In response to a recent post, Kathya asks:
Very interested post! Sorry if this is a dumb question, but could you just briefly explain what you mean when you say that your position is ontologically realist but epistemologically anti-realist? Thanks!
I’m in a bit of a hurry as I have to head out to pick up my three year old daughter from school soon, so hopefully Kathya will forgive me if my response is a bit abbreviated. Apologies for my slowness to respond. Between my heavy teaching schedule and other responsibilities I can be slow to get back to things. I understand that anti-realist epistemologies emphasize the active role that the social and minds play in the process of inquiry in “constructing” objects of knowledge. Knowing is not understood by these positions to be a passive relationship where mind merely mirrors the world like a reflection in a mirror, but involves all sorts of activities to produce knowledge.
read on!
There are a couple of reasons that I understand my position to be epistemologically anti-realist. The first of these reasons are ontological. One of the claims of my ontology is that all relations between objects involve translation. No object ever encounters another object as it is directly, but rather objects translate one another and produce something new in that process.
If we think of translation in the context of language this concept of translation can be fleshed out. The naive and common sense view of translation is that translation consists in a transfer of meaning from one language (L1) to another language (L2), such that meaning is preserved across the two languages. If we refer to the diagram of the Saussurean sign in the upper left-hand portion of this post, the naive concept of translation holds that while the signifier changes between L1 and L2, the signified remains the same across L1 and L2. In other words, for the naive theory of translation (NTT), the expressions “Il pleut”, “Es regnet”, and “It rains” are identical at the level of the signified. The medium in which the signified is expressed– the language –contributes nothing to the signified.
Now as everyone who knows two languages or who actually engages in translation is aware, this is not at all how things work. The NTT is a terrific and intuitive theory of translation. It’s only failing is that it is false. The English /river/ and /stream/ and the French /riviere/ and /fleuve/ are not, for example, equivalent. The former are distinguished by size the latter by whether or not the entity flows into the ocean. Additionally, there are resonances in any language that simply cannot be translated because they play on the dimension of polysemy through homonyms and whatnot. Thus, for example, Lacan’s concept of the nom-du-pere cannot strictly be translated into English. We can, of course, translate it as “name-of-the-father”, but this forgets that the term, when spoken aloud, also sounds like “No! of the father” in French. Similarly, Lacan’s concept of “sinthome” simultaneously sounds like symptom and Saint Thom. Lacan wants to play on all these resonances at once like multiple staves in a musical score. Since English is structured differently at the level of sound we cannot find an exact equivalent in English that plays on these multiple levels of meaning at once.
The point of the concept of translation, then, is fourfold:
1) Every translation is an interpretation. This comes home with particular clarity in the case of translating a text. Certain terms can be translated in multiple ways. The translator has to make a decision as to how it will be translated. Alternatives are possible. In this respect, a translated text (L2) is a bit like a fork in a railroad track. Choosing one translation excludes the other translations.
2) Every translation produces something new. The copy or translation is not identical to the original. Not only are certain resonances of the French lost in translating Lacan, but certain new resonances become possible in English because of the sound-structure of the English language.
3) The medium makes or contributes a difference. There is no such thing as a passive or transparent medium. Rather, the medium contributes differences to the content. In the case of the examples above, the mediums are the French and English language. That medium contributes different possibilities of meaning.
4) The medium is not a passive vehicle of meaning. If we think of the metaphor of “vehicles”, when we drive our car or take a train or plane we remain the same. The vehicle contributes no difference to the being that we are. The NTT conceives the signifier as a vehicle for the signified where the sound-image or signifier transports the signified without contributing any difference of its own. A careful look at actual translation, however, shows that the vehicle and medium contributes a great deal to the signified.
Following Latour, I generalize these basic points about translation to any interaction between objects, regardless of whether or not language is involved. Think about photosynthesis. Here we have photons of sunlight, the leaf and its photosynthetic cells, and the sugar produces. The leaf “translates” the photons of sunlight and produces something new: the complex sugars. There is no resemblance or identity between the photons of light and these complex sugars. Rather that sunlight becomes something new in passing through the medium of the photosynthetic cells.
Now because I advocate the thesis that translation is an ontological feature of all inter-object interactions, it follows that my realist ontology is necessarily committed to an anti-realist epistemology. Knowers translate the world about them just as leaves translate sunlight. The outcome of these translations is not identical to the inputs. This just is what anti-realism claims. Nonetheless, my position is an ontological realism because 1) I hold that the black-boxes (objects) that do the translating are themselves real entities and are mind-independent, and 2) because translation itself is an ontologically real process. Moreover, while I hold, like the anti-realist, that we can never have direct access to an object, I nonetheless hold that we can arrive at real and genuine knowledge of these black-boxes or objects and how they function through the laborious process of controlled inquiry.
Hope this makes sense. Alright, gotta run.
November 18, 2009 at 1:45 am
Levi:
I have been following this blog for a few weeks now, and I found this piece to be extremely helpful and elucidating. Thanks Kathya for asking, as well, as I was wondering more specifically about this relationship between the epistemological anti-realism and ontological realism. I can’t wait for your book to come out, Levi, as I find OOO to be a great step forward for philosophy.
November 18, 2009 at 4:13 am
[…] One is about LEVI’S VIEWS ON TRANSLATION BETWEEN OBJECTS. […]
November 18, 2009 at 5:04 pm
Wow, that is what you call a brief reply! Well thank you very much indeed. This is very interesting. I am not yet sure how to think about this idea of modeling all object-object interactions on that of linguistic translation, but I will go away and think about it. On the face of it to try and explain something like photosynthesis in terms of something like the translation of meaning seems a bit odd given that we have a very good scientific account of the former but not at all of the latter. However, perhaps you are not interested in explanation and more in coming up with a suitable metaphor for your basic idea that “no object ever encounters another object as it is directly”. Since I am not sure what it would be for one object to “encounter another object directly” (nor even what it means to say that nonsentient objects “encounter” one another at all) I am not sure what is really being claimed here, but perhaps you can further explain that when you have time. It seems to me that what you are saying is very close to what Graham Harman says about how one object always “distorts” or “caricatures” the reality of another object when they interact, only that you have chosen a different metaphor. I guess some people find such metaphors helpful, but they tend to leave me wondering what conceptual work they are supposed to be doing. Anyway, it is interesting all the same and I will think about it more and perhaps it will become clearer. Thanks again for the detailed reply to my question.
November 19, 2009 at 4:43 am
Hi Kathya,
Thanks for the comment. I think you misunderstand a bit. Translation is a “philosophical concept”, not a metaphor. Put otherwise, it is a technical term within the framework of my ontological theory. The post does not argue that we should understand object-object interactions based on linguistic translation and as transfers of meaning. The discussion of linguistics throughout the post is to underline some salient features of translation so that a philosophical concept of translation can be produced. These salient features are four-fold:
1) Media or mediums (Aristotle’s material cause) are not neutral and passive vehicles for forms (Aristotle’s formal cause), but contribute differences of their own.
2) The product of an interaction is something new.
3) The product of the interaction does not resemble or copy the difference contributed by the object interacting with the second object.
4) There is no element of an interaction that persists as the same or identical such that it is unchanged through the interaction.
Note that in these four points no reference is made to language or meaning. The discussion of language and meaning is only used as a launching point to generate a much more general concept. I also think you will find that science and philosophy are riddled with metaphors in the development of their concepts. Aristotle’s term “category” (Κατηγορίαι), for example outlines all possible ways in something can be a subject or a predicate in a judgment. However, the Greek term Κατηγορίαι originally has a very different meaning, signifying to “to accuse, assert, or declaim in a public assembly”. In stipulating a philosophical concept Aristotle draws on the resources of the Greek language and pushes it in a very different direction. This practice is not at all isolated. For example, in physics we talk about bodies “attracting” one another despite the fact that nothing remotely like this is going on.
My discussion of translation in no way challenges the great scientific theory we have of photosynthesis. The scientific theory of photosynthesis just is the mechanism of translation for plants. Here I think it’s important to remember that philosophy is meta-theory. It is the work of other disciplines to figure out the mechanisms of translation for the various forms of life, for physical phenomena, for texts, and social structures. Philosophy, by contrast, is, to put it crudely, a general and abstract theory of the basic structure of being that is presupposed in practices. What it contributes is greater clarity as to what we’re doing when we inquire and it assists us in asking better questions.
November 19, 2009 at 9:10 pm
[…] Michael Austin’s lucid explication of Harman’s theory of vicarious causation and Levi Bryant’s own take on what really happens between objects.) Harman’s book Guerrilla Metaphysics, in which he […]
November 22, 2009 at 1:17 am
Hi Levi,
I’m not sure if you will welcome my questions or comments, but I have still been thinking about these issues and I figured I’d give another stab at entering a dialogue here.
Since I come at this from a physics perspective, I tend to think of ontological schemes in terms of physical naturalism — which is to say, if I were to posit that a particular physical model were in some sense “true” (i.e., an exact one to one correspondence with reality), how would one map the ontological scheme onto this physical model? (This is not to say I am a physical naturalist myself, but I do tend to use it as a kind of thought experiment context so to speak.)
You seem to be relatively friendly towards physics but it’s not clear to me how one would overlay your ontology onto at least some plausible interpretations of quantum mechanics.
In particular, the objective existence of any object (as having a particular position in spacetime) in some interpretations of quantum mechanics depends on the object being observed — but the observing object itself has no objective status as “existing” except in relation to yet another observer. This infinite regress was a fundamental problem for some interpretations of QM and continues to be. In other words, in some interpretations it is not possible to solve this problem by referring to an “instrument” as an observer, because the instrument itself also has no objective status without referring to yet another instrument, and so on.
There are, of course, some interpretations of QM which allow for instruments, and so forth, to have a specific existence independent of interpretation — these are the so-called “objective collapse” interpretations. There are, however, other interpretations which are consistent with experiment, such as Everett, which do not involve objective collapse. My thinking is along the lines of the latter.
These interpretations do imply the existence of a human-independent world with dynamical properties which are independent of subjectivity (be it human subjectivity or animal or any other form of subjectivity). But it is difficult to reconcile these interpretations with the scheme you propose of objects which appear to have clear boundaries across which a translation occurs when the objects interact with “external” objects.
Strictly speaking, using, say, a strict Everett interpretation and assuming for the sake of argument a physical naturalism what is “objectively” present in “reality” actually has next to nothing in it at all. I.e., you have a universal wavefunction with no features whatsoever, no objects or observers, etc., whatever. (I.e., consider Max Tegmark’s paper on this subject: http://space.mit.edu/home/tegmark/nihilo.html )
If Everett turns out to be right, then objects of any kind can *only* exist relative to observers, in a fundamental sense (i.e., the entire structure of apparent reality is fundamentally a network of relations). Another way of putting it is that the objects, in this scheme, don’t precede the signals being received and translated by other objects, but the objects and their being perceived co-arise in some sense.
None of this actually invalidates thinking of objects “as if” they exist, because in an approximate sense (ignoring quantum effects) one can use that as an approximate model. So in this sense one can overlay your OOO ideas onto an approximate physical naturalism. But I can’t see how one can make any kind of fundamental ontological claims which fit your scheme and also are consistent with at least the interpretation I outline above.
Finally, I’m still unclear on the question of “overlap” which I raised earlier. It seems to me from your scheme that you’re implying that the interiority of objects are in some sense separated from the interiority of all other objects. But there seem to me to be obvious cases in which no signal is transmitted between objects, and thus no translation, yet a change in the interiority of one object immediately affects another with no signal being transmitted at all (it seems to me this is inherently required by the fact that objects may be composite).
November 24, 2009 at 3:47 am
[…] of reasons that this concept of translation is mistaken. I outlined some of these shortcomings in a previous post, so I won’t repeat them here. Latour’s concept of translation is broader than that of […]
November 25, 2009 at 5:55 pm
[…] to a couple of my posts from earlier this week on translation, Nate over at Un-canny Ontology writes: What is […]
September 20, 2012 at 3:31 pm
Hello, are these thoughts published in another more legitimate form of an essay or a book yet?