I’m a little over a quarter of the way through Pete’s epic Essay on Transcendental Realism (warning pdf), but am finding it quite good so far. Often it’s the case that half the struggle in philosophy revolves around philosophers trying to understand one another. We come from different backgrounds, have different key references, use language in different ways and, as a consequence, often end up talking past one another. As I read Pete’s account of his own transcendental realism it sounds remarkably close to my own style of argumentation in defense of onticology that defended on the grounds of transcendental realism alone.
One of the sticking points seems to be a difference in how we articulate ourselves. I make the claim that ontology precedes epistemology. Pete wants to make the claim that epistemology precedes ontology and that if we are to arrive at a realist theory of being we need to do so through epistemology and prior to ontology (11). Here I think we’re talking past one another. Pete writes,
For [his] transcendental realism, the structure of the world is sense-dependent upon the structure of thought, but the dependence is not reciprocal. This looks strange, until one realises that understanding the structure of thought is a necessary but not sufficient condition for understanding the structure of the world. In short, one must understand the structure of thought in order to understand what it would be to give a proper account of the real structure of the world. (11)
Pete defines sense dependency a bit earlier, writing that “[c]oncept P is sense dependent upon concept Q just in case one cannot count as having grasped P unless one counts as grasping Q” (9). For example, I cannot understand what a fork is without understanding eating. Pete’s point is that we must first understand the structure of thought in order to understand the structure of the world. However, if I understand him correctly, this relation isn’t reciprocal in that the world, nonetheless, is not dependent on the structure of thought.
The key point Pete seems to center on pertains to a structure of consciousness he draws from Hegel (here I wonder how far he’s willing to go with Hegel). Pete writes:
1) Consciousness relates itself to its object, or takes its object to be a certain way. What this means, is that it makes a claim about its objects.
2) Consciousness distinguishes between its relating (or its claim) and the object as it is in itself. In essence, consciousness allows for the possibility of error. (12)
In other words, the distinction between how we represent the object and what the object is in-itself is built into thought. Pete refers to this as “attitude independence”: “Something is in-itself if the way it is is independent of the way we take it to be” (13). Already we can sense that Pete is taking on– rightly, in my view –Meillassoux’s characterization of correlationism. Meillassoux sees the problem of correlation as residing in the fact that thought must relate to being to think it. The question for Meillassoux then becomes that of how we can escape the relation to thought to think the thing itself. I’ve always been dissatisfied with this formulation as it seems to render the problem of knowledge irresolvable. How can we know anything without relating to it? Certainly it isn’t the mere fact of relating to things to know them that Meillassoux is contesting in Kant.
Pete’s argument is remarkably close to Bhaskar’s argument for transcendental realism. Bhaskar begins from the premise that in our sciences we engage in experimental activity and that when we engage in experimental activity we create closed systems in which to observe things (he also has a similar argument about perception, but I’ll set that aside). Having observed this, Bhaskar asks why we engage in this curious activity. Bhaskar’s thesis is that this activity is only intelligible if generative mechanisms or objects behave differently in open and closed systems. In open systems, Bhaskar contends, objects or generative mechanisms can be operative without producing certain events due to the intervention of other objects or generative mechanisms. Likewise, in open systems, generative mechanisms can be present in open systems without being active at all.
This basic observation gives us the rationale behind experimental activity. We engage in experimental activity because we work on the premise that we must create closed conditions to trigger the events of which generative mechanisms or objects are capable. If our experimental activity is to be intelligible, certain things must be true of the world. It must be possible for objects to be active in open systems without producing the events of which they are capable (Hume-Kant are wrong to conceive causality as a constant conjunction of events), and the world must be structured and differentiated. Why must it be structured and differentiated? Because if it weren’t we couldn’t create closed systems in which to trigger events. Now while Pete’s argument and this argument initially appear very different, they both work with the same premise that Pete describes as “attitude independence” or the difference between how an object is given and what an object is in-itself (local manifestation and virtual proper being), and are contingent on the possibility of error.
Now why do I describe this argument as the thesis that ontology precedes epistemology rather than epistemology precedes ontology? After all, with Bhaskar I am beginning from the standpoint of knowledge and what is required for our knowledge. The reason behind this can be illuminated in terms of what Pete refers to as Brandom’s “deflationary realism” (which, incidentally, Pete rejects and which I don’t think can be characterized as a realism by any stretch of the imagination). Pete summarizes this deflationary realism through three points:
1) The world is all that is the case, or the totality of what is true. This is the same definition of the world with which Wittgenstein opens the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus.
2) Thought is just the rational process through which we update and revise what we take to be true.
3) The concept of the world is reciprocally sense dependent upon the concept of thought. This means that one cannot understand the structure of the world without understanding the structure of this rational process, or vice versa.
The problem arises with the very first thesis. Assuming that when Pete refers to the world as the totality of what is true he is referring to propositions about the world known to be true, we see how this thesis renders inquiry thoroughly unintelligible. Inquiry is premised on the existence of substances, objects, or generative mechanisms that we don’t yet know and which therefore we don’t yet have true propositions about. If the world were the totality of true propositions or, with Quine, we hold that reality or existence is nothing more than existential quantification, then we are undermining the reason we engage in inquiry in the first place. For the whole ground of inquiry resides in the premise or transcendental condition that objects or substances exist that have not yet been quantified over in any way. In other words, inquiry is premised on an ontological condition and this ontological condition is prior to any knowledge we have of any specific entities. I’ve never heard Pete address this argument or state where he stands with respect to it, even though I’ve repeated it endlessly. Then again, I’m not very good at keeping up with Pete’s blog.
As an aside, I think philosophers really need to relinquish situating epistemological questions in terms of things like thought, propositions, and perhaps even knowledge. This sort of terminology suggests far too passive a relation to knowledge and invites metaphors of specularity or mirroring. Instead, we should focus on knowledge practices or what people actually do in producing knowledge. The problem with thought is that it cuts all of those practices out of the story at the outset, as if they can safely be ignored and we can just talk about consciousness, thought, representations, and proposition. I think a number of problems in epistemology are just poorly posed because of this tendency. It might sound strange to say that we should relinquish talk of knowledge in epistemology. However, my point here is that we should instead talk about inquiry. Knowledge has connotations of factoids you look up in an encyclopedia. The concept of inquiry gets at the real work involved in producing knowledge. Philosophers, in their way of talking about knowledge, seem strangely disdainful of the practices that actual knowledge-producers use in producing knowledge. We seem to like the results of that inquiry while simultaneously treating the process of inquiry as philosophically insignificant.
Larval Subjects . 
June 24, 2010 at 7:22 pm
I’m not at all convinced by the distinction you seem to be drawing between philosophers and ‘actual knowledge producers’. Why are philosophers not actual knowledge producers? The earlier claim you made that they sit around reading scientific papers rather than doing science doesn’t hold water. Philosophers do philosophy which is a form of rational enquiry. If you were to take a bunch of formal logicians, for example, and tell them that their entire practice was parasitic upon scientific experiment, they would give you very short shrift and rightly so. Philosophers of science read scientific papers and then produce philosophical knowledge out them, although frankly prominent philosophers of science across the spectrum from Popper to Haraway have a lot more contact with scientists than that.
As for this:
I think philosophers really need to relinquish situating epistemological questions in terms of things like thought, propositions, and perhaps even knowledge.
You seem to be trying to redefine epistemology out of existence. I’m not convinced any epistemologist worth their salt is going to take you seriously, nor should they.
Frankly, I think that this whole debate over whether ontology or epistemology should take priority is a colossal waste of philosophical time and effort.You do know that epistemology was invented in the mid-nineteenth century by a Scotsman, right? Prior to that, the idea that you could separate questions about being from questions about knowledge would have been laughed out of court. Aristotle or Kant aren’t doing either ontology or epistemology at any given point, they are doing both at once. Of course, that makes them all correlationists, but I don’t have a problem with that…
June 24, 2010 at 7:40 pm
Johneffay,
My point is simply that we don’t pay nearly enough attention to the practices involved in various forms of knowledge production and that that suggests 1) that we don’t believe that these practices are relevant to questions of epistemology, and that 2) this has an impact on how these questions are posed. Reading scientific papers is not nearly enough and is part of the problem. If you want to do good philosophy of science, you have to get into the laboratory. I think your analogy to formal logic is completely inapt as a comparison. The point is not that philosophers should instead be doing science– I’m not sure how you would arrive at that idea from what I’ve said –but that it’s a mistake to focus epistemological questions on the outcomes and products of inquiry (e.g., the scientific papers) and ignore the process of inquiry. Nor am I clear how I’m trying to define epistemology out of existence. I’m specifying what epistemology should be about.
June 24, 2010 at 8:09 pm
Reading scientific papers is not nearly enough and is part of the problem. If you want to do good philosophy of science, you have to get into the laboratory.
If you want to do good philosophy of literature do you have to write a novel?
My point about good philosophers of science is that a lot of them are a damned sight closer to the laboratory than you seem to imagine. They may not be conducting experiments, but they are working in tandem with the people who do. The idea that they read a couple of journals and then pontificate in their armchairs is ridiculous.
Nor am I clear how I’m trying to define epistemology out of existence. I’m specifying what epistemology should be about.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge. You write:
I think philosophers really need to relinquish situating epistemological questions in terms of things like thought, propositions, and perhaps even knowledge.
If that’s not defining epistemology out of existence, I’m not sure what would qualify.
June 24, 2010 at 8:13 pm
Johneffay,
Your first point is all I’m asking. That philosophers be familiar with laboratory work. I think Latour is a good example of this. Bhaskar is another. With respect to your second point about defining epistemology out of existence, did you read the rest of the paragraph? I said that we should replace the concept of knowledge with that of inquiry. I begin from the premise that knowledge production is a collective affair. The problem with talk about thought is that it refers back to individual minds. I believe we should instead focus on practices rather than thoughts. It’s not an unheard of position in either epistemology or philosophy of science. Dewey, for example, comes to mind.
June 24, 2010 at 8:39 pm
Dewey’s theory of inquiry explicitly rejects epistemology, but even then he does not replace the concept of knowledge altogether.
By all means dump knowledge if you want to, but I really don’t think you can then claim to be doing epistemology in any shape or form.
Anyway, I don’t really want to get into an argument about Dewey or whatever, my real intention was to highlight the futility of these ontology vs. epistemology debates. I think Mikhail is right when he says we should be doing both at the same time. To my mind, knowledge and being raise equally interesting and important questions.
Incidentally, I don’t know whether you can see this from the way you view your site, but something horrible has happened to the formatting of this post.
June 24, 2010 at 8:50 pm
Thanks for drawing attention to this, Johneffay. This is what happens when you write posts when dog tired. I don’t think I’ve ever suggested that we get rid of epistemology. My gripe isn’t with epistemology but with anti-realisms. I’m much closer to what you referred to in the context of Kant and Aristotle (the latter especially). I just don’t think all philosophical questions are epistemological questions, that’s all.
June 24, 2010 at 8:54 pm
I think philosophers really need to relinquish situating epistemological questions in terms of things like thought, propositions, and perhaps even knowledge.
I’m going to side with Levi on this one. If you want to study “knowledge” and how humans “achieve it”, you need to first study the nonpropositional forms of bodily know-how which are “prior” to propositional knowledge. If you want to really study propositional knowledge in its full form, you need to study its development in time starting with the zygote. If I understand him correctly, Levi is railing against the philosophers who start with reflective, adult knowledge that is structured by precise grammatical forms and then work backwards, applying derived concepts to original phenomena. Infants don’t “think” knowledge in the way adults do, but it would be against scientific parsimony to suppose an infant does not “know” certain things, such as how to breath, cry, or beat its heart. We need to thus start with nonpropositional knowledge (grounded in material dynamics) and see how its structure acts as a scaffold upon which the reflective forms of thought are constructed.
I could have misinterpreted what Levi was intending though.
June 24, 2010 at 9:23 pm
Levi: Thanks for taking the time to read the essay. I think you’ve perhaps misunderstood a few points though. I’ll try to give a few specific examples, but I won’t labour them, as you still haven’t finished reading it.
1. I don’t think you’ve quite got what my asymmetrical sense-dependence thesis is and how it differs from both classical realism/idealism and deflationary realism. I wrote a short post on this recently:-
http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2010/05/24/directions-of-dependence/
2. I’ve gone to some length in the essay to try and show why attitude-independence isn’t anything like withdrawal in the way you’ve presented it, because withdrawal must be conceived in ontological terms (and is thus much more like a mind-independence account) whereas I take it that attitude-independence can be specified independently of such terms. This is also linked to the distinction I draw between representational and presentational accounts of thought. It seems like both your and Graham’s accounts are of the latter kind, whereas I’ve argued that attitude-independence can only be articulated in the former kind.
3. The notion of ‘world’ I’ve ascribed to Brandom is not the totality of *known* propositions, or even the totality of propositions *we take to be true*, but the set of actually true propositions, or what Brandom just calls ‘facts’ (I have a different definition of ‘fact’, but that’s not relevant here). This is equivalent to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus formulation: the world is the totality of facts.
The important thing to understand about Brandom is that he thinks that our grasp of the logical notion of ‘fact’ is more fundamental than our grasp of the logical notion of ‘object’, or that our grasp of ‘truth’ is more fundamental than our grasp or ‘existence’. This doesn’t mean that we can understand one without the other, just that we should give explanatory priority to the former. In short, our understanding of the determine world as that which answers all our questions, has priority over our understanding of it as full of things that our questions are about.
My own take on the philosophical notion of ‘world’ is indebted to this Wittgensteinian idea, but it’s more intricate. It’s spelled out more in the essay in terms of the distinction between the formal structure of the world, the formal structure of the Real and the real structure of the Real.
4. I don’t think you’ve understood Quine here. Quine thinks we quantify over the domain of what there is, and this means that ‘everything exists’ is a tautology as far as he is concerned. This doesn’t mean that we know what’s in the domain. Indeed, the point of ontology for him is to work out just this, rather than to work out ‘what it is’ to be an existent (since being an existent is just being in the domain). Neither Quine nor Brandom deny that there are things that exist, or that there need to be existent things in order for any inquiry to happen.
I’ll address the other stuff in my post. I’ve been rather delayed today due to an awful migraine which came out of the blue. I also have a few commitments over the next few days which will make working on the post more difficult (I’d hoped to get more done today). I will have something up in a few days though, with a bit of luck. For now, I’m off to bed.
June 24, 2010 at 9:41 pm
Gary,
That’s more or less close to what I had in mind. I’m a developmentalist at heart and think that epistemological questions need to be posed in terms of development. Thus, I fully embrace your observations about child development and the problem with beginning with adult knowledge. My argument was somewhat different in that I wasn’t so much talking about childhood development, but the sorts of practices scientists engage in when in the laboratory. The problem that occurs when we begin with the results or products of scientific investigation as a launching point for epistemological inquiry is that there’s very little resemblance between the published results and the world itself or what that published work purports to describe. We then get ourselves all twisted up wondering how these very abstract propositions can possibly map on to the world. The virtue of attending to the laboratory setting as that we gain insight into all the tools scientists use in conducting their experiments, how the scientists have to rework all sorts of materials or substances for their experiment, how they create closed setting, how they organize and codify data, etc. What we get are a chain of transformations leading from the muddled and chaotic world of experience to a more and more structured and specified world that gradually leads to the published form of knowledge. In other words, we get all the referential linkages that connect the highly abstract published work that shares little resemblance to anything in the world to the concrete world itself. When we understand this, we can move back and forth among this chain of linkages seeing how the scientist got to this abstraction from the world. I’ve written about this elsewhere under the title of Circulating Reference. The post starts out slow, but quickly gets into the nitty gritty of these issues.
June 24, 2010 at 9:47 pm
Pete,
Can you clarify this point:
When you say “actually true” propositions do you mean the totality of true propositions that could exist even if no one has articulated them (which somewhat undermines the concept of “proposition” in my mind) or do you mean the totality of true propositions available to humanity.
Thanks for the clarification of Quine. For me this is still a rather perverse understanding of existence insofar as it seems to relate existence intrinsically to propositions. That’s what I took his “thin” notion of reality to be. I think my point about withdrawal and attitude-independence is that the condition for the possibility of error you cite requires the transcendence of objects. And this requires the withdrawal of objects. I don’t fully understand your distinction between representational and presentational models of thought, but I’m not sure how I arrive at my argument based on the version of what you seem to be referring to with presentationalism.
It’s going to be difficult for me to sustain this discussion. I really need to get back to work on my book as the clock is ticking before classes resume.
June 24, 2010 at 10:10 pm
Pete,
I know you’re on the run right now, but I was wondering if you could clarify this for me. I notice that on page 23 you define the world as “All that is the case. The totality of all that is true” and you define the real as “All that is really the case. The totality of what is objectively true.”
I find this conception of the world and the real thoroughly perplexing. I begin with the premise that truth isn’t a property of things but of propositions. As a consequence, I’m led to the conclusion that the world and the real can’t be defined in terms of truth. The world and the real are neither true nor false, only propositions about the world are true and false. I wonder how you are thinking propositions and truth that you could make such a claim, and how this can be squared with the realism you apparently wish to advocate. Dusting off Ryle’s old idea of category mistakes, defining the world as the totality of all that is true sounds like a category mistake, not dissimilar from asking where the university is after being given a tour of many buildings at the university.
June 24, 2010 at 11:53 pm
I’ve always loved Whitehead’s concept of philosophy as an ‘adventure’ – where wonder will always remain.
I keep wrestling with this question of the possibility of interacting or relating to a ‘whole’ – which does not absolutely withdraw.
I can’t yet put my finger on it (articulate it), but there’s something wrong with the claim that objects cannot partially interact (or know) a whole.
‘Part’ of the problem is the claim itself. Even if an object is a ‘whole’, partial relation to it may be possible.
The other part is the assumption that objects are wholes. What happened to ‘multiplicities’? Neither one nor many…
Or Souriau’s multiple modes of existence of an object.
When a scientist exclaims ‘atoms exist’ has she not really made a claim about atoms, but only a partial statement about some of their qualities – whilst the really real atom remains forever withdrawn; and can only be inferred? Sounds suspiciously like an old thesis. Or as Latour puts it in Pandora’s hope when honing in on Kant: ‘a science-fiction nightmare’
June 25, 2010 at 1:40 am
Nonpropositional knowledge grounded in material dynamics… my word for this is “a practice”.
Maybe if you reject correlationism you reject epistemology wholesale. I don’t really think this is the case, but I guess time will tell who is the true Scotsman! :)
June 25, 2010 at 8:09 am
[…] questions about the way I define the notions of ‘world’ and ‘Real’ (here). I happened to have a really good email discussion with Daniel Brigham about this, after he heard […]
June 25, 2010 at 8:10 am
Here’s a quick post on the matter, as I had an explanation of some of these issues sitting in my outbox.
http://deontologistics.wordpress.com/2010/06/25/the-world-and-the-real/
July 10, 2010 at 9:28 am
[…] by Levi (the first two responses here and here, with a series of follow-ups here, here, and here). My original comment basically just recapitulated much of what I’d said in my recent post […]
July 15, 2010 at 10:39 pm
[…] for my own position. To this end, the final paragraph of his post on my transcendental realism (here) is perfect:- As an aside, I think philosophers really need to relinquish situating epistemological […]