There's a claim I laid out from Deleuze in the episode that I wanted to bring up for explicit discussion. I think it's provocative and deserves some thought but is almost certainly wrong.
It's about the picture of science as producing concepts and not propositions. I gave the example of Descartes's Cogito, and laid out a few of the apparent claims involved in that (the inference from thinking to a persistent subject doing the thinking, for one) that haven't historically stood up to criticism very well. I said there that Deleuze would point to a case like that to demonstrate that when you extract conceptual features and make them into regular old propositions, they become "mere opinions" of no scientific value, and you get endless, largely fruitless debate. This is what makes many people just dismiss philosophy as a lot of hot air.
But of course you could just take the case to be demonstrating weaknesses specific to Descartes's position. So I'd like to invite readers here to consider other cases that they have some recent familiarity with to see if the same holds up. Here's an example from the top of my mind:
Santayana in laying out artistic appreciation is trying very hard to be naturalistic and stick to observables, but isn't pedantic about it; he still talks at a high level of abstraction and doesn't spend really any time talking about his method. I can very well look at what he's doing as creating (more better, refining) concepts of beauty, apperception, matter, form, and expression. But is it the case that if you transform these into specific propositions, they just seem like ungrounded bullshit? Here's the main one: "Beauty is pleasure objectified." Assuming we've established sufficiently what that means (and if you can't get it from the topic announcement, you'll have to wait a week or two for the episode), the claims involved here are about experience and about linguistic usage: that while we don't always feel pleasure when calling something beautiful, we're saying that not just that it has the capacity or usual tendency to produce pleasure, i.e. that it is a means to produce pleasure, but that it is in itself as an end pleasurable. Now, we could proceed to debate whether that really makes sense, whether we're in making such a judgment making an ontological mistake of some sort, and then evaluate whether Santayana's account plausibly captures the experience and the semantics involved. I'm not going to actually go through the process of trying to pull out all of the component claims of Santayana's account here, but we could attempt it. In evaluating these claims, there would definitely be room for disagreement, and our counter-proposals could go back and forth indefinitely as Deleuze says. But does this mean that those propositions wouldn't accurately represent Santayana's view? That he's not making "claims" at all but merely creating some definitions? I don't find this plausible.
It may still be that the claims involved are "of no scientific value" in that the claims, while at root empirical, are not testable by means of empirical science. More work would need to be done to try to pull out some testable hypotheses from Santayana's account. I don't believe, however, that no understanding occurs prior to that point, or that doing so would be of particular additional interest. So yes, science and philosophy are often doing different things, but the way to capture this difference isn't to say that philosophy is not making claims at all, not putting forth propositions, or that if it is, they are by necessity mere opinions and so would not constitute knowledge.
I invite you all to subject your current theories to Deleuze's challenge in this way and see if you see any merit in it.
-Mark Linsenmayer
Mark:
With science we address issues of epistemology, how do we know what truth is, as reflected in propositional claims, which Deleuze would not deny is valid in the domain of science, but would label in the world of philosophy as the “image of thought,” conformist thinking of the Same, and disingenuine common sense thinking.
If we are trying to claim facts or propositions as true, go with science. If we are trying to get at metaphysical truth, go with philosophy. If we want to get at how things really are, we have to go beyond the illusion of truth as propositional (eg., Beauty is pleasure objectified) to the true nature of beauty and “think”, which includes access to all faculties at once (cognition, sensibility, imagination, etc) outside the boxes of facts, propositions, distributions (categorical thinking), etc.
As you notice the style of Deleuze’s rhetoric, it is similar to Nietzsche in that they do not argue propositionally, but demonstratively. They are showing us what thinking is and what therefore the nature of being is, the Truth beyond truths. Good philosophy according to Deleuze is making ontological claims while science must be limited to epistemological claims.
An example of conceptual thinking for Deluze applied to art is Kant’s concept of the sublime, which Deleuze affirms.
Hi, Wayne,
With science, according to Deleuze, we don’t do epistemology; we merely create “functions” to track regularities among observables. “True” is already defined on a plane (i.e. the epistemological work is already done), and I guess science traces patterns on a plane, so yes, science gives us (mostly) clear criteria for deciding whether a claim is true (I’m not sure whether this is a matter of “likely to be true given the evidence” as we ordinarily think of it or “operationally true” as a pragmatist would think of it; the scientist would likely not according to Deleuze make such a distinction.)
Deleuze does not (in the book I read) talk about metaphysical truth, and “truth” is not an adjective that you’d use to judge a concept, i.e. what philosophy does according to him, at all.
On the contrary, Deleuze very clearly makes a lot of claims in his book, though I see what you’re trying to get at in that he doesn’t argue his picture against competing pictures but instead just thinks he needs to sketch out the picture in detail: he doesn’t argue much at all that I can tell, if this is what you mean by arguing propositionally.
Thanks for clarifying, Mark:
I think the issue here is with the definition of “truth:” (some of your quotes here:) “specific propositions . . . Beauty is pleasure objectified . . . accurately represent Santayana’s view . . . of scientific value . . .testable by means of empirical science . . . testable hypotheses, whether philosophy is making claims . . . putting forth propositions . . . knowledge . . . scientific knowledge.”
All of these phrases indicate to me that you are challenging Deleuze’s claim that concepts turned into propositions become mere opinions of no scientific value, that you are looking to find “truth” in propositional statements which can be verified as true as science can verify truth through testable hypotheses and propositions which result in knowledge.
I believe Deleuze fundamentally challenges this form of thinking as false to begin with, as he describes in his example with Descartes. His problem with Descartes was not just with propositional thinking, but his use of reason itself as the primary faculty for knowing. Deleuze believes that reason gives the illusion of truth, and that an entirely new way and purpose of thinking needs to be forged. There is no “truth” nor “epistemology” in the rationalistic sense Descartes or Kant.
I apologize for the confusing way I used epistemology and truth, and agree that Deleuze does not apply the concept of truth to philosophy, but I would also say that he neither applies it to science (or art) since all are different aspects of the Actual (which is only provisional solutions to the more primary problems of the Virtual).
Deleuze makes no claims for the truth of science in the sense of your quotes above., or that “science gives us (mostly) clear criteria for deciding whether a claim is true.” It seems that you are using truth to refer to science but not philosophy. Again, I may be misinterpreting you here.
Here is his elucidation of Philosophy and Science (rom SEP): “Deleuze and Guattari distinguish between philosophy as the creation of concepts on a plane of immanence and science as the creation of functions on a plane of reference. Both relate to the virtual, the differential field of potential transformations of material systems, but in different ways. Philosophy gives consistency to the virtual, mapping the forces composing a system as pure potentials, what the system is capable of. Meanwhile, science gives it reference, determining the conditions by which systems behave the way they actually do . . .Science tracks the actualization of the virtual, explaining why this one road was chosen in a divergent series or exclusive disjunction (differenciation, according to Difference and Repetition). Functions predict the behavior of constituted systems, laying out their patterns and predicting change based on causal chains, while concepts “speak the event” (WP 21), mapping out the multiplicity structuring the possible patterns of behavior of a system—and the points at which the system can change its habits and develop new ones. For Deleuze and Guattari in What is Philosophy?, then, science deals with properties of constituted things, while philosophy deals with the constitution of events . . . How do concepts relate to functions? Just as there is a “concept of concept” there are also “concepts of functions,” but these are purely philosophical creations “without the least scientific value” (WP 117).”
So I think the use of “truth” is not warranted for either philosophy or science. But then what does it mean to know?
“Genuine thinking is a violent confrontation with reality, an involuntary rupture of established categories. Truth changes what we think; it alters what we think is possible. By setting aside the assumption that thinking has a natural ability to recognize the truth, Deleuze says, we attain a “thought without image”, a thought always determined by problems rather than solving them . . . To read a philosopher [or Santayana] is no longer to aim at finding a single, correct interpretation, but is instead to present a philosopher’s attempt to grapple with the problematic nature of reality. “Philosophers introduce new concepts, they explain them, but they don’t tell us, not completely anyway, the problems to which those concepts are a response . . . Philosophy, science, and art are equally, and essentially, creative and practical. Hence, instead of asking traditional questions of identity such as “is it true?” or “what is it?”, Deleuze proposes that inquiries should be functional or practical: “what does it do?” or “how does it work?”[27] (Wikipedia)
Hopefully that at least makes the problem more clear.
An additional clarification regarding propositional thinking:
Ultimately, what grounds the real for Deleuze is the Idea, which he expresses as the problem (Virtual” rather than the solution (Actual). This quote from Sommers-Hall (p. 160) points out the inadequacy of propositional thinking:
“Whereas for Plato, Deleuze claims , this process leads to a ground in an apodictic principle, for Deleuze it instead leads to an unground in the problem. This difference between grounds and ungrounds ultimately simply relates to the fact that apodictic [necessarily or demonstrably true] principles [versus problematic principles in which truth is possible] have the same structure as the system of propositions they ground (they are amenable to the structure of judgment). On the contrary, the problem differs in kind from the solutions it engenders. As such, it cannot ground solutions by providing a principle that we know to be true, because truth is a function of judgment, and the problem is different in kind to judgments.”
“Thus, rather than a ground it serves as an ‘unground’, destabilizing the vision of the world as amenable to judgement in its entirety. Rather than invoking “the moral imperative of predetermined rules’ (DR, 198)” Sommers-Hall is referring to the invalidity of propositional thinking when he speaks of “apodictic principles . . . propositions . . . judgment . . . moral imperative of predetermined rules.”
I wish I could find a more clear way to express the meaning of what is real (a better word than truth) for Deleuze, and what is not.
Also, I am not not claiming that Deleuze is denying the “truth” of science, but that science is not privileged in speaking about the significance of its findings, and that it is subject to the same false propositional thinking of philosophers and “common sense” thinking in general which relies on propositional thinking. (regardless of Delanda’s reinterpretation)
For example:
“How do we understand the world in which we find ourselves? How does the universe behave? What is the nature of reality? Where did all this come from? Did the universe need a creator? Most of us do not spend most of our time worrying about these questions, but almost all of us worry about them some of the time.
“Traditionally these are questions for philosophy, but philosophy is dead. Philosophy has not kept up with modern developments in science, particularly physics. Scientists have become the bearers of the torch of discovery in our quest for knowledge.”
Really Stephen? (Stephen Hawking, The Grand Design, p. 5)
I think D. has merit.
As do I, but explain…
Couldn’t Deleuze’s claim be related to Nietzsche’s idea that the true philosopher is a creator of values?
For Nietzsche, creating values is somehow “higher” than describing the world in propositional terms, perhaps because creation is more affirmative, more powerful, more active.
http://backdoorbroadcasting.net/2013/05/alexander-douglas-and-christoph-schuringa-spinoza-and-nietzsche-on-valuing/
Excellent point, but Deleuze is much more radically declaring a new metaphysics of the Virtual as foundational to the nature of the real.
I imagine that sometime down the PEL road the realism/antirealism tension will rise to the surface but to prime the intuition pump a bit:
http://www.academia.edu/1125097/Between_Realism_and_Anti-realism
dmf
I was just reading a post (maybe one of yours) or book or article which was arguing for replacing the philosophical distinction between Analytic vs Continental with Realism vs Anti-realism, which will be my new categories. My own intent is to speak and think analytically about continental philosophers and speak and think like a continental author about analytic positions.
very good, the man who wrote the book(s) on the subject:
http://hiram.academia.edu/LeeBraver
Mark:
Maybe this is a better response to your statements:
“does this mean that those propositions wouldn’t accurately represent Santayana’s view? That he’s not making “claims” at all but merely creating some definitions? I don’t find this plausible.”
“philosophy is not making claims at all, not putting forth propositions, or that if it is, they are by necessity mere opinions and so would not constitute knowledge.”
I think you are asserting:
1) There is knowledge
2) Knowledge is expressed propositionally
3) Therefore, when philosophy expresses propositions, it makes claims to knowledge, just as science does.
I think Deleuze is simply saying that it is not the business of Philosophy to be making propositional statements because that is to fall into the trap of the transcendental illusion explicated by Kant, leading to false understanding and false thinking about Reality. Instead philosophers and everyone else can get at reality better through the more robust thinking of concepts.
Knowledge according to Deleuze is not the best concept of Reality since it focuses so much on the merely provisional solution (Actuality), and not on the problem (Virtual) from whence it came. Much better is what Deleuze calls “learning” which is what kicks in when we come to the end of our knowledge and need to think outside the box, creatively. Reality is both the Actual (foreground) and the Virtual (background). Both of these aspects of Reality meet on the Plane of Immanence.
Hope this is a little more clear–Wayne
Trying to explain Deleuze to myself or anyone else feels like trying to explain a bowl of spaghetti to a Martian: to speak of any one piece means you have to explain every other piece at the same time. Deleuze has conveniently provided a condensed can of spaghetti to the end of Difference and Repetition (the final chapter), a summary of the book, which simply adds density to the spaghetti. I don’t think I am unique in this.
Deleuze’s Sixth Postulate on Propositional Thinking “The fate of us All’
:
The postulate of logical function, or the proposition (designation is taken to be the locus of truth, sense being no more than the neutralized double or the infinite doubling of the proposition).
“Teachers already know that errors or falsehoods are rarely found in homework . . . rather . . . nonsensical . . . without interest . . . banalities . . . ordinary . . . distorted, all heavy with dangers, yet the fate of us all” (Difference and Repetition, p. 153).
What is at issue here was raised by Russell, as the distinction between the truth-value of a proposition (whether it is true of false), and the meaning of a proposition. Russell goes on to state that truth is based on the specific beliefs of the speaker rather than on the general state of affairs and a proposition.
The sense of a proposition depends on the psychological beliefs of the speaker. A proposition can still ‘make sense’ even though it is false, and thus there needs to be a way to separate sense from truth. Here, Deleuze again exposes the concept of Kant’s transcendental to be too abstract to be helpful.
“The condition [sense] must retain an extension larger than that which is conditioned [the true or false]” (p. 153). Sense for Russell is much like common sense in that it grounds the true or the false. “The true and the false are supposed to remain unaffected by the condition which grounds the one only by rendering the other possible” (p. 153). So sense does not explain the genesis of the true and the false, but only conditions them.
This position results in two false options: 1) specifying sense in terms of the proposition itself which results in repetition without explanation or 2) specifying a root proposition as explanation which results into an infinite regress (sense of the sense). We then either infinitely regress, or stop with a ‘first proposition of consciousness’ (p. 155), such as Descartes’ cogito and the return to the problem of common sense.
Deleuze offers an alternative: from this point of view, sense is the veritable loquendum, that which in its empirical operation cannot be said, even though it can be said only in its transcendental operation” (p. 155)—that which is the virtual also rather than only the actual.
“Deleuze offers an alternative: from this point of view, sense is the veritable loquendum, that which in its empirical operation cannot be said, even though it can be said only in its transcendental operation” (p. 155)—that which is the virtual also rather than only the actual.”
Ok, that part was an unintelligible quotation, and my apologies. Deluze addressed this problem in his book “Logic of Sense” which is a much better explanation of that quote as a beginning, although “Difference and Repetion” fleshes out his dance between the transcendental and the empirical, the virtual and the actual, which is alluded to in the quote.