understanding. Brandom argues that this deontic
scorekeeping system is tacit in practice, having to be reconstructed actively by a theorist
(much as Habermas understands the need to reconstruct the tacit logic of communicative
rationality). Risks of misinterpretation by the theorist are high, both because the practice is a
tacit one – something done, rather than something that practitioners necessarily articulate
explicitly – and because the results of this process of deontic scorekeeping are expressed in
natural languages in terms that systematically suggest certain metaphors and analogies that
plausibly, but from Brandom’s perspective inaccurately, have been taken by philosophers as
support for correspondence theories of truth, transmission metaphors of communication, and
other theories Brandom criticises en route to unfolding his own model.

Brandom uses this model to suggest that all social actors have access to a practically-
grounded ideal of objectivity –(glad to see that all people have now become social scientists a
la Habermas and philosophers a la Brandom|!!) to the concept of a contrast between “what
other social actors think” and “how things really are”. Brandom presents this ideal of
objectivity as a structure to which social actors gain access by participating in
communicative processes: as a structure, it does not pre-decide social actors’ determinate
commitments as to what is “objectively” true, but rather gives social actors constant access to
the notion that there might be a gap between what social actors acknowledge or perceive to
be the case, and what “actually is” the case. The awareness of this potential gap provides the
most basic precondition for the emergence of critical sensibilities that will contest particular
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notions of “what is the case” – whether put forward by individual social actors or even by
communities as a whole.

Brandom goes beyond this, determining other practices that enable or contribute to the
emergence of this structure, unfolding an inferential theory that makes clever use of concepts
of substitution and anaphora to account for the ways in which different social actors can
“refer” to the same object, enabling social actors to speak about the same object, while still
differing substantially in their perspectives of that object, thus enabling concepts of
“reference” and “truth” that do not rely on the correspondence theories he is trying to
supplant. He makes further use of intrinsic differences among a universe of social actors,
where the diversity of social actors fuels differences in perspectives and therefore conflicts
over appropriate claims about “how things really are”. Along the way, he unfolds a
specifically normative vocabulary used to express the scorekeeping and other practices he
analyses, and he situates logical vocabulary as vocabulary that expresses, and can therefore
play a crucial role in rendering explicit, the implicit practices he theorises – thus explaining
the conditions of possibility for the emergence of his own, higher-order, model, while still
linking this model back to the social practices of actors whose behaviours he is theorising.

I cannot do justice to the full argument, and I’m conscious of duplicating details that Liam
will pick up, in a more adequate context, below. For the moment, I’ll bring my portion of the
talk to a close by saying that, as with Habermas, a great deal could be said about the strengths
and weaknesses of particular moments in Brandom’s complex apparatus. What matters most
for understanding his dispute with Habermas, however, is to recognise that (1) his “social
theory” operates at a much higher level of abstraction than Habermas’, not relying on specific
claims about the nature of the society or the historical period within which the sorts of
interactions he analyses play out, and not analysing the implications of any other sorts of
social practices, aside from the specifically linguistic exchanges at the centre of his analysis,
(2) he seeks to avoid predefining any particular boundary between subject-object and subject-
subject relations, viewing such boundaries as constituted in social practice and as themselves
reflective of practically-instituted norms – as Brandom expresses this, his approach claims
that there are “norms all the way down” – including norms determining what does, and does
not, constitute a normative or non-normative fact, and (3) his framework – particularly his
use of concepts of substitution and anaphora – is intended to provide room for social actors to
interact and communicate “successfully” in and through a wide range of divergence in
background assumptions and interpretations, and without necessarily achieving shared
frameworks of reference or consensus.

At this point, I’ll hand over to Liam, who will move down from the very high level of
abstraction at which I’ve been describing both projects, and into the trenches of a debate that
exposes some of the potential flashpoints where these projects may collide.

Habermas and Brandom, Facts and Norms

Habermas’ interest in Brandom can be seen as an extension of his engagement with the
Anglo-American pragmatist tradition, which began in the 1970’s, and which forms a
cornerstone of his own magnum opus, The Theory of Communicative Action. Two distinct
strains of this tradition concern Habermas: on the one hand, linguistic pragmatics, through
the work of Austin and Searle; and on the other, the philosophical pragmatism which runs
through, most explicitly, James, Dewey and Rorty. It is therefore not surprising that he be
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particularly interested in a major work which in part aims to marry together these two strains
of pragmatism.

The privileging of use over meaning, pragmatics over semantics, and social practices over
cognitive states in the order of explanation marks Brandom’s account as avowedly
pragmatist in both these senses. Throughout the many nuanced passages of Making It
Explicit, the overarching gambit is that of bringing the finely tuned semantic analyses of
language characteristic of much Anglo-American philosophy in the twentieth century within
the broader rubric of a thorough-going pragmatist framework. This is what excites and
provokes Habermas, among others – the promise of a social theoretic account which stretches
all the way down to a sub-sentential level of analysis. This could allow for the incorporation
of, for example, formal logic and model-theoretic semantics into social theory – a result
foreclosed by competing, rather than complementary philosophical traditions.

Brandom himself stops far short of a commitment to the kind of social quasi-transcendental
categories employed by Habermas, using the ‘social’ as a simple ‘unexplained explainer’.
How specific kinds of social practices emerge historically to shape what constitutes
meaningful statements is deliberately unspecified and underdetermined for Brandom. This
underdetermination will arise later as a major sticking point for Habermas.

Writing in 2000 in response to Making It Explicit, Habermas recognises its exhilirating

potential:

Making it Explicit is a milestone in theoretical philosophy just as A Theory of Justice was a

milestone in practical philosophy in the early 1970’s. Displaying a sovereign command of the
intricate discussion in the analytic philosophy of language, Brandom manages successfully to
carry out a programme within the philosophy of language that has already been sketched by
others, without losing sight of the vision inspiring the enterprise in the important details of his
investigation. The work owes its exceptional rank to its rare combination of speculative
impulse and staying power. It painstakingly works out an innovative connection of formal
pragmatics with inferential semantics, articulating a self-understanding that was already
available as a tradition but in need of renewal. Using the tools of a complex theory of
language Brandom succeeds in describing convincingly the practices in which the reason and
autonomy of subjects capable of speech and action are developed.

Habermas structures the remainder of his analysis in two parts: the first is largely an
articulation of Brandom’s position, while the second part adopts a more critical tone,
articulating three objections to which Brandom, in turn, replies. The following remarks
attempt to capture the substance of both these objections and Brandom’s replies. For the
moment I’ll skip the substance of the second objection and reply, which concerns a somewhat
more technical analysis of the character of second and third person relations in Brandom’s
account.

At the heart of the exchange is the conceptual status of facts and norms in their respective
frameworks. The different use of these terms, among others, creates considerable
complications for the present kind of synopsis, and a fuller treatment of the exchange would
need to supply a far more detailed mapping of the concepts which Habermas and Brandom
respectively deploy.
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The problem of feedback

In Habermas’ first objection, Brandom is correctly described as wanting to avoid the

naturalist conception of language, in which words designate objects first and foremost in the
order of explanation of meaning. From this designation, according to the tradition Brandom
claims stems from Descartes, comes the development of meaningful utterances. The
naturalist standpoint tends to run alongside a number of corresponding arguments: that of
semantic atomism, in which words, rather than sentences, have priority; of
representationalism, in which the correspondence between words and objects is taken as
given, or at any rate, as capable of adequate clarification and specification; of verificationism,
in which truth, rather than inference, plays the primary functional role of language. Against
these orientations, Brandom avowedly wants to submit an account that is normative rather
than naturalist; semantically holistic rather than atomistic; inferentialist rather than
representationalist; and oriented towards use-as-inference, rather than meaning-as-truth.

The problem for Habermas is how Brandom can articulate a pragmatist position which does
not lose touch with the world – a problem which, in short order, Habermas assesses,
variously, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Derrida and Rorty to have failed to solve. So does
Brandom succeed? A key indicator would be whether members of a community in
Brandom’s linguistic universe could correct their concepts in the light of experience. But
this is evidently not forthcoming:

One looks in vain for an analysis of empirically driven learning processes that not only
compel individual members of a linguistic community to correct their deficient linguistic
knowledge but force the community as a whole to revise habitualised semantic or conceptual
rules.(REQUIRED: self/individual and community correction/development/transformation of
semantic and conceptual norms and habits. But this does occur in specialized disciplines such
as sciences? Why? Restrictive and insufficient concepts become apparent and then are
modified and replace or transformed))

Later on he claims:

Brandom sees himself compelled to adopt a conceptual realism that, with its propositions
about the structure of the world ‘in itself’,(bas says Habermas) undermines his discourse-
theoretically based analysis of a reality which ‘appears’ in language.(good says Habermas)

Tradition can supply linguistic participants its conceptual tools ready-made (but modifiable
if required in specific contexts. I suggest that all the time with notions such as mind,
consciousness, etc) in the form of concretised facts; but in this event there would be,
Habermas claims, no availability of critical ‘kick-back’ from experience for those
participants. In parenthetical form, then, the first problem for Habermas is that Brandom must
be committed either to a kind of semantic circularity or contradiction – either language users
circulate inherited concepts in an endless cycle of untestable linguistic assertions, or they
have access to a correcting reservoir of experience. But in the latter case Brandom’s avowed
phenomenalism is contradictory.

The problematic is recast by Habermas as a failure of Brandom to adhere to a thorough-going

pragmatism – it is therefore is a strangely quietist one. It allows for only a one-way entry of
phenomena into discourse, at an initial point of perception. Thereafter linguistic practice
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takes its course, without providing feedback via a loop of subsequent action-perception. This
has serious, worldly consequences.

One of the governing impulses of The Theory of Communicative Action is the potential for
human agency within the overwhelmingly system-regulated character of capitalist modernity.
While Habermas would applaud Brandom’s rigorous dissection of linguistic practice, and his
overarching argument on the centrality of rational assertions (why always escaping into the
use of the ideal, godlike concept of rationality?) within that practice, what he sees as the
inevitable result of Brandom’s turn from naturalism leads to an untenable “semantic
passivity”. For Habermas and for Brandom too, as it turns out, this is an objectionable stance;
for Habermas it is objectionable both on epistemological grounds – since it gives insufficient
space for the dialectical relationship between perception and action in acquiring knowledge
– and on moral grounds – it rules out precisely the possibility for “communicative action” to
co-ordinate human agents on the basis of rational consensus. This latter point Habermas
returns to in his third criticism.

Habermas’ objection is strong: if it holds, with consequences Brandom is unlikely to want to

undertake, the edifice of Making It Explicit collapses – for it strongly undermines Brandom’s
whole point to demonstrate how sapience arises out of a tripartite structure of inference,
substitution and anaphora. If sapience equates to “semantic passivity”, it can hardly be a
consequence worth arguing for.???)

Brandom responds:

I agree with all of these criticisms of epistemological theories that present knowers as passive
spectators. But I deny that seeing our cognitive job as getting the facts right – commiting
ourselves to claims that were in many cases already true independently of our activities –
implies any such passive conception.

He acknowledges a world of objects which most certainly do intrude upon discursive concept
formation, and states emphatically:

We don’t just observe, we experiment; we formulate theories and hypotheses, test them, and
then revise them accordingly. Cognition is unintelligible except as an element of a feedback
governed cycle of cognition, action, cognition.

Similar passages exist throughout Making It Explicit itself – so how then does Habermas’
contention arise?

One possibility is that Habermas mistakes methodological moves for ontological claims. A
key tactic of Brandom’s in positing inferentialism is to rely upon a certain order of
explanation. For example, inference precedes representation; sentences precede words;
normative or deontic attitudes precede stances; intersubjectivity precedes objectivity; and
facts precede objects. Precession in order is not, however, a complete ontological disavowal
of the succeeding terms, but a prioritising of the means by which those terms themselves are
produced. Some examples of how Brandom operationalises this notional order:

The recognition of an independent, conceptually structured objective reality is a product of

the social (intersubjective) account of objectivity, not something that is either prior to or a
substitute for that account.
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And:

… there is an asymmetry between the two conceptions [of facts and objects]. I think the
notion of fact can be unpacked in a language that does not yet explicitly invoke objects.

So one read of this debate shows Brandom comfortably rebutting Habermas here. The
“feedback loop” between perception and action required for verification and for knowledge is
still available for Brandom, but downstream in the order of explanation from the essentially
normative character of the process itself. This would seem to bely Habermas’ concluding
point:

the objectivity of the world is not attested to by contingencies that we experience through
being affected by the senses and in our practical dealings [with the world] but only through
the discursive resistance of stubborn objections.

Brandom would contend that rather objectivity is attested to by such contingencies – but only
via the resistance of stubborn objections. Without those objections, in the sweeping
discursive game of “giving and asking for reasons”, objectivity does not arise – it is the
product, rather than the producer, of discourse.

But for Habermas, adopting assumptions which appear more explicitly in the next objection,
Brandom’s protestations would simply reaffirm his original line of critique. Another more
likely possibility for his complaint, then, is that Brandom ignores the necessary “meta-
theoretical” categories to make his theory stick. The lack of the proper differentiation of
subjective, objective and intersubjective spheres, which form the engine room for
communication in Habermas’ own theory, means that this piece of the inferentialist puzzle –
how to connect up language with the world in such a way as to permit correction through
experience – remains a poor fit.

The Problem of Facts and Norms

Habermas’ third objection concerns the pivotal concepts of facts and norms in Brandom’s
work. The objection contains both a formal and a substantive complaint. On the formal side,
Brandom makes something like a category error in collapsing the fact/norm distinction:

Brandom himself uses the vocabulary with the help of which we, in the horizon of our world,
distinguish between facts and norms, events and action. However, he conceives of everything
we do in applying concepts as action in a broader sense. Unlike Kant, Brandom reduces
practical and theoretical reason to the common denominator of rational activity.

And:

On the one hand, Brandom relativises the metatheoretical distinction between facts and
norms with respect to the normative language within which this distinction has to be made.
On the other, he treats normative states of affairs as facts on the assumption that we have
always to use a normative language when we make statements.

For Habermas, facts belong to a realm of instrumental reason; the sorts of statements which
are produced in rationalised systems, like science, technology and the market. Norms contrast
with facts; they are produced within the moral-judicial sphere that stands opposed to
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rationalised systems. Talk of facts being normative is to blur an essential “metatheoretical”

distinction, which must be made prior to a theoretical articulation:

The deontological understanding of morality, which Brandom himself also favours, does not
fit the conceptual-realist understanding of the moral vocabulary he proposes in order to
anchor the objective content of our concepts (of all concepts, including evaluative and moral
ones) in the conceptual structures of the universe.(???) In other words, a Kantian conception
of autonomy does not sit well with a picture that levels the discontinuity between facts and
norms…. under the contingent restrictions of an objective world from which they can obtain
no normative guidance for their dealings with one another, they have to reach agreement in
common on which norms they want in order to regulate their co-existence legitimately.

Brandom does not want to deny this Kantian distinction. Again however it is a question of
the order of explanation. Before one can ask how facts fall out into spheres of morality,
physics or aesthetics, it is necessary to ask just what facts are.

Facts, for Brandom, are “true claims”; a repeated and heavily laden phrase, which means
something like: facts are particular kinds of claims which commit the speaker to “the way
things are”, articulated through concepts, and are registered by listeners in what Brandom
calls a social practice of deontic “scorekeeping”. Such commitments are true, just if the
articulation is of a kind that listeners can register that commitment for the speaker. Facts can
be normative or non-normative – it is a question of which vocabulary is applied. At the same
time, and confusingly, facts are also normed – that is, they gain their status as true claims
through exposure to the normative practice of “giving and asking for reasons”.

Thus Brandom does not so much commit a category error, as a) deploy a schema where the
terms “fact” and “norm” cut across different ontological spheres, and b) conduct an inversion
of Habermas’ “metatheoretical” categories to, in some sense, “post-factual” ones – categories
which group facts intelligibly after one has a handle on what facts are. Those categories do
apply, says Brandom, just not here, at this level of explanation. Almost apologetically, he
offers:

I agree this is a crucial distinction [between how we find things to be in the nondiscursive
world, and how we make things to be by our own decision]… It would indeed be a bad thing
if it goes missing, becomes unintelligible, or even is treated as of merely secondary
importance in the account of discursive activity offered in Making It Explicit. But I do not
think it does, although that fact can be obscured by the ways in which I use ‘fact’ and ‘norm’
– which are quite different in some ways from standard usages, including Habermas’ own.

Habermas then moves on to the substantive question of norms. The title of Habermas’ paper
catches up with this final, and most problematic of objections: ‘From Kant to Hegel’. For all
Brandom’s rigorous explication of inferential semantics couched within a normative
pragmatics, there is ample ground for the positing of valid norms that do not emerge
naturalistically from either tradition, or from some transcendental (or, in the case of
Habermas, quasi-transcendental) injunction. This is to repeat, in Habermas’ view, the
Hegelian turn from a universal categorical imperative towards an endlessly dialectical
process, which in a secular context has neither moral foundation nor teleological endpoint.

Brandom is alive to the moral ambivalence of his account. He closes his reply with the
provision of two possible moral-theoretic inflections, introduced with the following caveat:
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The words ‘morality’ and ‘ethics’ (like ‘experience’) do not so much as occur in this long
book. Such an omission may seem strange in a work that takes normativity as one of its
principal guiding themes. It is, of course, not inadvertent. Its approach is motivated in part by
the thought that the understanding of conceptual normativity has been hampered by the fact
that theorists of normativity have typically focussed on moral norms.

The two candidates are “natural kind skepticism” or “trancendental moral theory”,
according to Brandom. In the first view, moral reasons are justly undifferentiated from other
kinds of reasons – they are reasons for action, but qualitatively indistinct. Here,

one might even suspect that the concept of distinctly moral reasons is a historical relic, an
artifact (as one might think the concept of distinctively aesthetic reasons) of a philosophical
outlook and project that belong to an age we have rightly moved beyond.

This is a form of moral nihilism. Conversely, in the second view,

one would look to ground one’s ethics in commitments that turn out to be implicit in
engaging in discursive practices at all.

Thus an ethical orientation would be found to underwrite the entire “giving and asking for
reasons” project, as a kind of meta-level “stance”, perhaps stated in social-contractual terms,
which permits dialogue to proceed. This, clearly, is a gesture towards Habermas’ own
theoretical undertaking. In a somewhat pacifying gesture, Brandom states:

Since in this way making explicit what is implicit in concept-use generally is precisely the
expressive role distinctive of logical vocabulary, it would follow that the road to ethics is
paved by logic. I take it that this thought is one of the central structures animating Hegel’s
approach to ethical concepts and commitments.

Thus Brandom concludes with the animating thought that the ethical dimension to linguistic
practice remains underdetermined, rather than undermined, by his account.

This may be insufficient to counter Habermas’ objections, since after all the role of the
analysis of pragmatics within Theory of Communicative Action is to bolster an overarching
analysis of society within modernity, to give impetus to the potentials for transformation of
an overly rationalised and systematised world. To leave open the very issue of ethical
grounds for discursive practice is therefore to erect a hollow, if elegantly baroque, theoretical
apparatus. An inverted form of this dilemma remains: to what extent does a more fleshed-out,
analytically capable account of discursive practices serve to strengthen, or alternatively
undermine, a social-theoretical framework like Habermas’? Conversely, how might such a
framework intelligibly wrap-up Brandom’s key achievement – the alignment of formal
semantics to both linguistic pragmatics and then philosophical pragmatism – to provide a
properly historicised and socialised ground for these discursive practices?

Habermas and Brandom, Facts and Norms In "Critical Theory"

Grundlegung on Brandom In "Conversations"

And While I'm Talking about HegelIn "Conversations"

191

Critical Theory, Dialogue, Drafts, Events, Linguistics, Reading Group, Self-Reflexivity

10 responses to “Transforming Communication”

1. Andrew Montin December 10, 2007 at 11:41 am

Hi, I’m glad the conference went well. Interesting paper. Just a quick point – Liam, I
think, says at one stage:

“[Brandom] acknowledges a world of objects which most certainly do intrude upon

discursive concept formation…”

But what does this entail exactly? And how does one make sense of it in the light of
his conceptual realism? It seems to me that one of the central issues in the debate
between Habermas and Brandom is precisely the origin of “world-disclosing”
concepts. For Habermas, such concepts are the product of cooperative effort in the
lifeworld; by contrast, he takes Brandom to be advocating a kind of methodological
individualism in which the subject has “direct access to a supposed conceptual
structure of the universe.”

The discussion about “feedback” is related because Brandom does not draw a
distinction between instrumental and communicative action. Habermas acknowledges
that Brandom has an account of experimental action (cf. the example of the litmus
paper) but argues that the fact reality frustrates our expectations about how to act is
not yet a reason for changing our doxastic commitments. For example, finding that
I’m consistently late when driving to work because I’m often stuck in traffic doesn’t
mean that I reassess my belief that driving to work is the best option; it may mean I
simply try to find a better route to work. As Habermas says: “Perceptual judgments
play a different role in engaged coping with reality than in the communicative horizon
of attributing, justifying and acknowledging truth claims.” Because Brandom is
oblivious to this distinction, it is not at all clear what would constitute “discursive
concept formation” on his view.

Btw, I’m in Melbourne all this week if anyone wants to have a coffee with me.

Reply

2. N Pepperell December 10, 2007 at 1:15 pm

Andrew – I’m always up for coffee or lunch. LM won’t be back until later in the
week, and I’m not sure when he’s planning on being back in circulation, but I’m
around. Tuesday isn’t great for me, but any other day should be fine – just email a
time that works best for you (if possible, meeting in the city is generally best for me –
I can induct you into the coffee shop where the reading group hangs out or
something… ;-P).
192

As for your comments above: I think this is the question In other words, we see
(well, I shouldn’t speak for LM, who is still holidaying in Tassie, the bastard ;-P) a
genuine basis for confusion here – an area in Brandom’s work where, because in
some senses (I think) Brandom takes the answer to this question for granted, and
spends his energies focussing on a very different sort of question, he is somewhat
gestural around these issues.

Personally, I don’t take Brandom to be recommending a sort of methodological

individualism – but I can understand how people come by this interpretation honestly,
given the Tarde-style formulations he uses in his work. I think, instead, that a broader
concept of the social is constantly referenced by Brandom, but as a sort of
unspecified, black box sort of concept – the theorisation of which might then render
Brandom subject to a critique that some of what he interprets to be intrinsic implicitly
in communicative practice, and then rendered explicit by the emergence of a certain
kind of normative and then logical vocabulary, might actually be constituted in a more
direct sense in other realms of social practice that Brandom “black boxes”.

One element of Brandom’s project that interests me greatly, in a critical sense, but
that we didn’t thematise in this paper at all, was Brandom’s critique of what he calls
“I-we” approaches to the social, as contrasted with his preferred “I-thou” approach.
It’s the advocacy of an “I-thou” approach that invites reading Brandom as a
methodological individualist, but I suspect that Brandom is thinking in a different
direction here – that what he’s trying to fend off is simply a form of thematising “the
social” that would view communities, collectivities, or “Society” as sort of an
empirical arbitrator of what is good or true.

Brandom doesn’t believe this offers sufficient critical potentials: he wants some
possibility for criticising society as a whole for being potentially wrong. He moves to
“I-thou” relations because they enable him to thematise how a structure of interaction
(paradigmatically, in his account, between two individual interlocutors, but in
principle extensible to other scales of interaction) can generate a counterfactual ideal
capable of cashing out the possibility for criticising, not only individuals for being out
off synch with some larger, norm-instituting, collectivity, but even societies as a
whole.

Brandom doesn’t consider that there might be other ways of going about this – that
not all approaches that thematise the social, understand the social as a sort of
Durkheimian anchor for the normative. I suspect this is what causes him to be
insufficiently attentive to the possibility of his being read a methodological
individualist (because he’s thinking about fending off other sorts of critiques and
misunderstandings of his work), and also what causes him to be as “black box” as he
is about determinate aspects of a specific social, which might open up theorisable
counterfactuals of different sorts.

This hits on another issue that we didn’t have time to thematise in this piece:
Brandom’s constant gestural references to history. I think it’s possible to make a case
that his approach is more abstract than it should be, given that he, in many places,
explicitly specifies his argument with relation to themes that have preoccupied
philosophy specifically since the 17th century. Although I’ve called his theory
193

“reflexive” above, its form of reflexivity is insufficient, I suspect, to account for this
level of historical specificity. Brandom could respond (and may think) that the
development of more formal and explicit forms of logical expression in the modern
era provide all the historicisation he requires – I would tend to counter that are some
suspicious homologies between what he finds in linguistic practices, and what I might
claim to find in other sorts of practices – suggestinng the need for a broader social
theory for an adequately reflexive approach. But the argument here would be
complicated enough that it didn’t seem appropriate for a conference discussion…

All this aside, though, LM and I also struggled with a certain murkiness in Brandom’s
account, around the exact sorts of issues that you are raising above – we debated back
and forth before presenting, trying to make better sense of what is going on. I think
I’m perhaps a little bit closer to “getting it”, having spent some time post-presentation
with Brandom’s Tales of the Mighty Dead – although, even here, I find that I sort of
go back and forth from chapter to chapter on what I think he’s doing… Interestingly,
trying to watch Brandom wrestle with Hegel in this work, he seems puzzled by
somewhat similar things, in relation to Hegel, as we are raising here in relation to his
own work…

But I suspect the issue will probably boil down to a matter of Brandom’s trying to
thematise very specific things, which leave his work at an odd skew relative to some
of the sorts of questions Habermas poses. On the one hand, I think it would be a real
stretch to try to substantiate the notion that Brandom believes in “a kind of
methodological individualism in which the subject has “direct access to a supposed
conceptual structure of the universe.”.” As well, Brandom does draw distinctions that
could map onto Habermas’ distinction between instrumental and communicative
action – the difference is more in how the two authors understand these distinctions to
be “grounded” in collective practice – with Brandom advocating a “norms all the way
down” position (such that the instrumental-coommunicative distinction is itself a
normative one) that makes Habermas nervous.

And Brandom genuinely does black box (I think) an analysis of the sorts of reasons
that might be accepted, in any particular context, as valid – pointing this back to more
socially-specified questions of who would be a trusted reporter, according to other
social actors, what sorts of arguments would tend to be accepted in some specific
context, etc. – Brandom’s analysis operates at too abstract a level to account for this,
allowing only (I think) for an analysis of what particular claims presuppose, and what
consequences follow from them, once some (unanalysed) context is given. Brandom
does give an account of how the notion of objectivity can arise as a counterfactual
ideal via intersubjective interaction – but this is the most abstract of critical ideals.
Habermas wants a system that will do more work than this (and I’m sympathetic to
that intention) – but, at the same time, Brandom’s work – if only by showing that it is
possible to effect a very different reading of the tacit structures underlying
communicative practice – may pose a certain challenge to how Habermas attempts to
ground his more specific critical ideals. This is the issue we still need to work out in
much greater detail (well, one of the issues – as is obvious from this post, there are
many others).

Reply
194

3. Andrew Montin December 11, 2007 at 2:09 pm

I think Habermas charges Brandom with methodological individualism on the basis of

Brandom’s “conceptual realism”. What Brandom characterizes as the “I-Thou”
relation would on the face of it be closer to Habermas’ intersubjective model
(Habermas also explicitly rejects the “I-We”), except that Brandom substitutes the
third person for the role of the second person in Habermas’ account of communicative
action. It’s further complicated by the fact that Habermas is critical in places of a
purely “I-Thou” or dialogical account.

In any case that’s a minor quibble. As you point out, the central question is how
Brandom’s model of communication can account for “objectivity”. Habermas thinks
that Brandom has to fall back on a notion of conceptual realism to do all the work
here; whereas Brandom claims that the conceptual realism has no explanatory role in
this regard. Only by clarifying Brandom’s account can we try to resolve the issue one
way or the other.

It would interesting to see how one could reconstruct the communicative /

instrumental distinction in Brandom’s theory – I’m a bit skeptical, I must admit.

Reply

4. N Pepperell December 12, 2007 at 9:06 am

Hey Andrew – sorry for the delay – been setting up the new laptop. My guess is that
we’re hitting on similar concerns with Brandom, but using slightly different
vocabulary to express them. In other words, I’m not so much trying to defend
Brandom in the face of Habermas’ critique, as I am unsure that the way the critique is
phrased, quite captures where I think Brandom leaves something to be desired.

The concept of “methodological individualism” carries particular connotations for me

– and I both think that Brandom invites those connotations, by some of the ways in
which he discusses his work, but that, ultimately, that’s not quite the most on-target
critique. I also suspect that Habermas is placing some of Brandom’s terminology in
not quite the right context, when he talks about Brandom’s “conceptual realism”- or
accuses Brandom of the idealist position that reality is already conceptually
structured: I suspect some of Brandom’s terms are being taken here, in a different
sense than they are intended (but I don’t have the texts with me here to flesh out what
I mean, and I also don’t think this is the most serious issue – particularly because I
think, even if one could make a case that Brandom is being “misread”, that
misreading is an honest one, in the sense that Brandom’s intentions are a bit murky).

On one level, Brandom makes a clear case (by “clear” here, I’m not suggesting that I
agree, but simply that I think it’s easier to read what he’s trying to do in the text) for
how a notion of objectivity, as a counterfactual ideal, might arise in the course of a
certain kind of interaction – and, as you’ve said above, I see some similarities
between this sort of argument, as a form of argument, and some of the forms of
195

arguments Habermas uses for explaining the practical genesis of some of the
counterfactual ideals to which he appeals. Of course, theorising “objectivity” as a
counterfactual ideal – asking how we can decide to render some of our judgments
subject to kickbacks from, say, a material world, based on reports from certain trusted
observers, analysed against socially-negotiated standards – isn’t quite the same thing
Habermas is trying to do, and it does dissolve far more back down into social
interaction (although Habermas probably goes a bit too far in suggesting that
Brandom asserts that the world “out there” is already somehow conceptually
structured – Brandom is reasonably clear that he’s not a “constructivist” in such a
strong sense).

Brandom, though, wants to leave much more ”open” and undetermined by his theory
than Habermas does – so, on one level, it’s not difficult for him to unfold a distinction
between communicative and instrumental rationality/modes of engaging with others
and with the world. But the kind of distinction he unfolds here, isn’t the kind of
distinction Habermas wants to unfold – and therefore the distinction can’t do the same
kind of work that Habermas uses this distinction to do. For Brandom, I suspect the
distinction would be a matter of different vocabularies and collective practices – far
more contingent than what Habermas envisages, and not itself grounded in Brandom’s
own theory of communicative practice, in the depth way in which Habermas seeks to
ground it.

Then there’s Brandom’s problematic reach for “the theorist” at various points in his
account. With these reaches, I suspect he breaches the immanent and reflexive frame
of his analysis – and Habermas seems to suspect this, as well, which would be why he
pings Brandom on the examples that he uses, which tacitly appeal to an audience not
involved in the exchange whose structural properties Brandom claims to analyse. I
think Habermas hits something very important here – but perhaps doesn’t select the
best or clearest examples of where Brandom does this sort of thing, and therefore
gives Brandom the “out” of, essentially, missing the point (I think) of the objection,
and dismissing the specific examples Habermas highlights, without capturing the
critical point: Brandom’s work makes constant reference to things that are explicit to a
theorist exploring certain practices whose logics remain only implicit to the
participants. From my point of view, this isn’t quite adequate for a reflexive,
immanent theory (not that Brandom would necessarily care whether he meets some
standard I want to impose on his argument, but I think I could make a case that there
are costs – and that those costs are expressed in certain moments within his own
argument, particularly in references to the historicity of his theorist, which suggest the
need for a wider frame of analysis within which that theorist could be accounted for in
a more immanent way).

At any rate: a bit disorganised on my part – I’ve had a distracting several days, and
am probably too far away from the text to be very clear or very sure about my
memory of what’s going on, so all of this is intended in a very provisional, getting-
my-head-around-things, way.

Reply

5. N Pepperell December 19, 2007 at 7:10 pm

196

Just a note, since people are being referred here from elsewhere, that this conversation
has partially migrated into another thread, albeit with slightly different themes…

Reply

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The Manifest Image and the Scientific Image (1)

Bas C. van Fraassen
Princeton University
(published: pp. 29-52 in D. Aerts (ed.). Einstein Meets Magritte: The White Book -- An
Interdisciplinary Reflection. Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1999.)
PART ONE. WORLDVIEWS IN COLLISION (?) .................................... 2
1. The Clash ........................................................... 2
2. The three main differences between the Images ....................... 3
PART TWO. THE PLAGUE OF IRREMEDIABLE VAGUENESS .......................... 4
3. Deconstructing the Manifest Image ................................... 4
4. Deconstructing the Scientific Image ................................. 5
5. Philosophical choices in response ................................... 7
PART THREE. AN INCOHERENT FICTION ....................................... 8
6. The Images as philosophical miscreants .............................. 8
6.1 What is this thing called the Manifest Image? ................... 8
6.2 And what of that thing called the Scientific Image? ............. 9
6.3 The dialectic that engenders the dichotomy ...................... 9
7. The very idea of images .......................................... 10
PART FOUR. REAL LIFE WITH SCIENCE ..................................... 11
8. A new beginning .................................................... 12
9. The continuity of common sense and science in method ............... 13
10. Perspectival discourse and relativity ............................ 13
11. Value- and function-laden discourse .............................. 14
12. Theory-laden discourse ........................................... 15
13. The spirit of gravity versus the unbearable lightness ............ 16
ENDNOTES ................................................................. 17
And new Philosophy calls all in doubt ...
And freely men confesse that this world's spent,
When in the Planets, and the Firmament
They seek so many new; then see that this
Is crumbled out againe to his Atomies.
'Tis all in peeces, all cohaerence gone;
All just supply,and all Relation ....
John Donne, "An Anatomie of the World,
The First Anniversary"
Let me begin with a question: how well does science represent the world? How well does it
describe nature, us, and our relation to nature? Does it give an adequate, exact, accurate picture, which
shows what there is in the world and what it is like?
This question has a presupposition. It assumes that science represents, that it gives us a picture,
so to speak: the scientific world picture. This is not an unusual assumption or way of speaking.
Philosophers and scientists themselves have been writing about the scientific world picture at least
since
197

Galileo, who said that it was a picture drawn by means of geometry. (2) You may well have recognized
this way of talking from various 20th century writers as well; perhaps you thought of Thomas Kuhn,
Paul
From this I draw uncompromisingly the consequence: clear thinking in local matters does not
require that we have, either actually or potentially a global conceptual scheme, metaphysical system,
or
worldview. A task more worthy of philosophy than the spinning out of such systems is trying to
understand how this can be. That is the task of defeating a Spectre which claims the consequent utter
meaninglessness of all thought. It is the problem all of us have, being post-foundationalist, post-
modern:
to describe ourselves without resorting to or falling into what Kant called the illusions of Reason.
Where exactly does Aristotle describe walking? If I remember it rightly, he says that we keep our
center of gravity over one foot while moving the other to a secure place, and then shift our mass. This
would indeed be prudent! But it describes a sort of goose-step, not our real walking which is a
continuous falling forward, a slow version of a headlong run, trusting ourselves to fortune. Learning
to
walk is learning to fall.
-------------------------------------------------------------------
ENDNOTES
(1) This paper was presented as part of the James B. and Grace J. Nelson Lectures, University of
Michigan (Oct. 1994), and of the Kant Lectures, Stanford University (Apr. 1995) as well as at the
Einstein meets Magritte Conference (Brussels, May 1995). For earlier thoughts on this subject, see my
"On the Radical Incompleteness of the Manifest Image", PSA 1976, vol. 2 (East Lansing, MI:
Philosophy
of Science Association, 1977), 335-343 and "Critical Study of Paul Churchland, Scientific Realism
and
the Plasticity of Mind", Canadian Journal of Philosopy 11, (1981), 555-567. I would like to thank
Prof. J.
van Brakel for helpful comments and discussion; his "Empiricicism and the Manifest Image" (ms.
1995)
includes a response to my view as well as to an extensive ambient literature (see further note 9
below).
(2) The recent popularity of such terminology, however, appears to begin with Hertz in the late
nineteenth
century.
(3) "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man", chapter 1 in W. Sellars, Science, Perception, and
Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), p.5.
(4) The reader may suspect that there is not such a great difference between the two classes which I'm
calling the 'systematizers' and the 'metaphysicians'. My nomenclature tries to follow Sellars' typology
here, and we'll have to see whether it is well based.
(5) See "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man", section V, p. 26ff (especially p.29).
(6) See "Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man", p. 26, which is however just one of the places
where this example appears. See also for example the section "A Pink Ice Cube" in Lecture 2 of Pedro
Amaral, The Metaphysics of Epistemology: Lectures by Wilfrid Sellars (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview
Pub.
Co., 1989), and section V of "Scientific Realism or Irenic Instrumentalism", R. S. Cohen and M.
Wartowsky (eds.) Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, vol. II (New York: 1965).
(7) There was just one voice in the wilderness: Berkeley arguing that the primary qualities were not
originally any better off than the secondary ones. I do not want to examine his argument here, but I
will
state in contemporary terms what I take to be his conclusion: the privileging of primary qualities and
their geometric representation was an act akin to pure postulation, an assertion that a certain created
representation is perfectly adequate, which gave the primary qualities their privileged status. Compare
E.
198

Husserl The Crisis of the European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology (tr. D. Carr;
Evanston:
Northwestern University Press, 1970), Part II sect. 9 "Galileo's mathematization of nature" (espec. pp.
23-
41) and Appendix B II "Idealization and the science of reality -- mathematization of nature" (espec.
pp.
309-310).
(8) Birkhoff, G. and von Neumann, J., "The logic of quantum mechanics", Annals of Mathematics 37
(1936), 823-843.
(9) Compare here Sellars and van Brakel on the manifest/scientific image dichotomy: van Brakel does
not
conflate the manifest image in the sense of how things seem to us ordinarily with the postulationally
constructed world of the perennial philosophy, as Sellars does. See especially J. van Brakel, "Natural
kinds and manifest forms of life", Dialectica 46 (1992), 243-263; "Interdiscourse on supervenience
relations: the priority of the manifest image", Synthese, forthcoming; "Empiricicism and the Manifest
Image", ms. 1995.
(10) I cannot except phenomenology from this charge; Husserl urged us to go back to the things
themselves in phenomenological analysis, but his Platonism was crucial involved in shaping that
analysis.
(11) The sense of "reducible" can in fact not be too strict; it does not mean that the old excluded
descriptions will turn out to be logically deducible from the new scientific descriptions. Both
Feyerabend
and Kuhn's more realistic description of what has been touted as reduction in the sciences, and leger-
demain
with such ideas as supervenience, functionalism, the intentional stance, or instrumentalism, give us
clues as to 'acceptable' weakening of the claim.
(12) Nancy Cartwright, "Fundamentalism vs the patchwork of laws", ms. 1995.
(13) The example, and the point, is not my own: see M. Heidegger, History of the Concept of Time:
Prolegomena (tr. T. Kisiel, Indianapolis: University of Indiana Press, 1985), Ch. 2 sect. 5.c. , p. 38.
(14) Compare Feyerabend's distinction between the characteristic and interpretation of a language in
Ch.
2 of his Realism, Rationalism, and Scientific Method (Philosophical Papers vol. 1. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1981). It does not seem to me, however, that we can rest easy with his
discussion. There is not enough to really speak of a theory, only a sketch for a theory.
(15) I do take it, contrary to some epistemologists, that the very point of forming a set of full beliefs
(on
whatever subject) is to have a single (therefore consistent, coherent) view (of that subject). But we do
so
on specific subjects, confronted as they come, related to "live" problems-for-us, in ways suited to
exactly
those problems.
(16) The preceding few sentences earned me some laughs at the Einstein Meets Magritte Conference,
where I delivered this paper on crutches, after a rock-climbing fall.
(17) Again: contrasted with 'local' reconstructions, whether of large parts of our past or small parts of
our
present -- such as logical reconstructions of classical physics or of population genetics.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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Wilfrid Sellars (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sellars/

Aug 9, 2011 - The scientific image grows out of and is methodologically posterior to the manifest
image, which provides the initial framework in which science ...

Consciousness (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consciousness/

Jun 18, 2004 - At the outset of modern scientific psychology in the mid-nineteenth .... e.g., conscious
states might manifest a richer stock of content-sensitive ..... with what John Searle calls the “intrinsic
intentionality” of consciousness (Searle 1992). ... scan a mental image of it, review in memory the
courses of a recent ...

Davidson and Sellars on "two images" - Jarda Peregrin

jarda.peregrin.cz/mybibl/PDFTxt/649.pdf

by J Peregrin - Related articles

Page 1. 1. Davidson and Sellars on "two images". Jaroslav Peregrin. * * * draft * * * 15.
3. 2016. Abstract. Davidson's anomalous monism is based on the ...
200

Abstract. Davidson's anomalous monism is based on the assumption that a human being can
be described or accounted for in two very different ways, using two very different and indeed
incommensurable conceptual frameworks, namely the physicalistic vocabulary of science and
the mentalistic vocabulary employed by the 'theories' we make about each other when we
interact and communicate. Also Sellars maintains that we have two alternative pictures of the
world and especially of us humans as its parts, namely the scientific image and the manifest
image. At first sight, the views of the two philosophers may seem quite similar; however, the
true extent of this apparent similarity is worth exploring. To that end, in this paper we tackle
the following questions: Are Sellars' reasons for claiming the irreducibility of his manifest
image to the scientific image the same or similar to those that Davidson has for asserting the
irreducibility of his mentalistic idiom to the scientific one? Is the normativity informing
Sellars' manifest image of the same kind as that informing Davidson's mentalistic idiom? Do
the notions of rationality considered by Sellars and Davidson coincide?
Anomalous monism and the stereoscopic vision
Donald Davidson's anomalous monism (Davidson, 1970) is based on the assumption that a
human being can be described or accounted for in two very different ways, using two very
different and indeed incommensurable conceptual frameworks. First, there is the physicalistic
vocabulary of science, which is suited to underlie descriptions informed by exceptionless,
determinate causal laws. Such laws give us a specific kind of understanding, the kind of
understanding that finds its highest expression within our most advanced scientific theories.
Second, there is the mentalistic vocabulary employed by what can be called folk psychology
(not Davidson's term), not suited for theories of the scientific ilk, but appropriate for the
'theories' we make about each other when we interact and communicate. This kind of
understanding differs radically from the scientific kind: understanding other people does not
normally strive for the ideal of predicting exactly what they will do or say in the future – for
although understanding another person involves knowing what is to be expected from her,

2
such expectations are in no way the determinate and exact predictions which is the ideal of
science1.
Wilfrid Sellars also maintains that we have two alternative pictures of the world and
especially of us humans as its parts; he calls them the scientific image and the manifest image
(Sellars, 1962). Just like Davidson, Sellars thinks that these two accounts are
incommensurable and are based on categorically disparate concepts. The irreducibility of the
mentalistic idiom to the physicalistic one is also explicitly addressed by Sellars (Sellars,
1953). These similarities prompted McDowell (1998) to conclude that here the agendas of
Davidson and Sellars, are quite parallel, if not identical; they both distinguish between the
physical space governed by the network of causal laws, and an alternative space the
constitution of which is governed by the "ideal of rationality":
The separation of logical spaces or constitutive ideals that underwrites the
irreducibility thesis reflects a distinction between two ways of finding things
intelligible. Both involve placing things in a pattern. But in one case the pattern is
constituted by regularities according to which phenomena of the relevant kind
unfold; in the other it is the pattern of a life led by an agent who can shape her
action and thought in the light of an ideal of rationality.
Likewise, Tietz (1980), observing that both Davidson and Sellars equate our need for an
alternative to the scientific picture of the world with our need to account for human beings as
persons (over and above mere organisms) sees an essential affinity between the two thinkers:
201

Despite considerable divergence between them in their semantic theories and

general approaches to metaphysical issues, Davidson’s and Sellars’ analyses of
personhood are in some ways remarkably similar. They ask the same questions:
How far does scientific analysis go toward explaining the nature of man? To what
extent is our concept of a person intractable to scientific, physicalistic
explanation? Can science give us a total picture of reality?
In general, however, literature on this interesting topic seems to be rather scarce. Hence the
questions we will tackle in this paper are the following: Are Sellars' reasons for claiming the
irreducibility of his manifest image to the scientific image the same or similar to those that
Davidson has for asserting the irreducibility of his mentalistic idiom to the scientific one? Is
the normativity informing Sellars' manifest image of the same kind as that informing
Davidson's mentalistic idiom? Do the notions of rationality considered by Sellars and
Davidson coincide?
1 This differentiation between the two kinds of understanding may be reminiscent of the
discussions of
the nature of the difference between "Naturwissenschaften" and "Geisteswissenschaften" in
18th and
19th century Germany, which adopted the term hermeneutics for the understanding in
humanities. In
fact, Davidson considered contemporary exponents of hermeneutics, especially Gadamer, as
kindred
spirits.
3
The manifest image and its normative dimension
I think that McDowell's assimilation of Sellars's theory of the two images to Davidson's
anomalous monism raises some doubts. While it is clear that for Davidson, the mentalistic
picture is indeed specific in that it is governed by the ideal of rationality, Sellars describes the
specificum of his manifest image in rather different terms. This is not yet to say that
McDowell is wrong on this point; but it is to say that closer scrutiny is warranted.
Therefore, let us look at Sellars in greater detail. According to what he says explicitly
(Sellars,
1962), the main difference for him is that the concepts underlying the manifest image, unlike
those underlying the scientific image, have a certain normative dimension. He claims that
"there is an important sense in which the primary objects of the manifest image are persons"
(p. 9) and later he continues: "To think of a featherless biped as a person is to think of it as a
being with which one is bound up in a network of rights and duties. From this point of view,
the irreducibility of the personal is the irreducibility of the 'ought' to the 'is'." (p. 39).
Hence the fundamental reason for his manifest image not being mergeable with the scientific
one is that it is not a description, or at least not a pure description. Whereas when we present
the scientific image, we are proclaiming what there is, when we present the manifest one,
there is a sense in which we are proclaiming what there should be. Thus the sentences of
which the manifest image consists are not purely indicative sentences: they are, instead, what
can be called normatives (Peregrin, 2014).
This picture is instructively complemented by what Sellars has to say explicitly about the
mind-body problem (Sellars, 1953)2. Here Sellars distinguishes between what he calls
"logical" and "causal" reducibility/irreducibility and maintains that though the mentalistic
idiom is not "logically" reducible to the physicalistic one, it may be "causally" reducible to it.
Oversimplifying somewhat, we can say that while "logical" reduction is just a matter of
translation (hence this kind of reduction of the mental to the physical, were it possible, would
involve translating mentalistic theories into physicalistic ones), "causal" reduction is a matter
202

of using physicalistic vocabulary to describe and explain how the mentalistic idiom functions,
what its point is, and perhaps also including how the mentalistic vocabulary may have come
to emerge.
Hence, for Sellars, the irreducibility of the manifest image to the scientific image, and of the
mental to the physical, has to do with the irreducibility of the ought to the is. Is this the same
thing as being governed by the "ideal of rationality", which guides Davidson's considerations
on the matter? Though rationality, certainly, does induce a normativity and hence an ought,
which means that Davidson's motif could perhaps also be considered in terms of the
irreducibility of an ought to is, the details of this view must be worked out. And, moreover, it
is not clear how much the ought of Davidson's rationality coincides with that which is
relevant for Sellars's view. Hence let us have a closer look at the phenomenon of rationality.
2 Sellars’ argumentation in this paper is discussed in detail by Christias (2015).
4
Rationality
There is no generally accepted definition of rationality. What seems to be uncontroversial is
that rationality concerns self-sustaining entities (typically organisms) and that it has to do
with
the effectivity with which the entities promote their sustaining, i.e. do things that we deem
correct in this (instrumental) respect. If the entity is supposed to represent its environment
(thus allowing for a slack between how the environment really is and how the entity
represents it), the effectivity amounting to rationality is supposed to concern the environment
as represented by the entity – its rationality is judged according to whether it carries out the
actions that we would deem correct if the circumstances were as the entity represents them.
Something like this is generally taken to be a necessary condition of rationality, though it is
by far not always taken to be a sufficient condition. (Though it is sometimes taken as
sufficient for what is called instrumental rationality3.) What more is needed to arrive at
genuine rationality? There is a lack of general agreement here, but one important strand of
thought has it that a genuinely rational entity must act on the basis of desires and beliefs.
This would entail that it is not enough for the rational creature to have just any
representations, as it must have specific kinds of representations, namely beliefs and desires.
Thus we can perhaps say that an entity is rational iff it has desires and beliefs and acts so that
if it desires a state S and if it believes that doing D will bring about S, it will do D. Moreover,
it is often assumed that a rational entity in addition to being able to carry out "practical
syllogisms" of this kind, can also carry out "theoretical syllogisms", i.e. deduce beliefs from
other beliefs.
Davidson (1982) follows this strand of thought, but, somewhat surprisingly, appears to
reduce
rationality to the mere having of propositional attitudes: the difference, he claims, between a
rational creature and one that is not rational "consists in having propositional attitudes such as
belief, desire, intenti, and shame" (p. 95); and again that "to be a rational animal is just to
have propositional attitudes, no matter how confused, contradictory, absurd, unjustified, or
erroneous those attitudes may be" (ibid.).
Is Davidson intending to say that it is sufficient for a creature to have beliefs, desires etc., and
that it is not necessary that it be able to employ them in the syllogistic manner, i.e. to use
them
for what we call reasoning? This I would doubt; a much more plausible explanation for his
not mentioning this explicitly is that Davidson is convinced that the processes of reasoning
are so deeply involved in constituting propositions that it is not possible to have propositions
without reasoning with them.
Now Davidson is quite explicit that his reason for rejecting the reducibility of the mentalistic
203

idiom to the physicalistic one has to do with the involvement of the former, but not the latter,
3 See Kolodny & Brunero (2015). (It is characteristic that the Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy
does have the entry "Instrumental rationality" but no entry for "Rationality".)
5
with the assumption of rationality. "It is a feature of the mental," Davidson (1970) claims,
"that the attribution of mental phenomena must be responsible to the background of reasons,
beliefs, and intentions of the individual." (p. 222) And "when we use the concepts of belief,
desire, and the rest, we must stand prepared, as the evidence accumulates, to adjust our theory
in the light of considerations of overall cogency: the constitutive ideal of rationality partly
controls each phase in the evolution of what must be an evolving theory." (p. 223)
This means that whereas when applying physicalistic vocabulary the only thing to which we
must pay attention is empirical adequacy, when applying mentalistic vocabulary, there is a
further concern: we must respect "the constitutive ideal of rationality". When our theory turns
out to be empirically inadequate, it is simply wrong; but when it fails to comply with the ideal
of rationality, this may only show that its subject matter, as a matter of fact, is not rational.
Rationality and normativity
Hence Davidson is convinced that the reason for the mentalistic idiom not being translatable
into the physicalistic idiom is that its application is underlain by the presupposition of
rationality. There is a sense in which the observations we form by means of this idiom
express
not what an organism will do, but rather what it ought to do - given its alleged beliefs and
desires and given its rationality. Thus if the creature in question really is rational (and if our
account of the entity is empirically adequate), then the thesis yields us a sort of prediction of
its behavior.
As Spohn (2002) puts it:
... we must ask, still with metatheoretical intentions, what sort of theory the theory
of rationality is. Of which kind are its claims? The answer is not clear. But the
first and best answer is that they are normative claims within a normative theory. I
am criticized for my past irrationalities. When I permanently speak and act
irrationally, people stop listening and taking me serious. And the question “what
shall I do now?” is – if it is not a moral question – tantamount to “what is best to
do?” or “what shall I rationally do?”. The theory of rationality is created in
normative discourse.
Causal laws tell us, in the ideal case, what will happen given the current state of affairs. Thus
they tell us that a billiard ball moving in a certain way will hit another billiard ball, that a
cube
of sugar put into water will melt, or that a dose of antibiotics will kill certain microorganisms
in an organism and cure its inflammation. As we are never able to take into account all
aspects of the current state of affairs, there is always the possibility that our prediction will
fail, that the billiard ball will swerve due to an unexpected gust of wind and consequently
miss the second ball, or that the antibiotics will not be powerful enough to curb the
inflammation. In contrast to this, the laws of rationality tell us what an organism ought to do.
They tell us that if somebody is hungry and she has a piece of bread, she ought to eat it, or
that if she is confronting an angry lion, she ought to flee. The same kind of uncertainty as in
6
the previous case, stemming from our imperfect grasp of the current state of affairs is also
present here; but here, in addition, there is a further possibility why our prediction may
potentially fail. And this is simply that she may fail to do what she ought to do.
It follows from Davidson's account that the very point of the ought which is yielded by our
204

accounts of our fellow humans underlain by the assumption of rationality ('as she is hungry,
she ought to grab the bread and eat it') are to indicate what would happen if the assumption of
rationality were ideally satisfied. Of course, we are not predicting particular movements or
other physicalistically characterized changes but something much more loosely individuated.
But nevertheless, the point of the mentalistic account appears to be to learn 'what to expect'.
The situation has much to do with what Dennett (1987) calls the intentional stance: there is a
specific attitude, Dennett claims, that we assume toward certain kinds of entities, to
understand and predict their behavior. While as concerns the most basic items of our
surroundings, like rocks or trees, we can use what Dennett calls the physical stance, and
while
as concerns complex artifacts we can use the design stance, people and perhaps some other
very complex entities necessitate the intentional stance, viz. explanation in terms of ascription
of desires and beliefs and predicting future actions as the results of their interactions.
As Dennett stresses, it is not so that we somehow detect the beliefs and desires inside of the
person to be explained; we just "know" that this kind of account "works", that it lets us
reasonably well understand other people and get clues with respect to what to expect of them.
As Davidson (1970) formulated it, propositions are like measuring units that we use to assess
other people4:
There is no assigning beliefs to a person one by one on the basis of his verbal
behaviour, his choices, or other local signs no matter how plain and evident, for
we make sense of particular beliefs only as they cohere with other beliefs, with
preferences, with intentions, hopes, fears, expectations, and the rest. It is not
merely, as with the measurement of length, that each case tests a theory and
depends upon it, but that the content of a propositional attitude derives from its
place in the pattern.
However, this set of measuring units has the peculiar property that it works only in specific
cases, namely in the cases when the entity we measure is rational.
Hence, according to Davidson, the mentalistic stance, governed by "the ideal of rationality" is
needed for the specific kind of understanding we need for other human beings and for the
ability to grasp what to expect of them. There are norms necessarily involved; not only
because we follow norms whenever we work towards an understanding of anything, but
because, over and above this, understanding others inevitably involves construing them as
rational beings, which in turn involves construing them as norm-following beings. As
4 See Hofmann (1995) for a detailed discussion of this aspect of Davidson's teaching.
7
Davidson (1995) himself puts it, "norms are being employed as the standard of norms" (p.
130).
In any case, it is clear that the normativity that informs Davidsonian mentalistic stance and
that makes it irreducible to the physicalistic stance is the kind which is involved in our
making sense of each other. It is the kind that is necessitated by our making 'theories' of
thinking, rational beings - in contrast to our theories of the rest of the world. Hence it is a
kind
of rationality that is still in a certain sense instrumental – it concerns the adequacy and the
effectiveness of our making sense of our conspecifics.
Rights, duties, and rules
Sellars, we saw, characterizes the peculiar nature of his manifest image also in terms of
oughts, though in contrast to Davidson he associates them with "rights and duties", i.e. with
the ways we hold each other responsible, rather than with our making sense of each other in
terms of beliefs and desires. Hence, to throw light on the relationship between the theories of
Davidson and Sellars, we should scrutinize the difference between the kind of ought yielded
205

by the Davidsonian considerations of making sense of each other and the ought that has to do
with Sellarsian considerations of making each other responsible. At first sight there seems to
be quite a substantial difference, but we should see whether this first impression is not
misleading.
How does an individual come to have a right or a duty? Typically, there is some kind of rule
or law which bestows it on one. One has the right to vote because there is a law that
guarantees this; and one has a duty to pay taxes as there is another law prescribing this.
However, by far not all rights and duties must be a matter of a codified law: in many cases
one has a right simply because members of one’s society take something for correct and
consequently they take one to have those rights and duties. For example, members of a tribe
without a codified law may take it for correct to take care of one's children, so one may be
taken to have a duty to care for them and also to have a right to be given some aid if this is
beyond her power. Thus, a written or formal form of a law is not necessary, but what is
ultimately fundamental are the normative attitudes of the members of the relevant
community.
Why are "rights and duties", according to Sellars, so important? Because they characterize the
peculiar human mode of existence, the mode we acquired when we developed our peculiar
kind of sociality. Out linguistic-cum-mental practices involve not only declarative judgments
or statements that serve us to review what there is, but rather also other kinds of statements
which help us enhance what there is by establishing our inter-individual institutions. It is
because we hold each other responsible, because we see each other as having our rights and
duties, that we can become persons (rather than mere organisms) acting in certain ways
(rather than merely displaying certain behaviors), thereby achieving our social reality that
finds its expression in the manifest image.
8
Thus, in contrast to Davidson, the normative dimension that makes Sellars see the manifest
image as irreducible to the scientific image has to do not only with our making sense of each
other, but also with the way our societies hold together and the way we form organic parts of
them. Our coordination is not a matter of merely interlocking habitual reactions to each
other's behavior (as, we can imagine, is the case for social animals such as ants), but rather of
the "rights and duties" which we confer on each other and which thus exist exclusively as our
joint achievements.
This also indicates that the concept of rationality Sellars employs might indeed differ from
the
one employed by Davidson. While Davidson's concept is closer to an instrumental concept,
particularly as it is interwoven with belief-desire psychology, Sellars's concept appears to be
closer to the broad, Kantian concept, according to which rationality and rules (which
constitute the "rights and duties") are two sides of the same coin. As Sellars (1949) himself
puts it, "to say that man is a rational animal is to say that man is a creature not of habits, but
of
rules" (p. 298). Similarly, with a greater emphasis on the social nature of rules and rationality,
Sellars (1992) writes: "To think of oneself as rational being is (implicitly) to think of oneself
as subject to epistemic oughts binding on rational beings generally" (p. 225)
Sellars stresses the importance of intentions as uniquely human attitudes. (His term intention
is not the technical term of Husserl or Searle, viz. a directedness of a mental concept towards
an object, but rather the much more down-to-earth expression of determination upon an
action.) An expression of an intention, which Sellars proposes to disambiguate by using the
wording I shall ..., is something different from a statement describing a future happening - it
is a different kind of speech act (also governed by a different logic): "to think thoughts of this
kind is not to classify or explain, but to rehearse an intention". Moreover, Sellars maintains
206

that aside of the ordinary, individual intentions, there are always what can be called
weintentions,
intentions not merely of an individual, but rather of a community.
Let me point out that, though Sellars does not spell this out explicitly, such an intention,
obviously, can be 'successful' – i.e. be really a we-intention in the sense that there is a 'we'
whose intention it is – only if it resonates with the intentions of other members of the
community. Its expression, We shall ..., is thus merely tentative, until it achieves this kind of
resonance. Unlike I shall ... which naturally matures into a volition and into an action, the
maturation of the we-intention is conditional on the existence of the resonance necessary to
there really be a we harboring this intention.
Thus a we-intention on the part of an individual does not yet amount to something that will
be, but rather merely to something that, according to that individual, ought to be. If the others
concur, thus establishing the kind of interconnection that make up a community, that which
ought to be comes into being. Therefore, the normatives – beliefs and statements expressing
what ought to be – become an important tool for making up a community. "The fundamental
principles of a community," Selllars (ibid.) writes, "which define what is 'correct' or
'incorrect', 'right' or 'wrong', 'done' or 'not done', are the most general common intentions of
that community with respect to the behaviour of members of the group". And rights and
duties
9
are the other side of the coin of these ought-to-be's: for me to have a duty is for me to be
bound by an ought, whereas for me to have a right is for some others to be bound by some
kind of ought concerning me.
Sellars and Davidson
Thus, though both Sellars's manifest image and Davidson's mentalistic idiom can be seen as
having crucial normative dimensions and being irreducible to a scientific theory because of
the irreducibility of an ought to is, the respective oughts crucial for the two pictures, and the
respective notions of rationality that underlie them, are not the same.
In Davidson's case, the ought is that which replaces an is in the case when we are not merely
describing and explaining an animal or an artifact, but a human being whom we perceive –
are
bound to perceive – through the prism of rationality. Davidson’s ought has an instrumental
flavor: saying, in this sense, that one ought to do something is saying that one would do it, if
one were ideally rational (that is, on Davidson's account, if one were to carry out one’s
actions so as to satisfy one’s desires in the light of one’s beliefs in the optimal way), i.e. that
doing it is the most efficient way of achieving something.
In Sellars's case the ought is different. The rights and duties we have result from our interplay
in our communities. Saying, in this sense, that one ought to do something is not saying that
one would do it if something were the case – it is rather saying that this is something that is
expected of one by one’s community, something the doing of which will be praised and/or
not
doing of which will be shunned.
References
Davidson, D. (1970): 'Mental Events'. Experience and Theory (ed. Foster, L. and Swanson, J.
W. ), London: Duckworth; Reprinted in Davidson (1980), 207-243.
Davidson, D. (1982): 'Rational animals'. Dialectica 36(4), 317–327.
Davidson, D. (1995): 'Could there be a Science of Rationality?'. International Journal of
Philosophical Studies 3(1), 1–16; reprinted in Davidson: Problems of Rationality, Oxford:
Clarendon, 117-134, 2004.
Dennett, D. (1987): The Intentional Stance, Cambridge (Mass.): MIT Press.
207

Hofmann, A. (1995): 'On the nature of meaning and its indeterminacy: Davidson’s view in
perspective'. Erkenntnis 42, 15–40.
Christias, D. (2015): 'A Sellarsian Approach to the Normativism-Antinormativism
Controversy'. Philosophy of the Social Sciences 45(2), 143–175.
Kolodny, N. & Brunero, J. (2015): 'Instrumental Rationality'. The Stanford Encyclopedia of
Philosophy (ed. Edward N. Zalta), Summer 2015.
McDowell, J. (1998): 'The constitutive ideal of rationality: Davidson and Sellars'. Crítica:
Revista Hispanoamericana de Filosofía 30(88), 29–48.
Peregrin, J. (2014): Inferentialism: why rules matter, Basingstoke: Palgrave.
10
Sellars, W. (1949): 'Language, Rules and Behavior'. John Dewey: Philosopher of Science and
Freedom (ed. S. Hook), pp. 289–315., New York: Dial Press.
Sellars, W. (1962): 'Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man'. Frontiers of Science and
Philosophy (ed. Colodny, R.), pp. 35–78, Pittsburgh: Univesity of Pittsburgh Press.
Sellars, W. (1992): Science and Metaphysics, Atascadero: Ridgeview.
Sellars, W. S. (1953): 'A semantical solution of the mind-body problem'. Methodos 5, 45–82.
Spohn, W. (2002): 'The many facets of the theory of rationality'. Croatian Journal of
Philosophy 2(6), 249–264.
Tietz, J. (1980): 'Davidson and Sellars on Persons and Science'. The Southern Journal of
Philosophy 18(2), 237–249.

THE MANIFEST AND THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGES

www.ditext.com/chrucky/chru-2.html

THE MANIFEST AND THE SCIENTIFIC IMAGES. The aim of philosophy, Sellars tells us, "is to
understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term ...

Image of man — the 'scientific' versus 'manifest' images of Wilfrid Sellars

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov › NCBI › Literature › PubMed Central (PMC)

by D Misselbrook - 2013 - Cited by 1 - Related articles

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'the framework in terms of which, to use an existentialist turn ...

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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consciousness

Consciousness is the state or quality of awareness, or, of being aware of an external object or ....
More generally, many philosophers and scientists have been unhappy about the difficulty of
producing a definition ..... Searle argues that with such a machine, he would be able to process the
inputs to outputs perfectly without ...

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John Searle - Page 16 - Google Books Result

https://books.google.com/books?isbn=144115387X

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But Searle treats subjective qualitative experience as the principle point of ... (the manifest image)
within our scientific world view (the scientific image).
208

[DOC]Lecture Notes
www.pitt.edu/~brandom/phil-2245/.../Sellars%20Intro%20plan%2009-9-2%20m.doc...

Sep 2, 2009 - (The same could be said of Searle, and maybe Quine.) .... The scientific image is non-
normative; the manifest image comes with the norms in.

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And, because experiential truths are manifest truths par excellence, scientific truths ... Searle, for
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Cover photo, Image may contain: 1 person .... Kant's things in themselves are similar to Dennett and
Searle ' s notions of manifest and scientific image.
209

9/2/09
Sellars Intro Plan
On the 20th anniversary of his death in 1989
210

1. Claim: Wilfrid Sellars is the greatest American philosopher of the 20th century. Put this
way, Brits are out of contention (Russell etc.), as are Germans and Austrians
(Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Carnap). Competitors might be:
a) Dewey
b) Quine
c) Davidson
d) Kripke
e) David Lewis
f) Rawls

2. Q: Why? A:
a) He was essentially alone in his generation (and among the contestants above) in his
deep knowledge of and the importance he attached to the history of philosophy. The
world-spirit is moving his way.
b) He was essentially alone in his generation (and among the contestants above) in his
systematic ambitions (“the synoptic vision”). Davidson and Lewis ended up being
systematic philosophers, but it was a surprise to them that things evolved that way.
(The same could be said of Searle, and maybe Quine.) Again, there is at least hope
that Sellars was ahead of his time in this respect.
c) His aim was, he said, “to move analytic philosophy from its Humean into its Kantian
phase.” This is a move beyond empiricism and naturalism (as it were, from logical
empiricism to logical kantianism). Rawls, too, with Strawson, contributed greatly to
the reappropriation of Kant by the analytic tradition. It is easy to forget that Kant
was anathema to the founders of the analytic movement. To Russell and Moore, not
to mention later folks like Ayer and Quine, he was where the idealist rot set in.
(Kripke is an interesting exception—but he’s never written about Kant, and it’s a
good question what he understands of him.) They saw, I think correctly, that one
could not open the door wide enough to let Kant in, and shut it quickly enough to
keep Hegel out. Sellars is officially, and in fact, on the Kant side of the Kant/Hegel
divide, but has serious Hegelian sympathies. Rorty describes me as aiming to move
analytic philosophy from its incipient Kantian to its inevitable Hegelian phase.
d) It is above all Sellars’s appreciation of Kant’s lesson about the essentially normative
character of intentionality—of mind, meaning, and rationality—that sets him apart from
his (20th century) cohort. [Tell my Kant story in brief, from first Woodbridge lecture (in
RiP).] Wittgenstein, too, appreciated this point, as Sellars acknowledges. The transition
to a “Kantian phase of analytic philosophy” is the replacement of a cartesian framework
with a kantian one, from certainty to necessity, from mind/body problem to
prescription/description or norm/fact problem

3. Aim of the course: to try to see how Sellars views, in the largest sense of the term, hang
together, in the largest sense of the term.
211

4. I want to address this issue by putting trying to characterize Sellars’s views in the context
of an understanding of the classical project of analytic philosophy, and of its principal
core programs (from BSD):
a) Classical project of analytic philosophy: to understand the meanings expressed by
potentially problematic target vocabularies in terms of presumptively unproblematic
base vocabularies. The desired relations between them have been variously
construed: analysis, definition, translation, paraphrase, reduction of various kinds,
supervenience, truth-making…to name just a few.
b) Core programs:
i) Empiricism
ii) Naturalism
iii) Functionalism (a late comer).
c) So the large shape of the question is: what is Sellars’s attitude towards these core
programs? What distinctive transformation of our understanding of them does he aim
at and accomplish?

5. Picture 1: Here is a story about the large structure of Sellars’s views. He was pulled in
two directions:
a) Against empiricism. Slogan (space of reasons passage): “In characterizing an
episode or state as that of knowing, we are not giving an empirical description of that
episode or state; we are placing it in the logical space of reasons, of justifying and
being able to justify what one says,” [EPM 36].
b) For naturalism. Slogan (scientia mensura): “In the dimension of describing and
explaining, science is the measure of all things: of those that are, that they are, and of
those that are not, that they are not.”
So: Allying himself with the Neurath, rather than the Schlick wing of the Vienna
Circle.
c) He is also the one who introduces functionalism (though hardly anyone notices): in
semantics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and ontology (his treatment
of universals).

6. The question is, how these views “hang together.”

a) Besides the notion of the Myth of the Given, Sellars is perhaps best known for his
distinction, in “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” between the scientific
image, and the manifest image, with his claim that it is the principal, defining job of
philosophy (at least modern philosophy) to explain the relations between them.
[Explain in general terms the distinction.]
There are two worries about how things stand with his own approach:
b) First, there is the worry that he ends up replacing one dualism (the cartesian dualism
of mind and body) with another (the kantian dualism of fact and norm). As I use the
term, a distinction becomes a dualism when it is drawn in such a way as to make the
relations between the distinguished items unintelligible. What is, in the end, his
account of the relation between the norms that articulate the manifest image and the
regularities or laws that articulate the scientific image?
212

c) Alternatively, there is the worry that his “scientific realism,” epitomized in the
scientia mensura, ends up committing him to a reductive naturalism, according to
which the manifest image is ultimately mistaken, and must eventually be replaced by
successor concepts within the scientific image. This is the lesson his student Paul
Churchland explicitly draws. This suspicion is reinforced by Sellars’s (relatively late)
obsession with “sensa”, that is, with the issue of what the successor in a “Peircean”
scientific framework of sensations conceived of as of continuous colors: the infamous
pink icecube. He endorses some truly astonishing conclusions in this vicinity. Again,
his discussion of “picturing” (in “Naming and Saying,” and in Chapter 4 of Science
and Metaphysics, “Truth and Picturing”) and in general his account of how matter-of-
factual regularities track norms raises the worry that he thinks that it is concepts of
these that will be the successor concepts of the normative concepts of the manifest
image, in a “Peircean” eventual scientific image. His student Ruth Millikan draws the
inspiration for her naturalistic program in semantics (see her Language, Thought and
Other Biological Categories) from Sellars’s “Some Reflections on Language Games.”
On this reading, Sellars’s scientific realism drives him to a reductive naturalism that
puts him in the same box with Quine or Fodor.

7. The result of these worries has been a sociological division among Sellars’s admirers:
a) “Right-wing” Sellarsians (Rorty’s terminology), such as Rosenberg, Churchland,
and Millikan see his scientific realism, epitomized in the scientia mensura and
PSIM (where he talks about the “primacy of the scientific image,” as the axial
commitment, and privilege his naturalism over his rejection of empiricism.
b) “Left-wing” Sellarsians, such as Rorty, Brandom, Williams, and McDowell, see
his normative Kantian insight, epitomized in the “space of reasons” passage in
EPM, as the core insight. We see the scientific realism as a throwback—a “pre-
Sellarsian remnant” as I called it, to Sellars’s irritation—to commitments Sellars
inherited from his father Roy Wood Sellars, without ever realizing that the
semantic and epistemological insights of EPM were incompatible with them.
c) Our hope, of course, is that the disagreements between right- and left-wing
Sellarsians can be worked out more amicably than those between right- and left-
wing Hegelians, which were settled only after an intensive years-long seminar
called the battle of Stalingrad.

8. Picture 2: Besides his appreciating and adapting Kant’s insight into the normative
character of concepts and concept-use, he also takes from Kant a transcendental
perspective, transposing it into a (meta-)linguistic key. Here the key point they share
is a realization that there are essential features of the framework that makes empirical
description and explanation possible that are expressed in kinds of vocabulary whose
principal office is not empirical description or explanation. Their role is rather, in a
broad (and confusingly elastic) sense, metalinguistic. (Cf. Kant on categories, pure
concepts, paradigmatically modal ones.) Sellars talks about the “tendency to
assimilate all discourse to describing” as principally “responsible for the prevalence in
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the empiricist tradition of 'nothing-but-ism' in its various forms (emotivism,

philosophical behaviorism, phenomenalism)” [CDCM §103]

9. On this picture, at the core of Sellars’s thought, in addition to the normative insight that
informs his distinction of the two images, is i) his nonrelational, functionalist semantics,
and ii) his view that every vocabulary of philosophical interest—modal, normative,
semantic, intentional, logical, and ontological—is to be understood in terms of its
functionalist, metalinguistic expressive role.
a) Sellars is an empirical naturalist (the scientia mensura), but a transcendental non-
naturalist (cf. Kant's empirical realism and transcendental idealism). His empirical
naturalism is what he (and following him, others such as Rosenberg) call his
“scientific realism”.
b) His transcendental non-naturalism is a matter of his appreciation of the normative
character of semantics (and so epistemology) and intentionality.
c) That normative character is what, in turn, underwrites the distinction between the
two “images”. The scientific image is non-normative; the manifest image comes with
the norms in.
d) This bifurcation provides the twist that he puts on the analytic core programs of both
naturalism and empiricism.
e) As pointed out in (6) above, there is a danger at this point of replacing a cartesian
dualism with a kantian one: the dualism of mind and body with that of norm and
empirical descriptive fact. To be entitled to the distinction without its becoming a
dualism, he has to have an intelligible story about the relation between the 'images'.
f) This is the point at which Sellars's other master idea is wheeled in. This is the idea
that normativity, modality, semantics, intentionality, logic, and universals and abstract
entities [which Sellars puts in a box, though it is not clear that they should be
assimilated]—basically all the phenomena that philosophers have traditionally been
concerned to address—are fundamentally metalinguistic phenomena, whose surface
grammar invites us to assimilate them to the bits of discourse that describe and
explain empirical descriptive facts.
g) His idea is that rather than describing or explaining, what these transcendental
discourses do is functionally classify discursive (linguistic-conceptual) expressions
and their use.
h) This is his way of working out the Kantian insight (cf. (1) above) that some bits of
discourse do not describe or explain empirical matters of fact, but rather express
(make explicit) essential features of the discursive framework that makes describing
and explaining possible.
i) “Transcendental grammar” (I think “semantics” might be a better term) is the
discipline that studies those essentially metalinguistic tropes. It is WS's version of
philosophy. This is his specific metaphilosophy: philosophy as doing transcendental
grammar, examing the use of expressions that play the metalinguistic expressive role
of making explicit essential features of the framework of describing and explaining
(cf the scientia mensura) that are not themselves descriptive or explanatory.
j) So for Sellars (cf. (a)), there are at root only two things one can do, cognitively:
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science, and philosophy. That is, empirically describing and explaining natural, non-
normative phenomena, on the one hand, and examining the functioning of bits of
discourse that make explicit essential elements of the discursive framework within
which describing and explaining are possible in the first place.
k) The dualism that threatens (cf. (e)) is thus manifested also in the danger of a
science/philosophy dualism. Sellars's response to that threat is not the Quinean
naturalistic one that assimilates philosophy to science. One move is to expand the
notion of philosophy to a second level: it comprises not only transcendental grammar,
but also the relation between transcendental grammar and the empirical scientific
enterprise of describing and explaining. (Cf the “fusion of the images”.)
l) His theory of the metalinguistic—an elastic, catch-all category—sees it as generically
a matter of functional classification.
m) And that fact provides the next twist: functional classification is itself a normative
concept. In functionally classifying linguistic expressions, one is not describing or
explaining how things empirically are. One is doing something else.
n) Among the expressions whose use one can systematically functionally classify are
those whose office or functional role is describing and explaining.
o) In this sense, philosophy is the more capacious enterprise, and science the less
capacious. Thinking normatively about what subjects do is the necessary framework
for thinking about the objects they (we) describe and explain. In this sense, Sellars
belongs in a box with the later Wittgenstein and the early Heidegger, and is a
conceptual idealist in the sense I have given to that term in thinking about Hegel's
idealism. This is what distinguishes his way of thinking about the science/philosophy
distinction (and keeping it from being a dualism) from Quine's naturalistic
reductionism. (Cf (k).)
p) This fact about the overall shape of Sellars's view has been masked by his “scientific
realist” (cf (a) and (o): Sellars's scientific realism is compatible with conceptual
idealism, with transcendental non-naturalism) approach to sensa. This is his
engagement with a version of what Chalmers calls “the hard problem” of (sensuous)
consciousness: the “location problem” (Jackson) with respect to phenomenological
properties of sensory consciousness, what red things look like to us. Here it looks as
though Sellars is being a naturalist in Quine's sense: what is real (but: in the narrow
sense) is what empirical natural science can tell us (all) about. If sensory
consciousness is real (in the narrow sense), then it must have an ultimately empirical
natural-scientific successor concept (cf. Sellars's concern with conceptual change and
progressive development). But, I claim, the key thing to realize here is that this is an
issue of sentience, not of sapience. Sensa are in the causal order, postulated as things
that trigger sapient responses, namely perceptual judgments. They are not the sapient
responses themselves. Sellars is not a “scientific realist” (naturalist) about the use of
normative or (therefore) 'metalinguistic' expressions. He does not envisage the
absorption of the manifest in to the scientific image, nor its replacement by the
scientific image. That is not the context in which he speculates about the scientific
successor concepts of sensa.
q) The other piece of Sellars that invites the reductive Quinean reading of his “scientific
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realism” [perhaps I should also mention, to begin with, misreading the scientia
mensura passage by ignoring its protasis] is his story about picturing: about how
norms can be reflected by regularities that track them, and so form a non-normatively
characterizable 'shadow' of them within the realm of the narrowly natural. My
ultimate view about this is that it belongs in a box with account of sensa. Picturing is
not meant as a reductive account of what norms are or why they matter, not part of a
scientific account of them. It is a supplement, to indicate that science need not have
nothing to say about us, just because it cannot encompass the normative dimension of
our lives. Picturing is to norms as sign-designs are to linguistic-expressions-in-use.

10. Sellars’s claim is that all philosophically interesting vocabularies are metalinguistic in
character. All are part of what he sometimes calls “transcendental grammar.” Semantic,
intentional, modal, normative, logical, universal-abstract, even terms like ‘time’ come in
for such treatment. This claim is never made explicitly with this generality. Rather, for
each vocabulary he considers, this is the form of his analysis. All of them turn out to
express essential features of the framework of describing and explaining that are not
themselves in the business of describing or explaining in the narrow sense.

11. Two large questions about the nature of this claim (before we start to worry about its
truth, and its justification—what reasons there might be to think it is true) are these:
a) What does he mean by ‘metalinguistic’ in this claim? The notion of transcendental
grammar will be important to consider in this connection. This is not only a very
capacious notion, it is elastic, and clearly encompasses a considerable variety of
substantially different offices or expressive roles. Hope: meaning-use analysis can be
of help here.
b) What can we say about the “wider” sense in which expressions performing these
framework-expressing (explicitating), transcendental, “metalinguistic” roles can be
considered as descriptive-explanatory? This question picks up the aspects of
Gibbard-Blackburn post-Geach expressivism (which allows for a descriptive
dimension to bits of discourse whose primary meaningfulness is to be understood in
expressive terms) and the generalization of it that Huw Price is promoting. This issue
becomes particularly acute when we look at modally rich statements of natural law,
which we can only come to justify empirically, and with moral principles. But
versions of it arise for all of the vocabularies that fall within the scope of the claim in
(1)—Sellars’s metalinguistic master idea.

12. In keeping with the though expressed at the end of (2a), one of my projects as we go
through these texts will be assess the extent to which a MUA (with accompanying MUD)
can be offered of each vocabulary Sellars addresses, and to what extent the metatheoretic
apparatus of BSD would need to be altered to accommodate his claims.

13. Summary:
a) Sellars’s Big Idea I: Normativity of Semantics and Intentionality. This insight shapes
and transforms his versions of empiricism and naturalism.
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b) Sellars’s Big Idea II: Empirical-Naturalistic framework of describing and explaining

(cf. scientia mensura) involves many linguistic expressions that articulate features of
the framework, rather than themselves describing or explaining (in the narrow sense).
(Kant) Much of our discourse is actually metalinguistic. (Carnap) This includes:
Semantic and (therefore) intentional discourse, (some) logical discourse, normative
discourse, modal discourse, talk of universals and abstract entities, (with some
waffling) talk about time… But Sellars has a protean, plastic, elastic notion of the
metalinguistic, which he never properly clarifies.
c) Sellars’s Big Idea III: Metalinguistic functional classification, rather than relational
semantics. Inferentialism as a way of working that out.
d) Sellars’s Big Idea IV (not explicit): Look at pragmatic dependences between the use
of various kinds of expression, in order to underwrite claims about conceptual
dependences between the meanings that they express. Paradigm: account of ‘looks’-
talk.
e) Sellars’s Big Idea V (not explicit): conceptual change as key to functionalist
semantics and epistemology. For it provides the answer to the key question for one
(like Kant himself) who makes the Kantian transcendental move—above all with
respect to modality. That is: lawfulness in general might be a necessary feature of all
empirical descriptive-explanatory frameworks, but the particular laws seem to be in a
generic sense contingent, and also a posteriori. We need to discover the laws of
nature empirically, and at least the low-level ones could in some intelligible sense,
have been different. That suggests that in a broad sense, they are empirical-
descriptive. What can one say about how these features can be combined? Sellars’s
approach to a response is in terms of an account of what happens when we change
concepts.

14. Among important things that we are not going to be reading:

a) Pure Pragmatics and Possible Worlds

b) EPM

c) Science and Metaphysics

d) Two Kant essays

e) Naturalism and Ontology

f) “Time and the World Order”

g) Linley lectures (Kansas)

h) Carus lectures

15. Resources linked from website:

a) Notre Dame lectures
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b) “Counterfactuals, Dispositions, and the Causal Modalities” (the only principal

reading that is not in In the Space of Reasons)
c) Chrucky central Sellars website, with bibliography
d) Sellars archive at Pitt
e) Recommendations for books, including recent monographs, on Sellars.
f) Syllabus

16. Close by describing the tragic arc of Sellars’s career (and some of the contingent reasons
why he couldn’t recover, after about 1965), as I have come to conceive and understand it.

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2017/03/09/is-consciousness-an-illusion-
dennett-evolution/

Is Consciousness an Illusion?
Thomas Nagel

March 9, 2017 Issue

From Bacteria to Bach and Back: The Evolution of Minds

by Daniel C. Dennett

For fifty years the philosopher Daniel Dennett has been engaged in a grand project of
disenchantment of the human world, using science to free us from what he deems illusions—
illusions that are difficult to dislodge because they are so natural. In From Bacteria to Bach
and Back, his eighteenth book (thirteenth as sole author), Dennett presents a valuable and
typically lucid synthesis of his worldview. Though it is supported by reams of scientific data,
he acknowledges that much of what he says is conjectural rather than proven, either
empirically or philosophically.

Dennett is always good company. He has a gargantuan appetite for scientific knowledge, and
is one of the best people I know at transmitting it and explaining its significance, clearly and
without superficiality. He writes with wit and elegance; and in this book especially, though it
is frankly partisan, he tries hard to grasp and defuse the sources of resistance to his point of
view. He recognizes that some of what he asks us to believe is strongly counterintuitive. I
shall explain eventually why I think the overall project cannot succeed, but first let me set out
the argument, which contains much that is true and insightful.

The book has a historical structure, taking us from the prebiotic world to human minds and
human civilization. It relies on different forms of evolution by natural selection, both
biological and cultural, as its most important method of explanation. Dennett holds fast to the
assumption that we are just physical objects and that any appearance to the contrary must be
accounted for in a way that is consistent with this truth. Bach’s or Picasso’s creative genius,
and our conscious experience of hearing Bach’s Fourth Brandenburg Concerto or seeing
Picasso’s Girl Before a Mirror, all arose by a sequence of physical events beginning with the
chemical composition of the earth’s surface before the appearance of unicellular organisms.
Dennett identifies two unsolved problems along this path: the origin of life at its beginning
and the origin of human culture much more recently. But that is no reason not to speculate.
218

The task Dennett sets himself is framed by a famous distinction drawn by the philosopher
Wilfrid Sellars between the “manifest image” and the “scientific image”—two ways of seeing
the world we live in. According to the manifest image, Dennett writes, the world is

full of other people, plants, and animals, furniture and houses and cars…and colors and
rainbows and sunsets, and voices and haircuts, and home runs and dollars, and problems and
opportunities and mistakes, among many other such things. These are the myriad “things”
that are easy for us to recognize, point to, love or hate, and, in many cases, manipulate or
even create…. It’s the world according to us.

According to the scientific image, on the other hand, the world

is populated with molecules, atoms, electrons, gravity, quarks, and who knows what else
(dark energy, strings? branes?).

This, according to Dennett, is the world as it is in itself, not just for us, and the task is to
explain scientifically how the world of molecules has come to include creatures like us,
complex physical objects to whom everything, including they themselves, appears so
different.

He greatly extends Sellars’s point by observing that the concept of the manifest image can be
generalized to apply not only to humans but to all other living beings, all the way down to
bacteria. All organisms have biological sensors and physical reactions that allow them to
detect and respond appropriately only to certain features of their environment
—“affordances,” Dennett calls them—that are nourishing, noxious, safe, dangerous, sources
of energy or reproductive possibility, potential predators or prey.

For each type of organism, whether plant or animal, these are the things that define their
world, that are salient and important for them; they can ignore the rest. Whatever the
underlying physiological mechanisms, the content of the manifest image reveals itself in what
the organisms do and how they react to their environment; it need not imply that the
organisms are consciously aware of their surroundings. But in its earliest forms, it is the first
step on the route to awareness.

The lengthy process of evolution that generates these results is first biological and then, in
our case, cultural, and only at the very end is it guided partly by intelligent design, made
possible by the unique capacities of the human mind and human civilization. But as Dennett
says, the biosphere is saturated with design from the beginning—everything from the genetic
code embodied in DNA to the metabolism of unicellular organisms to the operation of the
human visual system—design that is not the product of intention and that does not depend on
understanding.

One of Dennett’s most important claims is that most of what we and our fellow organisms do
to stay alive, cope with the world and one another, and reproduce is not understood by us or
them. It is competence without comprehension. This is obviously true of organisms like
bacteria and trees that have no comprehension at all, but it is equally true of creatures like us
who comprehend a good deal. Most of what we do, and what our bodies do—digest a meal,
move certain muscles to grasp a doorknob, or convert the impact of sound waves on our
eardrums into meaningful sentences—is done for reasons that are not our reasons. Rather,
they are what Dennett calls free-floating reasons, grounded in the pressures of natural
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selection that caused these behaviors and processes to become part of our repertoire. There
are reasons why these patterns have emerged and survived, but we don’t know those reasons,
and we don’t have to know them to display the competencies that allow us to function.

Nor do we have to understand the mechanisms that underlie those competencies. In an

illuminating metaphor, Dennett asserts that the manifest image that depicts the world in
which we live our everyday lives is composed of a set of user-illusions,

like the ingenious user-illusion of click-and-drag icons, little tan folders into which files may
be dropped, and the rest of the ever more familiar items on your computer’s desktop. What is
actually going on behind the desktop is mind-numbingly complicated, but users don’t need to
know about it, so intelligent interface designers have simplified the affordances, making them
particularly salient for human eyes, and adding sound effects to help direct attention. Nothing
compact and salient inside the computer corresponds to that little tan file-folder on the
desktop screen.

He says that the manifest image of each species is “a user-illusion brilliantly designed by
evolution to fit the needs of its users.” In spite of the word “illusion” he doesn’t wish simply
to deny the reality of the things that compose the manifest image; the things we see and hear
and interact with are “not mere fictions but different versions of what actually exists: real
patterns.” The underlying reality, however, what exists in itself and not just for us or for other
creatures, is accurately represented only by the scientific image—ultimately in the language
of physics, chemistry, molecular biology, and neurophysiology.

Our user-illusions were not, like the little icons on the desktop screen, created by an
intelligent interface designer. Nearly all of them—such as our images of people, their faces,
voices, and actions, the perception of some things as delicious or comfortable and others as
disgusting or dangerous—are the products of “bottom-up” design, understandable through the
theory of evolution by natural selection, rather than “top-down” design by an intelligent
being. Darwin, in what Dennett calls a “strange inversion of reasoning,” showed us how to
resist the intuitive tendency always to explain competence and design by intelligence, and
how to replace it with explanation by natural selection, a mindless process of accidental
variation, replication, and differential survival.

As for the underlying mechanisms, we now have a general idea of how they might work
because of another strange inversion of reasoning, due to Alan Turing, the creator of the
computer, who saw how a mindless machine could do arithmetic perfectly without knowing
what it was doing. This can be applied to all kinds of calculation and procedural control, in
natural as well as in artificial systems, so that their competence does not depend on
comprehension. Dennett’s claim is that when we put these two insights together, we see that

all the brilliance and comprehension in the world arises ultimately out of uncomprehending
competences compounded over time into ever more competent—and hence comprehending
—systems. This is indeed a strange inversion, overthrowing the pre-Darwinian mind-first
vision of Creation with a mind-last vision of the eventual evolution of us, intelligent
designers at long last.

And he adds:
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Turing himself is one of the twigs on the Tree of Life, and his artifacts, concrete and abstract,
are indirectly products of the blind Darwinian processes in the same way spider webs and
beaver dams are….

An essential, culminating stage of this process is cultural evolution, much of which, Dennett
believes, is as uncomprehending as biological evolution. He quotes Peter Godfrey-Smith’s
definition, from which it is clear that the concept of evolution can apply more widely:

Evolution by natural selection is change in a population due to (i) variation in the

characteristics of members of the population, (ii) which causes different rates of reproduction,
and (iii) which is heritable.

In the biological case, variation is caused by mutations in DNA, and it is heritable through
reproduction, sexual or otherwise. But the same pattern applies to variation in behavior that is
not genetically caused, and that is heritable only in the sense that other members of the
population can copy it, whether it be a game, a word, a superstition, or a mode of dress.

This is the territory of what Richard Dawkins memorably christened “memes,” and Dennett
shows that the concept is genuinely useful in describing the formation and evolution of
culture. He defines “memes” thus:

They are a kind of way of behaving (roughly) that can be copied, transmitted, remembered,
taught, shunned, denounced, brandished, ridiculed, parodied, censored, hallowed.

They include such things as the meme for wearing your baseball cap backward or for
building an arch of a certain shape; but the best examples of memes are words. A word, like a
virus, needs a host to reproduce, and it will survive only if it is eventually transmitted to other
hosts, people who learn it by imitation:

Like a virus, it is designed (by evolution, mainly) to provoke and enhance its own replication,
and every token it generates is one of its offspring. The set of tokens descended from an
ancestor token form a type, which is thus like a species.

Alan Turing; drawing by David Levine

The distinction between type and token comes from the philosophy of language: the word
“tomato” is a type, of which any individual utterance or inscription or occurrence in thought
is a token. The different tokens may be physically very different—you say “tomayto,” I say
“tomahto”—but what unites them is the perceptual capacity of different speakers to recognize
them all as instances of the type. That is why people speaking the same language with
different accents, or typing with different fonts, can understand each other.

A child picks up its native language without any comprehension of how it works. Dennett
believes, plausibly, that language must have originated in an equally unplanned way, perhaps
initially by the spontaneous attachment of sounds to prelinguistic thoughts. (And not only
sounds but gestures: as Dennett observes, we find it very difficult to talk without moving our
hands, an indication that the earliest language may have been partly nonvocal.) Eventually
such memes coalesced to form languages as we know them, intricate structures with vast
expressive capacity, shared by substantial populations.
221

Language permits us to transcend space and time by communicating about what is not
present, to accumulate shared bodies of knowledge, and with writing to store them outside of
individual minds, resulting in the vast body of collective knowledge and practice dispersed
among many minds that constitutes civilization. Language also enables us to turn our
attention to our own thoughts and develop them deliberately in the kind of top-down
creativity characteristic of science, art, technology, and institutional design.

But such top-down research and development is possible only on a deep foundation of
competence whose development was largely bottom-up, the result of cultural evolution by
natural selection. Without denigrating the contributions of individual genius, Dennett urges
us not to forget its indispensable precondition, the arms race over millennia of competing
memes—exemplified by the essentially unplanned evolution, survival, and extinction of
languages.

Of course the biological evolution of the human brain made all of this possible, together with
some coevolution of brain and culture over the past 50,000 years, but at this point we can
only speculate about what happened. Dennett cites recent research in support of the view that
brain architecture is the product of bottom-up competition and coalition-formation among
neurons—partly in response to the invasion of memes. But whatever the details, if Dennett is
right that we are physical objects, it follows that all the capacities for understanding, all the
values, perceptions, and thoughts that present us with the manifest image and allow us to
form the scientific image, have their real existence as systems of representation in the central
nervous system.

This brings us to the question of consciousness, on which Dennett holds a distinctive and
openly paradoxical position. Our manifest image of the world and ourselves includes as a
prominent part not only the physical body and central nervous system but our own
consciousness with its elaborate features—sensory, emotional, and cognitive—as well as the
consciousness of other humans and many nonhuman species. In keeping with his general
view of the manifest image, Dennett holds that consciousness is not part of reality in the way
the brain is. Rather, it is a particularly salient and convincing user-illusion, an illusion that is
indispensable in our dealings with one another and in monitoring and managing ourselves,
but an illusion nonetheless.

You may well ask how consciousness can be an illusion, since every illusion is itself a
conscious experience—an appearance that doesn’t correspond to reality. So it cannot appear
to me that I am conscious though I am not: as Descartes famously observed, the reality of my
own consciousness is the one thing I cannot be deluded about. The way Dennett avoids this
apparent contradiction takes us to the heart of his position, which is to deny the authority of
the first-person perspective with regard to consciousness and the mind generally.

The view is so unnatural that it is hard to convey, but it has something in common with the
behaviorism that was prevalent in psychology at the middle of the last century. Dennett
believes that our conception of conscious creatures with subjective inner lives—which are not
describable merely in physical terms—is a useful fiction that allows us to predict how those
creatures will behave and to interact with them. He has coined the term
“heterophenomenology” to describe the (strictly false) attribution each of us makes to others
of an inner mental theater—full of sensory experiences of colors, shapes, tastes, sounds,
images of furniture, landscapes, and so forth—that contains their representation of the world.
222

According to Dennett, however, the reality is that the representations that underlie human
behavior are found in neural structures of which we know very little. And the same is true of
the similar conception we have of our own minds. That conception does not capture an inner
reality, but has arisen as a consequence of our need to communicate to others in rough and
graspable fashion our various competencies and dispositions (and also, sometimes, to conceal
them):

Curiously, then, our first-person point of view of our own minds is not so different from our
second-person point of view of others’ minds: we don’t see, or hear, or feel, the complicated
neural machinery churning away in our brains but have to settle for an interpreted, digested
version, a user-illusion that is so familiar to us that we take it not just for reality but also for
the most indubitable and intimately known reality of all.

The trouble is that Dennett concludes not only that there is much more behind our behavioral
competencies than is revealed to the first-person point of view—which is certainly true—but
that nothing whatever is revealed to the first-person point of view but a “version” of the
neural machinery. In other words, when I look at the American flag, it may seem to me that
there are red stripes in my subjective visual field, but that is an illusion: the only reality, of
which this is “an interpreted, digested version,” is that a physical process I can’t describe is
going on in my visual cortex.

I am reminded of the Marx Brothers line: “Who are you going to believe, me or your own
eyes?” Dennett asks us to turn our backs on what is glaringly obvious—that in consciousness
we are immediately aware of real subjective experiences of color, flavor, sound, touch, etc.
that cannot be fully described in neural terms even though they have a neural cause (or
perhaps have neural as well as experiential aspects). And he asks us to do this because the
reality of such phenomena is incompatible with the scientific materialism that in his view sets
the outer bounds of reality. He is, in Aristotle’s words, “maintaining a thesis at all costs.”

If I understand him, this requires us to interpret ourselves behavioristically: when it seems to

me that I have a subjective conscious experience, that experience is just a belief, manifested
in what I am inclined to say. According to Dennett, the red stripes that appear in my visual
field when I look at the flag are just the “intentional object” of such a belief, as Santa Claus is
the intentional object of a child’s belief in Santa Claus. Neither of them is real. Recall that
even trees and bacteria have a manifest image, which is to be understood through their
outward behavior. The same, it turns out, is true of us: the manifest image is not an image
after all.

There is no reason to go through such mental contortions in the name of science. The
spectacular progress of the physical sciences since the seventeenth century was made possible
by the exclusion of the mental from their purview. To say that there is more to reality than
physics can account for is not a piece of mysticism: it is an acknowledgment that we are
nowhere near a theory of everything, and that science will have to expand to accommodate
facts of a kind fundamentally different from those that physics is designed to explain. It
should not disturb us that this may have radical consequences, especially for Dennett’s
favorite natural science, biology: the theory of evolution, which in its current form is a purely
physical theory, may have to incorporate nonphysical factors to account for consciousness, if
consciousness is not, as he thinks, an illusion. Materialism remains a widespread view, but
science does not progress by tailoring the data to fit a prevailing theory.
223

There is much in the book that I haven’t discussed, about education, information theory,
prebiotic chemistry, the analysis of meaning, the psychological role of probability, the
classification of types of minds, and artificial intelligence. Dennett’s reflections on the history
and prospects of artificial intelligence and how we should manage its development and our
relation to it are informative and wise. He concludes:

The real danger, I think, is not that machines more intelligent than we are will usurp our role
as captains of our destinies, but that we will over-estimate the comprehension of our latest
thinking tools, prematurely ceding authority to them far beyond their competence….

We should hope that new cognitive prostheses will continue to be designed to be parasitic, to
be tools, not collaborators. Their only “innate” goal, set up by their creators, should be to
respond, constructively and transparently, to the demands of the user.

About the true nature of the human mind, Dennett is on one side of an old argument that goes
back to Descartes. He pays tribute to Descartes, citing the power of what he calls “Cartesian
gravity,” the pull of the first-person point of view; and he calls the allegedly illusory realm of
consciousness the “Cartesian Theater.” The argument will no doubt go on for a long time,
and the only way to advance understanding is for the participants to develop and defend their
rival conceptions as fully as possible—as Dennett has done. Even those who find the overall
view unbelievable will find much to interest them in this book.