In contemporary analytic philosophy the word ‘exists’ has a very limited meaning: the things which exist are, more or less, the referents of our referential language. If I say ‘over there is a skyscraper’ then I take there to be such things as skyscrapers. And I take my sentence to pick-out, in all that is, that which is a skyscraper (ie. that my sentence refers to a skyscraper). This kind of existence does not presuppose any global nature to ‘Being as such’, nor does it connote any global understanding of what makes such existence possible. To say ‘there are skyscrapers’ is to say there are things of the skyscraper kind, but it is not to settle larger metaphysical questions about whether skyscrapers are ‘dream-skyscrapers’ or ‘just-skyscrapers’ (to distinguish between the case where we are in a dream or not).
This first-order existential language then is metaphysical in the sense that it provides the explanandum for metaphysics: is it that which is to be explained. The vast majority of metaphysical systems (varied enough to include Plato, Hume, Hegel, Heidegger, Quine, etc.) thus pay special attention to referential language or ‘first-order existential language’ as I have described it. The key questions about our ‘world-talk’ are: what makes such talk possible? What is the nature of the things it entails? How does our world-talk refer to the world? Or more generally, what is the relationship between world-talk and the world? Throughout the history of metaphysics then, philosophers have been motivated to provide a metaphysical framework in which to situate talk of this kind.
The key opening gambit in metaphysics here is in Plato (of course) whose parable of the cave begins by framing the duality (there being two) of world and world-talk as a dualism (consisting of two parts). For Plato, life is very much like being trapped in a cinema only seeing images of the world rather than the world itself. We’re to suppose it’s possible to leave the cinema itself, to ‘visit reality’ and to be amazed and astonished that we ever thought movies were ‘the real thing’.
It’s first important to note that this parable outlines a second-order framework for analysing first-order language. It says that language of the kind ‘there is a flower’ should be read as referring to movie-flowers (shadows) not Real flowers (forms). So there is two sense of Real here, the first order sense: there are, of course, flowers. And the second order sense, but these flowers aren’t Real flowers. This notion of ‘Real’ then, of there being a second-order real, can create a lot of confusion. Plato’s Flowers are merely real, but not really Real.
Claims of the kind ‘the table before me, and all tables, are just illusions’ should be decomposed into two kinds of claim then: 1. there are tables 2. all the things which are tables are illusions. Thus, for example, old scepticisms should be understood as a position which buys into a dualism of the Real and wishes to deprive many or all objects of Reality in the second-order kind: objects could be dreams, matrix-code, or anything else.
However contemporary scepticisms in analytic philosophy are usually presented as anti-realisms which deny the first order kind of reality (they don’t care to, or don’t presuppose a Really real and merely real). So an anti-realism about, say, electrons isnt saying ‘yes there are electrons, but like everything else, they are shadows on the wall’ it’s saying, ‘no there are no electrons; electron just refers to a piece of mathematics’.
It seems plausible initially, at least, that we should be satisfied with first-order reality – so where do second-order notions of Real come from? It is my claim here that they arise due to a confusion in first-order talk (and I think, must necessarily arise this way). Sometimes language refers: ‘over there is a cat on the mat’ is referring if there’s a cat on the mat – if I say it now however, sat in a chair in a room with no cat, such a statement is not referring. There is no cat (and indeed, no mat). So we have a duality in our world-talk, there is talk that ends up being referential and talk that ends up being non-referential. This duality I believe has become metaphysically deified: that the possibility of non-referential world-talk is elevated to the level of an unReality of world-talk all together. Those instances where we do not find “what our words tell us to look for” are contrasted to those instances where we do find “what our words tell us to look for” and this contrast is unduly given grand status as a split in the world itself rather than as a liability of language and world-talk.
Let’s focus this problem: how could a contrast between Real and unReal (eg. Appearance) ever even be formulated? All we ever have is first-order talk: when we’re given examples of Appearances these very examples are set within the language in which Reality is contrasted. The question ‘could everything be a mirage?’ can be immediately answered: no. A mirage is something which is set in contrast to something that isn’t a mirage, to be able to ask the question presupposes that some world-talk refers to mirages and some world talk doesn’t: Appearance and Reality are in reality as just the conditions refers and does-not-refer. Appearance is that situation where you point to something and make a mistake, lie or pretend (eg. ‘there is no beer in the fridge’), you use language about the world that does not refer to it. Reality is that situation where you use referential language (‘there is beer in the fridge’) and it does refer. There are no examples to give ‘outside of’ first-order talk to evidence a second-order notion of Real.
Notice here that ‘mistake, lie, pretend’ are epistemological terms: they are about whether we know that our language refers. When I walk into a bathroom, just before I get into my filled bathtub, I believe that the water I’ve been running is hot: I think, in effect, ‘the water should be hot enough now’, but I might be wrong – the water heating system might be broken. Thus this duality concerning language is actually an epistemic duality: we are sometimes wrong in how we describe the world and we do not know, ahead of time when that will be. We may have correct beliefs (knowledge) but we don’t also know when we know (our belief that our beliefs are correct isn’t always correct). Sometimes our language refers, sometimes we’re right. Sometimes our language does not refer, sometimes we’re wrong.
Thus there is something deeply suspect when we’re asked to transpose these conditions into metaphysical divisions or dualism. We can phrase this suspicion as a question to Kant: Kant, you claim there is a noumenal and a phenomenal: a metaphysical split between what Really is and what really is, between what our words can never refer to - what we can never talk about - and what we we always talk about – but where is this split? If we assume Kant is right and we’re stick in the phenomenal (the cave) then how ever could we discriminate between phenomenal and noumenal? Where in the cave is the noumenal? It is nowhere. It is a presupposition that can never be evidenced. Kant transposes the dualism of reference and non-reference into a dualism of phenomena and noumena.
If we’re in the cave we cannot justify it’s the cave (rather than the sunlight) so why even presuppose it? Thus we should say that are no Appearances in the sense dualism supposes, second-order appearance. It can appear that there’s beer in the fridge, and I might be wrong. But the fridge itself does not Appear – nor is it Real. So what are ‘appearances’, if not ghostly objects floating on top of the noumena? Let’s take the classic example of an appearance: the case where a stick appears bent because it is in a glass of water. Notice here everything is, globally, exactly how it should be – the way the world is, the layout of stuff we’re referring to with our language, is correct: how else could we have discovered refraction, if upon further investigation we found an Appearance of bentness and not refraction!
Appearance enters when we interpret the world, produce world-tallk - appearance is in the form of the proposition ‘the stick is bent’ – we take the situation to be one of bentness but we’re wrong, it’s one of refraction. We then contrast refraction and bentness and call one ‘Real’ and the other ‘Appearance’ but this isnt evidence of a dualism but a duality – our language doesn’t always refer. The bent stick isnt a lens which gets us outside reality and into Reality to see that there is Real and Appearance. The world is always exactly as it should be, it never Appears to be. Appearance is a feature of our descriptions of the world.
Interpretation of the world, production of world-talk, is the act of describing what there is (correctly or incorrectly). If we are inside a cave then world-talk is a description of what there is in a first-order sense only – it might be that outside the cave our first-order objects end up being something else ( ‘interpreting inside a cave’ might be called phenomenology). However if we realise that it doesn’t even make sense to presuppose this dualism, to presuppose we’re in a cave, then first-order interpretation is the final interpretation (‘interpreting in the sunlight’ might be called hermeneutics). There is no ‘Real’ to speculate about and thus no science of appearance to suffer – our world-talk is talk of the world simpliciter.
Michael Burgess participates in and organizes several philosophical groups in the UK and has recently completed graduate work in physics. He is presently writing on issues in metametaphysics with a view to graduate study in this area, and has written and presented on a variety of other topics: from academic articles on Leibnizian historical interpretation to machine learning in a quantum computing context.
Illustration by John Holbo at examinedlife.typepad.com.
Michael,
I’m sure you’re familiar with Robert Nozick’s Experience Machine thought-experiment. Here’s a brief excerpt:
“Plugging into an experience machine limits us to a man-made reality, to a world no deeper or more important than that which people can construct. There is no actual contact with any deeper reality.”
Do you find the notion of “reality” that Nozick’s appealing to here intelligible?
Mis-posted below:
Only in a limited sense. If everything behaved the way it does in both ‘worlds’ then these world’s are identical. In order for me to put a microscope to some wood and see bacteria, and see cells, and see dna, etc. there would have to be something with all the right relationships that these things have (x bit of code would have to related to y bit of code in a way that enables me to zoom etc.). If everything in one worled has *all* the relationships of the other world then these are identical.
You might say ‘but they aren’t second order identicical’ in one world its a relationship between dreams, and another code, etc. They are first order identical however, and all my world-talk in A is equally referring in B. now we’re left with the question what on earth could we be adding to the situation that distinguishes A from B?
Only in a limited sense. If everything behaved the way it does in both ‘worlds’ then these world’s are identical. In order for me to put a microscope to some wood and see bacteria, and see cells, and see dna, etc. there would have to be something with all the right relationships that these things have (x bit of code would have to related to y bit of code in a way that enables me to zoom etc.). If everything in one worled has *all* the relationships of the other world then these are identical.
You might say ‘but they aren’t second order identicical’ in one world its a relationship between dreams, and another code, etc. They are first order identical however, and all my world-talk in A is equally referring in B. now we’re left with the question what on earth could we be adding to the situation that distinguishes A from B?
I’m thinking that there are various names for the same basic distinction between appearance and reality. Kant’s phenomenal and noumenal is one, of course, and so it is with Plato’s cave and the Real world outside the cave. But I think it also shows up in the distinction between the world and “interpretation of the world” or “world-talk”. I mean, it seems that the dualism you seek to exorcise is inadvertanttly re-asserted in this attempted exorcism.
I think Plato, like many old-time aristocrats, had a low opinion of empirical, phenomenal reality. But the idea that we can get outside of that to something more real, something eternal and certain and fixed, has been a 2500 year curse on philosophy. It’s actually an incoherent idea because when did anyone ever crawl out of the human condition to view things as they really are outside of the phenomenal world? Then we end up testing our truths against an imagined Reality that we could never know.
Ah but there is dualism even in what you said. We aren’t trapped in a human condition. This is reality, it’s no trap.
Hmmm. That’s a very unsatisfying reply.
(from below,)
That interpretation takes place by humans, does not mean the stuff of interpretation is “in” humans (qua cave). When the light of a star reflects off a cup we dont say “therefore the star is *in* the cup”, nor is there any reason to say “there star is in us” when the same happens.
There’s no reason to presupposing that consciousness is a cave that we’re all trapped in. Consciousness is a process (the process of interpretation), not a place. When things strike it, they show themselves to it, and it is the things themselves which do so.
Reducing such concepts as “mirage” with stern science is going to lead you to making definite observations based on your relationship to reality. Mirage is used simply as an irrational tool by duelists to speak in definites on their relationship to reality. Fake, not real, the imposter reality seems more applicable to what they are trying to convey about their relationship with the world.
Ontology: Even if we grant non dualism to referential language (which I would also question as more of an assertion: “the things which exist are, more-or-less, the referents of our referential language”), we still have non-linguistic actual nonverbal perception which is subject to human perceptual phenomena and structured to interpret reality based on experience (shadows imply depth, etc) and provides a primarily nonverbal “appearance” of reality, regardless of verbal reference. See Metzinger’s “Ego Tunnel.”
> which I would also question as more of an assertion
Well is there *any* system which denies this? Even taking phenomenology with a dualist base (ie. phenomenology) there is still the ability to say “over there is a table” and either be “accurate”, lying or pretending. A phenomenologist engaged in description “of the world” is only producing statements that he takes to refer to the phenomenal. So within any system there has to be a means of describing “what there is” (in the limited first-order sense) *and* a means of failing to describe what there is.
Why then say these statements are referring to the phenomenal? Where are those statements that do not? Where is the split?
Whatever it is our statements refer to exists (small e), – we all must agree (scepticism about this just says there is *no way* of talking coherently about *anything*, and i think is therefore just an incoherent position that denies itself). I dont see what “setting the world inside consciousness” or inside any “cave” adds to the situation, I just think it’s a confused concession to a sceptical non-problem.
Our faculties of understanding (which I’d just call interpretation) “take place” from a point-of-view in a space, in a time, and so on. But what we are interpreting is *it*. That table *is* the table. There is no other. Our interpretive faculties produce interpretations that refer to X, that X is it.
That interpretation takes place by humans, does not mean the stuff of interpretation is “in” humans (qua cave). When the light of a star reflects off a cup we dont say “therefore the star is *in* the cup”, nor is there any reason to say “there star is in us” when the same happens.
Actually Kant’s transcendental deduction was developed in order to counter Hume’s skepticism and save science and God. While he did come up with the noumenal and phenomenal as a nod to some limits to reason, in the end he takes the same position as you do via his terminology. For Kant the propositional content of every judgment contains a set of a priori logical forms deriving from the pure understanding (categories), as well as a higher-order a priori rational subjective unity deriving from the faculty for apperception (including forms of intuition plus the implicit categories) or rational self-consciousness. Therefore reason grounds reality for both the cognitive and experiential, i.e., non-dualistic dualism. The objectivity of any object of experience is strictly determined by the forms of intuition plus the categories that are also implicit in judments to experience about those objects and also literally imposed upon those objects of experience by the faculties of the judging subject in acts of judgment. There fore the categories necessarily apply to all an only the objects of experience, and are objectively valid (Kant’s B Deduction).
I don’t see how your argument advances Kant’s position.
It depends on how you take the noumenal element of his system, as a metaphysical split in the strongest sense or not. Many people after Kant have taken “the strong view” where as he himself is more ambiguous.
Yes, he’s often talking about delimiting reason but he does this via a quasi-metaphysical split, in the end. There is no split between phenomena (phenomenal stuff) and noumena (noumenal stuff) if “noumenal” is an *epistemic* bounday. If “noumena” refers to a set of “propositions we may never know” *then* fine – but it does not, it refers to stuff. Thus Kant really has dualised this boundary of reason.
My problem with the “IS.”
Michael, initially you claimed:
#1) Is there any system which denies that “the things which exist are, more-or-less, the referents of our referential language”? This establishes your ground of ontology: that which exists is referents of our referential language; and your epistemology: we know about reality by referents of our referential language.
#2) Within any system there has to be a means of describing “what there is” (in the limited first-order sense) *and* a means of failing to describe what there is.
#3) Therefore we have “what statements refer to exists (e).”
#4) Interpretation (faculties of understanding) derive from a Point of View in space and time (Hello Kant) and thus are “IT”. The table IS the table that we refer to.
#5) This interpretation is not “in” humans (qua cave), as the light of a star reflecting on a cup does not mean that the star is in the cup, or that we are perceivers in the cave.
In response regarding #1: There is a non system, which does not rely on language, or on reference of language to what exists, but to what is neither systematic, nor referential: existence. So then you would say, there must be reference to existence–yes, but necessarily accurately referential? If not, we have a problem. And I would say not. Yes we have a problem, because the referential just makes linguistic things up trying to make “sense” out of experience, which is just so much shit–not necessarily “IT.”
#2) You are very assumptive in thinking that there is any such system which can describe “what there is,” or “what there is not”: as there is always more that is signified than what can be signified.
#3) Therefore we are far from being able to refer to what exists (e).
#4) This is where it gets interesting–that which is interpreted, whether there is an ego, and whether it resides in a tunnel of it’s own creation, whether it is “IT.” In today’s neuroscientific understanding of the “it,” there is at least the difference between the nonverbal of the right brain and the verbal (linguistic) of the left brain, which split brain research validates (Tales from Both Sides of the Brain: A Life in Neuroscience, Michael Gazzinga). What is “It”? The verbal or the nonverbal? The referential, or what else? We say “The Table” but does that actually refer to “the table”? I think not, as there is no full reference to anything. It is always more than we perceive, experience: the excess.
#5) So what is interpretation? Is there really a specific time and space from which we actually are able to interpret “IT”? Are we really able to interpret “outside the cave,” (qua truth) the nature of the cup, even though the star shines on it? Surely the star is not in the cup, although perceivers are limited in their abilities to accurately perceive “it”.
Regarding Kant: The noumenal is not an epistemic boundary for Kant, it is a guarantee based on reason. (The only delimiters are the Antinomies, Paralogisms and the Ideal.) The copula, “is” creates the judgment which is grounded in the categories which guarantees objectivity according to Kant.
The copula, “is” creates the judgment which is grounded in the categories which guarantees objectivity according to Kant–the “IT.”
Claims:
# Any system contains reference and non-reference.
# Reference is existence
# We are located in a particular space and time which constitutes our POV (a POV is *not* a cave, it’s a location).
# What we refer to at that location is what exists at that location.
> yes, but necessarily accurately referential? If not, we have a problem. And I would say not.
Yes, it *has* to refer. Otherwise you’re unable to speak. Reference is a given – it’s what metaphysics has to explain. I say “there is a table” when there is a table and I say “there’s no table there!” when there isn’t. Now explain!
You’re *explanation * ie. second-order system, is that we’re just “making sense our of shit”. BUT this is a second-order claim *about* what reference is doing. It does not deny reference. Now, why should I opt for your – or any – second order claim?
Whatever evidence or justification you provide for your second order “it’s all just shit” metaphysics, will be *in terms of* first order claims. You will say “look here” and now “look here” see how one is Real and the other Appearence, consider X and consider Y – see how we often fail to refer! *THEREFORE* …. *insert unsubstantiated second-order claims*
The very dichotomies of “shit” and “non-shit” which are entailed by your view are *just* the dichotomies of reference and non-reference. Once we though “there is no escape from the hermeneutic circle” but I think the reverse is true: there is no escape from reality into Reality.
#2) You are very assumptive in thinking that there is any such system which can describe “what there is,” or “what there is not”: as there is always more that is signified than what can be signified.
We have referential language, here’s some: “the previous words in this comment are in english”. I’m not assuming anything here: I’m asking for an explanation and then pointing out the limits of this explanation: whatever it is, it cannot justify a Real vs real.
NB. I’m happy to broaden “referential language” to referential gestures, such as pointing. “I point to the table” when there is a table I point to, and “I point to the floor” when there is no just table.
*whatever* system you have, you are always starting with referentiality and then add a second order explanation.
It appears that you are pointing out to us, that in the way we use language, Reality and Appearance mean, practically, that which refers and that which does not refer in language. Refer is a tricky concept, and seems to presuppose the dualism you are trying to avoid. If language simply referred to other language, then this problem would not arise (as much, reference would still be a relation that existed between bits of language and outside of language); but you use the word refer in a sense that has language pointing to a world outside of language. Language ‘hangs as a ghost’ above the world in the same way Appearance hangs above Reality. And I know you are not implying a linguistic idealism in this piece, although giving reference so much power, without explaining the ontological status of reference, leaves something out.
I did enjoy this article, and I think you are on to something. I have written something similar in spirit:
http://www.free-ebooks.net/ebook/Falsehood-An-Analysis-of-Illusion-s-Singularity
Cheers
Well that language points outside itself, via reference, is a given. That is something to be explained, not something to be invented. *Whatever* “second order system” you adopt (idealism, phenomenology etc.), reference exists. Any system without reference (language referring to the non-linguistic) is just incoherent, it’s a level of scepticism which borders on the meaningless.
> Language ‘hangs as a ghost’ above the world in the same way Appearance hangs above Reality.
Yes, exactly right. But this is not a dualism *within the world*, its a gap between language and the world. Not language qua phenomena and world qua noumena (ie. a dualism) – but language qua form-of-knowledge and world qua that-which-is known. It’s an epistemic bounday, it’s the gap that enables mistakes/lies/etc.
> giving reference so much power, without explaining the ontological status of reference, leaves something out.
Well I’m a realist (small r) about what, in language, we take to exist. “There are skyscrapers” says there are such things as skyscrapes (that have all the properties skyscrapers have). I might be wrong, but there is the gap. The ontological status of reference is that reference has ontological status.
Marc, I have the same problem of not being able to see Michael’s claim of reference and its ontological status, and now his statement that “The ontological status of reference is that reference has ontological status.” Michael, can you see how this appears as a tautology, assertion, etc. rather than an explanation, to those who are not clear about your position. I also enjoyed the article, and especially this dialogue.
To be more specific, are you basically coming from a (later) Wittgenstenian position or more from a Rorty, pragmatist position (just helps to orient).
> there are such things as skyscrapers (that have all the properties skyscrapers have).
I suspect that most people these days are realists (small r) about the universe (maybe not about language per se as you suggest).
For example, how do you know that skyscrapers have all the properties skyscrapers have?
I dont know that skyscrapers have all the properties I say they have. But my knowledge that my language refers isn’t a requirement for language to refer. If I say “go in that car outside” in the case where there is such a car my language refers, in the case where there isnt, it doesnt. That has nothing to do with whether I know it refers or not: reference is a relationship between language and the world that is *not* mediated via knowledge.
Here’s what I take as *that which is to be explained*: the world is a series of relata and relations. Language is one such relata that stands in a particular relationship to the world (that of reference / non-reference).
Whatever system you care to dreg up, from solipsism to somekina gnostic realism, this will be the case. If all that Exists Really is this very instance, then in this instant nevertheless is stuff related to other stuff and all can be referred to by language.
Essentially in the very same way that I can hold a cup in my hand, I can say “there is a cup in my hand”. Language is just another gesture that grabs the world. Whenever I use language to “grab” i either hit my mark, or I miss. That is what i mean by “the ontological status of language is that language has ontological status” – language is of, and in, the world, grabbing at it, like anything else. This is the case in any system.
Note that “world” above just means “relata and relationships”, it does not mean The Real World. So in the case of solipsism, one grabs oneself.
Now, as I say in my first comment at the very top:
If everything behaved the way it does in both ‘worlds’ then these world’s are identical. In order for me to put a microscope to some wood and see bacteria, and see cells, and see dna, etc. there would have to be something with all the right relationships that these things have (x bit of code would have to related to y bit of code in a way that enables me to zoom etc.). If everything in one worled has *all* the relationships of the other world then these are identical.
You might say ‘but they aren’t second order identicical’ in one world its a relationship between dreams, and another code, etc. They are first order identical however, and all my world-talk in A is equally referring in B. now we’re left with the question what on earth could we be adding to the situation that distinguishes A from B?
So: Language is a relata, related to the a system of relations between other relata which we call “the world”. What more do we add now? We can add something that substracts relationships (which is often the case in sly sceptical examples: virtual realities seem virtual because they do not have all the relationships the world does). We can add more relationships (eg. we can say that all relata are dreams). But we gain *nothing* from doing so, and can never be justified in doing so.
Thus what we are left with is the world, directly, unencased in “consciousness” or some other cave. My gestures, linguistic or otherwise, grab at the world. To say they grab at The Phenomenal is to admit they grab at the world, and then to add “which is inside consciousness” (etc.) – but this extra step cannot be justified. It’s idle supposition without any grounds.
While your explanations are more clear, your underlying argument still doesn’t connect all the dots. You have eliminated the subject at the expense of epistemic grounding. How do you know you know anything, or is that not relevant, but just that language refers.
>Reference is a relationship between language and the world that is not mediated via knowledge.
OK
>All my world-talk in A is equally referring in B
How do you know?
> How do you know you know anything, or is that not relevant, but just that language refers.
Language refers. This means that we can’t help knowing. It doesnt need endlessly grounded in “knowing that you know”.
We are, to use Heideggerian terms, already thrown into a situation, fully. There is no subjectivity behind things, no metaphysical distance between language, thought and the world. What we grab with our hands we equally well grab with everything else.
> All my world-talk in A is equally referring in B
> How do you know?
All the sceptical can do is talk about “the underlying”. This has nothing to do with reference. When language refers that is it. The sceptic has no freedom, we have no freedom to say “there is no chair” and disappear a chair.
To put it another way, when looking at a chair, all the sceptical can do is say “there are alternative worlds A, B, C,… where the chair Really is… blah” , but this does not deprive us of the chair.
Language referring means that we are knowers as such. It does mean we know when we know: of course, if that we the case then we could never be mistaken.
But this “never being mistaken” is the uneasy cover-up effected by phenomenology (et al.) – we’re to take it, that stood in front of something there are things to be said that *could not even possibly* be in error. This just isnt the case.
<That stood in front of something there are things to be said the could not even possibly be in error.
I fully agree.
However, I never got that from Heidegger or Merleau Ponty, not that I am saying phenomenologists figured out the bigger picture.
Heidegger shares my picture, see for example the first couple of sections of On The Essence of Truth and esp. when he says “freedom is not a property of man”: we are not free, stood before a table, to say “there is no table” and have that be anything other than untruth. (Freedom here meaning something like that situation in which the world is openly disclosed).
The sceptic in establishing alternative worlds for our referents to live in cannot deny the referents themselves (nor their relationships to one another: the cup is on the table, etc.) – this is why the worlds are identical from the pov of reference. Even to establish the alternative hypothesis the sceptic has to reconstruct, in language, what it is his hypothesis undermines (“the cup on the table isn’t really there!” – but notice, you have grabbed the world *already* in your formulation of this!). This is throwness. We are already in a position of having grabbed the world, of havign knwoeldge, the problem is to figure out which of our beliefs are the knowledge.
Phase 2 (Heidegger):
While Heidegger’s position of “On Truth” (aletheia) argues for the “openness that does not disrupt the concealing but entreats its unbroken essence into the open region of understanding and thus into its own truth,” his later position in On Time and Being (S&Z), The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking (1969) regarding aletheia is “unconcealment thought as opening, first grants the possibility of truth. For truth itself, just as Being and thinking, can be what it is only in the element of the opening.”
Also, “Hegel also, as little as Husserl, as little as all metaphysics, does not ask about Being as Being, that is, does not raise the question how there can be presence as such. There is presence only when opening is dominant. Opening is named with aletheia, unconcealment, but not thought as such.”
“Only what aletheia as opening grants is experienced and thought, not what it is as such. This remains concealed.”
Therefore, “what it is as such” “remains concealed.”
> the problem is to figure out which of our beliefs are the knowledge
Not according to Heidegger. Aletheia, truth consists of opening, revealing, not what is as such, nor that which is thought as such (which remains concealed).
After reading the exchanges back and forth it seems to me that you’ve side-stepped the problem of Dualism in favor of common-sense realism. On this view the relation between knower and known is as unproblematic as pointing at a char or saying “there is a chair”. It’s hard to see how this could be enough to defeat dualism or the appearance-reality distinction. Instead, as William James puts it, this common-sense theory has “left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending leap”.
“Throughout the history of philosophy the subject and its object have been treated as absolutely discontinuous entities; and thereupon the presence of the latter to the former, or the “apprehension” by the former of the latter, has assumed a paradoxical character which all sorts of theories had to be invented to overcome. Representative theories put a mental “representation,” “image,” or “content” into the gap, as a sort of intermediary. Common-sense theories left the gap untouched, declaring our mind able to clear it by a self-transcending leap. Transcendentalist theories left it impossible to traverse by finite knowers, and brought an Absolute in to perform the saltatory act. All the while, in the very bosom of the finite experience, every conjunction required to make the relation intelligible is given in full….”
>Itt’s hard to see how this could be enough to defeat dualism or the appearance-reality distinction
Show me any system without it! There is no coherent sceptical system that does not already have in it the starting point of reference.
Relata, relation and reference are here. There’s no denying them. I’ve located the appearence-reality distinction within reference – there is nothing more to defeat, give me an appearence that isnt already about a given (non-) reference.
> self-transcending leap
This is *assuming* a dualism and criticising the alternative from within dualism, ie. transcendence only makes sense from this picture. There is no “self-transcending” leap. The self is not at all involved in anything.
We are in the world and related to it. There is no moment of transcendence, the mind is not a place in which “ideas appear”. The whole mind-cave tradition is just making an errant assertion, that criticise others from its own inanity.
Looks like Michael is arguing for the ” primacy of existence over consciousness” ….. The self refutation of the skeptics denial mentioned by Michael has Rand all over it….
Michael,
Just wondering if you were familiar with Searle’s paper “The Phenomenological Illusion” and if so what you thought about it:
http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~jsearle/PhenomenologicalIllusion.pdf
I would say it suffers from being a little too conservative.
> A view is idealist in this semantic sense if it does not allow for irreducibly de re references to objects
That’s exactly my position. And it *is* idealism. Here I’m taking it as just a confusion to say it isnt, and in particular, a confusion which transposes failures of reference into a change in the nature of reference (sometimes language doesnt refer therefore there are Appearances). Every argument that persuaded me to idealism and then later to the phenomenological position is all subject to either this mistake or a very similar one.
In particular the most beguiling mistake which props up phenomenology today is its “priority” (which you can see Searle granting at the end). Yes we always begin with a phenomenology of a kind, but this does not phenomenologize everything: if you take several pictures of a room, you do not say “the room in the pictures is in the camera” or “the room is nothing above a synthesis of the pictures”. The pictures were merely the first step to knowing there was a room.
Idealist phenomenology (which is most of it in the tradition) says that because photographs “come first” whenever we use the word “room” what we really mean is a particular synthesis of these photographs. We do not, we mean the room. And further, all the arguments that say we transpose de re reference into phenomenological synthesis (i.e. put under a phenomenal operator) are just confusions about what ‘begining with’ entails. To begin with seeing-from-a-pov does not preclude our seeing being de re (of the things), nor that seeing is ‘purely phenomenological’ ie. bound to this perspective.
Thus the confusion, as Searle highlights, that realism requires a ‘Gods Eye POV’ – NO, because reference/seeing/activity/etc. is not bound to a perspective in the first place. What strikes us, as in the light that strikes the camera, is the world…
My point in this article may be stated as: the phenomenological operator is optional. We must be able to form expressions without it, in order to add it. So why add it?
Human–all too Human:
“Language as putative science. –
The significance of language for the evolution of culture lies in this, that mankind set up in language a separate world beside the other world, a place it took to be so firmly set that, standing upon it, it could lift the rest of the world off its hinges and make itself master of it. To the extent that man has for long ages believed in the concepts and names of things as in aeternae veritates he has appropriated to himself that pride by which he raised himself above the animal: he really thought that in language he possessed knowledge of the world. The sculptor of language was not so modest as to believe that he was only giving things designations, he conceived rather that with words he was expressing supreame knowledge of things; language is, in fact, the first stage of occupation with science. Here, too, it is the belief that the truth has been found out of which the mightiest sources of energy have flowed. A great deal later – only now – it dawns on men that in their belief in language they have propagated a tremendous error. Happily, it is too late for the evolution of reason, which depends on this belief, to be put back. – Logic too depends on presuppositions with which nothing in the real world corresponds, for example on the presupposition that there are identical things, that the same thing is identical at different points of time: but this science came into existence through the opposite belief (that such conditions do obtain in the real world). It is the same with mathematics, which would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no exactly straight line, no real circle, no absolute magnitude.”
― Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human
Forgive me but I am posting this before I even read the article because I am in a hurry and will read it later when I get home from work.
I came here because of the picture: it is from the textbook of a course on Plato that I took on COURSERA.org through the University of Singapore: “Reason and Persuasion: Thinking Through Three Dialogues By Plato”. Professor Holbo wrote the textbook with his wife, who is a translator of Ancient Greek, and he made the illustrations himself. You should check out his course if you are interested in this kind of topic. I’m sure he would be pleased to know where his illustrations have ended up.
Thanks for reading this little comment. I look forward to reading your article.