In a response to “The Ontic Principles Tangled Beard“, Alexei contends that difference is an insufficient ground for an ontology:
Leaving aside the idea that ‘difference differs’ (which suggests to me that you can’t actually identify a difference because identification is re-identification, cognition is recognition, and something that is always differing isn’t stable enough to be identified) I am claiming that there’s a paradox here, but it’s not exactly the one you outline. To put the matter simply, ‘difference’ is an insufficient notion for developing an ontology and this insuffiency is exhibited in the lack of context and context-dependence that differentially construed objects exhibit.
The idea seems to be that if everything differs then we don’t get enough stability within being for entities to exist, much less be theorized. It seems to me that this criticism moves too quickly, failing to explore the resources that difference offers in responding to these sorts of issues. What this criticism fails to take into account are differences in scale and duration characteristic of the world. A blooming flower is constantly undergoing change at each moment of its existence, both at the cellular level of the processes or operations being undergone by each cell and at the the level of the petals, opening and turning towards the sun. On the one hand, I am unable to perceive the cellular activity of the flower because of the scale at which I exist. Likewise, I seldom notice the process the flower undergoes as it blooms, instead noting only the result or final product of the now open flower. If this is the case, then it is because of the relatively slow duration that characterizes the movement of the flower with respect to the duration that characterizes my being.
read on!
Following Graham and Latour, it can be said that the flower is a black-box or has undergone “punctualization” with respect to me. That is, I treat the flower as an identical and unchanging object, oblivious to the heterogeneity that characterizes its being. This phenomenon of punctualization is not simply an epistemic phenomenon, but rather is ontological. The tree relates to the other trees in its vicinities not as a heterogeneity, but in punctualized form, as an obstacle to its light. A rock falling down a mountain does not encounter the mountain as a constantly changing processes at both the molecular and molar level, but as a series of obstacles informing its trajectory down the side of the mountain.
Moreover, in contemporary cognitive neuroscience we get a conception of cognition that is, precisely, differential in character, where abilities such as re-identification and re-cognition are the result of constant operations, not unlike the way cells must perpetually make themselves, and where each repetition introduces a difference in the neurological system as a whole. Re-identification and re-cognition are results and effects of these differential processes, products, not conditions.
The real question strikes me not as the question of how recognition and identification are possible, but rather as the question of when differences become appreciable in relations among assemblages. At each moment my eye contracts millions of photons of light. The physicists tell me, in turn, that these photons are themselves constantly differing, being both waves and particles, and that each of these packets of energy or photons are themselves undergoing all sorts of processes and variations. Yet when I look at this table before me, all I see is the color brown. At what point, through what process, does this brown shift from being the deep, rich brown that it now presents itself as to being a nearly blinding, shiny silver color as occurs when I shift my head slightly?
If there were no differences of scale and duration, Alexei would be right. However it is precisely these differences in scale and duration that allow for the phenomenon of punctualization or “black-boxing” that enable contexts or plateaus to be formed. This is also the importance of the notion of singularity as a difference that constitutes an appreciable difference. Singularities can only be spoken of in terms of inter-assemblic relations because what counts as a singularity will be a function of the assemblages entering into relations with one another.
Thus, for example, while it is ontologically true that a subatomic particle, as a being, makes a difference, it is generally unlikely that a subatomic particle constitutes a singularity for a wall. This is because, depending on the sort of particle it is, it is able to pass right through the wall as if it didn’t even exist. Likewise, the wall, for such a particle, offers little in the way of singularities in relation to the particle. Singularities, as I argued in “Margaret’s Pepper Principle” and “Towards a New Transcendental Aesthetic“, are points of density, condensation, friction, or resistance, thereby playing the role of appreciable differences in the genesis of a form or quality. However, when referring to singularities, it is always necessary to ask “with respect to what assemblages?” “With respect to what scale?” “With respect to what duration?”
January 24, 2009 at 3:42 pm
For a salient commentary from a viewpoint consonnant with quantum physics, see Schroninger’s 1944 (?) essay “What is Life?” Shrodinger notes that if one asks this not as a biological question, but one which has to respect the characteristic movements of atoms (brownian motion), then something has to happen in order for he systems we call molecules and the more complex systems we call cells and chromosomes to come into being, to undergo processes (including that of reproduction). We could continue the general trajectory of Schrodinger’s argument via, say, Gerald Edelman’s work on how vast networks of neurons, acting ineeficiently but in concert, generate as a kind of side product consciousness as we experience it and via an argument begun by Ruth Benedict among others about how cultural selection operates. All of these processes–and I have to insist upon the notion of process here–generate orders of system or structure (I prefer this term to Levi’s term network, but I don’t seem to see the difference he’s insisting on) in which culture has to be consistent with physics, i.e. culture can not violate physical regularities any more that molecules can) but at the same time as physics becomes chemistry physics has to conform with the regularities of chemistry and biology and consciousness at least for the duration these multiplex orders of processes endure. Levi seems to call all of these orders of processes “making a difference.” For those of us whose work concerns the operation of processes of some particular scale of multiplexity, this phrase “making a difference” can only be preliminary–a place to start to understand something of which differences make what sort of difference for the requisite forms emerging and disappearing within the pertinent orders of processes. For example, as an anthropologist, Kant doen’t make much of a difference but Goethe, especially his work on the internal structure of growing plants does because Goethe helps me think about the processes of living systems, i.e. helps me think morphologically. My apologies to Kant, but like Goethe I lack an organ which allows me to understand him.
January 24, 2009 at 4:21 pm
Great comment, Jerry. For me the vocabularies aren’t essential. I myself am not particularly fond of the term “network”, because I think the connotations of the term seem to invite analysis in terms of a single strata of entities or objects in their relations to one another, i.e., computer networks, interpersonal networks, internet networks, etc. For me the crucial feature of networks is that they are composed of heterogeneous entities such that they cannot be reduced to one type of entity (Margaret’s Pepper Principle). For this reason I think the term “assemblage” is better because, at least, it suggests a lot of different things being put together.
I’m wary of the terms “system” and “structure”– even though I’ve advocated them enough in the past –because, coming out of French structuralism anyway, and Systems Theory –both imply holism and the interdependence of elements. That is, they imply, to my ear, the strong ontological thesis that the entities cannot exist outside of their relationships as elements in a system or structure. I’m perfectly happy to grant the weak ontological thesis that entities exist differently when certain relations are added or subtracted, but I also want to maintain the autonomy of entities such that their being is not exhausted by their relations.
I think you’re right about the thesis of making a difference as being a preliminary starting point. I’m beginning at an extremely high level of abstraction so as to open the maximal degree of concreteness (i.e., issues of what the appreciable or relevant differences are). At the level of the epistemic or inquiry, a tremendous amount of very hard work goes into specifying the relevant and appreciable differences within a system, structure, or assemblage.
In my view the correlationist halts the issue of this work too quickly by centering the issue around reflexivity or the way in which all our relations to other beings are mediated by concepts, power, language, society, etc. A lot of the work done by practicing scientists consists precisely in trying to suspend these mediations or this dimension of reflexivity so that appreciable differences might be encountered. This proves to be a massive task because the universe exists at so many different levels of scale and duration, where differences of different sorts aren’t detectable at particular scales or levels of duration.
I recall– and my memory is fuzzy here –a documentary I saw a couple years ago about a project trying to detect a certain type of subatomic particle… A particle that would be related to dark matter, I believe. Because of the nature of these particles the entire project was extremely daunting as basically they can move right through the technologies we’ve devised without anything being registered. To solve this problem the scientists had built a massive pool of water deep in the earth lined with extremely sensitive detection devices to filter out, as it were, the noise created by other particles. These scientists were little looking for a tiny little “blip”. In other words, because of differences in scale and duration, all sorts of technology had to be mobilized to create an environment that would allow us to detect a difference that makes a difference. Correlationism just doesn’t have much to tell me about epistemology in this sense.
I’ve heard you gripe often enough about the reflexive turn in the social sciences along these lines as well. If inquiry begins and ends with reflexivity– or “observing the observer” –in the social sciences, then this form of inquiry is done at the get-go because the whole question is one of encounter an-other person, society, or people. Reflexivity might be an important step, but the real issue is encountering those differences that are independent of the differences I bring to bear.
January 24, 2009 at 5:13 pm
[...] going to take a break from the metaphysical debates for moment, to reflect upon President Obama’s Inaugural Address. I think that here, more than [...]
January 25, 2009 at 5:02 pm
For the record, Levi, most (if not all of my) criticisms are logical/conceptual. I take it, for instance, that saying difference differs is a contradiction: it means that difference is always doing the same thing, ergo it isn’t really different. And so difference isn’t different (this is a variation on Nate’s themes).
you say ‘Tomehto,’ I say ‘tomahto,’ let’s call the whole thing off…
Could you explain to me what the difference is between being able to identify or recognize a difference and that difference being appreciable in relation among assembalges. It sounds like exactly the same thing to me, since to appreciate implies being able to identify, recongize, etc. etc. That is, appreciation and identification are ‘Third Man terms:’ you need an observational position from which to ‘see’ two other things (and Like good old Plato noted, this is going to generate some form of regress but quick).
Past that, I think that if one takes both difference and durée as the fundamental categories of metaphysics, one can in fact develop a coherent account.
But I’m not sure that one can define a durée through what I’m going to call for simplicity’s sake a durée’s efficient differences. As I see what you’ve said above, a durée makes possible certain kinds of diferences, and hence can’t be defined in terms of those differences (Hempel’s flagpole example seems to demonstrate this). This is a logical point, the converse of which leads to vicious, unproductive circularity.
Past that, two more things: Difference and Durée don’t sound much different form Kant’s pure forms of intutions (space and time); you’ve simply tried to omit their relationship to human sensibility (turned Kant inside out, so to speak).
That’s just an observation, not a criticism. Although I do think it’s interesting that the more specification Object oriented philosophy gets, the more it starts to look like an inverted Kantian worldview.
Anyway, the big problem, as far as I see it, seems to be that I have no idea why I should accept the various durées of things as ontological, rather than contextual features of human knowledge claims. Why isn’t there, like there is in Kant, simply empirical intuitions of a durée, pure forms of the intuion, durée, and then the pure intuitive form of a durée, none of which have anything to do with the things that appear to us under various conceptual registers (flower, cellular activity, sub-atomic interaction, etc)?
I mean, it seems to me that the various durées don’t have the same set of ontological commitments, so why isn’t it more parsimonous to say that none of the differences picked out by the various durées are real, and that at bottom the only really real thing are super-strings or some such?
Why aren’t durées symptomatic of a more fundamental stratum that can account for the different registers of causal relationships?
January 25, 2009 at 6:00 pm
Hi Alexei,
Yes, I understand that your criticisms are of a logical order. I briefly outlined the structure of the argument in my post “Plato’s Full Nelson”. Hopefully you’ll note that I have not denied that operations of identification and recognition take place or occur. Rather, I have claimed that identification and recognition are not prior conditions but are results of complex processes that are differential in character and that refer to entities that both differ in themselves and differ from one another.
Differences in scale and duration helps to solve this problem by providing stable points from which one assemblage can observe another, or, as you put it, it provides an observational position. The reason that I’m able to identify my fence as this fence is because it does not appear to me as something that is changing, though ontologically and observationally it is something that is changing constantly. If I did not exist at a certain level of scale and duration with respect to the fence, this would not be possible, but rather the fence would not be experienced as a fence at all but would be encountered as something like a cloud in Brownian motion. This doesn’t change the fact that all sorts or differential processes are at work at the level of my neurology and the fence itself.
You are right to say that I see duration and scale as ontologically real rather than consisting of forms imposed by mind on world. Here I side with Whitehead over Kant.
I have not made the claim that super-strings are really real in comparison to other levels of duration and scale. In fact, my Principle of Irreduction and Translation forbids such a move. However, this rejection of reductivism doesn’t entail that entities don’t contain all sorts of other levels of duration and scale.
Maybe you could say a bit more as to just what you have in mind by “turning Kant inside out” as well as what you’re getting at by more fundamental strata accounting for different registers of causal relationships.
January 25, 2009 at 6:08 pm
Just to clarify on the issue of identification and recognition, my point is that the identified and the recognized are accomplishments or products, that they emerge, rather than things that are at work already in the mind. Think about the process that’s undergone by getting a degree in literary theory or what distinguishes the PhD as a reader of literature and the average person as a reader of literature. When first starting to read novels they are a bit of a chaotic mass lacking in differentiation or, what amounts to the same, being pervaded by so many differences that no meaning is produced (this would be especially the case with certain high modernist novels). Gradually, over the course of education and engagement with literature, texts become internally differentiated and differentiated from one another, such that the reader develops the capacity to distinguish significant and ordinary points within the text. The reader develops the ability to recognize genre, literary tropes, various thematic tendencies, various forms in which literary language is organized, etc., etc., etc.. Similarly in the case of developing a palate for wine, or moving to a new city for the first time where everything seems chaotic and disorganized.
My model of cognition would treat these abilities as the result of a process and a genesis, not as something that is there already at the beginning. Identity and recognition would not, therefore, be conditions, but products. These results would be, in part, acquisitions of experience or learning, and, in part, biological acquisitions. This model seems confirmed by neurology as well. At birth or over the course of its development in the womb, neurology teaches us that all of the neurons in the brain are connected to one another. The process of neural development is not a matter of forging connections, but rather of dissolving connections, such that certain relations among neurons take on the form of significant points in contrast to ordinary points, i.e., there’s a process of differentiation where, as Jerry would put it, form is generated.
January 25, 2009 at 7:47 pm
Hmmm. I don’t think I disagree with anything you’ve written in response to my last comment, levi. I’m just not sure you can draw the kinds of inferences you want from them.
So, for instance, you write,
and then in your second comment,
I agree, of course. This is also one of the reasons I cited Leibniz’s thesis ages ago: cognition is always re-cognition; identification is always re-identification. that’s to say, the cognitive function of identification is the outcome, the product, of a previous process that can then be applied to a novel context, situation, etc. I’m pretty sure no one would deny that (since to deny it would be to deny education as such).
The philosophical problem, however, never seems to be with what processes lead to what products, but rather with ascertaining how the conceptual space in which this account of processes and products is situated allows for such an articulation. Call this metatheory. That is, I take it that one needs to offer a coherent conceptual space (universe of discourse) in which to situate their claims about ontological entities. Otherwise no sense would attach to claims like, ‘recognition is a product of a process, not an antecedent condition of an external entitity.’
From my perspective however, then, a theory of the efficient causation of recognition doesn’t articulate what I take to be philosophically interesting/significant — namely the perspective from which these kinds of claims (true or false, it doesn’t matter) can be coherently made and articulated.
Formed as a criticism: although I agree with the theory of cognition you’ve sketched, and the role of identification, etc, I don’t think that begins to answer the tougher questions I’ve posed concerning the intelligibility of such a claim in the first place. It’s one thing to say, for example, that recognitive structures aren’t transcendental, but rather the product of a historically determinate process. It’s quite another to provide a framework in which the very distinction between transcendental and historical registers can be made.
The fault line separating us, and causing a theoretical dispute, is what to do with this kind of claim concerning the intelligibility of process and product. I tend to treat it is a conceptual problem/issue, and you seem to want to ontologize it. I take up a metaphilosphical position, you go for (a new) fundamental ontology. But for the life of me, I can’t see how fundamental ontology addresses the intelligibility of its claims (unless you hermeneuticize it, which is to say, bring back the subject in some form as the primary access to being)
Now that I think of it, my responses tend to have a kind of transcendental-phenomenological (I’m a fan of Husserl after all) thrust: they tend to be, “how can you make that claim, which involves the following conceptual backgrounds without falling into paradox?” And you tend to respond by saying “the differential character of Being is such that …”
That’s fair enough, I suppose. In any case, I also agree that what you’re calling scale and duration does help solve some of the anxieties I have about the determinability — not determination — of things. Nevertheless, the problem for me remains: what kinds of conceptual apparatus do you need in order to make these kinds of claims coherent? For they really seem to point past an ontological order and into an epistemological one.
Phrased slightly differently (and herein lies the alliance between speculative realism and object oriented philosophy, I think), you seem to be consistently refusing a metatheoretical (be it transcendental, or Hegel’s Begriff) level of discussion. Or again, you seem to be seeking to undercut the level of philosophical reflection that allows, or creates the space for the kinds of questions I keep trying to ask you. If that’s an accurate diagnosis, I’m not sure how this form of philosophy is intelligible.
In point of fact, I tend to think that you can’t really close off this level of reflection anyway. And this means, regardless of how you conceptualize ontology, you still have to account for the space in which this conceptualization takes place.
Anyway, I’m sure this is all very convoluted and unclear. So I’ll let the matter go for the moment.
One last remark about ‘turning Kant inside out.’ As far as I can tell, your remarks about duration, scale, and difference ultimately amount to an externalization of Kant’s account of sensibility and the functions of judgment. Your three notions define a certain way in which things can interact in much the same way as space, time, and the categories do, save that instead of resulting in a judgment, you have the interplay differences resulting in some kind of individuated object (for Kant judgment and the awareness of an object are the same thing, so there’s really no difference to be had, between external thing and judgment about an external thing). And, instead of a transcendental unity of apperception (or what amonts to the same things, intellectual intuition [Fichte] or the rotary movement of the drives [Schelling]) you have difference differing. It seems pretty obvious to me, but then again, lots of things seem obvious to me that turn out to be either dead wrong or totally obscure to others.
May 15, 2009 at 8:17 pm
[...] very schematic forms in my post Principles of Onticology (and here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here). In developing this ontology it should be noted that I proceed [...]