The debate between Einstein and Heisenberg resembles, in many respects, the debate between the realists and the anti-realists that has been unfolding here in the blogosphere. Einstein was deeply troubled by quantum mechanics and what he saw as the skeptical consequences of this theory such that we can never determine whether or not the properties discovered through our measurements of particles belonged to particles themselves. Heisenberg couldn’t see why Einstein & Co. were so bothered by this. Adopting the position of the pragmatist, he thought it enough that the measurements be able to make more or less accurate predictions, and that the question of whether or not the velocity or position measured belonged to the particles themselves was– and I absolutely love this expression! –a “distinction without a difference”.
Along comes John Bell proposing a theorem that would actually allow this debate to be decided. Now, I do not wish to take a position on whether or not we have access to the real properties of particles or whether we are forever limited to our measurements. I think this very much remains an open debate that is unlikely to be decided any time soon. Rather, I would instead like to draw attention to something else that arose as a result of experiments based on Bell’s Theorem.
read on!
I have occasionally been taking to task for refusing to answer questions like “what is the nature of time?”, “what is the nature of space?”, “what are objects?”, “what are primary qualities?”, and for claiming that philosophy cannot provide a priori answers to these questions. The results of experiments based on Bell’s Theorem provide a nice cautionary tale as to why philosophers should practice prudence in answering these sorts of questions. One of the surprising results of these experiments, conducted by Alain Aspect, was the discovery that particles originating from the same source would spin in exactly the same way when subsequently measured despite there being no recognizable connection between the two particles nor any possible causal connection between the two particles. For all intents and purposes, the two particles behave as the same object, despite being vast distances apart from one another. This is what is referred to as “quantum entanglement”.
The experiment has been conducted at a distance of as far apart as 20km, and physicists theorize that exactly the same result would occur were one particle here and the other in another galaxy (how they arrive at this latter conclusion, I do not know). As I observed in my last post, the locality hypothesis lies at the heart of all our science. The thesis here is that objects must directly interact in some way in order to have causal effects on one another. This gave Newtonians quite a headache for a long time because it wasn’t clear how something like action at a distance might be possible. Einstein changed all of this through his theory of General Relativity which showed, in part, how gravitational force is related to the constant speed of light, demonstrating the manner in which there is a local causal interaction. For example, if the sun suddenly blinked out of existence we wouldn’t experience any gravitational effects of this disappearance for eight minutes as this is how long it takes for light to travel here and gravity itself can only exercise its effects within the constraints of the speed of light.
What makes quantum entanglement so surprising is that the mirror actions of the two particles acting in tandem to one another takes place instantaneously, violating this causal constant of interaction. This has led some physicists to argue that the two particles themselves are a part of one and the same object and that there is some deeper underlying unity or oneness to reality of which particles are “aspects”. Here then we have a violation of two of our common sense assumptions about the nature of the world: First, we have what looks like an interaction between two objects that violates the locality hypothesis. Second, we take it for granted– as a sort of “transcendental condition” –that objects are localized in space or that they have a simple location in space, yet here we have an object which is claimed to be one object where its parts can exist on two different sides of the universe. It could be that subsequent inquiry will reveal that the two particles are indeed two objects, not one object, and that the locality hypothesis will somehow be redeemed or salvaged through some sort of discovery as to how these two spatially distributed particles are able to perfectly mirror one another. The point, however, is that this question can’t be answered a priori and were we to set a priori conditions as to what objects must be to be given we would very well be inhibiting this sort of research. Our concepts are not at the outset of research– though there are always provisional ones that guide our inquiry –but rather are the result of research.
May 2, 2009 at 12:36 pm
Why not? Are real properties of particles somehow different from real properties of objects? I am sincere in my inquiry and not trying to get us back to some eternal debate. Are you still a realist or have you moved closer to being a skeptic at this point, since you are being cautious in the very basic philosophical matters now (i.e. time, space, objects, primary qualities and such)?
I think this is an interesting point that came up several times here and there but we haven’t had a chance to get into it much, and it seems it would be quite a worthy subject. If you ever feel like some more Realism Wars are needed, I think this methodological (?) angle could be a good point of interest as it seems to me that this is a sort of empiricist approach that could be contested.
May 2, 2009 at 12:48 pm
Quantum entanglement, as you describe it, sounds like its consistent with the sorts of involution characteristic of Sivite cosmology, especially the Balinese version in which the Gods of the four directions are simultaneously at the edges of the cosmos (bhuvana agung), inside the organs of the body and the afterbirth (bhuvana alit) and the three temples plus houseshrine which define the vilage (desa). The geometry of such a fractal world is very different from a Euclidian common sense.
May 2, 2009 at 1:42 pm
Mikhail,
I have never denied that there might be certain things that might be impossible for us to know. The question of whether or not particles themselves have a position and a velocity or whether this position or velocity results from our measurements of the particle might be such an issue due to certain things pertaining to quantum phenomena. As I recall you were astonished by my thesis that the philosopher can’t determine what time and space are from his armchair. I’ve been arguing for quite a while that the answers to these questions require careful empirical and experimental investigation. At any rate, I do not have a desire to repeat the realism wars.
May 2, 2009 at 1:59 pm
Levi,
I’m not interested in repeating Realism Wars myself, just follow up or develop some issues that were left unthought. The question of time/space and armchairness is clearly not going to get resolved here as we have diametrically opposite views of what philosophy can and cannot do (or should and should not do, for that matter).
All I asked was, I think, using your language now, if there are things that are “impossible for us to know” and I am assuming here that it is not just a case of simple “unknowns” but of “impossible to know” then is this possibility/impossibility established empirically or theoretically? I think the major issue here is that we operate from different methodological assumptions and while most of the so-called correlationist accounts, as you noted many times, are very methodologically sophisticated (call is “metatheoretical” or “epistemological” level) or at least attempt to be, there isn’t much of the discussion of method in realism, or so it seems. Or maybe I am misinformed.
In any case, I see that you have avoided my question about skepticism (or even a kind of philosophical defeatism – let scientists tell us all about the world), so I am assuming you are less than interested in any sort of interaction about the issues here. Fair enough.
May 2, 2009 at 3:12 pm
Levi, your productivity has been phenomenal on this blog lately.
May 2, 2009 at 4:29 pm
Mikhail,
The impossibility– and as I said, the debate is still open in quantum mechanics –has to do with how measurement effects its object such that we cannot determine whether our measurements are producing the position and momentum of a particle or whether the particle itself has a position and a momentum. In short, it is an empirical matter.
I really don’t understand this charge of “philosophical defeatism”. I take it that there are some questions that philosophy is ill equipped to deal with or answer. If philosophy is going to make claims about the nature of mind, consciousness, time, objects, etc., then it is obligated to acquaint itself with what has been discovered about these things. If philosophy does not do that, then it risks confusing doxa with truth and genuine knowledge. Given that philosophy strives to break with doxa, this would be a matter of great concern. The desire for philosophy to have a domain all its own or to be able to answer these questions without reference to other disciplines has nothing to do with whether or not such a thing is possible.
I wasn’t aware that an elaborate discussion of methodology was required for realism. On the one hand, I’ve often referred you to Roy Brassier’s Realist Theory of Science which addresses these issues. On the other hand, it struck me as obvious that the methodology by which the real is determined would be that of various scientific methodologies. If, where the question of time and space is concerned, you’re talking about an analysis of how we experience time or how time is structured for us, I do think philosophy can contribute to such a discussion. However, I think that such analyses are a subset of psychology, not issues of what time is. If you’re suggesting that the philosopher could arrive a priori at a knowledge that time and space contract and dilate depending on the speed at which an object is moving, I think that’s impossible. Such discoveries required careful observation, measurement, experiment, the production of new technologies (notice these are all points about methodology), etc.
May 2, 2009 at 4:38 pm
One more point… Returning to Kant’s project in the First Critique, what was it all about? It was a question of answering how synthetic a priori propositions are possible. He was, as you know, seeking to ground mathematics and natural science. With respect to his claims about mathematics, I’ve tended more in the direction of seeing mathematical judgments as analytic, so that falls to the side for me. With respect to science and questions of causality, I’m not sure what Kant really gives us that helps us to escape Hume. As I have argued before, I can see the point that it’s difficult, under Hume’s account, to see how, based on the conjunction of impressions or sensation alone we would arrive at the idea of causal necessity. Consequently, Kant argues that this idea or concept arises from mind, not from experience. This really doesn’t get Kant very far in explaining how we arrive at a knowledge that there is a relation of causal necessity between two events. Since I can apply the concept or category of causality to all sorts of things, including many things that are not causally connected, Kant doesn’t get us very far in distinguishing between two events that are causally connected and two events that are merely correlated. Nor does his proposal really answer the question of how we know that the future must be like the past. In other words, Hume’s skepticism still remains; or at least as far as I can tell. Consequently, I’m happy siding with the “naive” realism of the scientist that has a much lower burden of proof and who willingly acknowledges that subsequent evidence might overturn his hypothesis or even the most well founded of claims as in the case of Einstein overturning Newton.
May 2, 2009 at 4:39 pm
Thanks Graham!
May 2, 2009 at 5:00 pm
Levi,
I did not say that realism does not have methodology, I said that it seemed to me that there was not much of a discussion of it and I wasn’t making that statement categorically – I stand corrected, you borrow methodology from Bhaskar then. There’s really no need to turn every point I make into a contestation.
I think you’ve consistently argues that philosophy does not have its own field, it’s “parasitic” – is there a properly philosophical field after all is said and done? If yes, what is it? If no, is there then a discipline of philosophy at all? Are we condemned to be a bunch of amateur scientists? Do you consider yourself to be a philosopher and what is exactly your field and your job then?
I’m not sure why you bring up Kant at all here, as our exchanges from the past showed, it is a point of contention as I have often contested your very simplistic language of mind imposing categories and so on, so I am going to ignore your reference to Kant as it doesn’t really address my questions at this point.
I do hope that for the sake of clarity we distinguish between “impossible to know” and “unknown” – I’m not sure that you can empirically arrive at a conclusion that something is “impossible to know,” only that something is yet “unknown” – impossibility in this case sounds like a categorical statement that involves necessity, and I’m not sure where it comes from.
May 2, 2009 at 5:13 pm
Given some things you’ve recently said about Kant– and insisted on still even after being presented with textual evidence to the contrary –I don’t know that you’re in a position to lecture anyone on their reading or interpretation of Kant. You seem to have a very poor understanding of some of the most basic and simple Kantian claims and your Kant seems to be just Mikhail under the name of Kant, not anything in Kant himself.
I have written a great deal here as to just what I understand the role of philosophy. You can look through the archives to see what I have in mind. I am not proposing that philosophers should be amateur scientists.
May 2, 2009 at 5:21 pm
Levi,
You’re written so many things about what you think philosophy is over the last couple of years I have been reading your blog, it’s impossible to gather at this point what you do as a philosopher. You recovered from a variety of philosophical positions in the past, you must forgive my inability to understand your present position.
Again, I was not “lecturing” anyone on their interpretation of Kant in my comment (I might have in the past, but I felt justified in my views), I simply stated that I didn’t understand why you needed to bring up Kant knowing that it is very likely to be contested by me. There’s no reason to resort to unprovoked insults, is there? You seem to be missing a sense of irony altogether here accusing me of “lecturing” you while in turn lecturing me on my complete lack of understanding of Kant. Yes, Levi, your Kantian dick is bigger than mine, can we leave it at that?
Listen, if you just need a choir of cheerleaders, please let me know and I will stop reading and commenting on your blog.
ME
May 2, 2009 at 10:17 pm
There’s nothing unprovoked in my responses to you. You have consistently addressed me in a mocking and insulting manner throughout our exchanges that has been completely unwarranted. Moreover, in discussion you perpetually change goal posts, throw out red herrings, and blow up when others do the very thing you ask them to do by providing textual support for their claims. Discussion really is impossible with you. I don’t know if you think you’re being charming or funny or if you really are just this big an asshole. Moreover, I looking at your arguments, ways of understanding things, and grasp of concepts, I can’t tell whether you’re stupid or whether or not there’s some basic barrier to communication at work here. The “cheerleader” remark is ridiculous. I don’t want cheerleaders, but I do want civility. You simply are not a civil person in discussion or debate. You are prone to ad hominem attacks, erratic emotional outbursts, making discussion personal rather than about the issue, etc., etc., etc. I’m really not sure what’s wrong with you or why you engage in this way. At any rate, I would be absolutely delighted were you to stop reading and commenting on my blog. I do not find discussion with you productive and I get the sense that you’re more interested in stirring pots or creating conflict than discussing things. Please go away.
May 2, 2009 at 10:44 pm
Sometimes disagreements, sometimes even talking past each other completely, helps other, silent readers understand what they think about what is being discussed.
May 2, 2009 at 11:40 pm
I think there’s more than enough civil interaction that isn’t characterized by all this insulting snideness that can accomplish that function, Kevin
May 3, 2009 at 12:00 am
100%. But Mikhail’s point was that he is admittedly very raw on the Kant issue, and by his lights felt that he was attempting to very delicately talk about related philosophical issues. For some reason one just can’t talk to him about (radically disagree on) Kant. All hell breaks loose. His POV was, “I was trying to be good, why the hell did you have to hit me THERE, Kant has nothing to do with what we were discussing”.
Now, you inadvertently insult me, he insults me, I insult you for reasons none of us can tell. We each think we are talking plainly and the other person is completely riled. The point is that the only reason why arguments get to this point is that IDEAS MATTER.
I know, personally, that I cannot bring Kant up to Mikhail, or even respond to one of his Kant posts without there being deep water to tread. God knows why. What I do know is that outside of Kant, Mikhail is marvelous.
You’ve deleted my posts more than once here, and driven me from your site before. And even our last exchange was getting a bit rocky. What I want to say is that Mikhail’s questions on this post, and your answers before it got heated, made the post more interesting for me.
What I generally suggest is that when some irritates you just let it go, and don’t answer back. Ignore the post, or beg off like you did to my recent round of questions on the last thread.
May 3, 2009 at 12:13 am
For me the last straw was the discussion surrounding Kant’s antinomies. Despite the fact that textual support has continuously been asked for, each instance where it’s actually been provided he has a meltdown and starts attacking the person providing it rather than revising his position. Between his jaw dropping failure to understand Kant on the antinomies (not to mention the fact that he doesn’t understand the difference between an argument– validity, invalidity, soundness, unsoundness, and strength –and truth and his bizarre misreading of Kant’s moral philosophy and what is and is not possible within it, it’s simply impossible to conduct any discussion with him. If textual support is out the window– even textual support coming from one of the commentators he continuously praises, Allison –and if everything degenerates into red herrings, personal attacks, and mockery, there’s no way for discussion to proceed. Additionally, it doesn’t help for him to refer to all realism as “naive realism” (rhetorically a dysphemism), mocking one for holding a realist position rather than simply sticking to the arguments. The little post on naive realism he has up over at Perverse Egalitarianism is filled with all sorts of snide remarks in the comment section, suggesting that I’m treating Latour as a “father figure” and simply receding into him out of comfort, rather than my work on Latour being part of a broader philosophical project. What an asshole. I find him to be unserious, lacking in philosophical background (often he seems to have no idea what he’s talking about even in his own so-called areas of expertise), and to have little of interest to say philosophically. Perhaps this is just a language barrier. That would be the most charitable interpretation. In my many interactions with him I have concluded that what he thrives on is creating drama and conflict– which he’s actually admitted on a couple of occasions –rather than really having a discussion. He’s an unsavory character and my blood pressure doesn’t need the aggravation or the constant little digs. I’ve never seen the marvelous Mikhail that you describe him as being outside of Kant.
May 3, 2009 at 12:22 am
This aside, I found his question of “unknowables” and “unknowns” to be a vital distinction.
I was just placing my one small voice with a check in the “more voices” box. Offense though, is offense.
May 3, 2009 at 12:29 am
The distinction is a vital distinction, I agree. I just don’t see how discussion is possible with someone who has cast you as a priori mistaken in your reading of everything and your position on various issues. Like a dog that cowers whenever someone moves their hand because they’ve been endlessly beaten by someone, I just don’t trust any of Mikhail’s questions or remarks because just when I think he’s being civil and engaging in earnest discussion all the nastiness comes in.
May 3, 2009 at 12:34 am
It’s strange how much “you are unintelligent” hurts…and how much of academia, and in particular the discipline of philosophy, is bent on finding some way or other to say it, nicely or otherwise.
May 3, 2009 at 4:42 am
Seriously, Levi, you have issues that are beyond me, I was, like Kevin noticed, trying to avoid any of the usual “hot spots” and attempt some sort of a conversation and you launched at me with all sorts of unprovoked insults. Now I see you were miffed about things I said and just wanted to insult me for no reason, instead of sending me a private note and asking me to never comment on your blog or ask you any questions. I agree with Kevin vis-a-vis silent readers, I hope they make their silent conclusions. I was inappropriate and insulting in the past, but I was always forthcoming and willing about my apologies. You are, on the other hand, have been a real bully. Our disagreement on Kant somehow translated into you being an expert and me being a rogue misreader, fine, I don’t need to prove to you that I know my Kant, I wanted to move on but you had to bring up your little feelings and your whole “teacher, he said mean things about me on the playground” – grow up, will ya?
Kevin, our Kant disagreements are one thing, my respect for your as a person is another, as I told you on some occasions, I thought our exchanges were not only controversial, but also thought-provoking and engaging and I really respected it and it meant a lot to me.
May 3, 2009 at 4:45 am
May 3, 2009 at 5:04 am
I speaka no English, I only do the math. Can you be even more insulting? Yes, go with the xenophobic racist slur – great job there, Professor Bryant!
Find a reference to Daniel Dumile is intentional for all of you how know your music.
May 3, 2009 at 5:37 am
To get away from realism wars and back to the original issues, I think the Einstein-Podowski-Rosen thought experiment cuts both ways in a very interesting manner to show something complimentary to what Levi initially claimed.
I have a deep distrust of a lot of thought experiments from analytical philosophy (Jackson’s what Mary can’t know, Chalmer’s Zombies, Putnam’s superspartans, etc.). They seem to assume: (1) that philosophical claims are true at all possible metaphysical worlds (where that outstrips the set of empirical worlds), (2) that conceivability entails metaphysical possibility, and (3) that we actually conceive of the thought experiments in the first place. In all of the above examples these three assumptions are tacitly made.
So you want to be a good naturalist and banish this kind of thought experiment. But then you end up going to far, banishing the kinds of thought experiments that are cardinal moments in the history of physics. I’m pretty sure that EPR never thought that Bell’s inequalities would allow there experiment to be capable of being empirically tested to see if you really got entanglement.
And this is a point somewhere between Emelianov and Levi, but leaning towards Levi probably. We just can’t know a priori the empirical import that an idea is going to end up having. So while I think Chalmer’s Zombie thought experiments are pretty useless (and I don’t mean to put him down as a philosopher here; he’s done much else and rendered a significant service in working out these thought experiments to where I *can* have reasons for doubting their usefulness), I can’t a prior banish their like from philosophy.
You get tons of examples just like this in the philosophy of perception where things that one might like to think are a priori end up having surprising empirical heft (Noe’s example of the inverting lense experiments, Goodman’s alterations to light tracking experiments, etc.).
So the ultimate moral is still Levi’s, we can’t carve off a safe place for philosophy as non-empirical. But Mikhail still makes a point, we can’t banish philosophy for seeming too a priori because we never know what is going to ultimately end up a posteriori. A lot of stuff that is a priori in the sense of being thought up in the armchair, and initially thought to be a priori in the sense of not being empirically testable, ends up being a posteriori in the sense of being non-trivially testable. Bell’s Inequalities convereted the Einstein-Podowsky-Rosen thought experiment in exactly this way.
So I hope I can remain an anti-anti-realist (never of the pre-Kantian realist sort, albeit maybe someday of “critical” kind) fan of the metaphysics Levi is putting together while still accommodating Mikhail’s intuitions about the autonomy of a prioristic modes of philosophy.
May 3, 2009 at 2:52 pm
Sighs. Mikhail, with regard to Kant you have been accusing me of misreading since the very beginning, so I’m really not sure where you get off being irate about me pointing out that you misread Kant on a number of points. I delivered the textual evidence in support of my reading yet you continued to attack my reading and even questioned my sanity. The thing is that the past does not simply go away. Your rhetoric leaves a lot to be desired and creates needless conflict. You say that this is just how you express yourself and that you mean nothing by it, but those who are the brunt of this rhetoric don’t know that. Returning to my beaten dog example, whenever you post on my blog and whenever I respond, I just don’t know what to expect from you. I expect to be whacked up side the head all over again. Our disagreement over Kant wasn’t about me being a “real bully”, but about pointing out places in your reading that I believe fundamentally misconstrue Kant. You will recall that you asked me to do this from the very beginning. And from the beginning you have been extremely insulting starting with the post on the so-called “downer principle” and the comments and posts that ensued from there. Such ways of addressing others make any dialogue extremely difficult, if not impossible. I think my response to you has been far from being unprovoked. What do you expect, someone to say “thank you sir, may I have another?”
May 3, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Great post, John. I have a similar distrust of thought experiments, while still finding them productive in teasing out hidden assumptions and questions to be asked. In the case of Jackson’s thought experiment, it suffices, I think, to shift the experiment from Mary’s knowledge of the brain, physics, biology, etc., to questions about hurricanes. Were Mary to be a superscientist who knows everything there is to know about hurricanes, would this knowledge produce a hurricane? Jackson seems to believe that knowledge of x produces x, but it’s difficult to see why that would be the case.
I am not at all suggesting that we shouldn’t engage in phenomenology or the analysis of historical, political, linguistic, etc., settings that inform inquiry. Roy Bhaskar, who falls into the realist camp, argues that both levels of analysis are necessary and is more than happy to make room for modes of analysis such as we find in Foucault or Kuhn with regard to social context. I think problems, however, emerge when we bracket or cut the referent out of the picture. Take Mikhail’s recent post on optical illusions: http://pervegalit.wordpress.com/2009/04/29/where-is-the-object/
I do not think that the realist denies that there are all sorts of perceptual illusions like this. In fact, if you look at the research in cognitive science and neurology, the realists even multiply these illusions, calling into question the “self-evidences” of phenomenological consciousness. What I find interesting in this example is the question of how the anti-realist is able to call this an illusion. It seems to me that the anti-realist must begin from the premise that the pencil in this example does have a position in order for this phenomenon to be interesting and illuminating. I don’t see why the realist must reject phenomena like the duck-rabbit (http://vis.berkeley.edu/courses/cs294-10-fa07/wiki/images/d/da/Duck_rabbit.jpg) or the face-vase (http://www.jyi.org/volumes/volume10/issue4/images/dilkina_1.jpg), or any number of other illusions. However, the realist will claim that these phenomena teach us something about the nature of perception and our brains, not about the nature of objects in the world.
In my view, there is a pragmatic justification for realism and an ontological justification for realism. The pragmatic justification for realism is, paradoxically, anti-realist in flavor. From a pragmatic point of view, the argument runs that realism is a useful fiction that we must adopt in order to do good research and philosophy. Here I think this argument pertains more to Continental anti-realisms than Anglo-American anti-realisms. Because, in Continental thought, we got a situation where the referent and the natural world are bracketed in linguistic forms of Continental thought and phenomenological forms of Continental thought, we have gotten a philosophical practice that tends to deal only with philosophical texts and that ignores the findings coming out of biology, neurology, physics, etc. This has contributed to Continental thought becoming less and less relevant to the contemporary world and also to Continental thought continuing to make a number of ontological assumptions about the nature of the mind, the world, etc., that are ill founded. Pragmatically, adopting the position of realism would help to mitigate this problem and would open up a variety of new lines of inquiry within philosophy far more relevant to our contemporary situation. This is why I praised Malabou’s work on neurology. She is not simply allowing neurology to dictate philosophy, but is asking what we are if it is true that our synapses are plastic. In approaching neurology in this way she resituates a number of debates. Where a Lacanian or a Husserlian, for example, would largely reject neurology out of hand, she resolutely embraces neurology but also subjects it to a critique. Likewise with Protevi’s work, Massumi’s work, DeLanda’s work, etc.
From an ontological standpoint, I can’t help but believe that a number of anti-realist positions are incoherent. I don’t see how, from a phenomenological standpoint, I can simultaneously claim that consciousness is the condition of nature and that nature is the condition of consciousness. Husserl bites the bullet and resolutely proclaims that nature is not the condition of consciousness. In saying this he throws evolutionary biology and neurology in the waste basket. I think that’s too high a price to pay. Therefore I believe that phenomenology– which I do think has contributed a lot –has to be reconceptualized and naturalized so as to not make such absurd claims.
May 3, 2009 at 6:00 pm
I can’t help thinking, on this issue of the empirical vs. the logical/conceptual, that Wittgenstein is something of use in the most simplicist of ways.
How much is “We can not know the position/velocity of a particle” a grammatical claim, in the sense:
One cannot use the word “position” in those circumstances. Wittgenstein’s transformation of Kantian analytics into grammar does something to soften the “ultimate” nature of conceptual truth claims. But I do think that even such grammatical restrictions can be empirically qualified. That is to say, we can empirically see that using the word “position” in certain circumstances just doesn’t work well. This does not make the “position” of particles unknowables, but not really unknowns either.
The idea that science can ultimately settle this question for me is aligned with the idea that the observations and framing of scientific theory can provide a more vivid context within which to see whether the use of the word “position” is appropriate or not.
May 3, 2009 at 6:43 pm
That all makes sense to me (neat take on Mary).
One of the chapters in me and Mark Silcox’s book concerns why nobody predicted that the Nintendo Wii was going to do so well. We argued that people were presupposing something like a phenomenalist account of perception as opposed to a Heidegger/Gibson/Noe enactivist account.
For Noe perception is a direct function of the way bodies and objects move in evolutionary niches. It is direct realist. The red humans perceive is really there, just as whatever it is pigeons with their weird number of rods and cones are seeing.
Strangely, to motivate Noe’s view he considers the way a lot of these illusions work. The most stunning is the one where people who put on reversing lenses initially see vomitious nonsense. It takes a long bit of moving around in the world to actually see it as a reversed world (text backwards, extending your left hand when really extending your right, etc.). But then if you wear the lenses over days and keep moving around the world, you end up perceiving things as not even flipped (when you put your right hand out, you see your right hand going out). So seeing normally is at the very least a function of motor skills and occlusion planes operating normally.
I think we agree about the incoherence of ontological anti-realism. I like to think of it in terms of anti-realisms all being varieties of transcendental idealism. But they (almost?) always end up incoherent because they predicate things to what are in effect the noumena that they are not supposed to. Heidegger in 44 of Being and Time is the big example. He tells us that beings exist without world (which belongs to Dasein). But everywhere else we can only talk about beings as being somehow abstracted from Dasein’s world. It’s just contradictory [people pointed this out with respect to Kant and things in themselves causing phenomena pretty soon after the critique]. Or if the anti-realism doesn’t fall into this incoherence it just becomes good old idealism.
I think in analytic philosophy the successes of Kripke et. al. with respect to issues of necessity have kind of moved most people into a state of pre-critical realism.
One of the reasons I’m interested in continental realists today is that continental philosophers realize that a lot more than just Hume’s problem with necessity motivated Kant’s transcendental idealism. So for me “critical realism” would (in addition to the problem of necessity) have to have something compelling to say also about the external world and totality. Noe and Harman’s very different forms of Heideggerian realism seems like good starting places at least.
Well this went far away from your initial point about the contingency of the a priori and the resultant impossibility of bracketing out science.- Though I do think there’s enough in Harman’s critique of Heidegger to connect the two sets of issues. Just as Heidegger should have given up the special place for Dasein in his system, he should have given up the special place for philosophy as an a priori endeavor, and I think for many of the same reasons Harman raises.
May 3, 2009 at 7:14 pm
Kvond,
I’m still working through all this stuff and trying to understand it myself, but from what I gather the issue is far bigger than whether or not it’s possible to know the position and velocity of a particle at once. More fundamentally, the issue is whether or not particles themselves have a position and a velocity or whether this position and velocity is simply a result of the measurement. That is, the thesis isn’t simply epistemological but ontological as well. Prior to being measured, the story goes, the particle is literally in a number of different places at once, or so one version of the story goes. In either event, the issue is very different from that of measuring the movement of the moon. There the measurement has no effect on the object measured, but in the case of QM the measurement doesn’t have an effect on what it measures. This is what ultimately led the physicists to a pragmatist and anti-realist reading of quantum mechanics. All of the debates surrounding the issue of whether or not a realist interpretation of QM is possible have spun on indirect means of determining position in velocity, where the measurements taken would not effect the behavior of the particle. This is what Bell’s Theorem and the experiments that flowed from it was all about. That is, it outlined a series of conditions for experiment that would allow for indirect measurement that would count in favor of a realist interpretation of QMs. The discovery of quantum entanglement as a result of these experiments came as quite a surprise.
May 3, 2009 at 7:16 pm
“Husserl bites the bullet and resolutely proclaims that nature is not the condition of consciousness. In saying this he throws evolutionary biology and neurology in the waste basket. I think that’s too high a price to pay. Therefore I believe that phenomenology– which I do think has contributed a lot –has to be reconceptualized and naturalized so as to not make such absurd claims.”
Toscano made the same point about Badiou in Bristol a couple of times.
May 3, 2009 at 7:19 pm
I would also agree that traditional phenomenology isn’t plausible, for precisely the reasons you mention.
And yet… notice that Husserl has a realist FLAVOR that is not found in other idealists. In principle, he still does a lot of work circling trees and chairs and eidetically varying them because there is a certain something to intentional objects that is never quite rightly depicted in sensuous intuition.
May 3, 2009 at 7:26 pm
Kvond and Levi,
Levi’s right. It’s misleading just to focus on position and momentum because you might wrongly interpret the uncertainty as an empistemic limitation on measuring resulting from of mechanical interference with the system (i.e. “if we measure momentum we bump the particle in a way that prohibits measuring position”).
But quantum physics has all sorts of conjugate properties that cannot be explained this way. They are irreducibly probabilistic prior to measurement, and collapsing the probabilities by measuring one causes problems elsewhere in ways that cannot be explained quasi-mechanistically (Lawrence Sklar’s “The Philosophy of Physics” explains this if I remember right).
In the EPR gedankenexperiment, you can set up a system where (1) each particle is 50% spin up and (2) when measured they will have different spin values. That’s all quantum physics says is going on. Prior to the wave packet collapsing that’s all there is. Einstein wanted a hidden variable theory such that we could say there were non-probabilistic facts explaining the measurement probabilities, but (and I’m a little shaky here, see Sklar’s book) Bell showed that such a theory would either be non-local or contradict other parts of quantum physics.
Anyhow, when they measure one particle and it collapses to say spin up, they know instantaneously that the other particle is spin down, no matter where the other particle is.
Levi is right that the fact that they are actually able to experiment with these things should be as embarrassing for apriorism as non-Euclidean geometry proved to be for the “return to Kant” moment a hundred years ago.
May 3, 2009 at 7:34 pm
Re: doctorzamalek
Isn’t phenomenology being naturalized by people who essentially see the tradition as leading through Merleau-Ponty instead of through Derrida? I’m thinking folks like Evan Thompson, Dan Zhahavi, and the all the good people at the Center for Research in Applied Epistemology in Paris (Fransisco Varela was there).
May 3, 2009 at 7:58 pm
For me Merleau-Ponty is one of the heroes of phenomenology for precisely the reason Jon states. Phenomenology only runs into problems when it proclaims itself to be a foundationalist approach that grounds all other modes of inquiries. Graham, while I certainly admire Husserl’s attentiveness to objects, I am more unsure as to the objects analyzed at mid-level experience constitute objects or not. Perhaps I’ve been reading too much neurology lately, but I can’t shake arguments coming from folks like Edelman pertaining to how the brain, over the course of its development, comes to “carve” up the world producing the objects of experience. Edelmen’s neurology would be of Kantian lineage in the sense that he maintains that objects (of mid-level experience) conform to mind, not the reverse. Edelman departs from this Kantian legacy in two important ways:
1) He rejects the computational model of mind where there is said to be a pre-existent set of categories, forms of intuition, etc., functioning like a computer program through which sensible experience is then pushed through or organized. Edelman’s empirical research suggests, by contrast, that various cognitive categories are emergent or “built-up” over the course of neurological development. For this reason, Edelman does not think, as does Kant, Husserl, or Fodor (and I’m not suggesting these thinkers are the same), that we can analyze and understand the nature of mind independent of the analysis of neurology. How the matter is organized, the processes it undergoes, the role of chemistry, etc., all play a role that cannot be set aside. Edelman’s understanding of categories, concepts, mind, and self as emergent results significantly shifts the manner in which Kant posed many of these questions. It becomes clear that Kant was confusing results of these ontogenetic or developmental processes with grounds or conditions. Moreover, it becomes clear that there is far more lassitude in cognitive structure than would be allowed under these sorts of Kantian models and their heirs. These processes of emergence are what Edelman refers to as “neural Darwinism”, which is a population based thinking involving selection and randomness in the formation of synaptic connections.
2) Edelman, of course, diverges wildly from a Kantian paradigm in that his “correlationism” is thoroughly naturalistic. The nature of our minds are grounded in our biology, not the reverse. As a matter of theoretical implications, this also entails that our minds were not “designed” for pure knowing, speculative reasoning, etc. Rather, they are the result of adaptation and survival. This naturalistic ground of mind is something worth keeping in mind when posing epistemological, metaphysical, political, and ethical questions as sources of bias, not because we should bow to something like evolutionary moral theory and the rest.
Now, in arguing for a limited correlationism, I am not suggesting that realism is to be thrown out the window or that we are condemned to correlationism. Just as Plato argues for a distinction between appearance and reality, fully well recognizing that at the level of doxa our relation to being is thoroughly pervaded by appearance, there’s no reason we can’t argue philosophically that our lived experience of the world is structured in correlationist terms (i.e., that the world in itself is not as we experience it in day to day life) and that there are means for going beyond this correlationist structure to get at things themselves in certain instances. Of course, this sort of thesis probably won’t sit well with your own particular brand of object-oriented philosophy or realism. Or maybe it will given your account of vicarious causality and the manner in which all objects translate one another when interacting with one another (meditations about the brain simply being one manner in which that translation takes place).
May 3, 2009 at 8:00 pm
Levi,
I”m unsure if indirect measurement would resolve the issue of how/why (direct) measurement does seem to effect position/velocity. This is to say, indirect measurement would tell us about those conditions, but not necessarily others. Maintaining a “realist” notion of position does not resovlve the “uncertainty” it seems.
For instance, why would “having a position” be a real property of a particle, and “having its position effected by measurement” not be a real property of a particle? This is the primary to the problems that occur when we think that properties are of a non-relational, non-contextual character.
As for embarassing apriorism, I don’t find Kant very interesting on these matters. Embarassing Kant is like scratching where it doesn’t itch. If you scratch enough something there is due to develop, and pretty soon starts to itch.
I guess it comes down to that fact that I refuse the ontological/epistemological distinction you sometimes find so compelling.
May 3, 2009 at 8:14 pm
Levi: “The nature of our minds are grounded in our biology, not the reverse. As a matter of theoretical implications, this also entails that our minds were not “designed” for pure knowing, speculative reasoning, etc. Rather, they are the result of adaptation and survival. This naturalistic ground of mind is something worth keeping in mind when posing epistemological, metaphysical, political, and ethical questions as sources of bias, not because we should bow to something like evolutionary moral theory and the rest.
Now, in arguing for a limited correlationism, I am not suggesting that realism is to be thrown out the window or that we are condemned to correlationism….”
Kvond: I know that you’ve loosely dismissed the semiotic idea before, but I can’t help thinking that you would appreciate the biosemiotic answers offered in the fourth chapter on Umwelten in Bains’s:
The Primacy of Semiosis: an ontology of relations(2006): http://books.google.com/books?id=qaIDNs0CkXsC
It is thoroughly biologically oriented, and takes the Realist/Anti-Realist debate, and Kantian influences, straight on. Here, the semiotic relation is pre-categorical and indicative of the powers of all life, as evolved. Bains does a great job of weaving together Deleuze and Guattari (with whom you are very familiar), with Kant and Heidegger. I wonder if this pre-categorical “sense” of biosemiosis would fit in with your evolutionary “partial correlationism”. The entire chapter is online.
May 3, 2009 at 8:15 pm
In light of my last comment, I should also take the opportunity to point out something concerning realism and how the mind structures the world. It seems that some anti-realists take realists to be denying that mind informs how we experience the world. That does not strike me as being the case. In the case of Graham’s work you have a sort of generalized Kantianism where all object interactions (not just human-object interactions) are characterized by a reciprocal “translation” of the objects involved and where there’s always an object in-itself that completely withdraws from the other object. There’s more than enough room here for observations about optical illusions, gestalt structures in human perception, etc. Graham is merely pointing out that this withdrawal of objects from humans is nothing special, but is an ontological characteristic of relations among all objects. In my own case, I’m more than happy to argue that for both animals and humans perceptual structures are organized and organizing in all sorts of interesting ways. In fact, in Difference and Givenness I argued that one of the implications of Darwin’s evolutionary theory was the need to rethink the “transcendental aesthetic”. In other words, after Darwin, we can no longer think of the transcendental aesthetic as a sort of eternal structure of all rational consciousness, but rather just as there is an evolution of species there is also an evolution of givenness. The bat encounters the world in one way, we in another way, and these forms of givenness can change. As such, we require a genetic or developmental account of the structure of our relationship to the world rather than one based on conditioning by a priori forms of intuition and categories. Even Meillassoux recognizes that there’s a difference between phenomenological experience and “absolute time” (not to be confused with Newton). The realist’s point is not that our mind doesn’t influence how we perceive the world in all sorts of interesting ways, but that this isn’t the final word.
May 3, 2009 at 8:22 pm
Kvond,
I can’t get into the nuts and bolts of the experiments, but the indirect route would have provided experimental evidence that particles have a position and a velocity and that this position and velocity is not simply a result of measurement. The approach was analogous to how we initially detected the presence of planets orbiting other stars. We couldn’t directly see these planets, but what we could detect were irregularities in the gravitational orbits of stars themselves. From this scientists were able to infer the existence of a planet as the source of these gravitational irregularities. Einstein et al. did not begin by maintaining a realist position concerning the position and velocity of particles, but rather sought to devise experiments that would point to a realist interpretation of qm. Regarding your question about non-relational concepts of properties, I think that’s the wrong sort of question to be asking. Certainly Einstein and Heisenberg will be agreed that when probability is collapsed in measuring a property something real is taking place. That is, Heisenberg, in his pragmatist interpretation of qm, is not a Berkeleyian idealist. The question is that of whether particles are “like this” apart from measurement. Are they probability fields where they are strangely in a number of different positions at once, or do they have in-themselves a precise position and velocity?
May 3, 2009 at 8:25 pm
Paul is actually an old friend of mine and I’ve read much of his work and enjoyed it. One of the things that’s interesting about the semiotic approach that folks like Bains and Deely take is that signs aren’t restricted to the human, but are real and material processes that take place in nature itself. I don’t necessarily find this approach objectionable in and of itself (in fact, my master’s thesis on Peirce, Derrida, and Husserl argued something to this effect). The reason I shy away from words like “signs” is similar to why you shy away from words like “property”. I think the term “signs” lends itself too easily to anthropocentric conceptions of the world, even when the semiotician is trying so hard to avoid this. In this respect, it’s prudent, in my view, to avoid using the word when talking about non-human relations and phenomena.
May 3, 2009 at 8:34 pm
Levi: “The reason I shy away from words like “signs” is similar to why you shy away from words like “property”. I think the term “signs” lends itself too easily to anthropocentric conceptions of the world, even when the semiotician is trying so hard to avoid this.”
Kvond: With this I entirely agree, in particular with Deely’s approach, which I reject for this reason. (And this is behind my desire to transform the rather phenonomenological Umwelt into an Exowelt in my recent post, to decenter the discourse of subject/object.) Be that as it may, and that you are good friends with the author, you may like the chapter because aside from the Deely conclusions, at least in the Deleuze reading he offers, there is a biological yet univocal semiosis that quite far from “human relations”, a way forward that cuts the Realist/Anti-Realist Gordian Knot.
If one reads “semiosis” and not “sign/interpretant” the human centrality disappears.
May 3, 2009 at 8:50 pm
Yea to Levi’s last thought. The trick is to have a non-correlationist metaphysics that accommodates all this (again, I think Harman buttressed with Alva Noe’s theory of perception really start you in a good place for Noe check out http://www.amazon.com/Action-Perception-Representation-Mind-Alva/dp/0262640635/ref=pd_bbs_sr_2?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1241383663&sr=8-2 ).
Russell’s argument for sense data has it that our experiences change all the time as a result of our changing, but that reality does not (actually Descartes made this same argument to show that hardness was a secondary property). Therefore we must be experiencing sense data rather than reality. Likewise the traditional argument from different minds holds that since pigeon perception is so different from human perception neither must be experiencing reality as it really is. But then you get the scandal of the external world.
But maybe reality as it really is just such that objects within it have all these different facets that respond differentially to different kinds of objects.
In a Harmanian sense, when two rocks orbit each other withdrawing and revealing facets of themselves to each other aren’t there still emergent properties that hold of the system? (I haven’t read Guerilla Metaphysics yet) Why is this any ontologically different from when a human body moves about an environment? Does the thought that there is no ontological difference allow us to avoid correlationism while also accommodating Edelman’s research? Given how empirically grounded Noe’s form of direct perception is, I think this has to work out.
May 3, 2009 at 9:22 pm
“Graham, while I certainly admire Husserl’s attentiveness to objects, I am more unsure as to the objects analyzed at mid-level experience constitute objects or not. Perhaps I’ve been reading too much neurology lately, but I can’t shake arguments coming from folks like Edelman pertaining to how the brain, over the course of its development, comes to ‘carve’ up the world producing the objects of experience.”
I’m not sure why it matters that the brain carves them up. They are still objects: unified, autonomous realities irreducible to any specific sort of givenness, which is precisely what Husserl shows better than anyone else.
One problem with an eliminativist approach is that it would eliminate not only “folk-psychological” intentional objects in the human mind, but also mid-sized *physical* objects such as geological and even chemical facts, to say nothing of historical or sociological ones. Whenever “mid-sized” is used as a pejorative term, it should not be forgotten that “small-sized” is being used as an alternative ideal, and that is riddled with problems.
In some ways Husserlians have brought all the trouble on themselves with their completely impossible attitude toward the real world, but you know the old adage about baby/bathwater.
May 3, 2009 at 9:28 pm
Sorry just read some more that came up while I was posting the above.
Levi, you’re spieling Harman’s metaphysics as a sort of Leibnizified Kantianism where each object has its own noumena and phenomena. Say we describe it this way. Then is it not also the case on his account that an object X’s phenomena/noumena distinction is always relative to the other objects with which X interacts? So the desk’s phenomenal (I don’t mean “perceptual” by “phenomenal”) properties for me now includes being able to be written on, but for the book it does not include this. Both me and the book appropriate the desk as something to halt gravity’s pull though.
But the desk itself is making possible these different appropriations, as it also appropriates different “phenomenal” properties from objects with which it interacts.
Why can’t that just be what’s going on when I look at the desk or when the pigeon looks at the desk? With Noe’s empirically grounded theory (I need to read Edelmen) there is no in principle ontological distinction between the book and the desk and me and the desk other than the fact that I can move myself in reaction to certain of the desk’s Gibsonian affordances. And the pigeon’s evolutionary history leads it to exploit different affordances.
May 3, 2009 at 9:59 pm
Graham,
Could you say a bit more as to what you have in mind when you claim they’re still objects? Objects in what sense?
I think you’re right about mid-sized objects. There appears to be something problematic in suggesting that the Grand Canyon or Saturn is simply a “phenomenon” because they belong to this mid-level range.
May 3, 2009 at 10:02 pm
Jon,
That would be my take. I was trying to say– perhaps clumsily –something similar to what you say about the pigeon and humans. The question then becomes one of whether this means we’re trapped in epistemic closure. Can we know, somewhat, what it’s like to be a bat and all that or are we trapped within our field of “appropriation”. I think one of the things that makes scientific methodology so interesting is that it uses instruments in such a way as to allow us to overcome limits of our own “appropriational structures”.
October 21, 2009 at 10:37 pm
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