Reading for December: Concepts and Objects (Ray Brassier)
This month we'll be reading Concepts and Objects* by Ray Brassier, 2011, which deals with issues concerning realism and conceptuality.
I would appreciate any help on introducing this work by those more knowledgeable than I on it.
Apart from preliminary questions and comments, please make sure to read the paper before getting involved in the discussion.
Have at it!
(*A quick Google should turn this up, but I won't link here for legal reasons.)
I would appreciate any help on introducing this work by those more knowledgeable than I on it.
Apart from preliminary questions and comments, please make sure to read the paper before getting involved in the discussion.
Have at it!
(*A quick Google should turn this up, but I won't link here for legal reasons.)
Comments (261)
http://www.re-press.org/book-files/OA_Version_Speculative_Turn_9780980668346.pdf [PDF]
From Wikipedia:
Brassier himself, however, does not identify with the speculative realist movement, and, further, debates that there even is such a movement, stating "The 'speculative realist movement' exists only in the imaginations of a group of bloggers promoting an agenda for which I have no sympathy whatsoever: actor-network theory spiced with pan-psychist metaphysics and morsels of process philosophy. I don’t believe the internet is an appropriate medium for serious philosophical debate; nor do I believe it is acceptable to try to concoct a philosophical movement online by using blogs to exploit the misguided enthusiasm of impressionable graduate students. I agree with Deleuze’s remark that ultimately the most basic task of philosophy is to impede stupidity, so I see little philosophical merit in a ‘movement’ whose most signal achievement thus far is to have generated an online orgy of stupidity."
I'm ignorant of Brassier's work apart from this essay, so hope others more knowledgeable will take up the flame, but I have read this specific essay several times, initially to try and get a grip on ideas about 'reality' which I was exchanging with another poster in another thread. Briefly...
I think Brassier proposes that there is an inevitable gulf between 'meaning' on the one hand and 'being' on the other, thus between 'concept' on the one hand and 'object' on the other. He argues for the independence of the object, the thing-in-itself, and that 'scientific representation' is an attempt to articulate in conceptual terms what that object can be thought and therefore be said to be. (para 29 and 45)
He believes that most continental philosophy (exemplified by Latour) mistakenly has this in reverse. They have elevated the concept over the object and so lose sight of the real. They are the bastard descendants of Berkeley and Fichte, whose arguments he believes can be boiled down to an erroneous refutation of mind-independence: he summarises their position as being that you can't escape the vicious circle of a mind only being able to conceptualise about products of the mind. He's disappointed that Meillassoux praises this 'strong correlationism'. He sees an approach derived from Sellars as a promising way forward, since it acknowledges the problematic relationship of observation to conceptualisation, but nevertheless holds to a version of objectivity (I infer, I didn't spot this word in the article) or object-independence.
How's that for starters?
I'm having a hard time unpacking this. What does that mean "what that object can be thought and therefore be said to be"? My interpretation of that is "science gives us the clearest understanding of what an object "is", and therefore is the only arbiter of what that object is independent of mind. Is that more or less accurate?
Quoting mcdoodle
I know this is its own lecture series..but briefly (and without jargon), how does Sellars propose to do this?
Thanks for being the first to respond.
"Brassier argues that the thought of radical extinction carries with it an enlightenment. What might this enlightenment be? Why might this horrific thought of erasure, extinction, be enlightening and ethically invigorating? [Because] [t]he truth of extinction is not the gloomy thought that all is pointless because everything is going to be destroyed anyway. Rather, the thought experiment of radical extinction hopefully accomplishes three aims. Insofar as the truth of every person’s life is death (i.e., there’s no afterlife), we should not direct ourselves to an afterlife, but rather should devote ourselves to this life. How can we live in relation to ourselves, to others, and to the earth in order to best live this brief spark that we possess? How should society be transformed and organized to maximize this existence?
Second, the truth of extinction with respect to the existence of the human species has the effect of decentering us. We can imagine a world where we are absent. As a consequence, we are not at the center of existence. We are one being– certainly important to ourselves –among others, and we are a being like the others destined to pass away. This discovery encourages us to both respect other beings, but also to recognize the fragility of ourselves and the world we rely on and therefore attend to the preservation of that world. Finally, the extinction of the universe cures us of messianism. There is no apocalypse, no final revelation of the truth, no final salvation, just this world. As such, we should squarely direct ourselves at this world and the work required to maintain this world, not at a world to come or an afterlife." (https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2012/03/05/entropy-and-me/)
Brassier's recent work is an attempt to flesh out how thought does in fact function if the above claims are in fact the case. As he himself puts it, "[Nihil Unbound] contends that nature is not the repository of purpose and that consciousness is not the fulcrum of thought. [Yet] [t]he cogency of these claims presupposes an account of thought and meaning that is neither Aristotelian—everything has meaning because everything exists for a reason—nor phenomenological—consciousness is the basis of thought and the ultimate source of meaning. The absence of any such account is the book’s principal weakness (it has many others, but this is perhaps the most serious)." (http://afterxnature.blogspot.com.au/2012/08/ray-brassier-interviews-with-after_26.html). "Concepts and Objects" is one of Brassier's attempts to remedy this short-coming (a remedy inspired by Sellars), and come up with an account of thought that is adequate to the image of it presented in NU (along with his other more recent papers like "That Which is Not", "Nominalism, Naturalism and Materialism", and "Against Flat Ontologies").
The full significance of nihilism and extinction for Brassier is found in the last chapter of NU, "The Truth of Extinction", which is worth reading if you actually care about this topic rather than getting others to do your work for you. Anyway, that's roughly the context in which C&O is written. I've merged this thread with the reading thread, as there's no reason why there should be two separate threads on an almost identical topic (Edit: it looks like the OP didn't carry over, and I'm not sure how to make that happen...)
-The traditional arch-problem for philosophy is the relation between what there is and how 'we' (I'll leave it as a problem who this 'we' is supposed to be) come to know it.
-Trying to solve the problem requires that we recognize that each question, of what there is and how we know about it, has to be informed by the other.
-This fact led modern continental philosophy to accept a kind of 'correlativism' in which being and understanding are conflated, or we find a way to hook ourselves into a circle whereby we start with our own understanding of being, use that to reflect on being itself, and so on.
-Instead of doing this, we should recognize that there is no originary meaning to hook onto, and try to give an account of how meaning arises through unmeaning constituents. Such an account can't be outside our conceptual apparatus by definition, but at the same time it seeks to know how things are independently of our relation to them, to 'break out of' this traditional circle.
-Doing this requires that we perform a 'Critical' project, like Locke's or Kant's, into our own understanding.
-Recent attempts to bridge the gap between knowing and being by declaring everything equally real and on an equal plane (meaning is just one more thing in the world) have failed. Our method should respect that traditional divide, and answer questions about its nature in a naturalistic way. This means that there cannot be any first meaningful principles onto which our explanations circularly or foundationally latch: every 'higher' mystery is explained in terms of something 'lower' that does not use the 'higher' mystery's vocabulary. (There also seems to be a sort of scientism he alludes to, where all such vocabulary must ultimately be able to be cashed out in scientific terms. I don't know why this follows from or is even associated with the kind of 'naturalism' he is talking about, and I have the inkling that it may even contradict it, as an idealization of science).
-----
So far, like ciceronianus I have little sympathy with this project and the opening strikes me as tedious and wrong-headed. But I will see if something changes over the course of the paper.
That is about the same as every other secular humanist philosophy. To me, that is no big insight.
Quoting StreetlightX
Quoting StreetlightX
I mean, this seems no different than any other atheist, humanist, secular or similar types of worldviews which is pretty much already predominant in the West.
Quoting StreetlightX
Yes, this is quite un-Schopenhauerian. He is trying to say that either a) there is no metaphysical ground (like a monism of some sort) or b) even if there is a ground, this ground is individuated particles and energy ergo no purpose can be imputed other than the necessary laws found in science and the contingent play of these objects in their seemingly infinite variations of cause and effect.
He is also saying that the mind does not impute meaning, but simply interprets it or categorizes it. It will never have the "full" truth of the object, nor are all interpretations the same. The one true interpretation can come close to the truth of the object by scientific explanation.
So far this is very dull and is pretty much the default thinking for secular thinkers. Also, I don't get his ontology here. What is the object then..the conclusions of a scientific experiment? The theories that go along with this? Are they the "laws" that science "discovers"? How are the conclusions of experiments and theories the object itself? It is what describes the object. Can one really exhaust all that the object is through description, scientific or otherwise?
How in the world did you draw these staggeringly off base conclusions? And why ought anybody answer your questions when you can't be bothered to do some of the required work to have this discussion in the first place? You're approaching the whole exercise with an awful attitude, and it shows in your lack of any close attention to the text itself.
Just a bunch of ad hominems.
This having been said, to those concerned about how mainstream, Schopenhaurean, or scientistic Brassier is: it might serve you well to worry a bit more about whether he's right.
Here's a brief summary of the some of the early sections, filling in the gaps a bit:
1-5. To understand what is real, we also have to understand our own method of representing the world. The only way to get at what is real is through representation in thought. However, in granting this fact, we can't forget that objects (what is represented) are distinct from the concepts through which we know them (representation). Reality is not already carved up into concept-sized bits for us: we do not get the concept DOG, for instance, by encountering dogs and abstracting the concept therefrom. Thus our cognitive activity shapes how things present to us. Nevertheless, reality itself is not of our making, and the concepts we employ in representing the world are not chosen freely. We ourselves are physical beings, shaped by the material world, and our mode of representing the world is part of what is shaped. So even though the meaning of the concept DOG is not inherited from a concept-world relationship between DOG and dogs out in the world, the fact that we have the concept DOG is a product of our being shaped by the world in which we live.
6-10. Heidegger understood that to access reality, we needed to understand our method of accessing it. However, he gave too much credence to commonsense ways of representing the world, confused representations with the real objects represented thereby, and never moved past explicating the structure of thought to explaining why it has that structure. The endgame of human inquiry is to understand how things are -- full stop -- not just how they are for humans. But even when we understand this, we will understand it through representation in thought. These are not incompatible claims. It is precisely by coming to understand our own cognitive machinery, and how it interacts with the world, that we attain such access to how things are in themselves. Some continental philosophers think we can just skip worrying about how we know what's real by identifying the "real" with what appears to us in immanent experience. This misses the point, and cheapens the notion of reality that we're after. We should neither assume that our concepts were given to us by the world to match the objects contained in it, nor that our concepts are an unchanging feature of us as human beings in our relationship to the world. Rather, we should see concepts as part of us, as material beings, shaped both by history and by natural history. We should adopt a "methodological naturalism," which allows us to make use of concepts like "concept," "reason," etc, so long as we can make sense of those notions in more fundamental metaphysical terms (e.g. in materialist terms).
11-15. Kant understood the importance of concepts in our representation of the world. But those who followed him overemphasized the role of concepts, and in the process lost track of the distinction between thought and reality. Kant also understood the difference between knowledge and sensation. Sensation is our material connection to the world. Knowledge, by contrast, is conceptual, and is governed by the norm of truth, which is independent of any particular subject. Knowledge is related to sensation in complex ways, but is not reducible to it. Wilfrid Sellars is important to this project. Like Kant, he synthesizes important lessons from empiricism and rationalism, while avoiding the skepticism of the former and the dogmatism of the latter. But he also synthesizes the important lessons from post-Kantian idealism and post-Darwinian naturalism, while avoiding the naive idealism of the former and the naive materialism of the latter. Sellars' work gives us tools to make sense of why the commonsense picture of reality celebrated by most continental philosophers has to be eliminated, and why the scientific worldview (consisting of theoretical postulates) is essential to making sense of ourselves as thinking beings. In giving up the commonsense worldview, we cannot give up the very concept of "concept" or of "thought" or "reason," as to do so is obviously self-defeating. Rather, we must employ rational tools to demystify rationality, explaining it in naturalistic terms as something not at all different from other natural processes. By allowing reason to retain an air of mysticism (a la Hegel), we leave it open to straw-man critiques from postmodernism and other forms of irrationalism.
16-24. Critique of Latour. Skipping this part. This is Brassier getting a jab in at Graham Harman. Harman is an acolyte of Latour's, and edited the volume in which this paper appears. Brassier doesn't like Harman. Anyway, Latour is not a very good philosopher, and the critique makes sense, but it's not all that interesting.
I'll pick this up again later.
Mm, I quoted Bryant because he gives a nice reader's digest version of NU to the uninitiated. Brassier's take on his own work is in fact more interesting, but without the relevant background - one I suspect Schopenhauer does not share - it can be hard to parse. Here's something I wrote elsewhere on it in a slightly more technical vein:
[quote=Me, elsewhere]The entire point [of NU] is that the thought of extinction renders thought immanent to being, insofar as "the transcendental scope of extinction... levels the difference between life and death, time and space, revoking the ontological potency attributed to temporalizing thought in its alleged invulnerability to physical death." The reality of extinction erases any sort of transcendence, and the 'leveling' that Brassier speaks of corresponds to the collapse of time that I mentioned earlier. To that extent, "extinction is not to be understood here as the termination of a biological species, but rather as that which levels the transcendence ascribed to the human, whether it be that of consciousness or Dasein, stripping the latter of its privilege as the locus of correlation."
This is why, unlike the phenomenological understanding of death as that which orients our actions and provides an index of value, the 'death' in question - that of extinction - is thus an entirely impersonal death, a death always-already at work that in no way serves to individuate us: "the thought of extinction tokens an annihilation which is neither a possibility towards which actual existence could orient itself, nor a given datum from which future existence could proceed. It retroactively disables projection, just as it pre-emptively abolishes retention... extinction unfolds in an ‘anterior posteriority’ which usurps the ‘future anteriority’ of human existence." The point is resolutely anti-phenomenological, and aims precisely to do away with the (existential) obsession with personal death. Extinction isn't really the sort of thing that can be obsessed over, insofar as, at the level of thought, it has already happened: "terrestrial history occurs between the simultaneous strophes of a death which is at once earlier than the birth of the first unicellular organism, and later than the extinction of the last multicellular animal."
The very thought of extinction then, has massive ramifications for the status of thought itself. Uncoupled from life, thought has an autonomy that is not bound to the vagrancies of life; thought itself marks a latent inhumanity in those who take themselves to be "merely human" and bound by finitude; through the thought of extinction, thought can "think a world without thought": "Extinction turns thinking inside out, objectifying it as a perishable thing in the world like any other (and no longer the imperishable condition of perishing). This is an externalization that cannot be appropriated by thought – not because it harbours some sort of transcendence that defies rational comprehension, but, on the contrary, because it indexes the autonomy of the object in its capacity to transform thought itself into a thing... extinction indexes the thought of the absence of thought. This is why it represents an objectification of thought, but one wherein the thought of the object is reversed by the object itself, rather than by the thought of the object. For the difference between the thought of the object and the object itself is no longer a function of thought, which is to say, of transcendence, but of the object understood as immanent identity." It's the thought of extinction that underpins Brassier's commitment to realism"[/quote]
B's. current work - as I read it - is precisely the 'filling in of the gaps' of the status of thought as it is presented in NU. If NU used extinction to level mind and world, C&O and related pieces trace out what thought ought to 'look like' if this is the case. Anyway, I'll try and stop talking about NU now. My post about it was in response to a thread by Schop in which he seemed curious about the 'nihilistic' aspect of B's thought, and it was that I was responding to.
Agreed. Sorry about the tone, there. Just meant to communicate to others that Bryant's rather milquetoast remarks weren't representative.
Your summary account seems on point, and I certainly agree that there's a solid through-line of philosophical motivation between the earlier and more recent stuff. I still think there's a pretty huge discrepancy between Nihil Unbound and what we're seeing now, though, mainly owing to Brassier's rejection of nearly all of the commitments he took back then from Laruelle. (Note to those unfamiliar with Brassier's work: ignore what follows.)
Still, at the conclusion of NU, he claimed that
Thus Laruelle's notion of radical immanence is the index of the "collapse of time" concomitant to the reality of extinction. This is really the same kind of thing he was saying when he was running around with the Laruelleans. See, for example, this passage from the Grelet volume:
But then, well after the move to Sellars, we see in his most recent paper on Laruelle:
Admittedly, in NU, Brassier already hinted at the rejection of Laruelle that would come to fruition here, but he was still leaning heavily on the Laruellean notion of radical immanence, which I take to be totally incompatible with his current Sellarsian naturalistic conception of rationality. That said, there are a few elliptical remarks in "That Which is Not" which may indicate that you have a better nose for these things than I do:
We'll have to see once he finishes the new book.
I think it actually has more relevance than you suggest. Brassier's move, for the purveyors of transcendental meaning, amounts to abandoning the all important question ( Why existence?" ) to only engage in shallow adoration of the world. The turn to the world, to thinking of objects as constituted in themselves rather than by "thought" or "reasons," registers as a brute call to enrich the here and now. All (transcendental) sources of meaning are abandoned for the world to just be the meaning of the world. It is the notion, meaning immanent in the world, which advocates of the transcendental most despise. And it is expressed, in one sense or another, in both Brassier's work and mainstream secularism.
In an entirely literal sense, Brassier's argument is, from the advocate of the transcendental's point of view, suggesting we enrich the here and now. He is denying the absence of meaning in the world. Things are by themselves, not as the result of some transcendental force. If we start thinking in terms of Brassier's philosophy, we start taking part in an idea that the world is not nothing, is not "meaningless" itself. In our understanding, we leave behind the meaningless world of the transcendental position, where things only matter because of some other reason (i.e. the "Why" ), and take-up (from the point of view of advocates of the transcendental) a stance of an "enriched world," in which things exist on their own terms.
I'm not sure about this - if anything, Brassier's ultimate charge in "L and the Reality of Abstraction" is that Laruelle basically loses his nerve at the last minute, rather than follow the consequences of his affirmation of the autonomy of the Real all the way to the end. This is why, among other reasons, C&O is so concerned about epistemology. Although his explicit targets are Latour and to a lesser extent Deleuze, in the background is also the Laruelleian gnosis which basically skimps out on furnishing the justificatory grounds of it's own position. Brassier's disillusionment with Laurelle is more or less that Laruelle doesn't follow through on his own insights - insights which Brassier holds to be singularly valuable. The whole post-NU 'turn' towards truth, negativity and representation is in some sense a way to remedy this lacuna and forge a Laruelleian inflected philosophy that throws out the bathwater without the baby of Laruelleian thought.
This is especially true in "Nominalism, Naturalism and Materialism", where he rehashes Sellars's account of representation as that which correlates with the Real without corresponding to it, thereby satisfying the Laruellian injunction to respect the autonomy of the Real. In this particular paper (C&O), the Laruelleian influence is cashed out in the discussion in §§28 regarding the 'gap' between object and concept wherein "the difference between the conceptual and the extra-conceptual... can be presupposed as already-given in the act of knowing or conception. But it is presupposed without being posited." The idea again is to respect the autonomy of the object, without which we end up subscribing to a pre-critical dogmatism that simply assumes a sort of direct cognitive access to the concept which he takes Sellars to have decisively refuted. Anyway, I'll try and talk about C&O properly now...
I wonder, does anyone want to discuss his criticism of the Gem? I think so far it's the only part of the paper that tries to offer some sort of substantive argumentation, so it might be amenable to some decent discussion. Further, the rest of his project seems to rest on the Gem being (1) real [i.e. philosophers have in the past more or less made the argument as Stove presents it] and (2) ineffective [i.e. Brassier's diagnosis of it drawing a non-tautological conclusion from a tautological premise is right].
I feel like Thomas Nagel said something along these lines..but that could be a false connection. Is it bad that most evolutionary biologists and others (including my self to an extent) already thought along these lines way before Brassier said it with more words and more references to French philosophers?
Quoting Glahn
Can you give an example of how we can make sense of these notions in more fundamental metaphysical terms (e.g. in materialist terms)?
Also, I think I hit a lot Brassier's stuff right on the mark with that comment. You haven't shown me where I am wrong.
1) Brassier doesn't believe in a transcendence (what I call a metaphysical ground). This is a wrong interpretation in your eyes?
2) Scientific evidence- especially the idea of species and universal extinction shows us that we have no special privilege in the universe.. Everything is contingent, humans don't matter in a universe not meant for humans.
So far, this is still nothing outside of most mainstream secularism. It is just that secularists, with this understanding in mind still have an optimistic idea of helping humanity through scientific discovery and technology. I don't see the import or even originality in Brassier's thought. It seems that his writing is a very internal debate between him and certain idealist philosophers in continental philosophy. He is really speaking to them because, by and large, the secularists in the modern world have already understood this view for a very long time. Most are not idealists and know humans mean nothing in the grand scheme of the universe.
The problem with that is it misrepresents those positions. It suggests they all share the secular humanist notion that the world belongs to humans to value and control as they see fit, to ever expanding progress. Secular humanism actually tends to think of the world for humans, just in a worldly sense rather than a transcendental one.
Brassier isn't arguing this position. He is attacking the metaphysics for those who proclaim a metaphysical ground, as opposed giving ownership of the world to humans.
Again, just emphasized that many don't think the world is for them but they work to promote science and technology. Use whatever term you prefer- scientific naturalism, materialism, realists, etc. the point was many people already think this way and hence there is nothing new or original here and that Brassier essentials is addressing a small group of idealists in continental philosophy.
But that's why it your is misleading. Some of those who hold positions of scientific naturalism, materialism, realists still think the world is for them. They get world do (or rather one part of the world, humans) what the transcendent does for the idealists, using "humanity" and "life" in replace of the role transcendent (to "give" meaning to the world). Other people who hold these positions don't.
You are equivocating between the two, to a point where you can't tell the difference between arguments which proclaim humans (morally) giving meaning to a meaningless world and those which are pointing out the absence of the transcendent.
Brassier is arguing the latter. He is not arguing humans are successful and progress by their nature, but rather pointing out since we are of the world, it is incoherent to describe ourselves in terms of the transcendent. He is, indeed, addressing a certain group of philosophical arguments, those which purpose a "Why," to point out they are incoherent. Our obsession the world must be "for us" by some reason do not make sense. Our expectation we must be more than a finite state is incoherent. We are expecting to be (defined by something other than ourselves) what we never are. His point is a metaphysical one, limited to identifying errors of reasoning regarding the transcendent and the world. It about the people who DON'T think this way, about mistakes made in philosophical thought. The insight given is into the incoherence of thinking there must be a solution to finitude (an insight which some realists/materialists/secularists, etc.,etc., could stand to realise, as they are treating humanity as the solution to finitude).
Still, even Brassier's insight is given in a context which doesn't respect itself. In beginning with idea finitude is a problem, Brassier's argument is caught in a form of reasoning which thinks it needs a solution. Supposedly, the "problem" is resolved because the world has no infinite form. We are seeking something which doesn't make sense, as if our finite nature was "The Reason" not to consider finitude a problem.
Obviously, this doesn't make sense. Just because the transcendent is incoherent and finitude has no logical problems, it doesn't mean existing people will understand or feel that way. The incoherence of the transcendent is not "The Reason" for people to accept finitude. There is no reason anyone accepts finitude. That's always a question of how someone exists, as opposed to logic.
Even in "an entirely literal sense," this seems wrongheaded to me. It's true that Brassier now recognizes the reality of meaning, but this is meaning as representational content. Think of the first level of meaning in Gilbert Harman's "Three Levels of Meaning" (not to be confused with that blustery charlatan Graham Harman). And Brassier is clear both in "Concepts and Objects" and elsewhere that the world itself does not possess meaning in this (or any other sense). To suggest that it does is to commit the Parmenidean error of identifying thinking and being, which he is very fond of criticizing.
The sense in which it might be said that Brassier is concerned with the here and now is this: in his political work, he endorses "Prometheanism," which is a form of ultramodernist Marxism intent that preservation of existing conditions of life has no weight in the making of large-scale political decisions. Political thinkers concerned with the "here and now" tend to be liberals and utilitarians worried to keep everyone happy under existing conditions of life. As in the Piercean philosophy of science he borrows from Sellars, in political contexts Brassier seems more interested in progress toward an end. In the theoretical case, the end is the stopping point of inquiry as representation of the real; and in the political case, the end is the stopping point of collective rationality as generic communism. These ends themselves have an immanent transcendence (the noumenon as the immanent transcendence of the object over itself, etc). It is the ends toward which we are oriented that concerns Brassier. He's interested to make clear that those ends are already present within our horizon of action, but it's not the flimsy, existential here and now of the secular liberal that concerns him.
Quoting StreetlightX
I worry this is a merely verbal dispute, but: the Laruellean idea to which Brassier is still committed is the autonomy of the real? I'd count it more likely Brassier found this idea in Kant, as did both Laruelle and Sellars. It's also present in Plato, to whom Brassier has turned with some enthusiasm in recent work. Laruelle's way of trying to flesh the idea out is precisely through the vision-in-one as radical immanence/gnosis, which is what Brassier rejects in him -- and all of which is flatly incoherent. It's not that Laruelle didn't go far enough, it's that his method didn't match his motivations. Brassier retains the motivations, which were what drove him to Laruelle, but it was those same motivations that drove him away. Sellars also shared the motivations, and developed a much more sophisticated, fully worked out, actually coherent account long before Laruelle started holding court (like so many small-time demigogs before him) among discontented ENS dropouts. So yes, Brassier had the good sense to throw out the Laruellean bathwater, but it was a Kantian baby that he retained.
All I ask is that you don't strawman me. I didn't mean to imply that all realists are secular humanists whereby the humanity as a replacement to the transcendent. Many of them pretty much understand we are simply contingent beings created out of the cause and effect of this world in non-deterministic way. But they CHOOSE to make "solving" humanity's "problems" (things like health, discovery, material survival, and technological creativity) part of their mission. It is not necessarily a transcendent mission, just a cause they choose to embrace, even if it is as non-special as any other action in a universe where "nothing" cares. I think the thinking here for these humanists is, "why not care about humans since that's what we are.. the universe may not give a shit, but we seem to care about survival and so forth, so let's focus on making lives and the species more comfortable, long-lasting, and knowledgeable". I don't see the contradiction if one realizes that the cause is simply for itself and not any grander mission than that.
By the way, being a Pessimist of sorts, I don't even identify with humanism and its optimism.. I am just giving an example that contradicts your point that these people delude themselves into thinking that humanity replaces the transcendent. They may very well know the universe is a nihilistic void of meaning but choose to focus on humanity anyways. Also, the whole idea that humanity and the universe will end a billion billion years from now. Those kind of numbers probably don't make a difference to people. It mine as well be infinity.
I'm not surprised to hear that Nagel holds some commitments along these lines, but the interesting source is Sellars. Though not widely known outside of academic circles, Sellars was one of the most important American philosophers of the 20th century, and was extremely influential in bringing analytic philosophy to the forefront of American intellectual consciousness, while simultaneously pushing past some of its early missteps (e.g. naive empiricism). Though it can be traced in fragmentary ways back to Aristotle, the notion of conceptual representation we find in Brassier was first worked out in Sellars' work on semantics. Sellars himself found some of the central ideas in Carnap's Logical Syntax of Language.
The concern with originality is a bit misplaced here. Brassier is an eclectic philosopher, meaning that his principal virtues are erudition and the ability to synthesize disparate ideas and traditions. He *seems* original to people who mainly read contemporary continental philosophy because they're used to interacting with a very narrow constellation of (anti-naturalist) ideas. Brassier is right about a lot of things because Sellars is right about a lot of things, but he does the extra service of relating ideas from Sellars to work in other traditions, and thereby increasing the number of human beings in the world who have encountered Sellars' philosophy.
Quoting schopenhauer1
Brassier does not discuss the details of such an account in "Concept and Object." He does, however, in some of his work on Sellars -- particularly in "Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism," which StreetlightX referenced earlier, and in the recorded talk "How to Train an Animal That Makes Inferences." Sellars' own account, in which Brassier has shown a great deal of interest, is very complex. I'd be happy to discuss it in depth, but I don't think this is the place. For the time being, a quick summation:
Sellars first gives a functional role semantics on which the meaning of an expression in natural language is its role in inference (governed by logical and lexical rules of inference); he then gives a theory of rule-governed behavior as supervening on (purely naturalistic) pattern-conforming behavior (such as develops through evolutionary change); he then gives an extremely robust defense of an explanation-first model of scientific inquiry on which the very structure of scientific theory-succession enjoins the logical possibility of a single, convergent explanatory theory (i.e. the unity of science), which account depends on a mind-bogglingly original treatment of the structure of inductive and abductive inference in terms of complex deductive argument schemas; he then gives a sophisticated ontology drawing on Wittgenstein's picture theory of representation in which predicates are reducible to structural descriptions of names, and names picture objects; he then gives very persuasive arguments to the effect that thoughts and other mental events are best understood as behavior-explaining theoretical postulates modeled after the characteristics of overt linguistic utterances; he then shows how, on a final ontology of the final explanatory theory, names in our ontology, understood as physical inscriptions or utterances, will (by logical necessity) stand in one-to-one *physical* isomorphy relations to the physical constituents of the universe; he then shows how the rules, thoughts, and events of inference which make up our folk psychology, if they are actual, can be modeled in precisely this sense, and conceived of as subject to physical laws. This presentation is spread out over a hundred or so papers, as well as a number of lecture series published as books. It's fascinating stuff.
Anyway, as stated by Brassier himself, the epistemological problem follows from the 'Critical injuntion' (cf. Kant) that: "Thought is not guaranteed access to being; being is not inherently thinkable. There is no cognitive ingress to the real save through the concept. Yet the real itself is not to be confused with the concepts through which we know it. The fundamental problem of philosophy is to understand how to reconcile these two claims." This injunction is 'critical' not in the sense of 'being important', but in the Kantian sense of requiring that we furnish an account of the relation between thought and being, rather than take any such relation for granted, which would be a fall into pre-critical dogmatism, in the Kantian sense. In this regard, Brassier holds to the tradition of Critical Philosophy inaugurated by Kant.
From this starting point, Brassier goes on to look at various ways in which this injunction has more or less been papered over in various ways, beginning with Latour, before going on to his wonderful discussion of Stove's Gem, which he uses not so much to establish realism, but - in keeping with the ground-clearing mode of the rest of the paper - to disqualify approaches which aim to diffuse realism as an issue from the get-go. Here, both Berkeley and Fitche are taken as targets, with Meillassoux also critiqued for buying too easily into the Gem. Again, it's not a 'positive' argument that Brassier is advancing here, but a negative one - or more precisely, an attempt to negate a negative (against the idea that thought cannot track the real).
Hence the conclusion of the piece which goes: "[R]ecognizing this does not resolve or answer any of the profound epistemological and metaphysical difficulties which confront us in the wake of science’s remarkable cognitive achievements. But it may help us realize that these difficulties cannot be circumvented, as both correlationists and dogmatic metaphysicians seek to do." Again, the idea is to 'keep open' a problem, rather than address it directly. There's more to be said about the specifics here, but that's the general thrust and structure of the paper.
A lot hinges on how one feels about David Stove and his Gem as applied to Berkeley. (These are paras 31 and 32 of C & O)
It does seem to me that one wouldn't know from Stove or Brassier that Berkeley said, for instance:
'...or any wise conceive or understand...' There are things we don't know yet; the good Bishop feels that God the first cause is holding them in readiness for when our measuring apparatus improves. I don't say I'm a Berkeleyan. I only mean I don't accept the supposed force of Stove's argument against such idealism, which is here a surrogate for an argument in favour of the analytic and against the continental. The perennial problem for a critic of Berkeley seems to me to say, OK, what's your alternative to always seeing oneself in one's own mind's eye? And Brassier doesn't offer that; he is, as SX says, clearing the ground as he sees it, and relying on passing references to Sellars to come up with the positives.
Does this matter though? Surely, this is a conclusion inferred by Berkeley from what he takes be a successful argument against a mind-independent world already presented previously? If he began with this he would be begging the question. But Brassier's point is that so too does the argument. So I guess it's true you wouldn't know the above from reading Brassier or Stove, but would you need to?
This is obvious if you look at what Berkeley says in the passages Brassier quotes, and then Brassier's characterization of the argument: the two seem to have nothing to do with each other, with Brassier' attributing claims to Berkeley that he does not make (the tautological premise that 'we cannot conceive of something without conceiving it,' which appears nowhere in the Master argument, let alone as a premise), and also fundamentally getting the form of the argument wrong. Berkeley presents the argument as a reductio of a realist premise, whereas Brassier presents it as an espousal of a first premise (a tautology) that then moves to another premise (a non-tautology), rather than an internal criticism of realism on its own terms.
I think it's fair to say that Berkeley's 'master argument' is, to put it very simply, based on the tautologous idea that what can be conceived must be itself a conception. From this it follows that if we can conceive an object then an object must be a conception. The next tautological step is the idea that conceptions occur only in minds. The problem then becomes the fact that objects are very obviously independent of any individual mind, with the corollary being that they therefore must be independent of the sum of minds, if each mind is separate. A mind which is independent of our minds must then be posited for the 'objects as conceptions' to exist in. And indeed, for Berkeley. objects are conceptions in God's mind.
So this:
is correct as far as it goes in that we have "not been deprived of any one thing in Nature", to be sure. But... we have now been lumbered with God; Who in Himself obviates further metaphysical and epistemological inquiry. In light of the deprivation of the need for such inquiry, this "lumbering" can then be seen to be no small imposition.
Berkeley interesting in that his main argument is, more or less, a direct opposition to Cartesian doubt and other positions which envision the world separate to our knowledge. In his focus on experience, he is clearly setting out we know things, "real" things, no matter what.
The problem is that Brassier's target has nothing to do with the making "real"/ "not real distinction (i.e. finding that which shows what is "real" or "not real" )," but rather the question of claims about what exists at specific times in the world.
Congruent with Berkeley's complaint, there has never been an instance of an object thought of without the someone thinking about the object, but... this does not amount to the absence of unexperienced objects. If I, for example, imagine a building which exists in the centre of Melbourne in one hundred years, it does not follow that it is never unexperienced. It might be the middle of the night when there is no-one around. It might be abandoned and become hidden beneath trees and bushes. Life might be snuffed out by some disaster.
Berkeley's error is not to suppose things are within the conceptual realm, but rather to think instances of thought or experience of objects are always necessary. In his effort to recognise the presence of experience ignored by so many others, he equivocates objects being thought or experienced in one moment as equivalent to them always being experienced.
His analysis of "experienced" and "unexperienced" is deficit. Berkeley treats them like the are a infinite feature of things, such that to say something is "of experience" or "unexperienced" is to proclaim is always one and never the other. The meaning of "unexperienced object," that is to say a moment in time when someone is not thinking about or experiencing an object, as opposed to an object being outside the conceptual realm, is lost on him (just as the meaning of "unknowns" are lost to those who view objects to be outside the conceptual realm. What exactly is an "unknown" if there is not something we may know, we may think of or experience? Such a suggestion is incoherent).
In the end, Brassier's objection to Berkeley is directed in the right area, despite its somewhat superficial reading. Berkeley is still suggesting experience is necessary (and thus, there is no world, no objects, without experience).
Indeed. Ironically, this cuts down Berkeley's own argument. Since "real(i.e. existing)" or "not real (i.e not existing), has nothing to do with whether an object is experiential (i.e. thought, experienced) or non-experiential (i.e. unperceived, unthought, unknown), the presence of experience isn't necessary for any object. Berkley is trapped in the same illusion as those he criticises. He treats the "real" as if it is a matter of being experiential as opposed to non-experimental. In his efforts to recognise how objects are thought of and experienced, even the "unknown" or "unperceived" ones, he confuses thinking about and experiencing objects for their existence.
No it isn't?
Sure, but it amounts to their inconceivability, which is the point that the realist is not willing to grant (hence why, when people see the Master Argument, they try to refute it at all costs).
Is that a question or a statement? If the former then I don't understand it, and if the latter, then what is an object, beyond being a conception, according to the assumptions you think the master argument is based on?
But that's utterly wrong. In thinking about unexperienced objects, we have the concept of an object which is not experienced. They are not inconceivable at all. Indeed, we can conceive any object as unexperienced. I can think of a time, for example, where the screen I am looking at is not experienced. All it takes is us to imagine an instance where no-one is experiencing an object. Berkeley is confusing instances of us thinking about an unexperienced object with the existence of an unexperienced object. They are not the same. When we have a concept that some object is unexperienced, it is not the state of the object.
At that moment, the object is experienced (I am thinking of my screen). The concept of the unexperienced object is, however, talking about some other moment (when I am no longer thinking of my screen). I am thinking of the moment of the unexperienced object which has yet to come (or has already passed).
But you see, you were thinking about it. So it was not unexperienced after all.
Yeah... now, but that's not when the "unexperienced" claim was referring to. It was talking about what an object was at some other time. Just because I'm thinking about it now doesn't mean the object can't be unknown or unexperienced at some other time. You are treating "experienced" and "unexperienced" as if they are infinite. They are not. Whether an object is experienced by someone is a question of a finite state.
Right, but if it were, you couldn't conceive of it being so, which is the point. You want to isolate the object in an alternate reality or time and say there it isn't being experienced: but this just loops the problem back into the present experience of a supposition about the past. It does not, as Brassier desires, 'break out' of the circle to find the object independent of experience simpliciter. Idealists of course have always been fine with complex overlapping structures of experience. But the realist is interested in escape form them.
Not in the moment of it being unexperienced, but the was never the claim.
I don't need to "find" the object independent of experience, in any instance where I conceive it, I always have it in experience. Including the times I conceive of objects which aren't being experienced. To think of the "unexperienced object" is to think the idea of an object, at a different time, when on-one is thinking about it. No attempt has been made to get "outside experience." The whole point is that I am thinking about a state where no-one is experiencing an object. Indeed, it's what I know (i.e experience) in this instance. I experience the concept of the unexperienced object, not the (future /former) unexperienced object. At my time, the unexperienced object I am thinking about is experienced.
They can't both be 'in experience' (by which I assume you mean, they are being experienced) and not be experienced. That is a contradiction you see.
OK, but if an object is a "bundle of ideas" then it is a bundle of conceptions; i.e. it is conceptual. That doesn't change the substance of the argument.
No, Berkeley's master argument is not based on a tautology. It is a reductio of the realist's claim that he can conceive of something that no one is conceiving of.
-Assumption for reductio: It is possible to conceive of something that no one conceives of.
-Hypothetical assumption: Someone conceives of something that no one conceives of.
-But by hypothesis, someone is conceiving of it.
-Therefore, someone does not conceive of something that no one conceives of.
-Therefore, by discharging of the assumption from a contradiction, it is not possible to conceive of something that no one conceives of.
There is no such claim. The experience doesn't exist when the object unexperienced.
Let's say I am reading my hidden diary. I think about how it will go unexperienced for ages(concept of the unexperienced object), possibly until it breaks down, when I an am longer alive (the diary is experienced).
Then I die (the diary is then unexperienced).
The experience, indeed, doesn't exist when unexperienced. The diary is not unexperienced until the states of experience of it cease.
But at such a time, you aren't conceiving of it either. So this does not show that you can conceive of something that nobody is conceiving of.
Why would someone ever suggest they could conceive of an unexperienced object (i.e. a time when no-one is experiencing the object ) without them conceiving of something? You are trying to separate the object thought of (the one that, in the future or past, no-one is thinking about) from experience. You are attempting the very nonsense you decry.
The entire point of the concept of the "unperceived object"is someone is conceiving of something: a past/future object that no-one is thinking of at its time (as opposed to one's own time, in which the concept of the unperceived object is present and the object is in experience).
I don't know -- it's not a very smart thing to suggest. Let alone write a paper about.
You can leave off this part, it doesn't add anything.
Look, it's very simple. The realist is concerned with objects no one is experiencing or thinking about. Since he thinks his project isn't nonsense, he claims he can conceive of such a thing. But you can't conceive of an object no one is conceiving of. This is not that hard, people.
Do you think that being conceived is the same as being conceived ex hypothesi?
Can a painter ever paint someone alone?
You can if the object doesn't exist.
If its a future object or a past object, it existence is not indexed to your present. You are ignoring the difference time makes. One can conceive of an object no-one is thinking about. It just can't exist in the present.
He doesn't claim people can conceive an object when no-one is conceiving of it. The claim is (and more generally, the realist position) that people can conceive of instances which don't yet or no longer exist. (which includes instances where no-one is aware of some past/future object).
Wouldn't the analogous question be, can a painter ever paint someone who isn't being painted? Of course, in the picture, he does not have to paint another painter. But he himself is painting this person, who he perhaps claimed was being painted by no one.
Of course. For example, I am male. Therefore, if we don't make a distinction between conception simpliciter and conception ex hypothesi, then I can't conceive of something that isn't being imagined by a male. Thus, I am entitled to reject the idea of objects that are not conceived of by males.
"The difficulty facing the proponent of the Gem is the following: since the assumption that things are only ideata is every bit as metaphysical (‘dogmatic’) as the assumption that ideata are not the only things (that physical things are not ideas), the only way for the idealist to trump the realist is by invoking the self-authenticating nature of her experience as a thinking thing (or mind) and repository of ideas. But this she cannot do without invoking some idealist version of the myth of the given (which I take Sellars to have convincingly refuted). So in this regard, the alleged ‘givenness’ of the difference between concept and object would be no worse off than that of the identity of the concept (qua self-authenticating mental episode). Obviously, this does not suffice to vindicate metaphysical realism; what it does reveal however is that the Gem fails to disqualify it. It is undoubtedly true that we cannot conceive of concept-independent things without conceiving of them; but it by no means follows from this that we cannot conceive of things existing independently of concepts, since there is no logical transitivity from the mind-dependence of concepts to that of conceivable objects. Only someone who is confusing mind-independence with concept-independence would invoke the conceivability of the difference between concept and object in order to assert the mind-dependence of objects
...The claim that something exists mind-independently does not commit one to the claim that it is conceptually inaccessible. By implying that mind-independence requires conceptual inaccessibility, the Gem saddles transcendental realism with an exorbitant burden. But it is a burden which there is no good reason to accept." (bolding mine).
To the degree that you've not addressed Brassier's argument for the necessity for such a distinction, I don't think you've really understood the argument. You still think, in other words, that the realist ought to accept the very burden that Brassier points out is unnecessary.
So, first, I'm not saying there is no such distinction. I am denying that it is the distinction in which the realist is interested. The realist is interested in objects independent of experience simpliciter, not independent of experience within certain hypothetical scenarios, while dependent on experience in order to be conceived of in those hypothetical scenarios.
Second, even if that were what the realist is talking about, your conclusion does not follow from your premise, since you are not the only one who can conceive things. And so there is no inference from what you can conceive to what can be conceived.
This isn't an assumption, though, it's the conclusion?
But this is not what is being claimed. The claim is that it is not possible to conceive of something that no one is conceiving of. But this is precisely what the realist calls for, and so precisely why Brassier feels he must 'refute' Berkeley.
No it isn't. "It is undoubtedly true that we cannot conceive of concept-independent things without conceiving of them; but it by no means follows from this that we cannot conceive of things existing independently of concepts, since there is no logical transitivity from the mind-dependence of concepts to that of conceivable objects." Again, concepts and objects mate.
How does it beg the question? Where does Berkeley assume that concepts and objects are identical? Rather, he establishes this conclusion as the result of argumentation, part of which involve sa reductio.
Begging the question is a formal fallacy. If he commits it, you should be able to outline explicitly what premise he maintains, and how it the conclusion is logically contained in it.
But this is not what Berkeley says. He does not say 'we cannot conceive of concept-independent things without conceiving them.' The point is we cannot conceive of concept-independent things full stop. And to see that this is so, he moves by reductio: suppose you conceived of something concept independent. By by hypothesis, you are conceiving of it. Ergo, it is not concept independent.
The assumption is implicit in the equivocation between 'things' qua ideata and things simpliciter. And of course Berkeley doesn't make the distinction - but that's precisely the problem. What you think is the feature is exactly the bug.
What equivocation? Where is it? Berkeley concludes that things are ideas; he does not assume this.
What do you mean by, he does not distinguish? He comes to the conclusion that they are the same; he does not assume this from the outset.
Do you understand the difference between a premise and a conclusion? Are you saying that any conclusion to the effect that X is Y is question begging? It seems to me you don't understand the structural difference between concluding that two things are the same, and assuming they are all along.
1) But, say you, surely there is nothing easier than for me to imagine trees, for instance, in a park, or books existing in a closet, and nobody by to perceive them.
2) But do not you yourself perceive or think of them all the while?
3) To make out this, it is necessary that you conceive them existing unconceived or unthought of, which is a manifest repugnancy.
This argument has the form of a reductio. In 1), the 'say you' is an indication that Berkeley is taking a premise provided by his opponent; in 3), he is showing that this results in a 'repugnancy,' i.e. a contradiction that requires discharging the premise.
No. This is not what he says the realist is committed to. He does not say they are committed to saying they can think about things without thinking about them. He is committed to saying that he can think of things that no one is thinking of. Please, Lord.
But this is precisely what he does, in Principles of Human Knowledge. I mean, exactly, literally, precisely, unequivocally. The only way you could think it wasn't is if you haven't read it. He literally starts out by outlining the various sorts of ideas people have, then the various sorts of objects that are in the world, and then drawing the conclusion from various arguments that they are identical.
This realist is interested in the idea that this stuff would all be here even if we weren't. The argument against this seems to be that we cannot conceive of anything without that thing being conceived of by us; therefore, we can't make sense of the idea of an unconceived object. But this is a non-sequitur: in order to conceive of an unconceived object, the object need only be unconceived within the conception.
Quoting The Great Whatever
I didn't say anything about what can be conceived, only about what is conceived. As a realist, I am happy to entertain the idea that everything can be conceived or perceived or whatever word you want to use for the idea that a mind can make sense of something. That's just saying that everything is intelligible. Mind-independence just means that the universe would happily chug along even if we weren't here, and that is perfectly compatible with the idea that such a universe would still be intelligible to the next race of sentient creatures that evolved to perceive it. By analogy: the fact that a sphere is visible does not mean that someone is currently looking at it, and its visibility does not make it "vision dependent."
I am also interested in this:
Quoting The Great Whatever
First, why should I accept the premise? I can't conceive of a person of whom I am not currently conceiving, so why should I assume that other people are conceiving things without me? After all, I can't conceive of it. Unless you're asking me to accept things I can't conceive of, in which case the master argument fails anyway.
The 'argument,' which is not an argument but a result of the realist's own claim, from which a contradiction is drawn, is that we cannot conceive of things that no one is conceiving of (i.e., we cannot conceive of precisely what the realist is interested in dealing with).
Realists are not interested in what is conceived of to be unconceived; they are interested in what is unconceived.
Quoting Pneumenon
I think the Master Argument does not establish idealism; what it does establish is that the realist is committed to talking about things he can't conceive of. I think it's consistent to just bite the bullet and accept that, but the realist usually doesn't want to. Berkeley can only establish idealism by further assuming that what is inconceivable is impossible, which I do not think is an acceptable premise.
The assumption objects and concepts are identical is embedded here. If they are different, there is no problem with conceiving an instance of existence which is unthought. My thought of: "X no-one is thinking" not the existence of X no-one is thinking. Thinking about an unperceived object does not commit to its presence. The concept of "unexperienced X" is present even as the "unexperienced thing" is not (as I am thinking about it at the moment).
There is only a manifest repugnancy if one equivocates thinking about an unexperienced object with its existence. Berkeley needs to equivocate ideas and things for his reductio to function.
Put it this way: both you and Brassier agree that the argument doesn't serve to establish idealism, only disqualify realism. It's a negative, not a positive argument. Which is to say, in order to be 'correct', it needs to get the realist position right. And for Brassier, this is exactly what it doesn't do. Why? Because it doesn't distinguish between concepts and objects. Where does Berekley not do so? In exactly the place where there's nothing to quote. I can only point out an absence, not quote one.
(Is this part of your idealist proclivities? If there's nothing to quote, Berkeley did not not-say something?)
Person 1: "There is stuff you can't conceive of, but I can."
Person 2: "Well, then, there's stuff I can't conceive of, but you can."
Person 1: "Wrong! You're trying to talk about stuff you can't conceive of. It's only right when I say it."
This seems like a reductio to me... Unless you think it's impossible for one person to be able to conceive of something another one can't. But then we're back to this argument:
I don't understand what this means. What do you mean by, a priori? Is the realist committed to the position that he cannot possibly be wrong about the distinction, and so any argument that purports to show that the distinction is invalid is wrong because he has ruled out that possibility to begin with? If that is not what you are saying, what are you saying? If it is what you are saying, what interest is there in an argument that simply assumes its conclusions a priori? You can assume anything you want a priori.
Nope. See: §§30: "Contrary to what correlationists proclaim, the presupposition of this difference is not a dogmatic prejudice in need of critical legitimation. Quite the reverse: it is the assumption that the difference between concept and object is always internal to the concept—that every difference is ultimately conceptual—that needs to be defended. For to assume that the difference between concept and object can only be internal to the concept is to assume that concepts furnish self-evident indexes of their own reality and internal structure—that we know what concepts are and can reliably track their internal differentiation—an assumption that then seems to license the claim that every difference in reality is a conceptual difference. The latter of course provides the premise for conceptual idealism, understood as the claim that reality is composed of concepts—precisely the sort of metaphysical claim which correlationism is supposed to abjure. Yet short of resorting to the phenomenological myth of an originary, self-constituting consciousness (one of the many variants of the myth of the given, denounced by Sellars), the same critical considerations that undermine dogmatism about the essence and existence of objects also vitiate dogmatism about the essence and existence of concepts (whether indexed by signifiers, discursive practices, conscious experiences, etc). Thus it is not clear why our access to the structure of concepts should be considered any less in need of critical legitimation than our access to the structure of objects. To assume privileged access to the structure of conception is to assume intellectual intuition. But this is to make a metaphysical claim about the essential nature of conception; an assumption every bit as dogmatic as any allegedly metaphysical assertion about the essential nature of objects."
The distinction does not secure realism or antirealism. The point is to stave off pre-critical dogmatism until an argument is advanced one way or another.
Who assumes this?
But it only leads to a contraction if it is assumed that the two are not distinct. That's why it's a contradiction. Which means the claim that Berkeley assumes that there is a distinction is wrong. Once you establish a distinction between concept and object, the 'contradiction' disappears.
How does it lead to a contradiction only if you assume they're not distinct?
'It is possible to conceive of something no one is conceiving' is a fucking contradiction. As in, put it in the predicate calculus and it can't be true on any interpretation.
Is your claim now that,
'I conceive of something no one is conceiving of'
Is not a contradiction? I would say that you don't understand English if you think that, not that you need to reexamine your metaphysical assumptions.
[frames a statement which utilizes no such distinction in any way, shape, or form]
Ha, contraction!!"
Yes. By definition my concept of an object is not the existence of the object. This is a logical expression. This cannot possibly be wrong because to say otherwise would commit a contradiction.
It would be to claim my imagining of a house was the existence of the house. I wouldn't need to do any building to have home...
This supposed "reductio" of Berkeley's is based on an equivocation between conceiving of the possibility of an object and conceiving of the object, and it is tautologous insofar as its conclusion is entirely based on a tendentious definition of the terms. Put in different terms there is no contradiction and hence no reductio:
Assumption: It is possible to conceive the possible existence of some object of which no one conceives .
Hypothetical assumption: Someone conceives the possible existence of some object of which no one conceives.
There is no contradiction here because the object that no one conceives of is not being conceived. It is the possibility of its existence that is being conceived.
The problem with that argument is it's still obsessed by "real" and "imagined" in the nonsensical Cartesian sense. Hallucinations are real. Someone who hallucinates actually experiences what they do. It isn't "fake" in the sense of not meaning anything. Everything is real in this sense. Dreams, hallucinations and "the real" are all things which exist.
The "real" and "imaginary" discintion has never been about what is outside the conceptual, but rather what is within it. "Real" points of things which exist (something thinking of an object, dreams, perceptions, hallucinations). "Imaginary" points out meanings (e.g. identity) expressed be states existence. -e.g. the hallucination of the dragon is "real" but the notion there is a dragon who will eat and kill me is "imaginary (as no such dragon exists)."
And we can't tell the difference be experiencing the "real" and "imaginary" differently because both do not describe anything. Neither has any sort of feature which makes it distinguishable. Dreams can appear just as real as reality, to a point where we can mistake dreams of reality and vice versa. "Real" and "imaginary' are their own logical expressions which we have to experience in themselves. Else we are stuck with no clue as to which is which.
Indeed. But the "experimental coherence" is NOT given by any aspect of the experienced tiger. Seeing its claws, hearing its roar, touching its fur doesn't give us that coherence. It's its own experience. Someone has to literally think "that's is real" or "that is imaginary." Even "falsification" doesn't circumvent this because it requires someone to make the logical distinction between what is real and is imaginary.
Someone might put there head through a hallucinated image of a tiger'e mouth, not get eaten and still think they were putting themselves in danger. All it takes is the thought: "The tiger exists (i.e. is real) and is going to eat me."
(and this is why you see "real"/ "imaginary" has a close connection with doxa. Since it is a logical distinction, one which is not drawn through an observation, people have to rely on specifying rules to indicate it. )
Are you seriously claiming that you can't conceive of the possibility that there might be things in the universe that no one will ever know about?
I think you already admitted that you disagreed with Berkeley that unconceived things are impossible; presumably that means you think they are (or at least might be) possible. If so, then you are conceiving of their possible existence.
Congratulations, it appears you have a skill you were previously unaware of.
If you now want to distinguish between 'conceiving the possible existence' and 'conceiving the possibility', then your objection
Quoting The Great Whatever
is inappropriate since I was talking about the former:
Quoting John
in the passage you were objecting to.
Aaron kindly directed me, the other week, to an essay that I think relates to the Brassier project. It's by Peter Wolfendale, a 'transcendental realist', which is here: https://deontologistics.files.wordpress.com/2010/05/essay-on-transcendental-realism.pdf
My struggle is that to me this new approach to 'realism' in Brassier and in Wolfendale among others puts the cart before the horse. In para 4 of his essay for instance Brassier says:
It does seem to me that if this among our presuppositions, if we think this to begin with, we will inevitably end up with this gulf between concepts and objects, and an underlying notion of the 'reality' of 'objects'.
I have an eccentric fondness for Nelson Goodman's irrealist views. As I read it, Goodman's arguments are that there are 'many worlds' in an intellectual sense - all of which acknowledge an Otherness but don't find a unifying theory-of-realness - so we may posit that there are different world-views, where concepts vary from view to view. But at the same time we don't fall into the potential cess-pool of postmodern anything-goes, because each world-view requires intellectual rigour and a unity of its own.
But whether you like Goodman or no, I would like to ask that we get back to Brassier. Has he pre-decided his metaphysics with the para I mention above? More generally, is this object-oriented approach the way to go? There are some sideswipes at 'process' views which aren't backed up by any specific argument, and I haven't understood just what is such a good idea about renewing our focus on 'objects'. As compared say to 'events': for any object left out in the sun for long enough transforms in concert with what's around 'it' :)
When TGW says this: Quoting The Great Whatever
and this:
Quoting The Great Whatever
he shows that he misunderstands the realist claim (at least the relevant versions of it in any case, and there are a few) ; which is precisely not that what is being conceived (the object) is just the same as how it is conceived to be or what it is interpreted as.
In the second quote from TGW the misunderstanding he has is very clearly shown. He admits that there is "what is conceived of to be unconceived" and (rightly) distinguishes that from "what is unconceived". He then makes the mistake of thinking the realist is interested in, or believes in the possibility of, precisely conceiving the latter (as we would a familiar object), which would of course be an absurd contradiction, because the unconceived cannot be precisely conceived but may only be conceived in the roundabout way of 'conceiving of the unconceived', i.e. abductively. Realism will always consist in exercising the imagination; there is no question of being able to precisely conceive the Real. Any realism that espouses the latter is a naive realism.
Why do you think Brassier is "putting the cart before the horse" in the passage you quote? As I read it, he is merely saying that our ways of conceiving the world are pre-conceptually conditioned by an actual "machinery" and that whatever that machinery might be it has no inbuilt purpose in so pre-conditioning us.
This is something B. does address, and I quoted it earlier - §§30 is the relevant passage. The idea is basically you have two options: either you begin by assuming that the concept is indistinguishable from the object, or you do not. If you do, you beg the question in favor of conceptual idealism. If you don't, you leave the relation between object and concept 'open' in order to be subsequently elaborated - it may turn out that they are indistinguishable, but this will have to be argued for:
"Contrary to what correlationists proclaim, the presupposition of this difference is not a dogmatic prejudice in need of critical legitimation. Quite the reverse: it is the assumption that the difference between concept and object is always internal to the concept—that every difference is ultimately conceptual—that needs to be defended. For to assume that the difference between concept and object can only be internal to the concept is to assume that concepts furnish self-evident indexes of their own reality and internal structure—that we know what concepts are and can reliably track their internal differentiation—an assumption that then seems to license the claim that every difference in reality is a conceptual difference... Is it is not clear why our access to the structure of concepts should be considered any less in need of critical legitimation than our access to the structure of objects. To assume privileged access to the structure of conception is to assume intellectual intuition. But this is to make a metaphysical claim about the essential nature of conception; an assumption every bit as dogmatic as any allegedly metaphysical assertion about the essential nature of objects."
"The articulation of thought and being is necessarily conceptual follows from the Critical injunction which rules out any recourse to the doctrine of a pre-established harmony between reality and ideality. Thought is not guaranteed access to being; being is not inherently thinkable. There is no cognitive ingress to the real save through the concept" (§§3)/ "We gain access to the structure of reality via a machinery of conception which extracts intelligible indices from a world that is not designed to be intelligible and is not originarily infused with meaning. Meaning is a function of conception and conception involves representation ... It falls to conceptual rationality to forge the explanatory bridge from thought to being. (§§3)/ "To know (in the strong scientific sense) what something is is to conceptualize it." (§§28)
Although what Brassier understands by conceptualization is not too clearly spelled out in the paper, it's safe to assume - given the passing references to Sellars and Brandom, as well as his work elsewhere (the video "How to Train an Animal that makes Inferences" in particular) - that to conceptualize is to be able to make an inferential move in a game of giving and asking for reasons. In other words, to know is to conceptualize, and to conceptualize is to be able to give reasons for a claim about this or that. But I can't help but feel - as do legions of others who have called Sellars out on this point - that this is an incredibly limited, if not debilitating account of what it means to know. I have no doubt that this is undoubtedly a kind, or a 'species' of knowing, but I cannot accede to the idea that it constitutes knowing tout court. In some sense, Brassier does acknowledge this. The knowing he speaks of does in fact seem to be a qualified one: "To know (in the strong scientific sense) what something is is to conceptualize it." Yet elsewhere, this qualification is not found: "Meaning is a function of conception."
It's hard though to mount an effective critique at this level because this notion is in fact not explicitly addressed in the paper, and is more or less deferred elsewhere. Perhaps Brassier does have an adequate answer to this sort of concern, but it won't be found here. What in particular concerns me is the exact status of sensation and affect, and the way in which the sensible relates to the rational machinery of rational conception.
Doesn't the above presuppose a distinction between concepts (or thought) and objects (or being/reality) (and so run contrary to the criticism he later levies in §§30)? Or have I missed something where the distinction has already been argued for?
All he concludes in §§30 is that we shouldn't "assume privileged access to the structure of conception".
You might find this interesting, if you haven't already read it:
http://bebereignis.blogspot.com/2011/07/brassier-and-sellars-on-sensation-and.html
Streetlight, should that be "intra-conceptual difference"? If not, could you explain this entailment further? I'm not seeing it.
But he didn't make a case against the assumption (at least not in §§30); he made a case against making the assumption. He said that the assumption needs to be defended. But that p needs to be defended is not to say that ¬p doesn't.
Just because we can't assume that there is something in the box does not mean that we can assume that there isn't something in the box.
Remember, Brassier is aruging against a negative proposition, not a positive one (i.e. 'there is no difference between concept and object'); the aim of the paper is to enact a negation of this negation: ¬¬p. And if ¬¬p, then p.
@John: Yeah, sorry, I meant intra. Late night slip of the keyboard/mind.
Concept is object= (naive) realism = idea "emerges" out of objects. However, the connection of object to idea presupposes an idea was there to begin with. How idea can emerge de novo, out of nowhere, from object is seemingly impossible to explain.
Object is concept= Classical Idealism whereby idea is a brute fact of reality and objects are thus conceptual at some level.. whether "to" someone (leading to Kantian Idealism and Correlationism) or to itself (leading to panpsychism).
Both are hard pills to swallow. Ideas being brute facts seem at odds with evolutionary biology and the notion that the world is interacting objects of nature following laws (i.e. thermodynamics). It is also odd to posit ideas emerging from non-ideas. Surely, physical matter can emerge into other variations of physical matter, but physical matter emerging into ideas has little to no explanatory power. Qualia, let alone higher order of thought seem brute and can never be "pointed to" via neural interactions itself. One must posit that there is an ability to have interiority in the first place. This would lead to a pansychism of sorts.
It may seem "odd" just because we can 'back-form' no exhaustive conceptualization of the process. But that we can produce no conceptual back-formation is exactly what should be expected if ideation did emerge from physical process.
You are cherry-picking there. Please at least reply to the whole post, which had a bit more explanation than that one quote. If you read the post again, I am saying that having experiences (qualia and higher order thought processes) presupposes an interiority. Otherwise, no explanation has occurred. The only answer to this would be the "epiphenomenon" answer which mine as well mean that angels and elves are the byproduct of neurons.
Here it is still assumed the idea or conceptual is the emerging state.The contradiction only appears because you aren't making the distinction between the object (existing states, which express the meaning of an idea) and the idea (logical expression). This is the error Brassier is trying to get past.
If we, instead, begin with the distinction between objects (states of existence, including our states of consciousness) and conceptual (logic, which is true regardless of what exists), this problem is resolved. Ideas/concepts have always been around and do not emerge at all (in fact, they do not exist. They are logical rules). While objects, including instances where we are aware of an idea (e.g. the state which is me understanding "tree") emerge and pass only in themselves.
[quote"schopenhauer1"]Both are hard pills to swallow. Ideas being brute facts seem at odds with evolutionary biology and the notion that the world is interacting objects of nature following laws (i.e. thermodynamics). It is also odd to posit ideas emerging from non-ideas. Surely, physical matter can emerge into other variations of physical matter, but physical matter emerging into ideas has little to no explanatory power.[/quote]
By making the distinction between the object (existing state) and concept (logic/meaning), these issues are resolved. Since ideas don't exist, they aren't brute facts. While states of consciousness, as they are states of existence, are material; objects which emerge and pass, another variation of physical matter, resulting out of the interactions of other states of existence.
The emergence of ideas is avoided. Physical matter is never suggested to emerge into ideas.
I must say that this is one of the reasons why this forum is so frustrating. You did this in the Stoicism thread as well. I am trying to have a dialogue with another person and you hijack the conversation. I understand, in principle, these forums are meant for multiple conversation tangents, but in practice this is very frustrating. I would be glad to have a separate debate with you, but by answering my reply to John, it clearly takes it in (perhaps) another direction and does not allow for the back-and-forth between the original participants. This is not only frustrating for me personally, but disallows a possible interesting unfolding of thought between the original two participants and breaks the flow of the original conversation.
To add to this, I would like to make a personal observation, that I think it is unfair for many people to pile on one person. In a "real world" debate, there are usually teams, and they are allowed to collaborate and meet. On this, usually there is little collaboration, so what ends up happening instead is a disproportionate number of people (who have roughly the same opinion) gang up on one individual who has to defend himself against many opponents. Even in this free-for-all internet forum format, this is simply unfair. I get it that there is little (if any) compassion for anyone else here, there are no house rules to go by, we all have strong opinions we want to share, and "all is fair in philosophy and war" but there has to be some leeway for the opponent so that a natural flow of conversation can take place and so that there is not one person against an army if you will.
Anyways, that being said I'll reply to your post nonetheless because I just tend to want to defend my position if I feel it is necessary...
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This, as far as I interpret it, is for all intents and purposes, incoherent unless you claim some sort of belief in correlationism, which I am gathering you do not. What is the difference between "existing states expressing the meaning of an idea", and the "idea" if not "object" and "concept"? You are just restating the distinction with more words.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
This makes no sense to me. If I am to descramble this, I think what you are saying is that concepts are logic. This just doesn't make sense. I don't even know what that is supposed to mean.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
How does this resolve anything? Ideas don't exist? What? You have to rephrase this all in order for me to understand this. The question is how your experience (qualia and other types of thought) are related or come from objects. You haven't even begun to answer the question other than perplexingly replacing "idea" with "logic" and then saying that the issue is resolved and ideas aren't brute facts. This explains nothing.
"Humans are concept mongers. This is the essential difference between humans and other animals. But this difference makes an immanent discontinuity within the natural order, not a transcendent exception. We can make sense of the discontinuity. Nature is not reasonable, and reason is not natural. Yet nature's unreasonablness is not unintelligible, just as nature's unreasonableness is not supernatural. The problem that Sellars confronts is this: how do blind evolutionary contingencies generate purposeful rule-governed activity - i.e. conceptual rationality. This has to be explained. So how do human animals
learn to speak, use language, and therefore think? If concepts are rules, and rationality is the ability to follow rules, and concepts and linguistically instantiated function, then the key to understand the specificity of the human lies in understanding how an animal can follow rules."
And this is just what Sellars's account of language is meant to provide. In order for your objection to have any force, it's that account you'll need to examine, in order to see if it holds up. Qualia and 'subjective experience' and so on are wholly irrelevant in this context.
I don't see how this explains anything. Granted, nature follows certain "rules" especially at the biochemical and physical level- this is nothing new. How you get from rule-based chemicals to "interiority" is not explained. The interiority is still this "extra" thing, that is somehow this "byproduct" of the rules-based biochemical/physical interaction. Essentially the extra "interiority" must be posited as some sort of panpsychism which is fine, but you then have to explain how it is a limited interiority of simply those rule-based chemicals and not other ones. It is self-encapsulated and there's your problem because you'll say.. X, Y, Z chemicals are doing 1,2,3 rules and 'wallah" interiority which does nothing to explain how x,y,z chemicals doing 1,2,3 rules is interiority just the correlation of the objects with this byproduct of subjective experience.
The problem of emergence is still there because, as stated earlier, while one can easily explain how objects emerge into other objects, it is hard to see how a particular set of objects emerge into subjectivity. Subjectivity seems to supervene on a particular set of rules/objects. If one set of rules/objects "are" subjectivity and not others, then this is a quite magical set of rules/objects because "red" doesn't seem to go with snowflakes but it does with biochemicals.
X, Y, Z chemicals doing 1, 2, 3 rules isn't interiority. At least no more or less than colliding atoms are two crashing cars. Your description of the causation of experience is unfulfilling because it is missing the most relevant object: the caused experienced itself.
Emergence functions by X, Y, Z chemicals expressing 1, 2, 3 rules, which results is the existing state of experience. Experiences are objects themselves, of the same order as rocks and trees. They are more instances of things in the world. Correlation of the objects X, Y and Z is not all that's is present. When those objects were together in this way, it was soon followed by the presence of another object, a state of experience. It is this object, the state of of experience, which IS the state of interiority (e.g. the experience of feeling happy, being aware of a tree, etc.,etc.). X, Y, Z chemicals expressing 1, 2, 3 rules is most definitely NOT interiority.
That's why it a relationship of causation. If X, Y, Z chemicals expressing 1, 2, 3 rules were interiority, there would by no causation. If X, Y, Z chemicals expressing 1, 2, 3 rules were interiority, it would be the presence of experience itself. In pointing out X, Y, Z chemicals expressing 1, 2, 3 rules, we would be describing about states of experience. This is clearly not the case.
Not that this has much to do with what SX is saying, but the supposed "problem of emergence" seems to be preventing you for thinking of language in a worldly manner, as if human instances of conceptualisation needed to be spoken about in terms of classical ideas.
I agree that on a certain kind of reflection experience may seem to be a kind of interiority; but I don't agree if that is taken to support a claim that there is any kind of ontological interiority beyond the ordinary sense in which organs may be said to be interior to the surface of the body, for example.
I should also explain that for me the idea of "emergence of ideas from physical process" does not mean that ideas are 'something else' in any ontological sense. 'Emergence of ideas' should be read as 'emergence of ideation' or 'emergence of a more complex process from a lesser complex process'.
I read it but have not had the time to comment on it.
I call bullshit. I think this idea of concept and object is essentially an expanded version of subjectivity and objectivity and almost all metaphysics arguments like this (object/subject/concept/object) conflate to philosophy of mind problems. Nothing more.. despite your elitist assertions that it is otherwise and that I am just too ignorant on the matter. Just because you don't see this, doesn't mean it's not the case.
I'll read more Sellars.. I am dying to see how his inference-based economy is qualia (notice I don't say "leads to qualia" as that is not getting at the matter). Just because I acknowledged qualia, something I am sure is trying to be explained away, doesn't mean it is not a matter of debate.
Hi Schopenhauer. Sellars distinguished between the "mind-body" problem on the one hand, and the "sensorium-body" problem on the other and held that, though the two problems are related, the solutions to them are different. Sellars tackles the the "sensorium-body" problem most thoroughly in his Carus Lectures. He ultimately proposes a rudimentary form of emergence-based process metaphysics as his solution. His solution is compelling and somewhat original, but also highly speculative and clearly incomplete. Sellars was well aware of this, and even surmised that the conceptual tools necessary to flesh out such a solution would not develop within his lifetime.
Brassier's paper is (arguably) concerned primarily with the "mind-body" problem rather than the "sensorium-body" problem. Again, that is not to say that the two problems are unrelated, but just that the latter is not the topic of focus for this particular paper.
I'm glad AaronR has joined the discussion because one issue that may be a side-issue - but which trips me up here - is how the very idea of language that Sellars-Brassier are starting from is a 'scientific' idea of language. I got bogged down before in trying to understand 'objects' because of this problem: that Sellars-Brassier assume that the core basis of language is a kind of fact-finding, truth-seeking mission. That gives a certain shape to one's very notions of 'concept', 'language' and 'object' that I - coming from a lifetime of arts and communication - don't automatically share. I think of language as communication, story-weaving at its core. I realise that that way postmodernism (and possibly madness) lies, but I'm looking for the analytic route all the same :) I tend to think of this quasi-logical account of language as a subset of language as a whole, as one language-game among many, whereas they are treating the language of science as the exemplary basis of language, but making it look as if they're addressing language as a whole by using very simple examples about red and rot. (I hope I'm making sense in explaining this. )
I *am* confused about the *sequence* of Brassier's argument. When I quoted what I felt were odd presuppositions in paras 3 and 4 of the C & O paper, Sx, you answered with paragraphs from *later* in the paper as if they *preceded* what I was calling 'presuppositions'. It does feel to me as if the paper starts with his answer ('We gain access to the structure of reality via a machinery of conception') then rolls it out. But I think this may be to do with your wider familiarity with his work.
Many thanks for the chat about Sellars and links, to SX and Aaron. Even though I'm expressing reservations above, your remarks have made things a lot clearer to me.
Sellars, at least, was much influenced by the later Wittgenstein, so he's pretty sensitive to the multifariousness of language. A distinction that might be helpful is the one he draws between language as thought and language as communication. Though children acquire language through communication, what they acquire is a system of representation that constitutes the very activity of thought. This is not to say that thoughts themselves are linguistic episodes, but that the structure of thought is derived from and governed by the structure of language. Though there is a sense in which, for each speaker, language as communication is temporally and epistemically prior to language as thought, there is also a sense in which communication is only possible once we have already acquired the ability to think. One consequence of this is that expression-meaning at the level of thought is ontologically prior to expression-meaning at the level of communication: in order for communicated language to be meaningful, thoughts themselves must have meaning.
Thus when Sellars offers his functional role semantics, he is giving an explanation of how expressions come to be meaningful within thought (i.e. through their role in inference). Sellars, of course, takes empirical representational language (e.g. "the table is red") as exemplary of language as thought, because one of the main things we get up to as thinking beings is representing the world. This, of course, is an idea from Kant: the same concept RED that appears in the spoken judgment "the table is red" plays a role in our first-personal experience of the table as red. It is one of Sellars' main purposes in "Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind" and elsewhere to show that there is no coherent sense in which we can be said to experience the table as red, save through representing it (in language as thought) using the concept RED. Now, the kind of language you're after--of the story-telling variety--certainly presupposes our ability to experience things as red, and therefore presupposes that we already have in place a full-blooded system of language as thought for representing the world as it is.
The sense in which this language is scientific by its own lights is meager. However, another aim of Sellars', throughout his career, was to show that the concepts we employ in representing the world in thought are themselves influenced by our theoretical commitments. The commonsense way of approaching the world is, on his picture, already the byproduct of a great deal of theorizing. He shows this through his famous fictional account of the genius Jones, who postulates theoretical entities called "thoughts" and "impressions" to explain certain kinds of otherwise mysterious overt human behavior. The idea is that, in incorporating these theoretical notions into our representational system, employing them not only in thought but also in story-telling, etc, we get a better grip on how the world actually is. And this is the principle purpose of the physical sciences, as the natural outgrowth of our fundamental curiosity about the world. Scientific language just is a mature realization of this curiosity, and it consists in representations of how things are, just as thought (understood as the medium of perceptual experience) traffics in judgments of how things are. The succession of microphysical theories we see coming out of physics are just more and more sophisticated descriptions (or recipes for descriptions) of how things are.
Thanks a lot Glahn. It's time I read more Sellars. I was by the way using the word 'scientific' in a rather broad way to embrace human empirical curiosity.
I quite agree that the redness of tables is background knowledge for most grown-up language, including story-telling. I hesitate in accepting that it's 'language as thought' exactly, but that's because I'm rather obsessed with language as dialogue (including dialogue with oneself), and therefore with language as intrinsically communicable, as anyone working from Witt outwards might be. I'm not clear how either thought or communication can be prior to the other, but I'm not disagreeing about this, just commenting.
'How the world actually is' is a phrase Glahn uses. I remain puzzled about the supposed primacy or focal importance of 'objects' in this actual world. The Sellars' argument is rich and thoughtful: partly, that the very idea of 'inner episodes', of individual knowledge and reflection, depend on mutual discussion and understanding. This is part of the attack on the myth of the given, as I'm reading it, that the old idea of sense-data pinging on the individual perceiver is mistaken. I believe I've inadvertently understood some of this through reading McDowell who regards himself as following Sellars in some way.
Nevertheless, Sellars focuses on a 'red triangle' as his exemplary concept. What of the other ideas infants and children learn alongside ideas about objects? I am thinking of properties/qualities - is a 'mother' the object who claims that title, or the sort of person who does 'mothering' things? I am also thinking of the mini-politics of any life: the child learns, for instance, mine/Mummy's/for general use, and the implications of appearance and actions - what might happen if Dad has that look on his face? Some of these may be said to be 'about' objects, but they are non-physical, and are also about processes, qualities, emotions. In what sense are objects supposed to be more primary to our concepts than these other notions, except to physically-based sciences?
I am seguing to Brassier here. He doesn't really put an argument *for* objects, does he? His argument is some sort of ground-clearing about other matters, which does not make any kind of clear case for the importance of 'objects' - as against, say 'properties'.
I would welcome comment/criticism if anyone else is still interested in this topic :)
In the sense that it is objects which express concepts, rather than objects which are expressed by concepts. Logically, any state of existence, an object, is defined by itself rather than determined through a concept. Consciousness is perhaps the most telling example. Our experiences are actually objects. They are states of existence defined not by someone being aware of them, but rather by their presence as a, existing thought, feeling, experience. If I am, for example, to be happy, what is required is not awareness of happiness or some infinite concept that determines the presence of such a state, but rather an object: the existence of myself as a state of happiness. A mere concept of me being happy is never enough. We can think about the meaning of me being happy all we want, and how it is logically necessary, but it has no power to form a state where I am happy. An object is needed for that.
Brassier is trying to undo the mistake of holding concepts as primarily, the idea that the infinite of the concepts is what determines states of existence. The whole debate about correlationism pivots around the supposed need for concepts to define states of existence. Supposedly, objects need experience to exist because otherwise the meaning of concepts isn't present to define the object. Yet, it seems, there are objects we don't know about all the time. How can there be meaningful objects outside experience when, it seems, meaning is only given in experience?
In taking objects as primary, we side-step this dilemma completely. Objects, since they are defined in themselves, no longer require a "present" concept (i.e. be experienced) to be. Perhaps more critically though, the infinite meaning of concepts is unattached from states of existence. What exists no longer defines the meaning of a concept and vice versa. No longer does a "concept" need to be "present (i.e. experienced)" to be true. The objects we don't know about, which are defined in themselves, can express the infinite meaning of a concept even if no-one is experiencing it.
I see that this is your case, and is a case that can be argued. (a) I don't see how Brassier argues this without your help :)
(b) I don't see how you're not presuming the answer in your analysis. If objects were indeed 'defined in themselves' they would be primary. I don't see how an object is so defined, though. Objects are defined by their properties and relations. This idea of being 'defined in themselves' seems to me part of the 'myth of the given', what Sellars is arguing *against*. He has a much more convoluted argument for the primacy of our talk about objects and thence for 'objects'. Or am I misunderstanding this 'myth of the given' stuff?
[quote=SEP]Wilfrid Sellars’s Argument that the given is a myth, from “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”.
1. A cognitive state is epistemically independent if it possesses its epistemic status independently of its being inferred or inferrable from some other cognitive state.
[Definition of epistemic independence]
2. A cognitive state is epistemically efficacious — is capable of epistemically supporting other cognitive states — if the epistemic status of those other states can be validly inferred (formally or materially) from its epistemic status.
[Definition of epistemic efficacy]
3. The doctrine of the given is that any empirical knowledge that p requires some (or is itself) basic, that is, epistemically independent, knowledge (that g, h, i, …) which is epistemically efficacious with respect to p.
[Definition of doctrine of the given]
4. Inferential relations are always between items with propositional form.
[By the nature of inference]
5. Therefore, non-propositional items (such as sense data) are epistemically inefficacious and cannot serve as what is given.
[From 2 and 4]
6. No inferentially acquired, propositionally structured mental state is epistemically independent.
[From 1]
7. Examination of multiple candidates for non-inferentially acquired, propositionally structured cognitive states indicates that their epistemic status presupposes the possession by the knowing subject of other empirical knowledge, both of particulars and of general empirical truths.
[From Sellars’s analyses of statements about sense-data and appearances in Parts 1-IV of EPM and his analysis of epistemic authority in Part VIII]
8. Presupposition is an epistemic and therefore an inferential relation.
[Assumed (See PRE)]
9. Non-inferentially acquired empirical knowledge that presupposes the possession by the knowing subject of other empirical knowledge is not epistemically independent.
[From 1, 7, and 8]
10. Any empirical, propositional cognition is acquired either inferentially or non-inferentially.
[Excluded middle]
11. Therefore, propositionally structured cognitions, whether inferentially or non-inferentially acquired, are never epistemically independent and cannot serve as the given.
[6, 9, 10, constructive dilemma]
12. Every cognition is either propositionally structured or not.
[Excluded middle]
13. Therefore, it is reasonable to believe that no item of empirical knowledge can serve the function of a given.
[5,11, 12, constructive dilemma][/quote]
Sellars is attacking the idea that what we know about the world is given by some logical rule or experience. What is at stake is not the presence of objects in-themslves, but rather the notion they are defined by instances of the conceptual that we understand. Perhaps the most relevant aspect to this argument is understanding the distinction made in 1. and 2. It is the distinction between logic/conceptual/meaning and awareness of objects.
All instances of knowledge involve epistemic independence. When we know something, we understand a meaning which cannot be defined in any other way. This logical discintion, however, does not define knowledge of the empirical world. If I understand myself to be the president of the US, I know a concept, I have an idea, but this is "knowledge" useless for telling whether or not I am actually president. Since it is epistemic independent, it does nothing to support the contention I exist as the president of the US. It's not an observation of the world. I can't infer I am US president from merely understanding the concept. I might be. I might not be. If I am to tell I need to leave behind the epistemic independence of logic/concept/meaning and observe states from which I can infer whether or not I am US president.
If I do this, if I start thinking about and observing objects, to infer empirical knowledge, what I know no longer has "epistemic independence." Relying on something else, objects, to define what I know, about the world, rather than (attempting) to do it through a mere understanding which has appeared in my experience.
Knowledge of the world cannot be given by logic. To suggest a foundational rule, a foundational concept, which determines/enables knowledge of the world is incoherent. If I'm thinking in terms of a epistemic independent concept, I can't infer anything. I'm not taking part in observation which would allow me to learn what was happening in the world.
Some realists actually fall into participating in the "myth of the given" when trying to defend world independent of experience. When they insist the unexperienced world simply must (i.e. it is logically necessary) be as per state we have experienced or know about in the present, they are trying to define knowledge of the empirical world with logic/meaning/concepts. They are trying to pass off the epistemic independent concept, their imagined state of the unobserved world, as if it was an observation of an object which allowed us to infer something was true about the world.
The word "object" is being used by Brassier and others in an entirely generic sense, and is intended to subsume anything that anyone (i.e. "the subject") could possibly think of or come to know. This includes such things as properties, qualities, processes, etc. The discussion is (arguably) being had at a level of abstraction higher than even metaphysics, though Brassier is perhaps not as clear-cut on this point as, say, Wolfendale is.
I think what Brassier's doing *in this essay* can be summed up very naively: Bringing back the thing-in-itself. Now, he's definitely done some acrobatic legwork in other places, but, here, that's all this really boils down to. He says as much, in some part or another of this work. It's not that the 'correlationist' is wrong, per se, but that his or her argument can be exploited by people like Latour. Ok, but that shit's on Latour, not the 'correlationist.'
Laruelle still seems central. I've struggled with Laruelle. I think there's real insight there, but it's buried, princess-and-the-pea, under gaudy rhetorical folds of awful obscurantism (I say this as someone who appreciates Derrida, Deleuze, Heidegger & Foucault!). The whole 'non-philosophy' thing is, frankly, fucking childish. I understand 'philosophy', for L, has to do w/ 'decision' - but whatever. The whole stupid rhetorical thrust of 'non-philosophy' is to seem a step ahead, regardless of what he has to offer. (My suspicion is that everything of value in laruelle could be rendered in 30 pages or less if people's tenure didn't depend on sprawling exegesis) This essay only has worth if Brassier has some legit method of accessing the thing-in-itself. Apparently that method is Sellars. But I'm skeptical. (By the way, Hi everyone! And great job, jamalrob, this site is fantastic. The format is much sleeker. I'm a big fan)
I'm not sure about this: given that the essay is meant to address an objection (to realism), it ought to stand on it's own. It's an argument against an argument, not a positive argument for something. Granted, it's precisely that 'positive' side which still requires elaboration, but you get my point I hope.
I agree with you about 'non-philosophy' by the way, and incidentally, so does Brassier. I forget if it's in Alien Theory or Nihil Unbound, but he more or less makes one long extended complaint that Laruelle does too much posturing to set himself apart from what he calls 'philosophy', which really in fact only refers to a very narrow set of (French) references to define philosophy, and that in fact, Laruelle can be appropriated into philosophical without much loss of fidelity, as it were. One of his recent(ish) essays, 'Laruelle and the Reality of Abstraction' (in the edited collection Laruelle and Non-Philosophy does alot to situate him with respect the Kantian 'critical turn' and put him right into the 'philosophical' continuum.
I agree with this and disagree with Caslisbury that any elaboration or 'subtlization' of the master argument could make it any the more plausible.
"They muddy the water, to make it seem deep". Nietzsche
I think it is important also to emphasize that any "positive elaboration" must necessarily remain speculative; that is must be some kind of quasi-'inference to the best explanation', and could never be something subject to being empirically demonstrated. That such ideas should be empirically demonstrable is in essence the precise requirement that is implicitly, and incoherently, placed on meta-empirical ideas by such anti-realist arguments.
No "legit method" of "accessing the 'thing-in-itself'" other than the strictly empirical will ( ironically) ever be admitted by (most varieties of) idealists and anti-realists.
1.) Physical processes CAUSE sense, perception, and conception is not the same as saying
2.) Physical processes ARE sense, perception, and conception.
Another problem I see is that people simply change TERMINOLOGY and somehow this solves the problem. By making physical processes signs or semiotic relationships, this still does not account for how physical processes ARE sense, perception, and conception.
(A)From paragraph 32: ". Berkeley’s premise is a tautology, since the claim that one cannot think of something without thinking of it is one that no rational being would want to deny. But from this tautological premise Berkeley draws a non-tautological conclusion, viz., that things depend for their existence on being thought or perceived and are nothing apart from our thinking or perceiving of them."
(B)From paragraph 34: "The paradigmatic or Berkeleyian version of the Gem assumes the following form:‘You cannot conceive of a mind-independent reality without conceiving of it. Therefore, you cannot conceive of a mind-independent reality’. Note that the Gem does not assert that there is no mind-independent reality; it merely says that it must remain inconceivable. "
In the space of mere paragraphs, we're told both that the Gem asserts that "things depend for their existence on being thought or perceived" & that "The Gem does not assert that there is no mind-independent reality."
I think there's a reason for the slippage. Brassier/Stove's dismantling of the gem is a dismantling of Gem(A). It's true that only by illegitimately conflating ideatum and object can one argue that the mind-dependence of a conception entails the mind-dependence of that which is conceived of.
But, now to Gem (B) There seems to be confusion here. In an earlier post, Pneumenon illustrated brilliantly the misunderstanding at play.
[quote=pneumenon] For example, I am male. Therefore, if we don't make a distinction between conception simpliciter and conception ex hypothesi, then I can't conceive of something that isn't being imagined by a male. Thus, I am entitled to reject the idea of objects that are not conceived of by males.[/quote]
Pneumenon appears to think that Berkeley's point is as follows: When I conceive of an object, that object acquires the predicate 'being conceived of by me." I can't conceive of any object I'm not conceiving of, just like I can't be in any building I'm not inside of.
But - and this is blisteringly clear if you read even a smattering of Berkeley's Treatise - "the gem" has nothing to do with this banal point. It's a provocation: So you're conceiving of something unconceived? Yeah, so what's that thing like in your conception? Can't really talk about what it looks like,for example, because what something looks like is always a matter of how it appears to something else. (The obvious rejoinder is to invoke the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. But Berkeley's already tackled this well before he introduces "The Gem." ) The point is that, strip away everything in your conception that derives from how the thing appears to (or is encountered by) us - and what's left?
I don't usually jump at the chance of rallying for these kinds of arguments, but Brassier and Stove just absolutely casually butcher it.
I mean look at this, from paragraph 42.
" It might be objected that we need [ the meaning/sense of] Saturn to say what [the object] Saturn is; that we cannot refer to Saturn [the object] or assert that it is without Saturn [ qua meaning/sense] But this is false: the first humans who pointed to Saturn did not need to know and were doubtless mistaken about what it is: but they did not need to know in order to point to it."
This is downright embarrassing. Yeah, of course the first humans didn't need to have our current understanding of what saturn is to point to saturn. But they quite obvious had some sort of understanding or experience of what they were pointing to. Otherwise they wouldn't have pointed.
There is a deeper reason for the slippage: if one avoids illegitimately conflating ideatum and object, while still trying to maintain conceptual meaning is only expressed in experience, it leaves nothing conceptual available for the unknown world. Brassier moves on to Gem(B) precisely because he grants Berkeley a reprieve from the error of conflating ideatum and object.
If Berkeley accepts a "mind independent" world, avoids equating ideatum and object, then he is committed to something outside experience. Unknown objects are present on a grounds other than experience. But this creates a problem: what are the unknown states? And how are they even there?
The point of an unknown is something is yet to enter knowledge. It's a conceptual meaning not known to anyone. Unknowns do not fit within a position which holds "mind dependence" of conceptual meaning. Berkeley's own call to the meaning of concepts is turned against "mind dependence." We, indeed, cannot not know of something without having a concept of it. But this also means something else: there can't be something knowable unless is it conceptual (so allowing the possibly someone will know what it is).
Expression of the meaning of concepts cannot be limited to experiences, as the correlationism would have us believe. Objects just express the meaning of concepts too. Objects, in themselves, must express conceptual meaning, whether they understood by someone or not. Unknown states require the "independent world." We must grant unknown objects express conceptual meaning or else accept their existence is impossible (in which case, we make the error of equating ideatum and object).
In that sense I think that, despite appearances, Brassier (and his many predecessors, all of whom have for some reason done the same thing to this very same philosopher, for 'some reason') is not interested in an engagement, but a sort of ideological blowing off of steam. Of the scholars that study him seriously (Brassier is obviously not one of them), only Georges Dicker is one Im aware of who doesn't as a result of that study come away with a massive sympathy for him. There are the ones who ultimately reject his arguments, but almost wistfully and reluctantly, like Sam Rickless, and those that have their minds blown and just become Berkeleians (John Foster and A.A. Luce are examples -- it's astounding how captivated they became).
The case study of Berkeley in particular was actually one of my reasons for developing a sort of pessimism about philosophy generally, not about its aims, but about the discipline itself. It proved to me in a way that philosophers simply are not very good at their jobs and that, either due to lack of talent, effort, or genuine desire for rigor, those who practice philosophy are uniquely very bad at their own discipline in a way that say physicists or plumbers are not, and that therefore a career in philosophy is not worth pursuing. End rant.
In general, while I like much of Brassier's writing and argumentation,* his motivation seems often to simply be the most radical, bad-ass, willing-to-stare-into-the-void philosopher out there, steely and sharp in a world of soft, sappy half-thinkers. Nihil Unbound suffered badly from this. That said, the turn to Sellars is kind of interesting. Taking a second stab at his "Some Reflections on Language Games" & I'm really enjoying it, even if I'm not yet sure to what degree I sympathize with his project.
* This, for example, so economically damns an entire project: "An eliminative materialism that elides the distinction between sapience and sentience on pragmatist grounds undercuts the normative constraint that provides the cognitive rationale for elimination. "
I've come to think, as I got more seriously into philosophy, that this is just true of continental philosophy generally, but it doesn't always manifest as being 'steely and sharp,' but just being the most 'transgressive' in whichever way is most fashionable, by reversing old plays on words with new ones. I think it might just be a bankrupt tradition.
Not that the rest of philosophy is much better, but I think I'm at a point that I spent so much of my life on a certain discipline that it's very painful for me, coming to the realization how bad it is and how much of my life I wasted. I am coming to sympathize with laypeople and scientists who think philosophy is just a load of horse shit, and further that my previous bristling at these positions and desire to defend philosophy came from feelings of personal injury at a discipline I had spent so much time on being outed as worthless. But when you see something like this, I just can't help but feel like there's no denying it, even if it's painful. Time to move on and do something worthwhile with your life, and undo the damage reading philosophy has done to you. It's just a hard habit to kick, like a drug addiction, and I really do believe it's legitimately harmful the way a drug is, poisonous to thinking and maybe life too. It's like believing Deepak Chopra or something, professionalized charlatanism that wastes the intellectual efforts of otherwise promising young people.
I read shit SX writes and think, "do I sound like that? Am I ever going to sound like that?" and it just makes me cringe.
I think this is fair point to make, but I suspect that the source of the slippage goes beyond Brassier's own inattention but to the inattention of those who use the Gem as an argument in the first place. That is to say, it is the 'correlationist' who slips from 'we can't conceive of things without conceiving of them' to 'therefore things can only exist mind-dependently'. The purely negative result of the Gem ("a mind-independent reality is inconceivable") is illegitimately sublimated into a positive one ("therefore things can only exist mind-dependently"). As I read the paper, Brassier aims to attack the first, negative result. If, as a result, the positive one falls as well, then so be it.
So when you say that Barkeley's argument is essentially a provocation, it's a provocation that Brassier's paper is meant precisely to diffuse. §§33 puts the paper's intended result succinctly: "By implying that mind-independence requires conceptual inaccessibility, the Gem saddles transcendental realism with an exorbitant burden. But it is a burden which there is no good reason to accept." It's this 'burden', that the paper is meant to get rid of in order to clear the way to a positive project.
If it's a slam dunk argument, it wouldn't be a burden. It'd be a stop sign. To call it a burden is already to implicitly acknowledge it as a provocation. But Brassier, throughout, paints it as a wannabe formal knock-down argument. That's strange. But, so ok, mind-independence doesn't entail conceptual inaccessibility. But would Brassier be comfortable saying that a conception of a mind-independent watermelon as being pretty much how we spontaneously imagine a watermelon( but with no one around) more or less gets it right? I kinda doubt it what with all the scrambling for Laruelle and stuff. But so wait what's the problem with that spontaneously imagined watermelon ?
(btw I'm a little over halfway through Sellars' "Some Reflections on Language Games" & while I'm like viscerally enjoying its subtlety and precision, I'm a little confused about how it ties in with what's presented in the essay being discussed.)
But Brassier's realism isn't cashed out in term of phenomenality but in terms of epistemology: it's not a question of appearance, but a question of knowledge. How can we come to know things of the world if there is no "pre-established harmony between reality and ideality" (§§3)? If "thought is not guaranteed access to being [and] being is not inherently thinkable", then how does thought 'track' being? Then §§4:
"We gain access to the structure of reality via a machinery of conception which extracts intelligible indices from a world that is not designed to be intelligible and is not originarily infused with meaning. Meaning is a function of conception and conception involves representation—though this is not to say that conceptual representation can be construed in terms of word-world mappings. It falls to conceptual rationality to forge the explanatory bridge from thought to being."
The rest of the paper will not go on the 'forge' this bridge, but clear away the debris that stands in the way of it's being forged. This is what Laruelle is useful for (the negative moment). The bridge itself is something B. locates in Sellars's conception of rationality (the positive moment).
I found 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind' illuminating - in a way - in relation to this brassier paper, and that's what I think Street or another poster directed me to. I think we should start a thread on Sellars actually :)
Quoting csalisbury
Both of you seem to be asserting that Brassier and Stove have misunderstood and misrepresented Berkeley's argument, but neither of you have given an account of exactly how you think the argument has been misunderstood/misrepresented by them.
Csalisbury, I think your contention that the argument is merely a "provocation" is manifestly false. Anyone at all familiar with Berkeley's philosophy will know that he was not merely an epistemological anti-realist but a metaphysical idealist who made the strong ontological claim that "to be is to be perceived". This is certainly a metaphysical claim and he circumvented the obvious objection that an object cannot logically be equivalent either to any one perception, or to the sum of perceptions, of it by positing that an object can therefore only exist if it is perceived by an infinite mind (God).
Insofar as I'm aware of Berkeley (I haven't done a deep study of him), he is misunderstood frequently. There is actually clue to this in the claim of the "infinite mind (God)." Is the mind of God any of ours? How then can the things we experience said to be dependent on our experience of them, as is often the characterisation of Berkeley's argument? In arguing the "infinite mind of God" Berkeley agrees with the logical distinction between (our) perception of the object and its existence.
Berkeley's concerns are actually similar to those expressed by the direct realist in some respects. His call to experience is an attack on the coherency of various position which pose, supposedly, and external world outside conceptual meaning. How can there be something not of (any) experience if it is subject to someone's knowledge? Such contention is an incoherent. It's impossible for something to be known if it is outside what can be thought or spoken.
Indeed, one of Berkeley's concerns is exactly what Brassier's worried about here. Berkeley position, in many respects, is a flawed version of the exact point Brassier is trying to make here: that knowledge outside the conceptual is incoherent.
Where Berkeley fails is not in the metaphysical error of equating objects with existing perceptions, but rather in the gaps within his metaphysical account and the failure to understand conceptual meaning in distinct from the expression of a concept in an existing state of consciousness. Mistakes which see him speculate an infinite mind of God to account for (unknown) meaning when no such account is needed. Berkeley's failure is not a crass equivocation between existing perceptions (e.g. of existing people) and objects, but rather a failure to understand that conceptual meaning does not need to be given in a mind. What Berkeley fails to grasp is that conceptual meaning is an infinite and that this entails non-existence.
Someone take Old Yeller to the back and shoot him, for Christ's sake...
I think you're right Willow, Berkeley's position is more or less equivalent to direct realism insofar as the things perceived are understood by him to be exactly as they are perceived to be even when they are not being perceived by us. That is so according to Berkeley because they are eternally perceived by an infinite mind and it is according to the way that infinite mind perceives objects that we perceive them.
It would perhaps be more correct to say that the structure of reality gains access to us, and gives rise to perception, although even to say that seems to give the misleading impression that we are somehow separate from reality. While it is true that we cannot strictly conceptualize the pre-conceptual there is no good reason that I can see to doubt that the conceptual arises from, and that it embodies the structure of, the pre-conceptual, insofar as it seems obvious that the former arises within the 'matrix' of the latter. There wouldn't seem to be any coherent alternative 'story'.
So, reality gains access to us and we gain access to reality, but we are not conscious of the inseparability, and deceive our selves with reified ideas of separation due to linguistically generated misunderstandings.
?
But that's the point the essay denies! Everything in the essay is predicated on that being false. (Though I'm not sure what work 'strictly' is meant to be doing in the quote.)
It really isn't. The essay is saying the exact opposite: anything which may be known is, by definition, conceptual.- i.e. of concepts. Brassier argument is a turn against the "pre-conceptual" or "the world outside concept," since it doesn't allow for anything which can be understood.
We don't conceptualize the pre-conceptual. The conceptual (meaning expressed by states) is so regardless of what we do or do not conceptualise.
Yeah, but concepts without intuition are blind.
But, ok, there is a distinction between the conception and the object. It's accepted that we can only access the object through our own conceptions, tainted as they are with meaning, but that doesn't mean that we aren't conceiving of something that lies outside that meaning. The structure of our conception is derived from the structure of that which lies outside it.
But this would make us almost like programs, or vehicles of truth. We would be able to speak truthfully about that which lies outside the pale of meaning, but, despite our speaking truthfully, we literally would not be able to make sense of these truths. Like a sober, secular version of speaking in tongues.
Most certainly not. The object is not our conception. Our conception is an entirely different state in-itself. That's why we need intuition (i.e. brute understanding). For an object to exist does not define the presence of someone who understands it. Only the outside state of a person can do that. Without this intuition, the existence of experiences which are the understanding of things, no-one would know or understand anything.
This is very confused. Please cite some passages from the essay to legitimize (and clarify) these claims.
How do you mean?
The quote you cited as embarrassing earlier has a pretty good example:
"It might be objected that we need [ the meaning/sense of] Saturn to say what [the object] Saturn is; that we cannot refer to Saturn [the object] or assert that it is without Saturn [ qua meaning/sense] But this is false: the first humans who pointed to Saturn did not need to know and were doubtless mistaken about what it is: but they did not need to know in order to point to it."
Notice that Brassier is arguing that Saturn exists, that a meaning of Saturn he knows, is expressed in the presence of these individuals who don't know they are pointing to Saturn. Brassier is not saying that, somehow, he knows something non-conceptual (the "world outside conception" these people don't know about), but rather that the conceptual (Saturn) is expressed outside (or rather regardless of) our concepts. In the presence of the object of Saturn, whether we know about it or not, the meaning of Saturn is expressed.
Thus, Saturn is still present and people can point to it, even though no-one at the time understands what they are pointing as Saturn.
Sorry, it's taken so long to respond.
[quote=csal]We would be able to speak truthfully about that which lies outside the pale of meaning, but, despite our speaking truthfully, we literally would not be able to make sense of these truths.[/quote]
The spirit of The Gem - backlit by the reflections preceding its introduction in the treatise - is an attempt to force the reader to try to conceive of something without incorporating elements that can only derive from experience (encounter/appearing-to/etc.)
If we wish to think of things or events occurring outside the ambit of possible human experience, we cannot incorporate a single such element. In the circumstances we wish to conceive, there will be no-one to whom the object will appear - no one who will experience the event - so the presence of any such element would indicate that the entire conception is a fantasy which occludes the observer its smuggled in (like the Freudian fantasy of watching one's own conception, a moment during which one must necessarily be absent.) Again, the point is not that one can't think of something one isn't thinking of because one is thinking of it. The point is that one can't use elements that only come about through experience to conceptualize a situation that irrecusably (lol) precludes any such thing.
Since what's being excluded is that which derives from a (finite) perspective, it's natural to hone in on those elements which relate to vision. But, to my mind, what's most difficult is the exclusion of experienced time. Of course we can say that a year refers to nothing but the earth's rotation around the sun and, as such, will hold just as well absent sentient beings (the earth will still revolve.) But drop the passage of time as experienced and just how quickly does the earth revolve around the sun? We can certainly compare this duration to other durations, but we can't quite grasp what any of it means without bringing it back to our experience of some particular duration. And that experience is always relative to the temporal scale we inhabit (cf Kant's Critique of Judgment, the relevant section of which I'm too lazy to produce at this moment. But I'll furnish it if pressed.)
How rapidly do events happen in our absence, in the absence of any experience? In a sightless, soundless, tasteless, touchless world with no perspective from which to establish a spatial or temporal scale, how do the experienceless postsentient years unfurl? Try - really try - to imagine this.
I suspect this line of thought gets flak because of how simple and naive it is, accessible to even the non-specialist (if a tree falls...). Nevertheless, I can see no way past it.
So, absolutely, we can create a web of inferences from statements/facts about that which lies beyond experience, but the real question is: If we pause for a second, do we really have a sense of what we're talking about? Are we not tacitly making use of the scales and perspectives we inhabit in trying to understand the truths we utter?
Much of this comes back to one's concept of 'concept.' I take the Kantian view that a concept without intuition is empty - imagination is necessary. I gather that for Brassier/Sellars, a concept is something like a move in an inferential game. And this is what I was getting at with the idea of 'secular speaking-in-tongues.' Like Zizek's 'symbolic real' - We can do the math, we can see what checks out and what doesn't, but that doesn't mean we have any grasp of what we're talking about.
If a philosopher's stance is x, does that mean that every argument or persuasive paragraph that thinker employs must be approached as a stand-alone proof of x? Or does it mean rather that he hopes to suggest x through a host of disparate techniques considered together?
I'm sorry but I just don't think what you're saying has anything to do with what Brassier is getting at. I don't know how to respond.
I'm even later to this party. But since this text makes contact both with preoccupations of continental philosophy that I am much ignorant of, but find interesting, and with issues of analytic philosophy that I am more conversant with, I just decided to print and read the paper. I will comment soon.
This the problem Brassier is addressing. Such a world is meaningless. Brassier brings this-up precisely because the "independent world," separate to the conceptual, does not make sense. Unknown things must be something. They must have a conceptual expression to qualify as existing states. Without this conceptual expression, no "how" to the unfurling of the world can be defined. Hence conceptual expression is not, as is commonly thought, a mere feature of awareness in experience but rather of objects too.
Thus, Saturn is present (object), and is Saturn (concept expressed by the object), and can be pointed to, even when no-one holds the concept in experience.
Indeed, but's that a strawman. Brassier is taking about expression of objects, not what we are aware of in our experience. The fact we are using our own scales and perspectives to understand something (including objects in the absence of our experience) has never been contested. Brassier is talking about something else which has no impact on the fact that what we know is always contained within our perspective.
This is decidedly not what Brassier is saying. It's almost the opposite. I'm sincerely confused as to why you think Brassier is saying something like this.
[quote=brassier] Thought is not guaranteed access to being; being is not inherently thinkable
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The real itself is not to be confused with the concepts through which we know it.
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[/quote]
He's describing difference between concepts expressed in expereince and objects there. Objects are never the means by which we know them (our experiences of an object). What this means is not that objects don't express concepts, but rather that such expression is NOT the presence of our experiences. Here he is pointing out our thoughts about objects are not the objects themselves.
I am unsure if the severe criticisms of Latour and Fichte (and the comparatively milder criticisms of Deleuze and Meillassoux) are fair since I am unfamiliar with them. His targets as he describe them are indefensible, for sure. Some of the criticisms of Berkeley (maybe not all) seem fair but this form of idealism -- esse est percipi -- is an easy target.
I have been puzzled by Brassier's reliance on the "thing in itself" as opposed to the thing "for us". While I was reading Concepts and Objects, I was anxiously awaiting for some positive characterization (however abstract) of the "in itself" but the only thing Brassier provided were vagues gestures in direction of Sellars. It's possible Sellars has an account of the noumenon that I overlooked because it was a part of his philosophy that I had found unconvincing (and it's been 8 years since I read O'Shea), and also, my favorite Sellars' inspired philosophers dispense with this notion altogether. Maybe it is meant to be adequately illustrated by Brassier's discussion of Saturn.
So we come to this part of the text. The discussion of Saturn seemed confused to me. There appeared to be an alternation between true but trivial claims and obscure conclusions that depend on one accepting false dichotomies, as if the refutation of Berkeley's idealism was sufficient to vindicate Brassier's ill explained transcendental realism.
Brassier usefully distinguish 'Saturn' (the name), Saturn (the sense; the Fregean Sinn) and Saturn (the "referent"; the Fregean Bedeutung). But those distinctions still aren't quite precise enough. Following Wiggins, I would distinguish the sortal concept 'planet', which is part of the conception one may have of Saturn, as the sort of thing that it is, from the mode of presentation of Saturn, the Fregean sense Saturn of which this conception is a part. They are not the same thing since two persons can share the same conception of Saturn as a planet and have it presented to them under two different modes of presentation (compare the famous cases of Hesperus and Phosphorus, or Afla and Ateb, discussed by Frege). Oftentimes, when Brassier mentions the 'concept' Saturn, he seems to mean the sortal concept ('planet') rather than the Fregean singular sense, or mode of presentation of Saturn, as this is usually understood in analytic philosophy.
One gesture that Brassier makes towards explaining what Saturn in itself is is to argue that one can refer to Saturn without knowing what Saturn (precisely) is. This is true. Following Putnam, we can argue that it is possible to refer to some sample of water, and re-identify it, or identify it with other samples of the same stuff, without knowing that being H2O is what it is (essentially) for something to be water. But this hardly means that one thereby means to refer to water as it is in itself (something we know not what) as opposed referring to it as being potentially answerable to a conception of what it is (e.g. as falling under some determinate sortal concept or other, we don't yet know which one). Before it has been fully investigated, people who refer to bits of stuffs can already understand that there are some (more or less) essential, or regular, properties that make it the sort of stuff that it is. This is a condition for the reference to be objective at all rather than being a reference to the occurrent and non-repeatable experience that it provoques in us.
Hence, people who refer to Saturn without knowing that it is a planet must at least know that it is something like a 'celestial body', say, that is, something objective that can be seen in the sky and will likely not reappear under the bed. This means that Saturn, thus conceived, falls under a determinable (vague) sortal concept that awaits further determination or revision. But the sortal concept under which it falls, however imprecise, still is a part of our conception of Saturn, and partly determinative of what it is.
Brassier of course accepts that the 'concept' (what he calls Saturn) is determinative of what Saturn is, as something answering to our conception of it. What he denies is that Saturn's being is thereby determined (at some point he says "circumscribed" but doesn't explain this term). This claim can have two readings, one that is quite trivial and another one that is quite implausible. The first one simply is the denial of Berkeleyan idealism, that our concept (Saturn) makes Saturn exist. OK. This seems trivially false (unless one is an idealist).
(Let me note in passing that there also remains an equivocation due to Brassier's failure to distinguish the Fregean sense of 'Saturn' from the sortal concept under which Saturn falls. The trouble is that under one account of Fregean senses (inspired by Kripke and Putnam, and further refined and defended by Gareth Evans and John McDowell) singular senses, such as the senses of proper names, or demonstrative expressions, are object dependent. But I will reserve discussion of this issue to another post. Let us just grant the denial of Berkeleyan idealism, or of the "Gem" argument that this and other idealisms allegedly depend on.)
According to the second reading, for Saturn to exist is independent of the sortal concept under which it falls when we think of it, perceive it, or talk about it, as whatever it is that it indeed is (in this case, arguably, a planet). But this is quite implausible. The reason is that reference just can't get any grip on anything objective without some minimal conceptual ground with which to anchor conditions of persistence and individuation that determine what it is one is referring to (in thought, talk, or demonstratively).
It would be easy to work out an example for an object like Saturn, but a simpler example is the case of a lump of bronze that materially constitutes a statue of Hermes. Can one point out demonstratively to 'this object' while being agnostic about its existing as a statue or as a heavy lump of stuff? Brassier, it seems, would need to acknowledge that we can only refer to it as something or other (i.e. as what it is). But what becomes of his claim that, in addition to being something that we refer to as what it is, it also is something in itself? Is that "it", that it is "in itself" still existing after we have hammered flat the lump of bronze and thereby destroyed the statue? It seems that the answer crucially depends on whether we are talking about the statue or the lump of bronze. But then there is no "it" existing independently of the what it is that is self-sustained in existence for an extended period of time independently of what it is. How long it remains in existence, and hence continues to be whatever it is "in itself" (if this makes sense at all) seems to depend crucially on what it is. Yet, Brassier seems to want to deny this.
You can understand what motivates his denial though.
Do sortal concepts (or sortal conceiving) exist in the absence of conceiving beings?
If no, and if Saturn's independence of sortal concepts is implausible, then there cannot be a Saturn without such beings.
If yes, then what exactly is this 'minimal conceptual ground' which is independent of conceiving beings? And how can we maintain such a ground without reverting to idealism?
The closest thing to a positive characterization of an alternative comes in section 29:
[quote=Brassier]The scientific stance is one in which the reality of the object determines the meaning of its conception, and allows the discrepancy between that reality and the way in which it is conceptually circumscribed to be measured. This should be understood in contrast to the classic correlationist model according to which it is conceptual meaning that determines the ‘reality’ of the object, understood as the relation between representing and represented.[/quote]
I'm not scientifically trained but I have my doubts that scientists see themselves as 'measuring the discrepancy between really and its conceptual circumscription.' I'm not really sure what 'measure' is even supposed to mean here.
In any case, it seems like Brassier wants is a radically nonconceptual...something (ground/matter/x?). A something from which concepts can arise, concepts which grant (necessarily limited) access to the nature of that something, but which, being necessarily limited, cannot claim to ever exhaust it.
As to this:
[quote=PN]Hence, people who refer to Saturn without knowing that it is a planet must at least know that it is something like a 'celestial body', say, that is, something objective that can be seen in the sky and will likely not reappear under the bed. This means that Saturn, thus conceived, falls under a determinable (vague) sortal concept that awaits further determination or revision. But the sortal concept under which it falls, however imprecise, still is a part of our conception of Saturn, and partly determinative of what it is.[/quote]
Heartily in agreement. I really don't know what Brassier was thinking. This is an amateur error.
This is a strawman because Brassier is not attacking the conceptual nature of anything that we know. Indeed, he makes exactly the same criticism: that a state must have conceptual expression, else be incoherent, as it isn't any specific finite state. "Meaningless" independent worlds are Brassier's targets here.
You've completely missed the role of the conceptual in Brassier's argument. His argument about Saturn is dealing in anything but vagueness. It's about a specific instance of knowledge, Saturn as the planet Saturn, and when this is present. His entire point is that Saturn doesn't fall under a vague sortal concept at all. It is, in the instance of the example, understood to be something it is not (e.g. the face of a mighty sky god), while the fact it is the planet Saturn is unknown. It is not about what awaits whether determination or revision (those are different instances of knowledge!!! ), but rather about specific instance of knowledge and how the relate to specific conceptual expression of an object.
Brassier IS NOT attacking that people understand Saturn in various ways conceptual ways, some right (bright light in the sky, the planet Saturn) and other wrong (mighty sky god). Rather he is pointing out that the conceptual expression of Saturn is present even when no-one understands Saturn to be there. Here the way Saturn is "sorted" conceptually by us at a given time has no relevance to Brassier's point. He's pointing out the object Saturn expresses the meaning of Saturn no matter how we might understand it.
Brassier is actually arguing the conceptual expression of Saturn is independent of the presence of our concepts (i.e. it is present whether or not Saturn is present in our knowledge; the position which avoids the idealism of saying someone needs to know the conceptual expression of Saturn for an object with such meaning to exist), as opposed to suggesting it is independent conceptual expression. The definition of reference is maintained because Saturn still expresses the concept that defines its reference to a statement. Hence those who don't know about Saturn ("It's a mighty sky being") or know about it in some other way ("bright light in the sky" ) are still talking about Saturn. Despite not knowing the concept of Saturn, they are talking about the object which expresses the concept of Saturn.
That's a misplaced question. Conceptual expression doesn't exist. It is a question of logic, not of states existence. Existing objects express concepts, they aren't the presence (existence) of concepts. Someone conceiving, therefore, has no need to exist do avoid the incoherence of things without concepts. Concepts are expressed regardless of whether we know about them. Both in terms of present objects (if an object exists, then it is there expressing concepts) and in other logical truths which don't deal with the definition of existing things (e.g. 2+2=4, the idea of a tree, etc.,etc. )
Saturn is not independent from conceptual expression. Brassier is not making any such suggestion. Rather he is pointing out that the presence of someone experiences is not required to define conceptual expression, as it isn't a state of existence. Objects are what exists or does not exist.
Where? Where does he make this criticism? (bonus points if you cite a passage that hasn't already been cited in this thread.)
Following Frege (or maybe, Wiggins' construal of Frege in his The Sense and Reference of Predicates: A Running Repair to Frege's Doctrine and a Plea for the Copula) I tend to distinguish conceptions (our specific, yet communicable, understandings of a concept) from concepts. A general concept (such as a property) predicated of an object yields a truth value, true or false, accordingly, whether the object has or doesn't have the property. All those notions (concept, object, truth value) belong to the realm of reference (Bedeutung) according to Frege. (Which is rather more restrictive than to say, with Quine, that they are values of bound variables). Sortal concepts are a special kind of general concepts rather unlike properties or relations. That's because objects can't have them accidentally. An object such as Saturn can't cease to be a planet, just like President Obama can't cease to be a human being. If something (a large celestial mass, say) ceases to constitute a planet, for some reason, then this celestial mass can't constitute Saturn anymore. It constitutes, at best, a remnant of Saturn. So, sortal concepts are rather akin to essential properties. But it can't be an a posteriori law of nature (something empirically discovered) that Saturn essentially is a planet. It is rather more akin to a conceptual truth.
We grasp sortal concepts through forging conceptions of objects (understandings of what they are). Sometimes, we also contribute in setting up some of the conditions of their existence, as is the case for functional artifacts and many social objects (monetary tokens, chess pieces, etc.) Our conceptions are, according to Wiggins' Frege, the senses (Fregean Sinne) of predicates that refer to concepts. A conception just is an understanding. It may be correct or incorrect and hence is beholden to the object it aims at being an understanding of (or of the laws of nature the object is governed by) for its correctness. Sortal concepts determine the criteria of persistence and individuation of objects that fall under them. Someone's conception of the sortal concept under which an object such as Saturn falls can be mistaken. The reason why this conception (how it is understood for something to be a planet) is beholden to Saturn for its correctness is because Saturn is the focus of a scientific inquiry. This inquiry is objective just because it has a point -- it discloses interesting and predictable features of phenomena, and objects (such as Saturn) as resilient patterns in the midst of those phenomena. We can adjust our conceptions of object in order to track the objective features that they really have, but this means no more an no less than that our conceptions of the objects that populate some empirical domain (astronomy, say) successfully discloses patterns that we are interested in (because they afford prediction, control, explanation, etc.).
What empirical inquiry reveals is first and foremost the discloseability of intelligible objects within some intelligible mode of empirical investigation (which need no be scientific). Discolseability is a modal notion. Actually existing objects, and the empirical domains that are a part of, need not be actually disclosed in order for them to exist, i.e. to be discloseable. So, thus far, there is no threat of idealism involved in the Fregean account of sortal concepts.
What I was invoking with the idea of a "minimal conceptual ground" just is a minimal understanding of the objective sortal concept an object may fall under when it is identified empirically (maybe perceptually) as being a material object at all (rather than, say, an utterly confused bundle of sensations). I am not claiming that this understanding must be actual in order for the object to exist. My point rather is that if we abstract from even such a minimal understanding of the persistence and individuation criteria that determine what an object might be, then we can't make sense of it potentially being the focus of a protracted and systematic empirical inquiry into what it really is. That is, we must start with some understanding in order for our empirical investigation (our experiences) to rationally bear on our initial understanding (that's the inescapable theory ladenness of experience). But since there always must be some such initial understanding, and this understanding is at play in acts of receptivity (empirical inquiry) this background is transcendental, in the Kantian sense. This transcendental background consists in the discloseability (to us) -- of objective Fregean concepts -- not subjective conceptions. It is not transcendent. Concepts are 'objects' of empirical inquiry. So this background is in play, and objects can exist, even before, or without, any actual understanding (conceptions) by us. And yet, those objective concepts only are objective inasmuch at the patterns that they potentially disclose are intelligible to us (rational embodied enquirers). One may call that conclusion conceptual idealism (or pragmatism). But I think such an 'idealism' is innocuous from a naturalistic point of view since it also is a form of realism and it furnishes an account of the objectivity of empirical judgment.
Quite agreed. Brandom offers little improvement over Sellars on this issue, which is why I mostly rely on McDowell and Haugeland for suitable correctives to Sellars' account of experience.
I am glad you noticed too. Maybe I should have read the whole thread before commenting.
(On edit: I answered below, at long last)
I think this is an important observation, but I see this more as a challenge for Brassier to address, not a problem for his conception of things in and of itself. For example (to reel off an immediate thought), so what if we 'tacitly make use of the scales and perceptives we inhabit in trying to understand the truths we utter'? I'm not sure that anything Brassier says precludes such a use, nor that such a use would in fact be problematic for the rationalist realism that Brassier is trying to advocate for. In fact, isn't the whole point of the paper to establish that even if we make use of specifically 'human' resources - perception, conceptualization, etc - none of this precludes realism? One thing to note is that elsewhere (in his paper "Nominalism, Naturalism, and Materialism"), Brassier in fact does try to explicit address how it is that meaning functions (in what is more or less a recapitulation of Sellars's theory of 'picturing'). The upshot is that meaning is a relation between words and other words, insofar as words are themselves objects:
"The criterion of pictorial adequacy is formulated using our most extant conceptual categories and, as such, is internal to our signifying scheme and dependent upon our predicative resources, yet it can still be used to track the correlation between conceptual order and real patterns. [How? Because...] meaning is not a relation: meaning statements establish metalinguistic correlations between words and other words rather than a metaphysical relation between words and things. The basement level of language consists of pattern-governed connections between natural--linguistic objects and other physical objects. Words do not depict reality because of what they mean but because of physical connections between the semantic regularities obeyed by speakers and the physical patterns in which these semantic regularities are embodied ... These uniformities are incarnated in phonetic, graphic, or haptic patterns, as well as behavioral ones. They are exhibited in the uniformities of performance that constitute pattern-governed linguistic behavior. But these patterns reflect espousals of principle that constitute linguistic competence."
In terms of your objection, I think in such an account there is in fact a way to respond to conceptualization mererly being a 'symbolic real', or in the famous AP term, "a frictionless spinning in a void" - namely, that such a spinning takes place only by way of the friction provided by dint of language's being an 'object among objects', and not a ephemeral 'mirror' of the world, as it were. Whether this account is itself adequate is an open question, but these at least might be the rudiments of a Brassierian reply.
Thanks for such a detailed reply!
I'm in thoroughgoing agreement that some kind of transcendental background is necessary to get cognition going. It will not do to begin with raw sense data and nothing but.
But just what is the ontological status of these sortal concepts? Do they exist (insist? subsist?) waiting to be discovered? Are they somehow baked into the objects they determine?
Since "planet" is the sortal we've been playing with, it seems a good candidate for close examination.
Yet (as you noted on the Quine thread) there exists a certain celestial mass that has ceased to constitute a planet. Is there no longer Pluto, only a remnant of Pluto?
As you probably know, the revised definition of planethood responsible for Pluto's exile was established by a vote. This vote was motivated by the discovery of new celestial bodies which, according to the definition which afforded Pluto planethood, might themselves qualify as planets.
The reason for Pluto's change of status was not a realization that our conceptions of it were mistaken; rather a new definition of what "planet" meant was [I] constructed [/I].
Now whether or not a given body satisfies the definition of planet indeed depends on the characteristics of the object itself. But, as the vote illustrates, the very concept of 'planet' is a contingent human construction, informed equally by empirical discovery and categorizational expediency. While we may assume that pluto existed before humans, it makes little sense to say that the sortal planet did.
(This is unpolished and I have more to add but im posting from my phone at a bar because I'm itching to get something out. I may refine and add-to soon)
They are ontologically co-eval with the objects that fall under them. So the sortal concepts have the same ontological status, that is, the very same grade of objectivity, as the objects that fall under them. For instance, a particular rabbit (Fluffy, say) may fall under the sortal concept oryctolagus cuniculus. Understanding, and investigating, the sort of thing Fluffy is goes hand in hand with investigating the life form that it belongs to, the species, something like an Aristotelian immanent form.
In the case of a functional artifact such as a can opener, its function, as the kind of tool that it is, and the context withing which it operates, which includes the intentions of its designers and users (mostly) determine what it is.
Objects of scientific inquiry -- so called natural kinds (including chemical substances or elements) -- sometimes fall under sortal concepts that are partially constituted by the pragmatic point of the scientific practice that discloses them. In all cases, for both entirely 'natural', or (partially or mainly) socially constituted objects, the sortal concepts are 'baked' into the objects that fall under them, indeed. This is just to say that something can't exist appart from existing as an exemplar of the kind of object that it is, whatever we may happen to know (or decide) about it. It is only discloseable or thinkable as such. (This doesn't rely on the fallacy of the Gem, I don't think. ) It nevertheless makes good sense to say that natural kinds (one particular kind of sortal concepts) are discovered rather than invented, since, unlike socially constituted objets (such as dollar bills) we aren't responsible for the conditions under which they come to be instantiated.
No object ever ceases to be the kind of object that it was just because some definition has changed (unless the sortal concept is entirely socially constituted, and the objet falling under it is instituted by a performative act). Pluto would cease to exist altogether if Pluto itself was materially altered (or some of its relational properties that is part of the definition of a planet changed) -- through losing mass, say -- and in that case the residual mass left behind could be called a remnant of Pluto, no longer a planet, and no longer Pluto.
If there occurs a conceptual revision within a scientific practice, and "planet" is given a new definition, we are entitled to say that Pluto still exists as a planet, under the old definition, and Pluto* doesn't exists anymore as a planet* under the new definition. Inasmuch as both the old and the new definition each have a point within different scientific (sub)-practices, they can both single out an object, just not the same, on pain of equivocation (and violation of Leibniz's Law).
Yes, I agree. But it was constructed with a view towards achieving more coherence and perspicuity in a classification scheme. The view that ought to be resisted (I would urge) is that we can single out objects as they are in themselves appart from the way they are individuated within the schemes that express our understandings of them. Those understandings can't be separated from our practical and/or theoretical interests in those objects, and the systematic relations (laws and norms) that they bear with other objects and phenomena in the specific empirical domain that they populate (e.g. the cosmos).
I am unsure why you would think that, though I wouldn't phrase it exactly like that (as sortal concepts existing). All I am saying is that, whatever your definition of a planet might be, assuming only that it has a point (as part of an intelligible conceptual scheme) and isn't utterly confused or incoherent, planets existed as planets, and were thus discloseable as such, for as long as there have been planets. Similarly for rabbits and the life forms that they instantiate. An animal can't come into existence before the life form that it exemplifies (or so I would argue).
I am quoting myself because I want to preemptively address a possible objection, but I don't want to dilute the main point of the previous post.
I was discussing a case, or a possible construal, of an episode of 'conceptual revision' (scare quotes explained later), where the proposed revision can be taken to replace, though not annihilate, the point of the old concept. Hence it is still legitimate to say that Pluto still is a planet (old definition), even though Pluto* isn't a planet* (and never was).
The objection is that this way of construing things makes it nonsense to say that Pluto (or whatever you want to call it) still exists but isn't a planet anymore. It is indeed nonsense to say this, and it rests on an equivocation between Pluto and Pluto*, but I must explain why it nevertheless makes sense to say that Pluto still exists (as a celestial body), and is the selfsame object that people knew about before the episode of conceptual revision.
The proper construal of this episode of 'conceptual revision' may be suggested by Putnam's discussion of the meaning of 'water' in The Meaning of "Meaning". It is often proper to credit early users of a concept, who had the old understanding (and were relying on the old definition) proleptically with an inchoate grasp of the new concept, or, at the very least, to ascribe to them a standing rational obligation to be open to good reasons that motivate the 'conceptual revision' (so called). Hence, what occurs isn't conceptual revision at all (that is, a revision of a Fregean concept), but rather a revision of the conception people had of the concept that always had been inchoately understood and correctly referred to. This inchoateness needs not even be a nascent state of subjective undertanding, but -- as in the case discussed by Putnam, of 'water', a natural kind concept that singles out a sort of substance initially referred to deictically by means of an exemplar, and/or by means of a prototypical definition -- rather depends on external factors: e.g. as of yet unknown features of the world (such as the chemical composition of water) that contribute to securing the reference of our concept-names.
Hence, for the case of Pluto, it isn't unfair to credit older folks with the true belief that Pluto now is the selfsame object that they always have (correctly) known as 'Pluto', event though they once incorrectly thought it to be a planet*. What they were understanding to be the conditions for something to be a 'planet' just was an incorrect conception of the selfsame concept (planet*) that has now more perspicuously been expressed with the new definition -- a definition that excludes Pluto from its extension.
I am not arguing that this is the most accurate description of the recent historical Pluto case, but it may be a good construal of very many episodes of 'conceptual revision' (or conceptional revision, ought we to awkwardly say) encountered when progress occurs in our understanding of concepts that we already were (or should have been) aware to have a fallible understanding of. Putnam's own 'water' case may be more fitting. And also, such an account clears up some puzzles about proper names, natural kind terms, identity and reference. One may refer to Gareth Evans: The Varieties of Reference, especially the chapter on proper names, for more background on this neo-Fregean gloss on Putnam (and Kripke).
I am only quoting and responding to this paragraph because it nicely hones in on the ground of my perplexity with Brassier's idea of the thing itself, which you construe (possibly faithfully) as an object's self-expression of its own meaning. Even if we grant Brassier the possible intelligibility of such a notion -- which I am prepared to do for the sake of argument -- I don't see how it can be squared with the idea that this object can be pointed at (i.e. referred to deictically). That's because the understanding that we have of an object isn't something over and above the object's spatial and temporal extension. (I am saying this loosely without committing myself to perdurantism; since I rather favor endurantism regarding substances). Our understanding rather singles it out together with the spatial extension that it has, and temporally delimits the conditions of its coming into, and going out, of existence.
The example that I gave earlier was that of the lump of bronze that constitutes, over some finite time period, a statue of Hermes. One can point at the statue (and thereby also point at a lump of bronze) while being unclear over what kind of object it is. Now, Brassier would say that the object pointed at exists regardless of one's knowledge of what it is. (See paragraph 42). But what object is it that Brassier believes is being pointed at? There are at least two of them -- a statue, and a lump of bronze -- and arguably an indefinite number of different objects that different possible understandings of the ways in which the empirical world can be carved up could single out as the object being pointed at. It could be Hermes' nose, of even, supposing Hermes were a person, Hermes himself (with the demonstration of his statue being a conventional means of referring to him).
Brassier objects to the idea that understanding what Saturn is (the concept Saturn) is required for the object pointed at to exist. He objects that this requirement would commit one to conceptual idealism. I would like to agree but I must ask what "object pointed at" is he is talking about? What we are committed to, with 'conceptual idealism', might not be the claim that our having a conception of the object makes it exist, or is necessary for its existing since the object could indeed preexist our conception of it, in the manner of a living Triceratop that existed a long time ago, and could even dispense entirely with our ever coming to that understanding. What we are committed to, rather, only is the claim that for an object of a specific kind to be existing, at any given time, just is for it to be potentially answerable to a correct conception of that kind of objects. In Fregean terms, for the object to exist just is for it to fall under the intelligible and objective concept (regardless of anyone actually grasping the concept) that determines what kind of object it is (together with its persistence and identity conditions).
This, and earlier paragraphs that I didn't quote, is very nicely put. I think you would enjoy Sebastian Rödl's Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect. This treatise nicely complements Gareth Evans' The Varieties of Reference, that focuses rather more on the spatiality of embodied experience.
I get your point. But I do think it's reasonable to take the argument that it is impossible to conceive of that which is unconceived, when coupled with the idea that what can be conceived is only that which can be perceived, as leading inevitably to " Else est percipi" and thus to be an argument that perception must be the essence of existence.
@Pierre-Normand
Haven't had much free time recently. Just a placr holder to let you know I plan to respond tonight or tomorrow.
You are missing that, in that instance, the statue is named. You began by pointing at a statue. The object you were thinking of has been there all along. Similarity, Brassier begins by talking about Saturn. What object someone is pointing at is always, assuming a coherent claim about the world is made, given in talking about some state of the world (statue, Saturn, etc.,etc.).
Perhaps more critically, Brassier's argument doesn't merely concern itself with a specific object. He has a major point about the logical expression of any object. In making the argument objects don't need experience to exist, Brassier is making a metaphysical argument not an empirical one. In talking about "the thing-itself" one doesn't actually point to any object at all. That's not what the concept is about. One is stating a logical truth about any object, not saying any particular thing exists. It is to say how the statue, the lump of bronze, each atom, the many collection of atoms, Hermes' nose, an object representing Hermes, etc.,etc., etc. (extended to all objects), are given in themselves, as opposed to being dependent on something else to be logically defined.
This doesn't make sense because existence is never in question here. All that deal with is the meaning of an object. It says: "For an existing object to make sense, it falls under an intelligible and objective concept, which is how its defined as a distinct object."
What it takes for an object to exist, that an object is present rather than not, isn't spoken about.
Yes, it is rather a misleading notion isn't it?
Bluntly: our understanding of things would remain 'correlationist' since those scales and perspectives are, indeed, for-us. (Spatial or temporal) 'Perspectives' and their accompanying scales can only be introduced metaphorically into a conception of a sentience-less world. (I know some latch onto the theory of relativity to try to show how perspectives are indeed part of space-time itself, but I take it we both understand the misunderstanding at play here and can safely pass it over.)
Perhaps such scales and perspectives can afford us access (though 'access,' as tgw rightly notes, is a troublesome metaphor) to that which isn't for-us. Perhaps they can afford us access, that is, to non-perspectival 'truths.' But if we can only understand those truths by retaining a perspectival supplement - well I think this leaves us four options:
(1) We can speak truths about the in-itself, but our understanding will be forever correlationist. A psychoanalytic metaphor: We 'speak' unconscious truths while remaining deaf to them, entangled, as we must be, in quasi-fictitious accounts of ourselves. These truths could be heard by an analyst, if there were one, but there is not.
(2) We're wrong. There really isn't an it-itself. Strong correlationism.
(3). It would be nice to talk about the in-itself, and man there probably even is one, but there's no way to get at it. Weak correlationism.
(4)Panpsychism
I don't really see any other way. I read Brassier's Nominalism, Naturalism & Materialism about a year ago and found it pretty unconvincing. I'm sure we can fruitfully approach speech-patterns (or concept-patterns) as natural processes and glean some insights. But the idea that we might discover some connection between those patterns and the patterns of the things they represent (but not mirror!) seems hyper-speculative. How would one go about demonstrating that a pattern of ?•orange?• occurences is structurally linked to some kind of extralinguistic pattern involving (constituting?) oranges? Harder still: How would go about linking that speech-pattern to orange-patterns that are independent of the orange's incorporation into a speaker's culture?
If sortals are co-eval with the objects that fall under them, then how are we to consider the Pluto case? Since it came down to a vote, do we take it on faith that the right description of the sortal planet was championed by the majority; ought we to believe that the minority view of what 'planet' means lost because the true description will always find support among the greatest number of scientists? Or is it that there may be temporary diversions down wrong paths during particular historical eras (e.g. the luminiferous aether) but that scientific inquiry is inherently self-correcting, slowly drawing itself toward the final, true, definition?
Or should we say instead that had the minority view prevailed, that would indeed be the correct definition?
[this is tangential, but another reflection. If sortals are co-eval with the objects that fall under them, this means, of course, that they don't pre-exist (acknowledging the vagueness of 'exist' here) the objects which 'instantiate' them. Note how strange this term is here. When one says 'x instantiates z', it generally means that x depends on something that does not depend on it, that x actualizes z in a particular, contingent circumstance. But, in your usage, not only does x rely on z, but z relies on x. The material conditions of x's existence make possible the sortal which it 'instantiates.' x instantiates z at the same moment x makes z 'exist.' X depends on z which depends on x which depends on z which depends....]
Everything you've written about sortals seems to imply human purpose and understanding. Indeed you said as much in the Quine thread.
[quote=PN]But there is a seeing as, a sortal concept, that makes something -- or rather singles it out as -- a bean. The question that can't possibly be answered through appeal to 'things as they are in themselves' is "How many objects are there in the pod?". Atoms are objets, so are bean parts, bacteria, and two beans stuck together may count as an object (for some purpose or other). Strip away all purpose and understanding (by us) and you dispense with all sortal concepts. [/quote]
"Strip away all purpose and understanding (by us) and you dispense with all sortal concepts."
Taken in conjunction with
"Planets existed as planets, and were thus discloseable as such, for as long as there have been planets."
I can only see two ways of making sense of these claims taken together.
(1) Pre-human existence must implicitly have a sort of anthropo-soteriological dimension. Planets existed as planets before human existence precisely because, when humans arrived on the scene, they would finally bring about the 'purpose' and 'understanding' planets and their sortal had awaited. A kind of AP rendering of Schelling.
(2)There exist as many sortals as there are possible - human or non human - ways to relate to and understand an object, as in a sort of logical matrix. Thus there is the sortal 'planet' (which is our current understanding of 'planet') and there is the sortal planetx (which are those bodies which correspond to our previous understanding, plus have the existence of at least one red-spot-like storm) and there is the sortal 'lol' (which includes those celestial bodies which are (1) closer to the periphery of a galaxy than to the center & (2) that have been struck by a number of asteroids n where n is less than the number of black holes in a sphere of which 'lol' constitutes the center and whose radius is n lightyears.)
(Fwiw, your view strikes me as Heidegger in Fregean Clothing)
In a thread on PF someone recently asserted that the onus is on the realist to explain what it means to for something to exist independently of words or beliefs. I pointed out that the questioner will reject any possible explanation on the grounds that it is (necessarily) given in words. I said this is a case of loading the dice from the start.
It is based on the misleading notion of 'access', as is your passage I have quoted here. If we think our experience is 'for-us', this is always already a case of presuming our limited access. This presumption is based on a (Cartesian) belief in the infallibility of introspection, that what thoughts and concepts and perception are is somehow transparent to us, so that we can understand what it means for something to exist for us, but cannot possibly understand what it means for something to exist 'in itself'. What if the understanding of both these ideas, the 'for us' and the 'in itself', is only given in terms of use? We all understand very well, in terms of use, what it means for the dinosaurs to have existed prior to the advent of humanity.
So, I would argue that we don't have "access" to either the purported 'for us' or the 'in itself', the whole notion of access is a red herring. We know what it means for something to exist for us or in itself because we know the use of these terms and can grasp the two different contexts.
Yes, but plenty of people know the use and context of 'God' (implying, among other things, omniscience, omnipotence & benevolence) as opposed to 'mortals.' But once you start thinking deeply about the concept, all sorts of problems crop up. We know very well what it means, we think, to talk about the earth rotating around the sun even when there is no conscious being remaining. (I personally believe such rotation *will* occur in these circumstances, don't get me wrong.) But, as I tried to show with my thought experiment, it's actually very very difficulty to imagine what this would be like without smuggling in a human-like observer.
The problem with relying on 'ordinary use and understanding' is that ordinary use and understanding changes drastically over different eras and between different groups. That many readily understand the distinction between God and Mortal does *not* mean we ought to accept their claims about God.
(also note that reducing the distinction between for-us and in-itself to linguistic use echoes the Hegelian reduction of for-us and in-itself to a conceptual distinction, implying that the distinction itself is internal to the conceptual, as Brassier carries on about in this paper.)
This seems like a cognitive-sci-phi talking point misplaced. I don't disagree that we can be mistaken during introspection, but I don't see what bearing our introspective fallibility has on our capacity to understand objects as they'd be outside human perspective.
No doubt we do think the in itself in counterfactual terms of 'what we would experience'; but I think this is mischaracterized as any kind of illegitimate "smuggling in". All I want to emphasize is that we all know just as well what it means for the tree to be there on the other side of the hill when no one is looking at it as we know what it means for the tree to be there in front of us when we are looking at it.
I don't claim that all concepts are genuinely coherent. 'God' is either a coherent apophatic concept understood in terms of what it is not (for example 'not mortal'), or it is an incoherent faux-entity.
I think the ordinary use and understanding of distant unseen objects would be more or less universal. and based on the counterfactual. 'The mammoth is just the other side of the hill, we will see him when we reach the summit'.
While I would say that the distinction between 'in itself' and 'for us' is "internal to the conceptual" I would also say that what that 'internal to the conceptual' means, the implications of that, is not transparently obvious to us, as we are wont to think it is.
Quoting csalisbury
The point I wished to make was that what is meant by 'for us' is not given to us as an introspective understanding, as we are 'naturally' (naively) led to imagine. We do not introspectively know what it is to think something, to conceptualize, to imagine and so on, in other words. So our understanding of the 'for us' is given in terms of the term's contextual uses, just as the understanding of 'in itself' is.
Also, I want to say that our linguistic understandings of existence represent deeper 'embodied' understandings of existence that are themselves not by any means naturally conceptually transparent to us.
Sorry to respond so briefly and to such a small portion of what you've written, but I don't have enough time to mount a full reply tonight.
[quote=John]All I want to emphasize is that we all know just as well what it means for the tree to be there on the other side of the hill when no one is looking at it as we know what it means for the tree to be there in front of us when we are looking at it.[/quote]
What's important to note about this example - as opposed to full-bodied conscious-less circumstances - is that our world, with its temporal and spatial scales, is still in full operation, with the concealed tree representing a sort of blind spot within that world. Thus, though the tree remains unexperienced, it does so in a certain place in our world and for a certain duration of time, all of which rest nicely within the spatiotemporal scale of the world we inhabit (i.e. we 'know just as well what it means for the tree to be in unexperienced space x" because we implicitly understand the space and duration of this tree's unexperienced existence as unfolding in the same way as experienced space and time around it. This is precisely why Meillassoux draws our attention to ancestrality and Brassier draws our attention to the post-human future. They recognize how adroitly the correlationist can account for exactly the type of thing you describe. (If you want, I can look up and cite the passage in After Finitude in which Meillassoux addresses this in order to show why it is necessary to find different examples to counter to correlationist. He explains it much better than I can.)
Thanks for your reply csalisbury. I did read After Finitude, but it was at least five years ago. However I still remember thinking that his notion that, for example, the situation vis a vis prehuman or "ancestral" entities is really different in principle from that of entities that are currently merely extremely distant to us in space or distant within 'human' time doesn't make sense.
I mean if we say that humans have been around for 1 million years, just for argument's sake, would it follow from Meillasoux' standpoint that objects more than 1 million light year's distant enjoy a different ontological status, because the light we are receiving from them was emitted prior to the advent of humans, compared to objects less than a million light year's distant?
Yes, that's a fair characterization. You can also say that it's a form of strong correlationism.
Your main question to me concerns the the 'existence' of sortal concepts in time, and whether those concepts pre-exist the objets that instantiate them. One might ask the same question regarding secondary quality concepts and the answer would be similar. (I'll single out relevant differences in the last paragraph below). For something to be red just is for it to look red to us in standard conditions. "Look" is here understood dispospositionally, as a passive power that red objects have to affect our sensibility in a specific way. Hence an object currently not looked at (or never looked at) still is red because it still has the relevant power. Even though optical properties of surface reflectance may be part of the explanation of this power, the concept of redness is nevertheless inseparable from the structure of our sensibity since only some specific (to us) features of reflectance spectra are visually salient to us (owing to both physiology and culture). When we conjecture that Triceratops might have been red this means that, for instance, had we been around before they went extinct, then they would have have looked red to us.
There is a pseudo-problem generated by the question whether red objects still would be red in a universe where there are no observers. This is a pseudo-problem because there is no such thing as "a universe" that we can refer to from the outside, as it were. As regard the question whether red objects still would exist in our universe if we became extinct, or never came about, the answer is simply yes. Bus then this is just a simple counterfactual modal claim similar to the claim about currently unobserved or far away red objects. It still refers to *our* universe and *our* concept of redness. (Kripke's possible-world model for modal logic -- as used in Naming and Necessity -- unlike Lewis' own counterpart theory, respects this point, I believe -- See Gregory McCulloch, The Game of the Name, a book worth its price for the title alone). We are thus merely inquiring about the hypothetical causal impact of our specific extinction, and not any 'impact' from stripping away, as it were, our conceptual scheme from the world.
The 'lol-planet' pseudo-sortal concept is pointless, as is Nelson Goodman's 'grue' pseudo-secondary quality concept, because it resists being integrated into a conceptual scheme intelligible to us. A conceptual scheme intelligible to us isn't an arbitrary formal construction, but rather is a way of talking (shaped by the specific human form of our embodiment and enculturation) that enables us to disclose objets in the world that answer to our interests and rationally justified existential commitments (from the point of view, ultimately, of practical reason). The existential commitments of the scientific community, for instance, ground the justification for some definition of a 'planet' over another because this definition enables the scientists to sustain or increase the intelligibility of the empirical domain of astronomy. The domain itself isn't circumscribed independently from the interests of the community, so long a the historically situated scientific practice has a point, and responds to some pragmatic interests including the fulfillment of explanatory, predictive and/or technical aspirations. This leaves room for some amount of contingency and arbitrariness (hence the occasional need for a vote).
The main difference between general sortal concepts (that single out objects and incorporate our understanding of their conditions of persistence and criteria of individuation) and general property concepts (among whose secondary quality concepts are paradigmatic, and primary quality concepts (so called) are derivative abstractions) is that the general property concepts are valid across several empirical domains. There are red finches, red tables, and red planets. But there are no planet fruits or planet tables. Sortal concepts have more restricted scopes because they single out objects not just in respect of specific causal powers that those objects have to affect us (and their surroundings) but in respect of the way those objects are constitutively individuated in a manner essentially tied up to the empirical domains that they belong to (and hence also to the conceptual schemes within which those domains are disclosed). Individual pants and animals are conceptually tied up to the self-perpetuating life forms that they belong to (which determines their norms of health and behavior) while artifacts are tied up with the human practices within which they are brought into existence. Scientific objects are likewise tied up to scientific practices within which they serve explanatory purposes.
There would be more to say regarding the relatively higher grade of autonomy (with respect to our conceptual practices) that belongs to life forms compared to the sortal concepts that single out human artifacts, socially constituted object (e.g. currencies) or 'scientific objects' such as planets or electrons.
Thanks for the reply. I think I'm much more familiar with your general position than I thought I was; your analytic philosophy references and turns of phrase primed me to assume you had a much different stance than you do.
There are two primary reasons accounts of the sort you lucidly present here leave me dissatisfied:
(1) Ancestrality (as discussed by Meillassoux)
(2) "Worldless" experiences (of the sort TGW often likes to discuss.)
I'll only address the first reason in this post.
I'm not sure if you're familiar with Meillassoux's discussion of ancestrality. I think it shows shows how the quasi-idealism you espouse is not all that 'innocuous.' Since I'd already gestured toward the relevant passage in my last exchange with @John, it seems worth discussing. I'm going to take the lazy path and mostly just quote Meillassoux.
[quote=PN]As regard the question whether red objects still would exist in our universe if we became extinct, or never came about, the answer is simply yes. Bus then this is just a simple counterfactual modal claim similar to the claim about currently unobserved or far away red objects. It still refers to *our* universe and *our* concept of redness.[/quote]
[quote=Meillassoux][Meillassoux speaking as a hypothetical correlationist] It is not difficult to conceive the status of the un-witnessed in the context of a datum which must be essentially considered as lacunary. All that is required in order to re-insert this type of occurrence within the correlationist framework is to introduce a counter-factual such as the following: had there been a witness, then this occurrence would have been perceived in such and such a fashion. This counterfactual works just as well for the falling of a vase in an empty house as for a cosmic or ancestral event, however far removed....
...[Meillassoux speaking as himself]The objection against idealism based on the distal occurrence is in fact identical with the one based on the ancient occurrence, and both are equivalent versions (temporal or spatial) of what could be called 'the objection from the un-witnessed', or from the 'un-perceived'. And the correlationist is certainly right about one thing - that the argument from the un-perceived is in fact trivia and poses no threat to correlationism. But the argument from the arche-fossil is in no way equivalent to such an objection, because the ancestral does not designate an ancient event - it designates an event anterior to terrestrial life and hence anterior to givenness itself...
....Let us be perfectly clear on this point. The reason why the traditional objection from the un-witnessed occurrence - it being a matter of indifference whether the latter is spatial or temporal - poses no danger to correlationism is because this objection bears upon an event occurring when there is already givenness. Indeed, this is precisely why the objection can be spatial as well as temporal. For when I speak of an event that is distant in space, this event cannot but be contemporaneous with the consciousness presently envisaging it. Consequently, an objection bearing on something that is unperceived in space necessarily invokes an event and a consciousness which are considered as synchronic. This is why the event that is un-witnessed in space is essentially recuperable as one mode of lacunary givenness among others - it is recuperable as an in-apparent given which does not endanger the logic of correlation. But the ancestral does not designate an absence in the given, and for givenness, but rather an absence of givenness as such. And this is precisely what the example of the spatially unperceived remains incapable of capturing - only a specific type of temporal reality is capable of capturing it; one which is not ancient in any vague sense, nor some sort of lacuna in that which is temporally given, but which must rather be identified with that which is prior to givenness in its entirety. It is not the world such as givenness deploys its lacunary presentation, but the world as it deploys itself when nothing is given, whether fully or lacunarily. Once this has been acknowledged, then one must concede that the ancestral poses a challenge to correlationism which is of an entirely different order than that of the unperceived, viz., how to conceive of a time in which the given as such passes from non-being into being?. Not a time which is given in a lacunary fashion, but a time wherein one passes from the lacuna of all givenness to the effectivity of a lacunary givenness...
...So the challenge is therefore the following: to understand how science can think a world wherein spatio-temporal givenness itself came into being within a time and a space which preceded every variety of givenness.[/quote]
Schopenhauer was perfectly willing to countenance the paradox of ancestrality by doubling down.
[quote=Schopenhauer] But the world as idea, with which alone we are here concerned, only appears with the opening of the first eye. Without this medium of knowledge it cannot be, and therefore it was not before it. But without that eye, that is to say, outside of knowledge, there was also no before, no time. Thus time has no beginning, but all beginning is in time. Since, however, it is the most universal form of the knowable, in which all phenomena are united together through causality, time, with its infinity of past and future, is present in the beginning of knowledge. The phenomenon which fills the first present must at once be known as causally bound up with and dependent upon a sequence of phenomena which stretches infinitely into the past, and this past it self is just as truly conditioned by this first present, as conversely the present is by the past. Accordingly the past out of which the first present arises, is, like it, dependent upon the knowing subject, without which it is nothing. It necessarily happens, however, that this first present does not manifest itself as the first, that is, as having no past for its parent, but as being the beginning of time. It manifests itself rather as the consequence of the past, according to the principle of existence in time. In the same way, the phenomena which fill this first present appear as the effects of earlier phenomena which filled the past, in accordance with the law of causality. Those who like mythological interpretations may take the birth of Kronos (??????), the youngest of the Titans, as a symbol of the moment here referred to at which time appears, though, indeed it has no beginning; for with him, since he ate his father, the crude productions of heaven and earth cease, raid the races of gods and men appear upon the scene.[/quote]
The problem of ancestrality seems very real to me, though I've no idea how to deal with it (Meillassoux's answer has all sorts of problems, imo). But Schopenhauer's explicit affirmation of what the correlationist only implicitly avers - it just doesn't work for me. I can unpack that not-working, if you like.
You're leaving out a fifth option: the it-in-itself is nothing. A feature which has no element to describe or phenomenological manifestation to talk about. Something humans can understand perfectly well because there is nothing more to say about it. A logical feature which isn't more than "the thing itself' and so does not manifest as any sort of chainlink (which we might describe as steel, strong, long, grey, etc. etc., ) between the objects and language/experience.
[quote="csalisbury] This seems like a cognitive-sci-phi talking point misplaced. I don't disagree that we can be mistaken during introspection, but I don't see what bearing our introspective fallibility has on our capacity to understand objects as they'd be outside human perspective.[/quote]
The point is they are not, in the relevant sense, outside human perspective. Everything in existence is linked in causality. Human perspectives are stuck connected to everything else. Any state of the world is X.... to a human perspective. "Introspection" is a problem because it slices the world into what is "for us," things of human perspective, and that which is not, things which cannot have anything to do with human perspective. The interconnection of causality shows this separation incoherent. Our world cannot be split into what is "for us" and that which is "outside us." The error of introspection and correlationism is not to demand the rest of the world is connected or meaningful in relation to us. Rather it is in its use of the dichotomy of "for us" and "outside of us." In thinking in terms of the world being "for us," we use the dichotomy of separation which forms incoherence around ancestrality.
Philosophy has trouble with this because tends not to think of things-in-themslves. It attempts to make them a matter of correlation to language. Supposedly, we must be able to encompass an experience in language for us to have felt it or understand something.
The reference of "the thing itself" the the only way we have to think and speak about wordless experiences in language. We can say: "I felt something, but I cannot put it into words" and actually communicate to others about the worlds experience. In some cases, our reference to the object (as any experience is an existing object) even causes them to understand this wordless experience, despite language not describing anything about it.
The "wordless" is not hard to describe. We know it doesn't, in words, have one. Whatever the "wordless" might mean (which we may well know), we know it can't be given in words. The correlationist project, where everything about any object is linked to a form significant in language, fails spectacularly. Our experiences and the world are not limited to the concepts we use in language.
Schopenhauer's idea that time begins with givenness just doesn't work with current cosmology and paleontology. This is one aspect of the problem Meillasoux identifies. It is phenomenological or lived time that begins with givenness. On what grounds could it be insisted that there is no other time than the phenomenological and the measured time that it gives rise to?
There is nothing in the passage you quoted from Meillasoux that seems to offer any reason to think that the advent of givenness should make an ontological difference to that which remains ungiven. I mean there seems to be no suggestion that at the arising of givenness everything is suddenly given all at once. For me the problem of the ungiven is simply the problem of the ungiven, whether distant, ancestral or simply hidden; the 'status' of the ungiven is that it must be guessed at.
As Hume pointed out causation is not a given but it certainly seems to work for us in every sphere of activity and understanding. We 'get it', although as with all things, including what we think of as 'given' and as 'ungiven', if pressed to give an exhaustive account or explanation, we find we cannot.
I am open to the possibility that I am missing a real problem that Meillasoux has identified. Since you say you can see the problem, perhaps you could give an account of it in your own words?
We don't experience our individual will at all, it is merely a post hoc idea, I would say; but we do experience our individual acts (insofar as we consciously experience them at all) as intelligible within a temporally ordered sequence.
I more or less agree with TGW here. The temporally ordered sequence is a new experience which happens after the event. So, I think, is spacial significance. We don't see or think of the room in the moment we first see a letter on a screen. We don't see or think what comes after or before the latter we are looking at. All those things happen later. They are different experiences.
Our acts of individual will (in the sense of a moment of experience) are always distinct form and proceed us placing that experience in space and time. Intelligible in a temporally ordered sequence they might be, but there is no moment of our lives which is also the moment of us placing that moment in space and time.
I don't disagree with you here, Willow. To the degree that we do consciously experience our acts though, they must surely to that degree be intelligible, and hence part of a temporally ordered sequence. Perhaps we can be said to consciously experience our acts only after the fact.
I agree that we are never, except in thought about our experience ( which must necessarily be after the fact), "placed in a moment in space and time". If that is what TGW meant, then I agree with him. The question is whether experience that is not at all thought about can be meaningfully be considered to be experience at all; I would say it can, (in the same kind of sense as we might say "the rock experienced the warming effect of the sun") but that such 'experience' definitely should not be considered to be any kind of conscious experience; which means it must be outside the ambit of what is given to us to consider as a fully coherent part of analytic discourse. To say that such experience is timeless, though is merely to say that it does not partake of measured time, not that there could be no sense of phenomenological time attending it. Such things cannot be analyzed, but may only be alluded to.
John, I think there is a missing 'not' in your first para here - 'is not really different in principle' - and if so I agree with you. I don't understand Meillassoux's distinction, in the quote csalisbury cites, between inferences from distant objects (purportedly because the consciousness of them is now) and distant events-in-time (purportedly because such events are antecedents of the onset of givenness). In both cases - far-flung parts of the cosmos, and long-ago events - the inferred events precede the onset of givenness, and in both cases the consciousness of them is now. Either the ancestrality problem should apply to both, or neither.
(accepting the term 'givennes' to be going on with)
Maybe the others who think Meillassoux is on the button here could explain?
I'll reply in full probably tomorrow. Yeah, the experience of light whose source is lightyears away *does* work just as well as the archefossil precisely because the scientific explanation of the former brings up *temporal* considerations (of a time antecedent to the emergence of consciousness) Distance is involved for sure but its what this distance means in terms of time that makes it relevant.
This reminds me vaguely of how Sartre treats the "being" of an object in the opening of Being and Nothingnes. (The opening is all I've read of the book.) But, as your characterization of the in-itself as mere "logical factor" already implies, this ultimately cashes out as the in-itself being an in-itself for-us; it remains a species if strong-correlationism.
Actually it's probably because of my cumbersome expression that you read the need for the 'not'.
Basically the sentence says "I remember thinking that his notion that the situation with (regard to) ancestral entities is really different from that of (other) entities doesn't make sense.
Of course in the trivial sense that it is being called 'in itself' it is 'for us', but this stands in opposition to what the name signifies. The idea is for us, to be sure, but what the idea purports to signify is not.
The other aspect is that the in itself (as noumena) is for us not merely as the conceived, but also as the perceived.
The in itself is for us but not insofar as it is in itself.
We may quickly become entangled in ambiguity and even contradiction when attempting to talk about this situation but what alternative is there other than Wittgenstein's silence? I believe we can more or less grasp the issue even if we cannot speak positively and coherently about it. Of course I cannot prove that; it is something (apparently) that one either accepts or doesn't, more a matter of taste than anything else.
But is there some point, the advent of givenness say, where the 'distance as time ' ceases to be problematic?
Of course we could never know when that change in ontological status occurred or how we could possibly make sense of it. That's essentially the problem I see with Meillasoux' 'ancestrality' issue.
I cautiously agree with you regarding the "in-itself" but I think it's incumbent on us to think through the difficulties close examination of the concept presents. And man are those difficulties tough.
I'll lay my cards on the table and say I lean toward a panpsychist stance.
First and foremost I think it's important to remember M is arguing [I] against [/I] the correlationist so *he* isn't claiming different ontological statuses for this object or that; he's seeking argumentative fulcrums.
Secondly, I'm not quite sure what you're asking. Can you expand or reword?
Taking off my Brassier hat for the moment (and putting on my Deleuzian one), I'd say the best way to go about addressing this is to note that those scales and perspectives are 'pre-individual' in the sense that they are not simply 'for-us' but rather of us. Pace Spinoza, we simply are a particular sustained ratio of movement and rest, rhythm and periodicity, and to utilize these scales is already in some sense to tap into the so-called 'in-itself' to the degree that they were never 'ours' to begin with.
Now, where B. diverges sharply is in his commitment to truth. His problem - among others - is that the conceptual resources provided by Deleuze and - most especially Latour - cannot countenance truth (Deleuze might reply with a hearty 'but truth isn't interesting...', to which B. would reply that if one is to be a realist, one needs to deal with truth). Anyway, in order to deal with truth, Brassier has to turn to a conception of naturalized rationality, not unlike the kind found in Brandom and the post-Sellarsians. This is most clearly set out in his paper That Which Is Not. Here's some relevant snippets:
"Rationality is not a psychological faculty but a socially instantiated linguistic artifact—language and sociality being taken to be interdependent here. To invoke the normative character of conceptual discourse is simply to point out the inferential nexus which renders propositional contents mutually interdependent and conceptual commitments reciprocally constraining. This inferentialist formalization of rationality leads to an understanding of philosophical theory as the formal explicitation of the (sociolinguistic) conditions of conceptualization. To articulate the formal infrastructure of thinking and speaking is to render explicit what was already implicit in conceptual practice. It is to set out the preconditions for knowing how to think and to speak. This shift from implicit know-how to explicit knowing-that involves a kind of reflexive “self-consciousness” on the part of cognitive agents, but one which does not operate at the level of phenomenological presentation: it is not a matter of self-consciousness as presentation of presentation, but rather of the explicit representation of latent representational mechanisms.
... Truth is semantically correct assertability, which is to say optimally justified assertion. Yet truth involves a transition from implicit warrant to explicit endorsement: to know that something is true is also to recognize that one is obliged to assert that it is the case, that one should move from assent to endorsement, where endorsement is the theoretical explicitation of practical inferential assent. Philosophy is the explicitation of truth, understood as the formal manifestation of latent content carried out via the representation of representation."
This, ultimately, is what Brassier understands by 'tracking' the real via conceptuality. Invoking Deleuze once more though, the idea - or at least how I'm trying to charitably read it - is that just as the periodicity of our bodies is pre-individual, so too is 'conceptual practice' just that - a practice, which is to say, it too is of the world and not just about it, as if separate from it. To the extent that rationality is discontinuous with the real though, it is on account of it's rule-bound, normative dimension, which constrains, in a 'top-down' manner, as it were, the flux of the sensuous, allowing for one to speak about truth - which is how B. will cash out his realism. Personally, I think this is a rather 'thin' constural of realism, but I've said enough here and hope that this is some grist for the mill in any case.
To defend Meillassoux (though I don't agree with him in the end, but to be fair) it seems to me that one can 'get' this Schopenhauer sentence and yet disagree with it. It's an imaginative statement about a particular way of re-living the beginning of knowledge. But there might be knowledge to come which would bring the feeling of that moment into question.
But is his argument that the arche fossil poses a different problem than the merely distant or even simply unseen object not based on the notion of an ontological difference between anything originating in the 'time' of pre-givenness, and things originating in the time of post- givenness?
The past, if you like, is like a rule of thumb: it's a schema for extending the way something can be manipulated 'backward.' It's projected by experience, not something that was 'really there' as if before it.
Awareness does not dependent on being thought about or recalled in memory. Life does not need to think about how it had an experience to have one. And it is most definitely a conscious experience. I don't need to think about how the stove was hot for it to be hot. I just feel that in the moment. Our lives are full of moments of awareness we never think about, experiences which never in our memory. We do not have to think: "I am thinking..." to have a thought. It most certainly a conscious experience. Our analysis has already taken that has given by we are talking about conscious experiences.
To be aware of what we are thinking in any moment is a different experience than that (now former) moment. The "timeless" of experience is defined by how the moment of any experience is not the moment we are thinking about it. It applies to any experience, including experiences when we think about what we are thinking of. Let's say I experience a hot stove. Then I might think about how I experienced a hot stove. Then I might think about how I was thinking about a time when I experience a hot stove just a moment ago. And so and so on. In the moment, even experience is timeless. I don't place any of my experiences in time until I've passed into a different state of experience.
When TGW says people don't get the Schop quote, he is right. It's not merely trying to, as many people think, say that anything is dependent on experience, but rather trying to deal with the distinction of "timeless" of any experience or state of the world (the presence of a tree, for example, says nothing about time) in a world where overstate is placed within time. How can everything of time but "timeless" in this way? How can things be given on their own ("timeless") when all are other things (states of existence) are necessarily given with them (causality, everything connected in time)? That's the supposed paradox.
[quote=John] I can see no good reason at all to believe that, because I can see no genuine problem with the notion that they originated independently of our experiences.[/quote]
They haven't "originally" occurred independent of our experiences at any time though. They are part of causal system all bound-up together. Ancestral events prior to us cannot be given without our experiences.
If we talk about past events, we have left behind discussion of any single moment. No moment has a "beginning." We can't say any moment the world "originated" at a time. We can say that some moment occurred at one time rather than another, but then we have left behind any discussion of a moment. We are talking about time and causality, all events bound-up together in necessary relation: there is no independence.
So should I take this to indicate that you do believe what I have said I find unbelievable, and that you cannot provide any good reasons why I should join you in believing it, or that you simply can' t be bothered providing such reasons?
I agree. I said consciousness does, not awareness. I mean it's a matter of terminology; I prefer to reserve the term 'consciousness' for reflective awareness.
I don't agree that the mere sensing of the heat of the stove is a conscious experience; it is certainly an example of awareness, though, however basic. When you say "I feel it in the moment" you are projecting your conscious awareness of a past experience back into a purported 'moment in which it occurred'. In that sense I agree with TGW that the experience (the basic awareness) is not attended by any experience of 'being in a precise moment'. A sense of having been in a moment of experience, though, may appear reflectively almost immediately after the sensation of the heat though. I believe this reflexiveness can occur prelinguistically; which means it can occur to, not only humans, but to (some) animals as well.
Quoting TheWillowOfDarkness
I do not see any reason to think that "ancestral" events, just like any other events we do not experience, cannot coherently be said to occur, or to have occurred, independently of our experiences.
All events, and not just ancestral events, cannot be given (to us) without our experiences; that is a mere truism.
Hi Willow,
I apologize for the long delay. Brassier's example of people pointing at Saturn, while not knowing what it is, is supposed to problematize the idea that "Saturn's existence -- that it is -- is a function of what it is -- that Saturn [the concept] is indissociable from Saturn..." (Concept and Object, p.62)
It could be argued that for an object (e.g. Saturn) to exist, or not, doesn't depend on our ever having acquired, uncovered, or created the concept under which it falls. This concept (e.g. the concept of a planet) is the referent of some word that expresses our conception of what it is, on my Wiggins/neo-Fregean account. Saturn itself is the referent of its proper name (or of some definite description, or some deictic act of reference such as pointing), and any such act of reference in thought or speech is enabled by our having some grasp of the concept.
What is more difficult to conceive, and this was my main objection, is that there might be anything out there that answers to the description "the object pointed at by people who didn't know what it is". This could be sensibly said if what was meant was "the object pointed at by people who still only had at that time an indistinct conception of what it is". But that can't be what Brassier meant since he wants to divorce the idea of the object's existing by itself from the concept of what it is.
Another way to convey the point of my 'lump-of-bonze / statue' example is that someone who didn't have possessions of any one of those two concepts (or any other relevant concept of a definite sort of material object under which the object pointed at falls) and who nevertheless pointed her finger in direction of the statue (thereby also pointing it in direction of the lump of bronze, and countless other things) would not thereby make *any* deictic act of reference since she wouldn't have any normative standard on the basis of which to determine if any part of the "object" is indeed a part of it (rather than, say, something extraneous accidentally attached to it, or touching it) or under what conditions the object could be said to have been destroyed and/or ceased to exist.
So, the alleged possibility of an act of "pointing" to Saturn by people who don't know what Saturn is at all seems to fall short from showing that Saturn's existence -- that it is -- can be separated from the concept of what it is.
Thanks for raising up the problem of ancestrality. I wasn't acquainted with it -- at least not under this guise. I gave it some thought and still need to give it some more. Incidentally, I had likened your 'lol-planet' concept to Goodman's 'grue' concept. Maybe a closer analogue would be Dennett's lost sock center!
There can be an appeal to the historical imagination, whether or not one believes one is talking about something that was 'really there'. On Meillassoux's and my historical account, using our historical imaginations, certain events pre-dated the presence of homo sapiens on our local planet. That schema seems fine to me and makes no realist assumptions. If it's not ok, all sorts of archeological, paleontological and similar discourse has to have new caveats placed on every page. That's where I'm defending his right to a point of view, and claiming that this is a disagreement with the Schopenhauer turn of phrase.
What Meillassoux goes on to fret about, as I understand him, is that in a certain scientific schema, we 'know' beyond reasonable doubt - indeed we can 'know absolutely' - that certain events happened in certain time-scales before homo sapiens, via radiocarbon dating, and that because of this, all we think we know about contingency and necessity has to be rethought. For myself, that's where I don't follow him. But if others feel they've understood him better than me, I'd be glad of their tuppenny worth.
Some of my momentary experiences are plans for future action, and some are memories of past action, each understood to be going to happen, or to have happened, in a certain time-scale. How can one say that such experiences aren't placed in time?
I hope you don't mind an inconsequential quibble, but radiocarbon dating relies on carbon-14, which has a rather short half-live (5,730 years), and isn't reliable past 62,000 years. A variety of other isotopes enable radiometric dating all the way back (with ever coarser resolutions) to several billion years in the past.
I'm a bit confused John but it may just be because I've misunderstood your stance. You think there *is* some in-itself, no? You think the correlationist is wrong, yes? Because Meillassoux's ancestrality is meant to be a problem for the correlationist. If you're unmoved by correlationist's account then you needn't bother with ancestrality at all. But then you also have no reason to read Meillassoux. He's making an argument *against* the correlationist but (attempting) to do so from within, by granting most of their points. You keep talking as if Meillassoux, with the ancestrality problem, is trying to provide a positive ontological thesis which you disagree with. But the point is rather to make the correlationist a little uneasy about the sophisticated account they reflexively roll out. If youre not moved by - or acquainted with - that account, then there's not even a faux-problem for you to find - there's just confusing shadowboxing.
That you appear to be arguing the failure of the ancestrality thought experiment against TGW makes things even more muddled. He doesn't think it works either.
If you (1) find the correlationist's account to be hopelessly confused and (2) think that M's argument 'fails' then my question to you is: fails to do what?
I'll explicitly explain why I think schop's account is problematic later this evening. I want to do so carefully and precisely. As I hope I've demonstrated, I "get" the paradox of trying to think an "in-itself" outside of experience.
The ancestrality problem has no direct bearing on M's discussion of necessity and contingency. Ancestrality is only a relatively short portion of the book. Its meant to be a visceral shock to the correlationist view which segues into a close consideration of correlationism's inner logic (which logic M endorses, but believes that, if considered closely, implies a dissolution of the correlationist circle). Thats where necessity and contingency come in. In fact, the central argument book could function without ancestrality altogether really.
Quibble accepted :)
My understanding of TGW's position, such as it is, is that he does think the notion of unexperienced objects is incoherent and is thus a problem for realists. On that account he probably doesn't think that ancestrality is an extra problem. I haven't been disagreeing with him on the basis that I think he accepts ancestrality at all.
My challenge to him was to provide an actual argument as to why we should think that ancestral objects, or for that matter any objects which are said to have originated in the past, (which really applies to every object that is not present that you can presently think about) actually had no real existence in the past at all, that the only existence they had is an existence projected back by us from present experience.
Idk. I've done my best to show why unexperienced objects *are* a problem and you responded with a stew of 'Wittgensteinian silence' & 'i guess its a matter of taste'. If thats where we're at I don't see much point in laboriously explaining a sophisticated way of dealing with unexperienced objects constructed by those who aren't willing to prudently turn away from such paradoxes; and to do all that just to then show you how to undermine that very account. It seems like a waste of time. You've pinpointed why the correlationist is wrong from the outset (we know very well the difference between in-itself and for-itself, just look at how we talk), so you've no real need to wander down the maze they've built around their initial, mistaken, insight. After Finitude simply wasn't written for you.
I think, provided what you've said so far, the best way for you to approach After Finitude is like so: 'Some people are silly enough to think that the very idea of the in-itself is fundamentally compromised. They went through a lot of trouble to do away with that idea by finding new ways to talk about things like e.g. scientific discourse There exists a writer silly enough to take these people and their ideas seriously enough to argue against them on their own terms. This kind of thing is not worth my limited time. There are other, actually lucid philosophers to read.'
That's all fine csalisbury, I am very familiar with all the common arguments as to why the very idea of 'unexperienced objects' constitutes a problem. I understand that there is a divided philosophical landscape over this issue, and many of the divisions are complex; I acknowledge that, and I also acknowledge that the answer is not be found in any simplistic return to naive realism or naive idealism or naive anti-realism.
The fact that there is such a divided landscape with obviously highly intelligent protagonists and very sophisticated arguments on both sides convinces me that there is no demonstrable 'fact of the matter' as to whether unexperienced objects *really are* a problem (not to mention the unexperienced ancestrality of objects :P), and that's why I think of it as a matter of taste. I am certainly not recommending that debate or inquiry should be curtailed, though; no doubt there are still some more interesting things to be said about the issue.
I was just concerned that I might be missing something about a very specific point, but if there is nothing to miss there, then my concerns are laid to rest.
I'll post soon as I can.
And sorry@John those same life events were stressing me out big time and mad me a little testy. I think youre a good poster and I apologize for being a dick.
Hey no problem csalisbury I never thought you were being a dick. We all get testy at times...and understandably so since life's no fucking picnic! ;)