Over at Being’s Poem (an excellent blog, btw), Daniel has an interesting post up raising questions about OOO. Daniel writes:
Here is where I find that some very rudimentary questions can be raised, in spite of Levi’s recent proclamations about how OOO has been circumspect in providing support for their claims. The first obvious observation concerns the status of real objects. Since every time I think about, type in, or generally relate to my computer, either in practice or theory, the real object in relation to me withdraws, how do I know that it is, in fact, one real PC that is withdrawing and not a multitude of PC-Parts, or of qualitatively different real objects altogether? More specifically, since every time I think/act towards my PC this will be towards a sensual distortion of the object, how can I ever know anything about the structure of real objects as such?
There’s much more there (Daniel is prolific), so read the rest of the post here. In my view, it is crucial to distinguish between what I call “epistemological realism” and “metaphysical realism”. Epistemological realism is a thesis about knowledge. It is the claim that the way we represent objects is the way objects are. Here representations and objects mirror one another. Metaphysical realism, by contrast, is the thesis that objects are mind-independent and exist in their own right.
All epistemological realisms are also, necessarily, metaphysical realisms, but not all metaphysical realisms are epistemological realisms. This is the case with object-oriented ontology and follows, as Daniel notes, from the very logic of its metaphysical claims. Object-oriented ontology is a metaphysical realism without being an epistemological realism. If this is so, then it is because objects withdraw from any and all relation. Insofar as knowledge is a form of relation, it follows that objects withdraw from knowledge alone. This is to say that knowledge cannot be a mirror or identical representation of objects.
Here, then, we seem to encounter a contradiction. If knowledge cannot be a mirror of the world by virtue of the fact that objects withdraw, what warrants the claim that the world is composed of objects at all? Isn’t OOO overstepping the limits of its own knowledge, claiming to know that which it itself claims cannot be known? And if this is so, doesn’t this entail that OOO isn’t even entitled to claim that the world is composed of objects, nor that we can even know whether objects are withdrawn?
read on!
The best arguments I’ve come across for the thesis that the world is composed of objects are found in Roy Bhaskar’s early work, A Realist Theory of Science. Bhaskar’s strategy is transcendental (in his early work he refers to his position as “transcendental realism”). A transcendental argument is an argument that argues that certain conditions x must be the case in order for something else to be possible or intelligible. Saussure’s Cours is an example of a transcendental argument (though he does not use this terminology himself). Saussure asks “what are the conditions under which communication is possible?” Here communication is the practice to be rendered intelligible. What is sought is what must be the case in order for communication to be possible or take place.
Saussure’s answer is that in order for communication to be possible there must be a shared system of language within which those who communicate are situated. Now note, language, for Saussure, is a very strange thing. Language is not what is spoken. No one has ever heard language. Language cannot be directly observed. Nor, as strange as it may sound, can language be spoken. Rather, language is that shared code, that shared system, that allows communication to take place. In this regard, language, Saussure argues, is the condition under which speech is possible. What the linguistic seeks to investigate, in Saussure’s model, is this system or code, and this system is inferred through the investigation of speech and other texts.
Bhaskar is engaged in a similar project. Bhaskar’s transcendental question is “what are the conditions under which scientific practice is intelligible?” This question needs to be refined in two ways. First, Bhaskar asks “what must the world be like for scientific practice to be intelligible?” Bhaskar’s thesis is thus that the conditions under which scientific practice are intelligible are ontological. In order for scientific practice to be intelligible the world, he argues, must be a particular way. Second, in asking after the conditions under which scientific practice is intelligible, Bhaskar is, in fact, asking for the conditions under which experiment is intelligible. For Bhaskar, the key question is not about the reliability of truth-claims in science, but about scientific production. He is not asking how scientific propositions map or hook on to the world, but about what transcendental conditions lie behind our experimental activity.
I will not go into all the details of Bhaskar’s arguments because his arguments are complicated and lengthy. Bhaskar argues that there are five conditions for the intelligibility of our experimental practice; that is to say, there are five ways the world must be for experimental practice to be intelligible: 1) it must be possible for generative mechanisms [objects] to be out of phase with their qualities, 2) the world must be differentiated, 3) the world must be structured, 4) the world must be hierarchically stratified, and 5) the generative mechanisms that populate the world must be intransitive. I’ll discuss each of these conditions briefly in their turn.
Being Out of Phase
What are we doing when we conduct a scientific experiment and why are we doing it? When we conduct an experiment we place entities in a controlled or isolated setting. But why do we do this? We wish to observe, of course, what they do or how they behave. Yet why is it necessary to place them in a controlled or isolated setting? Bhaskar argues that scientific experimentation is necessary because it is possible for entities to be out of phase with their properties or the events of which they are capable. In other words, outside of the experimental setting entities can fail to display the nature of the acts of which they are capable. They can be dormant, but also their powers can be disguised or suppressed by the intervention of other entities. Experiment thus places entities in closed settings so that it might discover the acts of which a particular sort of entity is capable. Were entities not capable of being out of phase with their properties and the events of which they were capable there would be no need for this detour through experiment.
This first condition is the foundation of my distinction between local manifestation and virtual proper being. Within my framework, all local manifestations are acts or activities of objects or generative mechanisms. Here what we ordinarily refer to as properties or qualities are doings on the part of objects. The red of a billiard ball, for example, isn’t a quality that that billiard ball has or is. Rather, the red is something the billiard ball does. It is an activity on the part of the billiard ball. To manifest is to do something. This doing, in its turn, is dependent on all sorts of interactions. For example, lighting conditions. The key point about local manifestation is that it can fail to occur. We can, for example, turn out the lights. At this point, the activity of “redding” ceases to take place. The ball ceases to locally manifest itself as red. However, the powers of the object, its capabilities, its virtual proper being remains. We infer powers through local manifestations, yet these powers are nothing like the local manifestations. The powers of an object always far exceed any of its local manifestations. Here, already, we encounter the withdrawal of objects in a variety of forms.
The World is Differentiatied
As we saw in the previous section, experiment involves situating entities in controlled and isolated settings. If this is to be possible, it follows that the world must come in chunks. The entities of the world must be differentiated or independent. Were this not the case, then it would not be possible to isolate entities so as to conduct controlled experiments on them. Thus, while we always encounter entities in relations of one sort or another, we must conclude that these relations are of an external, rather than internal nature. In principle it must be the case that entities can be severed from whatever relations they happen to currently entertain. For example, the condition under which fifty yards of fabric (one of Marx’s favorite examples) can indifferently exist and interact in either a barter system or a capitalistic system is that its being is independent of either of these relational networks. Here then we have grounds for an object-oriented ontology.
Entities are Structured
In order to act and locally manifest themselves in the world entities must have an internal structure that maintains itself throughout the duration of its existence. We should take care, however, not to conclude that these structures are fixed or static. Each structure or substantial form is capable of endless variations and mutations. In this respect, we should think of structure not geometrically but topologically. The clip below gives a nice sense of the nature of structure:
Here we encounter instances where, in each instance, one and the same structure undergoes a series of variations. In each instance (there are three different topologies in the video), the structure topological remains the same while the local manifestations perpetually shift and change. These structures, of course, can undergo variations that reach bifurcation points where new structures or substantial forms come into being. In other words, they can reach points where, as a function of reigning conditions, new objects come into being.
Entities are Hierarchically Structured
When Bhaskar refers to the hierarchical structuration of the world he is referring to emergence. Scientific inquiry proceeds by showing how higher level laws are based on lower level laws. For example, one phenomenon might be explained by electricity, yet electricity, in its turn, is explained through quantum mechanics. Alternatively, the motion of the planets or the movement of our red billiard ball might be explained through gravity, yet we then need to explain gravity through the elusive Higgs-Boson particle (if it’s found to exist). Entities are nested within entities. The important point here, however, is that the hierarchical stratification of the world is not eliminative. Higher scale entities have an autonomy, independence, or existence of their own characterized by their own generative powers. They cannot exist without the lower scale entities, nor do these higher order powers contradict the powers of the lower scale entities, but they are autonomous entities in their own right, irreducible to these lower scale entities.
Entities are Intransitive
The claim that entities are “intransitive” is Bhaskar’s fancy way of saying that entities are independent of mind, society, language, or experience. They exist in their own right. The term is to be contrasted with what Bhaskar calls the “transitive”. The transitive dimension of knowledge, by contrast, refers to the social dimension of knowledge: the practices by which knowledge is produced, the social setting (investigated by figures such as Pickering or Latour) in which knowledge is produced, inherited knowledge in the form of theories, texts, prior findings, institutions in which knowledge is produced, etc., etc., etc.
The claim that the generative mechanisms or entities of knowledge are intransitive is the claim that they are independent of the minds, society, language, or experience through which they are known. A transitive verb is a verb that requires both a subject and an object as, for example, in the sentence “Tom threw the ball.” Were the objects of knowledge purely transitive they would have no existence independent of the investigators and society through which this knowledge is produced. Bhaskar rejects this hypothesis again on the grounds of experimental practice. Were the objects of knowledge purely transitive there would be no need for experimentation as entities would not be out of phase with the properties or acts of which they are capable. This possibility of being out of phase requires that entities be independent of the knowledge that discovers them.
The point here is not that the transitive dimension does not exist, but that the entities aimed at by this transitive dimension are independent of that transitive dimension. Take the example of my acquaintance with Graham. I get to know Graham transitively in a variety of ways. I gradually come to know him through my experience of him, talking to him, listening to him, reading what he writes, observing how he behaves, and so on. Moreover, my knowledge of Graham is informed by a broader historical, social, and philosophical background that influences how I interpret him. However, Graham himself is intransitive to how I come to know him and to this background horizon. Graham exists as an entity in his own right independent of any of this that I bring to the fore in getting to know him.
To Conclude
A first point to draw from the foregoing is that these claims are entirely agnostic with respect to the question of what entities exist. The foregoing makes no claims as to whether it is atoms, subatomic particles, organisms, stars, baseballs, etc., that exist. These are questions for actual inquiry and cannot be answered a priori. All that is said here is that if scientific practice takes place then the world must be such that entities can be out of phase with their qualities or the acts of which they are capable, that it must be differentiated, that entities must be structured, that it must be stratified, and that the objects of knowledge must be intransitive to that knowledge. Here, incidentally, it’s worth pointing out that goo theorists and relationists are obligated to respond to this argument. They can, of course, argue that scientific practice doesn’t take place, that it is a pseudo-practice, and therefore dismiss the entire transcendental argument altogether. Alternatively, if they concede that scientific practice does take place, they are obligated to explain how it is possible in that instance where the world is composed of pre-individual goo.
Second, fallibility is built into this transcendental account of knowledge. Daniel asks “how do we know that the computer is an object and not just an aggregate of computer parts?” Insofar as OOO is a metaphysical realism, not an epistemological realism, the only answer is that we’re not entirely certain. It could be that the computer is merely a collection of objects and not an object in its own right. I don’t claim certainty. Many philosophers, influenced– probably unconsciously –by a Cartesian tradition seem to treat certainty as a model of knowledge. Absent certainty, then the conclusion seems to be that we are entitled to dismiss any ontological claims. This strikes me as a very odd premise. Certainties are few and far between, but that doesn’t entail that there aren’t degrees of probability and likelihoods.
Third, however, we are obligated to provide arguments as to why we believe it is likely that this or that is an object. When I make the claim that, for example, the Coca-Cola Corporation is an object, I am making both a very strange claim and one that ought to be defended with reasons. Here my argument is that the Coca-Cola Corporation both possesses powers and is interacted with by other entities in ways that are irreducible to any of its parts. The Coca-Cola Corporation is capable of doing things that its parts are not capable of doing. Likewise in the case of the computer. I believe the computer is itself an object, that it can’t be reduced to a mere aggregate, because it has powers and is capable of doing things that its parts are not capable of doing.
One might here evoke the “causal redundancy” argument, claiming that when such claims are made we fall into a causal redundancy that parity does not require. That is, when we claim that the computer has causal powers we seem to be claiming both that the parts of the computer cause such and such and that the computer causes such and such. Yet aren’t we multiplying entities needlessly when we do this? Can’t we say, instead that it is merely the parts that do whatever it is that we say the computer is doing? And if this is the case, can’t we merely abandon the idea that the computer exists altogether? The problem is that the structure or organization of the computer is not nothing. It is by virtue of this structure or organization– what I call “endo-structure” or “endo-consistency” –that the computer has the powers that the computer has. The computer cannot exist without its parts– though it is not unimportant that those parts can be replaced –but neither can it be reduced to the parts. The computer has the powers it has by virtue of that structure, organization, or substantial form. The parts, of course, are a necessary condition for the computer being a computer, but they are not a sufficient condition nor can the computer be eliminated in favor of its parts. At any rate, back to editing.
Larval Subjects . 
January 17, 2011 at 7:36 pm
I’m very glad that you made this post, Levi, as it addresses precisely the question that I was wondering about lately: the relation between OOO realism and epistemological realism.
I’m not going to quibble with the answer you’ve given here, mostly because I like the transcendental route that you’ve traced. I will note, however, that epistemological realism does not necessarily have to involve a representation/reality correspondence (as it seems you’re claiming in par. 3 of your post). For instance, Kant seems to have begun thinking about knowledge in terms of representational realism, but then stumbled upon his own Copernican Revolution which effectively abandons representational realism in favor of a constructivism that is not representationalist.
Kant remains a metaphysical realist in the first Critique because he thinks, of course, that there are mind-indepdenent things that cause our cognitive machinery to get to work constructing representations. But this theory cannot maintain that there is a way things *are* and a representation of these things in the mind that may or may not accurately reflect the real state of things.
So, Kant seems to be a metaphysical realist, but an epistemological idealist/antirealist. My question now becomes: is Kant entitled to his metaphysical realism? He thinks its senseless to talk of appearances (phenomena) without something that appears (noumena), but is there anything more than a linguistic argument being made here?
Could Kant claim that, transcendentally we can posit the reality of autonomous objects? Would this positing be speculation on his part, or a form of knowing that there are (or must be) objects for the categories to work up into experience?
Please take these claims as friendly queries about how to bolster arguments in favor of OOO whenever the epistemological question arises. (Note also that I’ve just ordered Bhaskar’s book.)
January 17, 2011 at 7:46 pm
[…] Levi’s anticipatory response to my unasked question here. GA_googleAddAttr("AdOpt", "1"); GA_googleAddAttr("Origin", "other"); GA_googleAddAttr("LangId", […]
January 17, 2011 at 10:13 pm
Thanks Levi, this is the most complete presentation of a plausible Object Oriented Epistemology I’ve read to date and it does begin to address some the worries about the content of ‘realist attitudes to X’ I’ve raised elsewhere. I completely agree about emergence. Any form of flat ontology (and not just the object-oriented kind) needs real emergence and not just epistemologically defined ‘weak emergence’.
That said, I’m a little worried that your argument might presuppose a phenomenologically dicey model of perception. Arguably, we don’t perceive colours as transient properties. We perceive them as stable properties of objects that are more or less preserved under different lighting conditions – hence the phenomenon of colour constancy. So then why not identify the colour red with whatever surface reflectance properties of objects generate typical colour experiences. This is still compatible with the position that objects have properties that can be unmanifest but also leaves it open that we do indeed reliably track such properties – as with the dynamic properties of sounds. I don’t see anything anti-realist there.
January 17, 2011 at 10:24 pm
Thanks David. I’m a little unclear as to what you’re getting at with color. Now granted, I’m always a little hesitant with the example of color because I believe that color is an example of why I call an “exo-quality” and is not a property of “colored objects” themselves. In my vocabulary, exo-qualities are properties that emerge from an interaction between two or more objects. They have no independent existence apart from those qualities. The sense I get from the human and animal neurology I’ve read is that color is produced by brains interacting with objects. I nonetheless use the example of color because it’s something we can easily verify phenomenologically ourselves. What I’m trying to get at with the color example is that the color of objects shifts and changes with changing lighting conditions. I detail this a bit more thoroughly in my post entitled “The Mug Blues“. The color of my coffee mug shifts and varies depending on whether it exists in sunlight, bright ceiling lights, candle light, moonlight, etc. As such, I claim that color is an “interactive property” and the result of the regime of attraction in which it exists. It seems to me that you’re talking about how we subsume objects under a color classification or category. We say that the mug is “blue” (we subsume it under a homogeneous category) despite the fact that the mug undergoes all these variations. Indeed, it takes some effort to even notice the variations that the mug undergoes.
January 18, 2011 at 12:07 am
Levi-
To clarify my earlier comment…I realize that I misspoke by suggesting that your definition of empirical realism is faulty. Let me retract. Let also add that I think that it’s funny how the same question about metaphysical realism arises whether we’re thinking about Kant or OOO. OOO has the problem of explaining how they can speak about autonomous objects that withdraw from observation, whereas Kant has the problem of explaining how he can hold that there is a noumenal realm of objects that lies ‘beyond’ the constructed world of experience.
Of course, Kant is not committed to a view of mind-independent objects, but perhaps he should be given the transcendental conditions you note in Bhaskar’s work?
January 18, 2011 at 12:56 am
Thanks for this detailed and very useful discussion, Levi. This afternoon, I read Isabelle Stengers’ excellent chapter in your *The Speculative Turn*, and I was fascinated by her discussion of science and practice. Any thoughts on how Bhaskar (who seems to rely quite a bit on scientific inquiry) might respond to her perspective? (I haven’t read Bhaskar yet but have put his book on my reading list–thanks for the reference.) And, on a different note, while I find object-oriented philosophy extremely appealing, I get very stuck and resistant at the idea of objects “withdraw[ing] from any and all relation.” To me, this image seems to reinforce the self-enclosed hyper-individualism of mainstream US (and western!) thinking–a radical, nonrelational individualism which plays such a large role in colonialism, racism, capitalism, and many other isms. (Because hyper-individualism insists that each individual as entirely responsible for his or her fate, it makes social-justice work very difficult and leads to heartless, judgmental attitudes. After all: if each individual is fully responsible for his or her own life, there’s no need for collective action, public assistance, or any type of change. Just pull yourself up by your bootstraps!)
January 18, 2011 at 1:30 am
Hi AnaLouise,
There is a long running debate surrounding that status of relations in speculative realist circles. In my own case (my ontology isn’t identical to Harman’s), my ontology is deployed to properly analyze relations and interactions. In other words, the thesis is not that there are no relations, nor that relations play no important role in the world, but rather that relations are external to their terms. Put in another way, entities can be detached from their relations and enter into new relations. I take your claims about racism, colonialism, capitalism (I’m a type of Marxist myself) very seriously. Far from leading us to overlook these things, I believe the ontology I’m developing draws attention to them. However, it also ontologically grounds, in my view, the possibilities of breaking with these things. Were entities the same as their relations there would be no hope or possibility of breaking with these sorts of regimes. If you have the time, this post might give you a better sense of how I think about relations and the sorts of networks you’re talking about: https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/01/17/object-oriented-ecology/
You can skip the long block quote to get to the meat of the post if you wish. All of this is much more thoroughly developed in my forthcoming book, The Democracy of Objects.
Without sharing all the details of her ontology, I am largely on board with the Stengers-Latour-Pickering model of scientific investigation. All this post outlines are what the world must be like for those practices or investigation to be intelligible. There are two sides to the scientific project: the transitive and the intransitive. Here I’m focusing on the intransitive. However, the transitive or social dimension is equally important. In The Mangle of Practice Pickering gives a gorgeous gloss on what this transitive dimension looks like. As Pickering writes,
Pickering goes on to remarks that,
In their meditations on science and scientific knowledge, Stengers, Pickering, and Latour are all trying to think the interplay of broader social fields and interests, institutions that train researchers, experiment, but also the implements or machines that investigators use to elicit certain responses from other entities (the entities being studied) in the world. Each, in their own way, emphasize the dimension of risk and surprise embodied in these engagements. This is a model of scientific activity I wholeheartedly embrace. Glad you’re enjoying the collection.
January 18, 2011 at 1:31 am
Sorry, wrong link in the previous post. It’s fixed now but here it is again just in case:
January 18, 2011 at 2:05 am
Thanks for your thoughtful reply, Ian. I’ve read a lot of Pickering and found your discussion helpful. Interestingly, your “wrong” link, which lead me to your discussion of “blue mugs” (or should I say, “mugs bluing”?) was especially helpful in offering me an alternative to the image of objects “withdrawing” from each other and the world. You write of an object “perpetually withdrawn or in excess of any of its manifestations.” My literary mind appreciates the latter formulation, the image of teeming, untameable, unmeasurable, surprising excess.
January 18, 2011 at 2:10 am
I have an endless fascination with my bluing mug! It’s “Levi”, not “Ian”. I’m nott nearly as sharp as Ian.
January 18, 2011 at 2:32 am
I’m so sorry, LEVI! Naming is important, and I hate to mess up.
January 18, 2011 at 2:42 am
Don’t worry, I already have all sorts of issues with my name… I didn’t know my legal name (Paul) until I was six or seven years of age. I’m used to erasure in the symbolic order and unphased by it!
January 18, 2011 at 6:25 am
http://ecologywithoutnature.blogspot.com/2011/01/levi-on-epistemological-vs-metaphysical.html
A great post methinks.
January 18, 2011 at 6:43 am
Very nice post.
Uncertainty and ambiguity is already built into this philosophy from the beginning, so there is always the question of mistaking objects. We never know absolutely whether the sensual object has a real correlate, but we can allude, suggest, hypothesize, deduce and imagine that a real entity is probably at work. My take on the computers and its parts is, why are the parts granted reality and power that the computer isn’t? Once you start reducing or deferring reality like that, you have to say that those parts have parts themselves, and so on and so on, with reality appearing nowhere in the mereology at all, till you get to some supposedly ultimately real particle discovered by physics. So the computer isn’t real, but its micro-particles, presumably belonging also to a zebra, vitamin E and a tuning fork, are? The world’s individuals simply disappear.
Daniel wants knowledge to be clear and relatively transcendent, seeing a link between the real object and our experience of it from the outside so as to compare them — hence his desire for a kind of adequacy between the sensual and real, or between the endo- and exo-dimensions of the object. In the absence of this possibility, the only choice is to abandon any structure of reality in-itself as hopeless, but why? Because it is not adequate to knowledge? The problem is the very word “know” and its equivocation. Object-oriented thought does not really, as I understand it, deny knowledge of objects, just a particular model of knowledge which Levi talks about above: epistemological or representational realism. We are perfectly capable, through experiment and reflection, of listing capabilities, properties and qualities of entities so as to distinguish them, use them and contemplate them. We do it all the time. The ontological point is that these lists are taken, not from this real object as it is in-itself, but a new object which includes myself and this real object — the experience, testing, reflection or experiment is itself an emergent object which complexifies and translates the real object inside it. It then is able to create new local-manifestations through this new network of myself-realobject. Knowledge is one of these manifestations. But the pre-experienced object necessarily recedes. It’s necessary, though, for it to explain how this relation is possible in the first place (if it is a genuine relation with a real object).
The problem with his diagrams is that the relation DOES include the real objects of himself and his computer, or himself and the tree. The real tree is part of this relation which conjures the sensual object, but the real Daniel is only directly experiencing the sensual or particular manifestation to him via this new emergent relation. Or, I would say that knowledge is a kind of emergent-system which uses aspects of its components (the real Daniel and the real tree) to generate new qualities of this system as system-states or sensual objects. For instance, a theory is itself a new object, with its own mysterious dimensions, such that it is able to do things that truly surprise its own authors.
January 18, 2011 at 7:00 am
Just another quick note: I second Levi that Being’s Poem is a prolific and excellent blog. And I did enjoy the diagrams that Daniel made. It’s obvious he is taking this philosophy very, very seriously, which can only be applauded.
January 18, 2011 at 9:16 am
Hi Levi,
Well, there may be a sense in which, as you put it, ‘color is produced by brains interacting with objects.’ For sure, without some kind of visual system, we couldn’t have colour experiences. But (and I accept that this may be naive and problematic in many ways) we usually distinguish the experience qua mental or neurophysiological event and its content. Before we can evaluate this claim we need to consider whether colours are mental events, properties of mental events (e.g. actual neurophysiological properties) or contents of mental events (the list is not exhaustive – I should add: or none of the above!).
For example, my experience of the macbook I’m typing this post on is not the macbook – or at least not the macbook alone. It is, if the neuroscientists are right, a highly distributed process which involves my peripheral nervous system (retinal input), primary visual cortex (VI) with other areas of the brain all linked together in a recurrent loop via ascending and descending thalamacortical structures. From the perspective of active externalist views of cognition (with which I am sympathetic) this resonating loop mereologically includes the very thing itself – the macbook – since the continuation of this pattern may depend on my brain-body system being embedded in an environment which furnishes the relevant sensory input as much as upon the recurrence within the cranium. If you an internalist about these things, on the other hand, the neural pattern is something distinct from the object.
However, in both cases it seems to be possible to make a vehicle content distinction. The visual experience (with or without the physical object) is a vehicle, the object (the macbook) to which I intend is (part of) its intentional content.
Now, a similar point could be made about colours. Colours are mind-external properties which generate experiences of them in brains, just as objects generate experiences of objects.
BTW just reading your piece in the Speculative Turn, which I’m enjoying greatly!
January 18, 2011 at 12:05 pm
@Levi:
Thank you for this reply Levi! It certainly clarifies a lot. And I apologize for making you re-state your arguments anchored in Bhaskar. Here I leave you a few observations about what you state here. This is all very good, and exceptionally clear.
All the best!
Dan
http://bebereignis.blogspot.com/2011/01/levis-object-oriented-ontology-virtual.html
January 18, 2011 at 6:40 pm
Objects for all their withdrawal seem to be really good communicators. The metaphysical realist position leads me to speculate about the apparent thoughtfulness of objects. Bhaskar’s approach is interesting for asking what the world must be like in order for experimental activity to function, which it does. I suppose that, considering human persons in their translational schema specifically, historically there is an increasing relationship between these translational schema and our extensional mathematical schema, one that portends an imbroglio in the near distant future that, thankfully, will not exhaust the withdrawn objects themselves.
Of course we crave the uncommonly accurate, and understandable models of how objects manage to do all or most of what they do. In this regard, a science-friendly OOO will lead us to marvel with every more specificity and analogical charm at the secret workspaces of objects.
The more I read about OOO and emerging sciences, the more I am reminded of a great Tom Waits song, from the Mule Variations:
“What’s he building in there?
What the hell is he building in there?…
And what about all those packages he sends?”
Today I happened upon the 2009 emeritus lecture of Chaos mathematician Ralph Abraham at UC Santa Cruz (http://www.ralph-abraham.org/talks/emeriti/). Abraham is fascinated about the emergence of cognitive styles that transform and bifurcate history. Without claiming any kind of certainty, Ralph is led to infer the existence of some kind of threshold of connectivity in human history viewed as a complex dynamical system, whereby realizations of mathematical structures in the brain bioplasma of certain members of the group subsequently impact social organization and cultural practices of collectives. For example, paleoanthropology has charted the history of musical instruments back to bone-flutes, the earliest playable flutes being around 10 thousand years old. The hollow bones are of different diameters, yet the interval spacing of carved holes reflects a knowledge of the mathematical relationship between diameter and interval required to produce a similar tonal scale in a multiplicity of many-diametered instruments. Large groups of players could harmonize as a result of this mathematical realization. To accomplish this, someone such a shaman figure must have understood some sophisticated arithmetical relationships. The capacity of large groups to play consonant music together is a major advance socially that hinges upon a new cognitive style associated with mathematics. This is one example of an object (in this case a shaman figure) whose translations of a world of objects induced a stable mathematical realization as applied to bone flutes which induced modifications in the translational schema of multitudes. There are other examples along these lines that relate mathematics to translational schema.
Abraham also explains that when fractal geometry was developed in the early 1970s, mathematicians saw that an unimaginable multitude of familiar phenomena were expressible as fractal phenomena, as if their once-withdrawn coherent organization were suddenly translated in a really amazing new language. The elegance of the mathematical formalization and especially its computer models (!) increased Ralph’s degree of certitude that mathematical thinking impacts the translational schema of the human object in ways that increase man’s sphere of influence.
Abraham speculates that, given the increasing frequency of these emergent cognitive styles historically, associated with new forms of mathematics, we can expect realizations to emerge in the near future that will drastically re-organize cultures and societies. For many of us this is not a big imaginative leap. However, the idea is that these future mathematical realizations can induce bi-furcations and phase changes, which are bizarre and unpredictable. In other words, the mathematical schema lead us to admit possibilities that might otherwise be viewed through translational schema to be mythologemes and phantasies.
Abraham, for his part, suggests that sophisticated agent-based modeling (and computer power) will induce humans to experimentally demonstrate solutions to problems such as starvation and increasing ocean temperatures.
My point in mentioning all this is to indicate that metaphysical realism combined with an awareness of the history of mathematics and social organization leads to a beautiful profusion of futures research. Acknowledging nested hierarchical systems, we may be curious about this historical trend whereby a globe full of humans unfailingly, but occasionally, produces thresholds that induce members to realize how to modify the translational schemes of a globe full of humans. We cannot anticipate bi-furcative phase changes, yet some of us with mathematized translational schema intimate their emergence with a sense of filmic rising action.
Historically there is an increasing relationship at least between human translational schema and mathematical schema, one that portends an imbroglio in the near and distant future. This is something to consider.
Perhaps I should blog about this on my own page, and convince some of you to subscribe, rather than yammering like this on Levi’s forum? …Touche…
January 18, 2011 at 9:24 pm
A most interesting and satisfying post.
“The sense I get from the human and animal neurology I’ve read is that color is produced by brains interacting with objects.”
Yes. What’s particularly tricky is that it’s even more complicated than the interaction of surface reflectance and ambient light. The color of a given patch on a surface also depends on the properties of adjacent patches. There are any number of demonstrations in perceptual psych where a two patches of the same pigment under the same lighting conditions will appear as different colors because their neighboring areas have differing reflectances.
January 20, 2011 at 5:18 am
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