Scripture become Philosophy become Fantasy
by rsbakker
Cosmos and History has published “From Scripture to Fantasy: Adrian Johnston and the Problem of Continental Fundamentalism” in their most recent edition, which can be found here. This is a virus that needs to infect as many continental philosophy graduate students as possible, lest the whole tradition be lost to irrelevance. The last millennium’s radicals have become this millennium’s Pharisees with frightening speed, and now only the breathless have any hope of keeping pace.
ABSTRACT: Only the rise of science allowed us to identify scriptural ontologies as fantastic conceits, as anthropomorphizations of an indifferent universe. Now that science is beginning to genuinely disenchant the human soul, history suggests that traditional humanistic discourses are about to be rendered fantastic as well. Via a critical reading of Adrian Johnston’s ‘transcendental materialism,’ I attempt to show both the shape and the dimensions of the sociocognitive dilemma presently facing Continental philosophers as they appear to their outgroup detractors. Trusting speculative a priori claims regarding the nature of processes and entities under scientific investigation already excludes Continental philosophers from serious discussion. Using such claims, as Johnston does, to assert the fundamentally intentional nature of the universe amounts to anthropomorphism. Continental philosophy needs to honestly appraise the nature of its relation to the scientific civilization it purports to decode and guide, lest it become mere fantasy, or worse yet, conceptual religion.
KEYWORDS: Intentionalism; Eliminativism; Humanities; Heuristics; Speculative Materialism
All transcendental indignation welcome! I was a believer once.
Three Pound Brain 
I like your piece a lot. I, too, find much to be suspicious of in this sort of language. But I’m often troubled by your use of *capitalism* to explain why various theoretical approaches aren’t valid. One of the advantages that Continental philosophers continuously brandish at their Analytic counterparts is their political engagement, and while much of it is nonsense, I do think that it makes a bunch of sense why various branches of the State aren’t investing in far-left political commentators.
Also, I’ve always been confused by statements like “No traditional discourse has survived the scientific rationalization of their domain. All of them have been reduced to hokum, expelled from the courts, hounded from policy, from rationality altogether, and relegated to fantasy, which is to say, become commodities sold to balm the superstitious soul.” Like, scientific racism is pretty great example of the problems of taking science to be true. And for more contemporary issues, there’s *tons* of problems regarding the status of mental illnesses which relate to the kinds of evidence admitted into scientific journals.
Like, I think naturalizing people is a good thing! But I’m less convinced that science is gonna be *right* about it, at least within the time frame that you offer, and that the political implications of scientific research are as straightforward as it seems like you think. And I think that’s related with your examination of Continental philosophers, who often make speculative claims divorced from empirical evidence, and social scientists / theorists who use the methodologies of Continental philosophy to examine scientific, social, and political practices (one great example is Nikolas Rose).
I’m sympathetic to much of what you say, but I don’t see where I ever imply capitalist commitments have any relevance to validity (as opposed to inevitability). For me, science is THE enemy, but precisely because it commands the cognitive heights (which in turn, drives it’s institutional dominance), and these heights are antithetical to our intuitive understanding of ourselves and each other. That the process is messy, filled with monstrous amounts of bullshit (like social Darwinism or behaviourism, or the bulk of what we now call ‘cognitive science’ (which is not replicable)), I take as a given.
when we teach science to high-school kids we need to explain that the history of scientific progress is the repeated debunking of our folk beliefs, of course we won’t but we should…
Word. This actually helps. Therefore, the job of the philosopher is to determine philosophical theories in accordance with the massive amounts of data generated by the sciences, broadly construed, with an emphasis on analyzing cognitive science. And therefore, BBT is the mechanism by which you determine which scientific theories are most useful?
Also, the reason why you often cite capitalism as a way of figuring out which discourses are important is not to determine which particular theories are true (in a pragmatic sense), but which discourses are more likely to produce something true (in a pragmatic sense). Is that right?
“Therefore, the job of the philosopher is to determine philosophical theories in accordance with the massive amounts of data generated by the sciences, broadly construed, with an emphasis on analyzing cognitive science.”
I wouldn’t say there’s any one job, but I think the most important job, at the moment, is helping humanity fasten the seatbelts by providing ‘metanarratives’ actually tracking the accelerating transformations.
“the reason why you often cite capitalism as a way of figuring out which discourses are important is not to determine which particular theories are true (in a pragmatic sense), but which discourses are more likely to produce something true (in a pragmatic sense). Is that right?”
A good fraction of cognitive science is commercially actionable: it really is as simple as that. Combined with big data, it allows capitalism to engage us biomechanically: this is why I’m so smitten by Lawrence’s ‘System Zero.’ Efficacy attracts capital, the philosophy be damned.
Yeah, I’m with it. I dunno if you’ve come across this piece, but it certainly proves a lot of the points you’ve been making: https://antidotezine.com/2017/01/22/trump-knows-you/.
I know you’re not super into Continental critical theory (as its notion of a ‘subject’ relies on folk-psychological accounts of belief), but I’ve found both Foucault- and Adorno-inflected studies of surveillance to be really helpful in understanding the relationship between surveillance, the state, and private interests. A great example is Marc Andrejevic’s “iSpy: Surveillance and Power in the Interactive Era”, which has been (along with your writings) one of the most helpful ways to understand the relationship between media technologies and subjectification (the way marketing and advertising shape our relationship to the world; if I was to put it in your parlance it’d probably be ‘something something manipulating our cognitive ecology via information overload and privation something something’).
*…rather than social scientist / theorists.
Wrote in a bit of a hurry
Curiously, another paper in the same volume, ‘The Relation Between Transcendental Philosophy and Empirical Science in Heidegger’s Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics’ by Michael Lewis seems to have failed the same failure you ascribe to Johnston. It’s interesting to see that a lot of other philosophers are starting to concern themselves with the challenge posed by science, but as I wrote to Callan regarding the last post, you’re asking philosophers to admit that their 2500 year long intellectual enterprise has been a waste of time and effort. That’s asking a lot. I don’t think too many people who are currently invested in the philosophical enterprise are going to renounce it and become scientists (or woodworkers or plumbers) but I do think fewer and fewer people will become academic philosophers and the field with gradually wither away.
Well, the irony is that if I’m right, attempts to recoup human exceptionalism will occupy more and more thinkers, not less. The refs were pretty hard on the paper (while acknowledging it should be published) primarily by insisting ‘continental philosophy’ was something far larger than Adrian Johnston. I was puzzled because my definition was both pragmatic and explicit: to the degree you rely on the same arguments and tactics as Johnston, then your philosophical practice runs afoul the same problems.
But there is much to be salvaged from the tradition, not the least of which is the refusal to let the political and the everyday out of sight. My argument is not an argument FOR analytic philosophy–my target in the JCS piece.
I’ll have to check that article out!
“Well, the irony is that if I’m right, attempts to recoup human exceptionalism will occupy more and more thinkers, not less.”
Some religious leaders are genuinely devout, and some are out and out charlatans. I think in that case there is a continuum from the devout to the fraudulent. I would not be surprised if future philosophers came to occupy a similar continuum.
“…but I do think fewer and fewer people will become academic philosophers and the field will gradually wither away.”
Me too. Philosophy is healthy and sorted elsewhere but the academic world seems to be struggling to catch up with Plato. I would not blame scientists for their low opinion of philosophy but professional philosophers. The profession seems a lost cause. Departments are closing as we speak. Then perhaps people will start to study philosophy instead of the set reading list.
Oh my. There are both problems and glories here.
To start with the problems: How can someone define “continental philosophy” in terms of “individuals inclined to identify Adrian Johnston as one of their own”? I have written nine or so books on Hegel, Heidegger, Derrida , Foucault, and the like, and had never heard of Adrian Johnston until I read this post.
Defending that tendentious definition by saying that insofar as Continental philosophers are not intellectual kin to Adrian Johnston they are “outside the purview of this article” is the same as saying that Continental philosophy itself is outside the purview of this article–in which case, find another term for what you’re attacking (like “transcendental materialism”).
That scientists laugh when asked if Continental philosophy can “force profound changes in science” is without doubt. But try asking them about analytical philosophy. In 2000, Scientific American quoted a physicist as saying that being seen talking to any philosopher was like being seen coming out of a porn theater. Scientists can be wrong, too.
“Where is the great defense of continental philosophy”? Try reading the Introduction to my Time and Philosophy (Acumen 2011). It may not be great, but it certainly is spirited–and clear.
On to the glories.
There is indeed a recent tendency within Continental philosophy to try to make it into a competitor to science, and I agree that this often results in bad (partly because unacknowledged) religion. I deplore it.
And I agree that Continental philosophy (like analytical philosophy) is unacceptably parochial.
And I agree that Continental philosophy (like analytical philosophy) has enormous problems understanding itself.
But in the Continental case, I trace these (in my recent book, The Philosophy Scare) to the persecution of Continental philosophers by political forces in America 60 years ago, and to the resulting need to try and define it in such a way as to exclude Karl Marx, which makes it largely unintelligible.
I applaud Scott Bakker for his willingness to take on what is undeniably a strong trend within Continental philosophy, and i probably agree with many of his specific criticisms of Johnston.
And I applaud Adrian Johnston for his willingness to try a new route in philosophy–heaven knows we need it–even when full understanding of that route is still some ways away. Both Bakker and Johnston have contributed to that glorious effort–but the right words should be used to characterize it.
Speaking of glories…
Fortune favours the brave.
http://the-nexian.me/home/experience-reports/119-the-toad-and-the-jaguar-profound-5-meo-dmt-experiences
The assessment of “Right words” are crucially dependent upon a perspectival position and their respective commitments, problems, and interests which those words are representative of. Bakker’s interests as a theorist concerned with contemporary _naturalistic accounts of intentionality and cognitive function_ and continental perspectives on these _contemporary problems_ may not be the same as your interests as a philosopher interested in the _history of contintental thought_ more generally. If your argument is that Bakker isn’t conducting his assessment on your terms. then you need an argument for why your terms should have priority or precedence. Johnston is not representative of Continental thought as a whole but he is being used as a foil for certain tendencies within continental thought. Why? Well, for one he is a fairly clear and systematic expositor. Many other figures have stylistic aspects which make their thought more circuitous or difficult to follow for those not already embroiled in continental thinking (Brassier, Zizek). Johnston’s down to earth account of his own research programme renders it comprehensible for some of Bakker’s readership who might not themselves be totally aquainted with continental thought (given that part of Bakker’s interest is the tendency towards institutional closure of the consumption of the output of continental theory…).
Professor McCumber,
If it’s not too much to ask, could you elaborate on the need for continental philosophy to exclude Karl Marx? Why that is? Whose doing it? Is it helpful/harmful? Etc…Or point me to where you do elaborate on the matter.
I always agreed with Sarte’s claim that:
““I have often remarked on the fact that an “anti-Marxist” argument is only the apparent rejuvenation of a pre-Marxist idea. A so-called “going beyond” Marxism will be at worst only a return to pre-Marxism; at best, only the rediscovery of a thought already contained in the philosophy which one believes he has gone beyond.””
I suspect he’s talking more about the politics of the Cold War and McCarthyism than about any philosophical argument for excluding Marx from Continental Philosophy.
“Defending that tendentious definition by saying that insofar as Continental philosophers are not intellectual kin to Adrian Johnston they are “outside the purview of this article” is the same as saying that Continental philosophy itself is outside the purview of this article–in which case, find another term for what you’re attacking (like “transcendental materialism”).”
Welcome to the board, John! Thanks for the kind words, but I fear I don’t feel the bite of this criticism. How is my definition tendentious? Think of the intractable nature of historical periodization debates: It’s far easier to agree on exemplars of the Renaissance than to define it, wouldn’t you agree? Certainly the degree to which a critique of an individual generalizes to a group is fraught, but I don’t see how I pretend otherwise. Meanwhile, it seems pretty clear that individuals typically identified (by themselves and others) share a great deal in common with Johnston.
The cartoon version:
http://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/we-are-special
Cosmologists are special,
https://www.theguardian.com/science/shortcuts/2017/jan/31/guide-to-holographic-principle-of-universe
but so are dead dogs…
—“Only the rise of science allowed us to identify scriptural ontologies as fantastic conceits, as anthropomorphizations of an indifferent universe.”
What nonsense. If someone has falsified the Perennial philosophy then they have forgotten to tell anyone else. Science does not have an ontology and could do with paying more attention to the Upanishads if it wants to have one, or even Kant. The author clearly equates Religion with dogmatic Christianity which is a painfully naive thing to do.
If our religion states that we live in indifferent universe then this a ‘fantastic conceit’ and not a proof.
Not impressed, and quite annoyed at this clumsy and inexpert dismissal of religion. A rigorous approach would have used the term ‘commonplace Chjristianity’ or some such, since the entire argument falls apart where the blanket-word ‘religion’ is used.
When science can improve on the ontology of Buddhism it will have a right to its opinion. Until then it should be cautious in case it makes a fool of itself.
I’m confused. Religion is a matter of *faith,* is it not?
It’s a little like a Second Apocalypse actually.
https://vividness.live/2012/08/22/charnel-ground/
Yes, faith is all-important for the dogmatic religions. However, for most of religion faith is a temporary affair waiting to be rendered unnecessary by knowledge.
If the essay spoke of the ontology of commonplace Christianity then all would be well for it doesn’t have one, as Whitehead famously points out. Science did not banish it, it was never there in the first place. But what is generally called ‘true religion’ is a very different thing. Dogmatism would be a non-no and knowledge would be what matters. The writers of the Upanishads were not speculating, and their ontology can be presented as a matter of logical necessity. (As Kant showed).
This is a widely misunderstood issue but it need not be. After all, it is not a secret that the dogmatic faith-based religions have spent centuries trying to banish the knowledge-based approach.as heretical and claim it leads to a false doctrine. I just wish so many atheists did not buy into their propaganda.
This is the irony, that possibly the largest part of religion makes exactly the same criticisms of the Churches as the atheists, and much of it endorses atheism. Yet atheist rarely see this. They think that to be religious one has to have faith in God’s existence. They do not see that most most of religion takes a much more ambiguous view of God, as does classical Christianity. An ontology cannot start with existence but has to start before this.
A simple summary would say that generally religion teaches that you are God, and can therefore establish this for yourself without need of faith. This was Schroedinger’s view, so we cannot say science has even dented it. .
I have no problem with criticism of religion but some care is needed in targeting it since too often the criticisms are of 19th century Catholicism and Protestantism, and this is like criticising science for believing in philostogen.
Pardon me if my first post seemed a bit heavy-handed. Note to self, must not get irritated. .
These ‘separate spheres’ arguments just strike me as opportunistic, I fear, yet another way to explain away the inability to find decisive consensus. If ‘God’ isn’t a wildly controversial theoretical posit, then I don’t what is. The science, meanwhile, continues to suck all the cognitive oxygen from the room. This is all my argument needs, I think. Science moves on. Religion and philosophy spin their wheels in the same ancient mud.
I don’t think this is a good thing. I just think we’re all but helpless until we acknowledge this is so.
If you don’t like the word ‘ontology’ we can use something else, speak of the application of intentional cognition to solve for theoretical questions of divinity. Or are you suggesting the brain uses entirely different machinery to theorize God, something unique to divine cognition? For nonbelievers, such as myself, you have to admit this is going to sound hinky.
Let go into the mystery…
http://realitysandwich.com/320490/the-god-molecule/
rsb – I’m sorry to be so critical, really, but If someone is going to write about religion they have a duty be accurate. Your comments makes it seems that you are against against rigour and scholarship. This ‘Dawkinsian’ approach to religion is just silly and does not amount to a criticism of religion.
I am not a theist so the God argument is irrelevant to me. The argument here is against a system of belief that is endorsed by a minority of religious people and that is clearly naive is an an easy shot. But what about religion? How about some discussion of the broader phenomenon?
At least it should be pointed out what is wrong with religion. All we are told here is that dogmatic theism is a bad idea. Well, yes it is, just as Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, Theosophy, advaita Vedanta and even Christian mysticism tell us. It is not news in religion.
Is is clearly NOT scientific to take this approach but a betrayal of science. Sorry to be so critical but the level of the debate needs to raised somehow. You have to get to know your enemy or your artillery fire will be wasted.
It is true that religious people often have naive and anthropomorphic ideas. In this area of knowledge it;is difficult to avoid this, and critics of religion are equally guilty. Let’s forget them. Nobody argues that science is useless by citing pseudo-science and religion deserves the same treatment.
In this case it is only a matter of being careful to target complaints against certain religious idea or doctrines rather than using a blunderbuss that causes massive collateral damage.
Peace and love – let’s not get into a typical religion vs science argument. They need not be at war if we look at the best of both. .
R. Scott Bakker,
Maybe I’m not totally understanding your rejection of a priori views, but it seems to me that both Kant and Nagel make a rather compelling case that no matter how successful science is (and it is quite successful), our mental apparatus limits the degree to which we can and cannot know things. Certain facts for instance will forever be incapable of representation given the structure of our mental apparatus. For Kant we have the phenomenal/noumenal distinction, and for Nagel the idea that just as the Bat cannot understand what is it to be human, we cannot understand what it is to be a panoply of things in the world. Chomsky refers to this dichotomy as mysteries and problems. Problems can presumably be solved (one day, somehow), e.g., sickness caused by germs was a human ‘problem’, but mysteries are issues we either cannot form the right question about or will forever lack the wherewithal to solve. [although I’m very much an atheist I would wager what is the origin of the universe is fundamentally a mystery and it’s arrogant to presume humans can answer that question – but we can say an all loving god isn’t it].
“Efficacy attracts capital, the philosophy be damned.”
Finally, while it’s true capitalism will float towards certain areas of study, it’s also true that it will AVOID TRUE/NEEDED areas of study, due to the limit of efficiency and/or profitability. I.e., what’s more profitable, developing green energy, or sticking to our efficient oil system? What’s more efficient and profitable, curing cancer, or treating it? Just the way science is done under capitalism almost de facto takes on the values and normalized pathology of capitalism. Studying the behaviour and mentality of capitalist subjects is likely to give you capitalist results, unsurprisingly. Ya know, it’s not the consciousness of men that determines social reality, but social reality that determines their consciousness.
Just finished book 2 of your series, will start book 3 within two weeks. Very excited!
Best,
CB
Thanks, CB. The Journal of Consciousness Studies just came out with “On Alien Philosophy,” which actually explains the origins of the illusion of the a priori on nature’s mundane dime. I understand neglect and ignorance well enough, I think, but I have a hard time making sense of essential cognitive closure claims. Cognition is limited by information and capacity, sure, but science is nothing if not an object lesson in how to secure more of each. In principle arguments limiting what information and capacity might be available in the future strike me as wildly implausible. It’s been surprises all the way down the line so far.
Regarding Capitalism, yes. You make an important point–the most important one, when all is said and done.
R. Scott Bakker,
I definitely am not defending the claim that science 1) won’t continue to surprise us and startle us with unforeseen advances, or that 2) science should throw its hands up in the air at difficult problems or 3) some god of the gaps bullshit haha. But, I do think the question how did the universe get here is almost definitely not answerable by homo-sapiens, and I do think, when I look at whale and dolphin brains, we probably cannot know what it’s like to be a dolphin, in the same way a bat cannot know what grief, or jealousy, rapture, calculus, irony, or beauty are.
I mean just look at this dolphin brain!
That extra lobe could be ‘tapping’ into phenomena I don’t even know I don’t know!
Best,
CB
Hi CB and Scott,
I started writing yesterday until my computer crashed.
Several things. I would not begin to try to delineate what our current brains can access as regards representations. That is, our representations of an atomic nucleus or the structures of a black hole engage in all sorts of shallow representations or markers of the form of such things. It seems highly questionable to speculate at this point on what our brains are capable of representing in enough detail to “understand” to some degree. This is not to mention trying to delimit what future slightly modified brains may be capable of doing.
Kant was an idiot and was not giving useful demarcations of our brains’ representational limits.
As to mysteries and bats. It is uninteresting that we cannot readily shape your brain to match that of a bat’s brain so that you can experience a given scene. This is no different than that you cannot exactly match your neighbor’s exact experience. You may share a great many of your neighbor’s representations of a Trump joke, given that both of you are humans born in the same age within the same class . . . But if you wish to exactly recreate their experience you would have to modify your brain to match their’s to some threshold. Anyways, such things are not mysteries, or at least we will some time soon stop seeing them as such.
Existence may be an unsolved (unsolvable) mystery, but whatever Nagel believes follows from such is empty. Nothing useful follows to any rigorous degree other than that we have no fathom idea and cannot see one.
Lyndon, excuse me, but I really don’t want to enter into a conversation with someone who calls Kant an idiot. Disagree with him all you like, but the basic principle of charity really ought to be given to someone like Kant and Nagel. Kant is not a stupid person, wrong or right.
Modifying my brain only tells me what it’s like, for me, to ACT like a bat, it doesn’t make me know what it’s like to BE a bat. Moreover, the problem of representation and being is much more difficult in animals like whales, dolphins, and elephants, where they have the properties of human brains AND something else.
Kant was an idiot…”
This is fighting talk.
Kant showed us how to connect physics, metaphysics, consciousness studies, religion and nonduality. I rather think he was not an idiot but well ahead of the game.
I think you are wrong to assume that existence is unsolved or unsolvable.
Kant was an idiot–like every other human on the planet, you and me included. But I think the primary error he makes lies in his representationalism, not his transcendental explications of them. Representations are ways for brains to manage cognitive complexity without having to deal with that complexity, and so are hopelessly ill-suited to ‘answer’ questions regarding the nature of that complexity.
We can not be a bat, but why would should we accept that in order to understand something you have to be it. We can’t for example be quantum informational processes, or fluid dynamical processes any more than we can be bats, but I severely doubt if you would extend your same charity to those phenomenon and claim we can not understand those phenomenon. What its like to be a bat arguments just expose our ignornance concerning even formulating the explananda of cognition and consciousness. Just as I don’t know what its like to be a bat, I don’t any better what its like to be conscious, and neither does nagel or anyone else. Any attack on coherency of the qualia notion (and there are many: cf, Metzinger’s discusssions of this issue in Being No One) implicitly attacks arguments such as Nagel’s.
The BBT has less in common with discussion on the hard problem of conciousness and more in common with what Jack has begun terming as the “genuine problem of consciousness”: what must we ‘be’ like neurobiologically in order to have two seperate and relatively disjointed and difficult-to-smoothly-integrate orders of understanding — causal / mechanical understanding, and social /metacognitive understanding. Jack and Bakker contends we can answer the latter question, and answering this question might actually begin to tell us a lot about ‘Hard problem’ type of questions concerned with phenomenality and qualia.
Is this Anthony Jack you’re referring to, Void?
Anthony Jack… you showed me his paper “a scientific case for conceptual dualism” bit ago
just in case C B wants to follow up and check it out:
Click to access 2013%20Jack%20A%20scientific%20case%20for%20conceptual%20dualism%20(1).pdf
on the lighter side: http://jonronson.com/Jon_Ronson_Confirmation_Bias.mp3
“What this means is that nature, for Johnston, is intrinsically contradictory. Three things are generally supposed of contradictions: first, they logically entail everything; second, they’re difficult to think; and third, they’re conceptually semantic, which is to say, intentional through and through. The first two considerations raise the spectres of obscurantism and sophistry (where better hide something stolen?), but the third should set the klaxons wailing for even those possessing paraconsistent sympathies. Why? Simply because saying that reality is fundamentally contradictory amounts to saying that reality is fundamentally intentional. And this means that what we have here, in effect, is pretty clearly a kind of anthropomorphism, an example of the deathless intuition that the universe must somehow resemble us for us to belong to the universe.”
What a fantastic paragraph.
I’m a long-time lurker and reader of The Second Apocalypse, and sooner or later, I plan to mount a defence of Meillassoux against your concerns.
Thank you Mike! I’m keen to see any defense of correlationism, but know that my first question is going to be, What is your theory of meaning? Find a coherent account in Meillassoux, and I’m all ears.
As an initial answer, I’d say his critique of correlationism renders any question of meaning in the sense of Sellars’s manifest image to be secondary, in that he requires no particular account of how the world appears to humans. Or in other words, one can plug in whatever version of the correlation they wish in order to account for the for-us, up to and including eliminativism.
The real form of meaning he needs for his project is mathematical, and he attempts this in “Iteration, Reiteration, Repetition” (it’s in a volume called Genealogies of Speculation; there’s a separate first draft loose on the internet which he disavows).
The short form of his answer is that mathematical symbols are meaningless, and do not refer to anything (contra, e.g. Badiou, who makes them refer to the pure multiple). Math as a series of meaningless graphical marks forms a correspondence with the quantitative multiplicity of things as a typographical variation – the correspondence is not semantic but graphical.
A long paragraph from the end of that essay says:
“To count something, to associate one-line to any things whatsoever functions in the same way: there is no semantization of signs but only semiotization of things. And thus, the numerical sign will conserve its emptiness in mathematizing the Universe, having voided the Universe of its meaning to the point of making it the typographical variant of its operations. The eternal silence of infinite spaces through which the way of the count wends. The whole world can be numbered not by giving meaning to the signs of numbers, but by proposing a rewritten version of their absence of meaning. And this correspondence implies no fusion: the world is measured without fusing into its measure, insofar as its deuteroabsoluteness remains thinkable.” (Meillassoux 2012, 186)
So, a meaningless theory of meaning. How does that shape up to you?
The problem, of course, is that he’s just another philosopher making funny philosophical sounds. Anyone can speculate, and everybody does speculate. We’re hardwired to rationalize. When you advocate, the tendency is canonize what you’re advocating, and to neglect the fact that this particular canon is simply one small set of discursive claims in a jungle filled with them. That’s what skeptics such as myself see when reading quotes like the one you provide.
To be blunt: I just don’t see how such claims can hope to matter, given that they do nothing more than add to the heap of disputation. Speculative Realism is such a strange philosophical development to me: just when science begins the industrial analysis of the constitutive nature of cognition and just as cognitive psychology lays bare our theoretical incompetence, a group of philosophers ‘discover’ that seeing cognition as constitutive of was the error all along, and endorse forms of dogmatic speculation as the corrective.
My approach is pretty simple: the human is another biological component of its environment, susceptible of detailed understanding as such. There’s no limit to this detail, which is what causes all the problems. What people find difficult to swallow is the notion that discourses such as Meillassoux’s, as something distinctively human, are also susceptible of detailed understanding as biological components. I’m trying to show people ways to interpret the same problematics from a genuinely naturalistic standpoint, one bound into the mad, mad power of the sciences, not stranded on the irrelevant periphery.
But the bottom line is that a theory of meaning is at once a theory of cognition. As such, it should possess real consequences for empirical research on cognition. There’s a reason it’s the holy grail! It’s the place where speculation has to engage the science, what we actually know regarding cognition, lest it lapse into a kind of philosophical astrology.
Hi rsb – You are entitled to your assumptions, of course, but I hope you’re aware of many you are making on behalf of your preferred view. What you call ‘your approach’ is your assumptions. You do not have to make them and cannot justify them.
Science has nothing to say about most of this and you don’t endorse apperception, so giving up speculative philosophy is giving up on the problem and making do with assumptions. I don’t feel this is a rational or scientific approach, popular as it may be. .
.
“But the bottom line is that a theory of meaning is at once a theory of cognition. As such, it should possess real consequences for empirical research on cognition. There’s a reason it’s the holy grail! It’s the place where speculation has to engage the science, what we actually know regarding cognition, lest it lapse into a kind of philosophical astrology.”
Eliminativism is just as much a form of correlation as anything else. A transcendental apparatus that projects or forms is doing the same job of shaping the for-us as a cogsi apparatus which forgets.
Second, can research into cognition proceed without research into what is cognized? Phenomenology, in the limited sense of analyzing the contents of consciousness as opposed to the wider sense of a transcendental account of consciousness. This is important because Meillassoux’s account of the meaninglessness of math depends on the phenomenal experience of meaningless signs; it is the phenomenal point at which we leave the phenomenal and quantify dead matter.
As an aside: I’ve understood your project as being one which is supposed to make the epistemological considerations in the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit obsolete. Am I wrong?
If my brand of eliminativism runs afoul correlation, then correlationism as a critical diagnosis is pretty much meaningless. This is because on my account the relations between organisms and environments are no different than any other kind of relations constituting environments. It’s nonintentional. The patois of ‘knower and known’ is convenient (and well it should be) but always shorthand for physical processes on my account.
But this is precisely the problem: after two thousand and five hundred years (!) of speculation on the nature of cognition and experience, we cannot even agree on the formulation of the explananda, let alone explain anything. At what point do we abandon speculative ontology? Another thousand years? What are your criteria Mike? What would it take for you to recognize that speculative ontology (a road I spent more than a decade travelling) represents a wrong turn.
On the naturalistic approach, you cobble together your ontology as you go along, using things like consilience, experimentation, and abduction to fix your posits. This is the approach that has given us smartphones, so…
But you have an even larger problem, which is what I was trying to highlight in my previous reply. Continental philosophy is deeply invested in POAs, ‘problematic ontological assumptions.’ As philosophical sins go, correlation is deeply puzzling, like I say. If you want anyone outside of your discursive ingroup to listen, if you want to be relevant, you have to first explain how your particular POA can accomplish something no other POA (like ‘identity thinking’ or ‘the metaphysics of presence’) has: namely, convince anyone belonging to discursively relevant groups.
Drat – that should have been ‘how many you are making…’
Uhm not to be crude, and maybe I’m fundamentally misunderstanding you, but:
“The problem, of course, is that he’s just another philosopher making funny philosophical sounds. Anyone can speculate, and everybody does speculate. We’re hardwired to rationalize. When you advocate, the tendency is canonize what you’re advocating, and to neglect the fact that this particular canon is simply one small set of discursive claims in a jungle filled with them. That’s what skeptics such as myself see when reading quotes like the one you provide.”
strikes me as either an egregious ad hominem, or hoisting oneself by their own petard ….no?
Hoisting oneself by one’s own petard, were my position reliant on mere speculation. My alternative takes a great number of empirical positions.
Great discussion.
Rsb – You say…
“But this is precisely the problem: after two thousand and five hundred years (!) of speculation on the nature of cognition and experience, we cannot even agree on the formulation of the explananda, let alone explain anything. At what point do we abandon speculative ontology? Another thousand years?”
I think you would enjoy reading the literature. The Buddhist philosopher Nagarjuna famously solved ontology in the second century, pretty much as Kant does but successfully. If you have objections to his ontology, which is not speculative and which is endorsed by vast swathes of humanity, then go for it. I haven’t seen here one yet.
Your complaints are against Western philosophy and dogmatic or speculative religion and they are exactly the same as mine except that I may make them even more strongly. But they are not complaints against philosophy or religion. They are parochial. They are evidence that you have not looked beyond the university philosophy department or the local church.
—“What are your criteria Mike? What would it take for you to recognize that speculative ontology (a road I spent more than a decade traveling) represents a wrong turn.”
I’d agree totally. We’re hardly likely to be able to make up the solution for how Something can seem to come from Nothing. It is hubris to think we might. This is why a lot of people go and actually look and check the facts for themselves. Then they come back and explain. The literature is vast.
What would you like to know about ontology? I’ll have a shot at some answers if you like, or can sketch the answers that the Perennial philosophy would give. Perhaps I can persuade you that ontology is a matter of logic and reason, experience and apperception, with less and less need for speculation.as one progresses and in the end no need for it at all.
The problem is that everybody finds their ontology compelling, which is usually a pretty good clue that something is amiss. But I fear the skeptic will have the better of you at every turn. What is logic? We need to know to know its limits, and especially its range of application. What is reason? Anyone’s guess. What is experience? Pretty clearly not what tradition has thought. What is apperception? Almost certainly not what the tradition presumes.
Each position you hold in the galaxy of alternatives represents another intuition driven guess. The fact that those alternatives strike you as the only game in town just follows.
I’m in exactly the same boat, except that mine has empirical markers in the larger game.
I suppose not everyone is interested in these things, but I do find this rejection of ontology and logic irrational and most odd for someone writing about it. I sometimes think folks are more concerned with protecting their preferred views than making progress. Thanks for the chat but it’s best I drop out rather than argue. .
Who’s rejecting logic and ontology? All I’m rejecting is the tendency to assume one’s own logic is the only true application and one’s own ontology is the only true account.
I don’t know what you mean by ‘one’;s own’ logic’ or ‘one’s own’ ontology. I use Aristotle’s logic and it seems to work fine and it shows that there is only one ontological scheme that is not logically incoherent. This is not my fault.
I’m just pointing out the irony that it’s always the other guy’s logic and ontology that’s flawed. My logic and ontology are, of course, THE logic and ontology. 😉
Everybody but everybody thinks they won the Magical Belief Lottery.
I’m sorry but I don’t recognise this postmodern approach to logic. All ontological schemes are flawed except one, obviously, and logic allows us to identify which it is. The question of ‘yours’ and ‘mine’ does not arise. I do not see the problem.
Kant is clear. All selective conclusions about the world as whole are undecidable, and this is because they don’t work in logic. Case closed. All that remains is to find the one that does work, and this is not difficult.since there’s barely any choice. .
I know this is not taught in our universities, but philosophy is is in a right mess in the department. Footnotes to Plato and all that. On the outside things are much rosier.
Are you saying this is postmodern?
The fact is, the kind of certainty you evince is actually a reliable sign that something has gone wrong. You should be suspicious of it. You should recall how common it is.
I’m suggesting that by rejecting logic you become a victim of opinion. Do you notice that you have no objections to my view?
My view is very common, as you say. I find it reassuring. But I can demonstrate my results so reassurance is not an issue.
I’m being a bit hard-nosed, I know, but I’m also being factual. I see no need to be pessimistic about logic or ontology. All that is required is to do the analysis and it bothers me so few people do this.
Your certainty is very common (tragically), not your view. That’s the irony. Nobody can agree on these matters. Everyone thinks everyone else is getting the ‘logic’ wrong. Meanwhile, we know as a matter of empirical fact that humans are prone to dupe themselves in a great number of matters.
I don’t reject logic. I just don’t think I’m a magical exception. Ergo, I try to be suspicious of my intuitions of certitude.
I’m really only interested in the views of those who share those suspicions simply because they tend to know what will change their mind on any given matter.
Richard. Pardon my rather irritable tone. I genuinely cannot understand why you would believe what you do. I wonder if we can take this conversation anywhere. I became intrigued so checked your ‘about’ page. I see that you speculate that we are machines and that certainly is impossible in metaphysics.
I feel that it is not a good idea to speculate like this and it is not a professional approach. I believe it is much better to go in search of the facts. Why would anyone do otherwise? You speculate that there are no facts but why speculate? You’re doing exactly what you complain about in other philosophers.
You assume that I cannot be correct and so don’t ask me back up my assertions. If you did I would. There are vast areas of metaphysics of which you are unaware and of which you will remain unaware while your pessimism prevents you from exploring them.
It is possible to understand metaphysics and from a study of it to arrive at the correct ontological solution. Many people have done it. It is actually quite difficult not to do it. Your pessimism is evidence for what is true, just as was Russell’;s and Carnap’s .The failure of the pessimistic views you all endorse is loudly self-proclaimed, and the only thing you miss is that it reveals the solution. It is not finding the solution that is difficult but only understanding it.
At any rate, it makes no sense to argue that it would be impossible to know what is true because the argument is self-defeating. This is pointed out by Francis Bradley, one of many metaphysicians who show us how to work out the truth about ontology. .
I wish I could persuade you to cheer up but I’ve said my piece and don’t want to simply argue. Perhaps we should leave it here. My feeling as that many people are too humble to believe that they could better than the professors when if fact it’s a doddle.
I realize that you can’t. It’s part of my point, actually.
How weird. Why not do the work? Anyway, never mind.
Bradley like the British Hegelian Bradley. Sure, the appearance reality distinction is a useful one but can it be absolutized? Look at the trenchant debates on this issue surrounding measurment and observation in quantum mechanics and what is the status of things which are useful in calculations like wave functions and hilbert spaces, where there is no unanimous agreement that these things are “real” or even how we could go about finding out. But overall, You are misrepresenting his position based on a very cursory reading and extrapolation. He does not reject logic nor does he reject logical vocabulary and logical concepts. he just likely follows the empirical literature which says outside of specialized training people aren’t very good at it; and moreover — in situ — in REAL discursive practices (chattering to other people to arbitrate about what to do next) we often do not have the time nor the cognitive resources to actually carry out reasoning in the sense that a logician (whose work, bear in mind, is often most applicable to problems in computation, expert database updating, and so on… the logical work that leads to automated medical diagnostic systems that outperform actual human doctors at assigning correct diagnosis, scott would be totally in support of… he just doeesnt think that what logic studies is how human beings actually reason in most parts of their actual activities). So maybe we should spend time looking less at how the philosopher thinks Human should Reason and more time at how people actually come to grips with the world around around them is something like RSB’s position.
VoidsIncision
Nice post. I’d agree that many people don’t use logic properly (especially in metaphysics) and that Bradley does use it properly, and also (for logical reasons) that the Appearance/Reality distinction cannot be absolute.
So why must we decry logic and reason and retreat into opinion and conjecture? Why do we not follow Bradley’;s example?
A rhetorical question. Not many people want to go where logical analysis takes us.