"If you think the realism vs. anti-realism debate is a “pseudo-problem,” then you’re a correlationist."
By this account (Harman's), I am certainly not. I think the debate in question is not a pseudo-problem but a mystery. One can think this in at least two possible ways. Possibly we are too stupid to understand the issue; our brains did not evolve to confront such metaphysical conundrums. This would be something akin to Colin McGinn's philosophy of consciousness. On the other hand, possibly the issue is irreducibly mysterious; it resists resolution by the very nature of its terms. My money is on option 2.
Incidentally, even Wittgenstein, while he may have used the term "pseudo-problem" a bit at a certain stage in his career (or at least contributed to the atmosphere that made this term welcome), regarded the "mistakes" that language could lead us into as far deeper than what is usually meant by this disparagement. For him, the purgation and self-examination involved in clearing up such "mistakes" was a struggle--one could justly say a spiritual struggle, if one did not fear (or care) about misappropriation of the adjective; and if at a certain moment the question seemed to "disappear," this did not make it a stupid mistake.
I do however think that "correlationism" is a persistent resolution to the debate that cannot be forsworn once and for all, anymore than can "metaphysics". In my ontology/epistemology (and I am suspicious of any too-rigid separation of these), any entity that could "think" the issue will wind up being correlationist; correlationism is, like geocentrism, how the world looks for a certain kind of situated consciousness.
If oxen and horses and lions had hands and were able to draw with their hands and do the same things as men, horses would draw the shapes of gods to look like horses and oxen to look like oxen, and each would make the gods' bodies have the same shape as they themselves had.This remark by Xenophanes, preserved for us by Clement of Alexandria (Miscellanies 5.110), did not mean that Xenophanes believed there were no gods; we know from other quotations (fragmentary though they are), in Clement and elsewhere, that Xenophanes held that "God is one, greatest among gods and men, not at all like mortals in body or thought," (Miscellanies 5.109); "All of him sees, all of him thinks, all of him hears," Sextus Empiricus quotes (Against the Mathematicians 9.144). In like manner, neither should we conclude that, the "human-world interface" being demystified, the question of the interface per se is now moot. The day we bridge the human-dolphin divide (or perhaps when a computer convinces us to ignore the machine-human divide) we will learn again that philosophy is not anthropology, but has only been so by accident, as it were.
Wittgenstein was essentially against the empiricist claim that we concocted our language/conceptual schema from attention to inner data. (cf.beetle in the box etc) Now the dolphin world and the human world are a version of the empiricist theory and I would say that following Bergson, the grandfather guru of the thinkers that seem to have influenced the OOO folk, the dolphin remains at dolphin level because the dolphin is processing everything. The immense complexity that human perception entails means that it would take an eternity to process and extract anything from sensory input. As you know and here my elision is vast,( the differential calculus is Bergson's protophenomenon) (Coleridge), humans use memory and a tiny element of the flux of duration to symbolise the whole. Thus he says that metaphysics is an attempt to discard symbolism and find a way into the absolute.
ReplyDeleteBergson would reject the spectrum that runs from naive realism to subjective idealism finding that they imply each other. In many ways his thought bears a family resemblance to Platonic form, the vedic words of Shankara and the strangely overlooked anti-abstractionism of Peter Geach in 'Mental Acts'. There is a world of reality but we are speechless before it. It is not that we cognitively closed to it as McGinnn would hold but that we hide from it.
There must be few things that not once used to be mysteries. So before concluding to irreducibility, we must keep on trying. Correlationism is not necessarily simple which would make the interface a pseudo-problem. Bergson for one, would certainly want to have us look more precisely and apply his method for the intuition of duration. My take is, that sensing and knowing are extremes on the scale of human capabilities, from dealing with material-, to dealing with cultural reality surrounding us and making us up. Our brain is the product of evolution, including our history of dealing with, or sensing, material reality, up till this moment. The content of our brain is of the same sort, only this time dealing with, or knowing, cultural reality. This is enough to make us do all that we do at that interface, brilliantly or not.
ReplyDeleteRon~~
ReplyDeletewelcome. The only remark I'd make in rejoinder is that I mean "mystery" in a technical sense as a question whose matter is, as it were, incommensurate with the manner & very fact of inquiry. It is not just as shorthand for a question we don't know the answer to. Also, I like your website-- I am quite interested in memory technology, a field with impeccable philosophical credentials (e.g. Bruno).
Om~~ Thank you for mentioning Geach, a figure who is, alas, passing somewhat into eclipse. There was a promising line of religious philosophy in that generation of British thinkers that has not been followed up. It had two sides to it (to vastly oversimplify); one side reached a sort of collapse in Braithwaite, who pushed the "it's nonsense, but important nonsense" line about as far as it could go. (This is a line I have some sympathy with, as you know, but I don't want to make the whole game of it.) But the other side was, e.g., Anscombe & Geach, (and perhaps Dorothy Emmet, another neglected reader of Whitehead among other things). Geach's logical and analytic work has had some impact -- he had a strong influence on my teacher Bernard Harrison -- but his Catholic thought is not as widely known, I believe.
Skholiast:
ReplyDeleteMy point in relation to Geach was about his anti-Lockean stance in 'Mental Acts'. I don't know anything about his Catholic thought from a doctrinal point of view. Yes he of course is keen on Aquinas and held that the abstractionist view ascribed to him is a mistake.
Ron:
Bergson certainly read up the current literature of his day on the brain and used it to offer what was a startlingly counter-intuitive position namely that memory does not reside in the brain. cf. Matter and Memory. Other than pointing to the existence of duration what was the technique for its intuition?
Om, apologies for missing your point in my enthusiasm. I ought to go read 'Mental Acts' again with an eye to the comparisons you draw (Bergson, Sankara). In any case I like the way you sum up the position you attribute to Bergson, contra McGinn-- not that it's hidden from us, but that we hide from it. The question is, can we do any other.
ReplyDeleteThank you for the privilege of having such inspiring teachers. Happy to see my 'app' isn't considered a conundrum and I am more than willing to explain to you all the ins and outs. Bergson's technique for intuiting duration, away from the symbolic 'clippings' of intellect and sociobabble I believe he described in chapter The Perception Of Change (Second Lecture) in An Introduction to Metaphysics. What we need to re-learn is to perceive using 'the fringe of instinct': differentiation, immediacy, actuality, continuity, change, 'present past', newness and a kind of transparency (‘resolved enigma’).
ReplyDeleteSkholiast:
ReplyDeleteCan we do other than hide from it you ask. Heraclitus would have said 'Nature loves to hide' but whether it is 'phusis' as power or nature that hides or is hidden by the very fact of having a conceptual schema with time and space as primitive is a question that is moot (mute). The Westerners deny us agency in this regard generally. To a good rote learning student who echos him saying "it seems that I am superimposing on my original nature"; Sankara ironically remarks "Well you must stop superimposing then".
You know and I know and God help us Ken Wilbur knows, in 15 colourways, that the curtain parts from time to time or that it turns into a gauze theatrically. While we fidget in the queue poets get waved through...
http://ombhurbhuva.blogspot.com/2006/12/louis-and-henri.html
Ron:
While I was writing the foregoing your post came through. By the power of Sony's ereader I find in the 2nd. lecture of 'Mind Energy' the phrase 'a fringe of perceptions' which seems to be what you were referring to. ..."may there not be around our normal perception a fringe of perceptions most often unconscious, but all ready to enter into consciousness, and which in fact do enter in exceptional cases or in predisposed subjects?"
His judgement about this sort of intuition is that it is adventitious and that there are blocks to the irruption into our normal consciousness of such potentially disturbing knowledge. Clairvoyant savants may occur occasionally and in the life of any of us in extraordinary circumstances flashes of second sight may happen but it is by no means, in his opinion, a normal capacity. The other question that occurs is how this psi relates to the intuition of duration. Are they both aspects of a greater mind? Could there be one without the other? Certainly to many this will be an aspect of his thought, in the Anglosphere particularly, that is not 'sympa'. I imagine that Ditchkins have placed it on the Index.
Ombhurbhuva, this sort of intuition replaces intellect the way the dynamic religion and the open morality replace the static and the closed kinds, if not blocked. We need it though for our human kind of instinct with its special fringe allows us to know and fear the not-here not-now, even our own passing. Ditchkins believe(s) we don't need that, for suspect reasons.
ReplyDeleteSkholiast:
ReplyDeleteBryant is breaking up on me. He seems to be going correlationist on everything or that you are correlationist only if you reserve it to the human sphere. Generalising it is fine.