Over at Ecology Without Nature, Morton cites one of the questions he received at DePaul:
I was interested in how your work and other critiques of correlationism deal with the question of epistemology and justification. Kant’s critique of our attempt to grasp the real is precisely a caution against onto-theology… I wonder how these worries about falling into an onto-theology that can never ground itself or provide justification are dealt with in such a critique of correlationism.
In response, Morton says a bit about the sciences. I personally think epistemology has little to do with science and that it makes little in the way of contributions to the sciences. Scientists just do not bother themselves with the finger waving of the epistemologists and the rules they claim govern inquiry into the world. The closest we get to epistemology having an impact on the science is in the critiques that folks such as Foucault, Haraway, Latour, Gould (The Mismeasure of Man) etc., where systematic biases in various discourses are disclosed. In a number of respects, epistemology is a thoroughly parasitic discourse that is of interest and importance only to philosophers.
The question Morton cites here strikes me as being based on a fundamental and very common misunderstanding about the nature of what OOO is claiming and arguing. It confuses epistemological realism with ontological realism. Epistemological realism is the thesis that our representations represent entities as they are in-themselves. Epistemological realism is the thesis that we can represent other entities in the world as they are. Ontological realism is the thesis that entities are irreducible to our representations of them.
read on!
OOO, as I understand it, is incapable of epistemological realism. OOO makes no claim to represent entities as they are in-themselves. Within the framework of OOO such representations are impossible because entities are withdrawn. Withdrawal entails that realist representation is impossible. Here special attention should be paid to the details of Harman’s actual arguments. Harman does not argue that Kant is wrong to say that we can’t represent things-in-themselves but rather only ever encounter phenomena, Harman argues that what Kant says of human-object relations is true of all object-object relations. What Harman thus contests is Kant’s privileging of the human-object relation, not the basic thesis that humans “distort” the in-itself.
Within my framework, this same point is arrived at through the resources of second-order cybernetics. Second-order cybernetics argues that all systems (what I call “objects”) are 1) operationally closed and structurally open, and 2) self-referential. Operational closure is the thesis that operations taking place within a system only ever refer to one another, not an outside or external world. Neurological events only ever refer to other neurological events. Immune system events only ever refer to other immune system events. Thoughts only ever refer to other thoughts. Communications only ever refer to other communications (not the minds or brains of those that communicate). And so on. Structural openness, by contrast, means that systems are nonetheless open to perturbations from the world around them. This would be what Kant refers to as the manner in which the mind is affected by the world, though with a greatly extended scope, no longer referring simply to human minds but nervous systems, other animals, social systems, etc., etc., etc.
The self-referentiality of systems or objects refers to the manner in which objects relate to their environment. Every system faces an environment that is far more complex than the system itself. If a system is to endure or exist it must reduce this complexity. It is here that we encounter the self-referentiality of systems. Systems are self-referential in two senses: First, in the sense that their internal operations only ever refer to other internal operations. Second, in the sense that their openness to their environment is a product of the system’s own distinctions. There’s a very real sense in which every system or object creates it’s own environment. This is why, as I argued in a recent post, we must distinguish between Umwelt and world. Umwelt refers to the environment created by the system through its own self-referential operations. World refers to what exists independent of the system or object in question. The point is that the latter can never be reduced to the former. Systems in the environment of another system– say, for example, my cats or other persons –can never be reduced to my Umwelt. I encounter them within my Umwelt in a particular way as, what Graham calls “sensual objects”, yet they are always and everywhere irreducible to my sensual objects just as I am irreducible to my cat’s sensual objects. If this doesn’t provide one with all the critique of ontotheology one desires, I don’t know what does.
In response to my post “Glasses, Withdrawal, and Critique“, Jeremy Trombley quotes me and asks,
“…sensual objects are the way in which one real object encounters another real object. That real object encountered, however, is withdrawn from the real object that encounters it.”
Then do we ever encounter the real object? Can we ever know it? Or can we only hope to know the sensual objects that exist within ourselves? How is this different from correlationism? Maybe I’m missing something…
Nope, Jeremy isn’t missing a thing. As I understand it– and maybe others disagree with me –the OOO critique of correlationism is not a critique that would finally deliver us to the real itself or things-in-themselves. It is not an epistemological realism. OOO’s critique of correlationism is a critique of the privileging of human correlation. Put differently, OOO multiplies correlations, it doesn’t get rid of correlations. There is the way humans correlate to the world, bats correlate to the world, rocks correlate to the world, aardvarks correlate to the world, hurricanes and tornadoes correlate to the world, social systems correlate to the world, dust mites correlate to the world, etc., etc., etc. Another way of putting this would be to say that OOO strives to take up the point of view of other entities on the world. A number of entities correlate to the world in rather uninteresting ways, but a number of entities correlate to the world in very interesting ways. This is what is meant by “second-order observation”. In second-order observation we are not observing another object, but are rather observing how another object correlates to the world about it. We are striving to adopt the point of view of that object. Rather than encountering the object “for ourselves”, we are striving to observe how the object encounters the world “for itself“. What is it like to be a bat?
A number of questions change at this point. Let’s return to the question of knowledge. Philosophers often assume that questions of knowledge are questions of how a human relates to the world. While it is certainly true that humans as individual persons are knowers, this hopelessly confuses the question. The sorts of knowledge that epistemology generally explores– what counts as scientific knowledge –do not pertain to a relationship between human beings and worlds. Rather, they pertain to a relationship between social systems and the world. Humans belong to the environment of these social systems; which is to say that they are outside of it. This follows from the closure of systems. The body of scientific knowledge is composed of communications, not neurological events, ideas, or thoughts. These communications only refer to other communications and are regulated by distinctions immanent to those communications. The question of the epistemology of science is thus not a question of how a mind relates to the world, but of how a particular type of social system, the scientific social system, relates to the world and how its communications are structured. In other words, we here have an entity– the scientific social system –that must be understood in its own terms just as the manner in which a bat relates to the world must be understood in its own terms, and where the individual human being or mind is relegated to the environment of this system.
April 12, 2011 at 2:31 pm
[…] a recent post, Levi quotes Jeremy Trombley citing Levi and following up with a question: “…sensual objects […]
April 12, 2011 at 4:36 pm
Yes, it is a very subtle point and shift here. You’ve said before, and I very much agree, that object-oriented thought is a continuation of the work of the death of God, not its reversal. All of the caveats of epistemological relativism or anti-realism remain, but they are recontextualized into a larger field and no longer allowed to be exceptional. It is taking the project of Freud and Darwin even further, I think. And this is the very point of object-oriented ontology: the human-world rift is not the only rift, but one among trillions. It is not ontologically unique (though it is, like all object-world relations, particular).
When God is alive, our exceptional status is secured. After the death of God, our very debasement or neurotic severing from the world had to be exceptional. Object-oriented ontology removes even that exceptional status: no entity is at one with itself or its world. All is split.
April 12, 2011 at 4:49 pm
Just one other point after reading Adrian’s post above — I think that the central point is to say that, though a bat’s Umwelt dies with it, its world doesn’t, and that you have to have some concept of world (defined by Levi above) in order to make sense of Umwelt at all. Or, in Luhmann’s words, the real is precisely what we don’t encounter directly (but that still must be “there” for encounter to happen at all).
It seems to me that Chris and Adrian, in previous discussions, admitted the existence of Umwelts only, and no world apart from any individual Umwelt.
April 12, 2011 at 5:08 pm
Isn’t the point that freedom and choice emerge out of the deterministic base, and are based not as much upon metaphysical freedom as upon the immanent becoming of the world, which is non-calculable except by this very becoming itself?
This is a very subtle point indeed, but i guess this can be read as a pretty standard “compatibalist” position.
Maybe this difference can be articulated in the difference between determined and pre-determined.
April 12, 2011 at 7:00 pm
Pardon if this has been answered previously, feel free to point me to it if so. That being said:
Epistemological realism is the thesis that we can represent entities as they are in-themselves. So for instance, I take it that Meillassoux is an epistemological realist in this sense, insofar as entities as they are in themselves can be correctly represented as being “necessarily contingent”, “mathematizable”, etc. So there are certain properties of things-in-themselves that are epistemically accessible to us.
You say that OOO does not advocate epistemological realism. However, what about the property “being withdrawn”, or even “being necessarily withdrawn”? Isn’t that a property of the thing-in-itself, and moreover a property that is epistemically accessible to us, insofar as it is something the object-oriented ontologist claims to know? Is there a principled distinction to be made between the property “being withdrawn” and the properties Meillassoux discusses like “being necessarily contingent” that distinguishes Meillassoux from OOO on this point?
I suppose this is some version of the infamous question concerning the status of the thing-in-itself for Kant. If the thing-in-itself is unknowable, how can we so much as say that it exists without overstepping the very boundary we erected?
I know some of the common moves Kantians make in response to this kind of objection (distinguish schematized from unschematized categories, the methodological/innocuous two-aspect reading of the thing-in-itself, etc), but I don’t see how any of them could be utilized by OOO….
April 13, 2011 at 12:49 am
Levi, Thanks for addressing my question. I hadn’t noticed it because I’ve been bouncing around a lot the last two weeks. I’ll have to think about what you say here more, as well as Adrian’s comments – my brain’s a bit fried at the moment and I still have some work to do tonight. I’ll get back with you though.
April 13, 2011 at 1:30 pm
Yes. It seems to me that some SR-ists want to think outside the human-world correlate, as humans, and some want to multiply the correlate everywhere (that would be us lot).
April 14, 2011 at 6:32 am
I’ve posted the following at Morton’s:
I was struck by one of Bryant’s opening gambits:
In response, Morton says a bit about the sciences. I personally think epistemology has little to do with science and that it makes little in the way of contributions to the sciences. Scientists just do not bother themselves with the finger waving of the epistemologists and the rules they claim govern inquiry into the world.
I won’t claim that what I do is science. But if it were possible (for me) to be scientific about the questions that most interest me, I would be so. As it is, well, I do what I can.
At the moment I’m really concerned about being able to get good descriptions of things like, for example, cartoons, or poems. I want descriptions that can be shared by others and that others can build on. I want to be able to craft descriptions of cultural artifacts that have the same, shall we say, heft, as the descriptions of flora and fauna developed by naturalists starting in the early modern era and continuing one, well, to today.
Note that the famous 1953 Watson & Crick paper in which they explicated the structure of DNA, that was fundamentally a piece of description. But description built on top of some very ambitious and indirect data gathering. So it is, in some deep way, very different from describing a flower or a millipede. But it is also, in some equally deep way, much the same.
As far as I’ve been able to tell, philosophy (of whatever strip) has little to offer me.
I also like this:
It is not an epistemological realism. OOO’s critique of correlationism is a critique of the privileging of human correlation. Put differently, OOO multiplies correlations, it doesn’t get rid of correlations. There is the way humans correlate to the world, bats correlate to the world, rocks correlate to the world, aardvarks correlate to the world, hurricanes and tornadoes correlate to the world, social systems correlate to the world, dust mites correlate to the world, etc., etc., etc.
April 14, 2011 at 11:41 am
I think a nice alternative to ‘epistemology’ is ‘gnoseology’ (or ‘gnostology’). It’s something of an archaism although I think that it’s still used in the philosophy of education and so on. It means “the philosophy of knowledge and the human faculties for learning” but I think it could be appropriated with a more distinct definition.
If epistemology is the inquiry into the validity (or invalidity) of knowledge gnoseology can be the investigation of knowledge simply as a concrete reality. That is, as part of existence itself – as part of ontology. This rather sums up Latour’s work – he works almost entirely on the subject on knowledge, what it is, how it is made and circulated and how, through these circuits, we come to know but his is not an ‘epistemological’ project. There is no gap to be guarded between sense and nonsense. He isn’t interested in specifying conditions under which things can be said to be valid or legitimate and he doesn’t recognise the split between ontology and epistemology – not because what is is whatever we know but because what we know is part of what is. Moreover, knowledge is not some abstract, immaterial thing – to use Hans-Jorg Rheinberger’s phrase, we know through ‘epistemic things’. This is a ‘relativist’ epistemological position (as opposed to an absolutist one) but can easily be understood as a realist gnoseological position insofar as epistemic things are understood as real – and they surely are.
April 14, 2011 at 3:10 pm
I have some thoughts posted here.
April 14, 2011 at 6:42 pm
[…] Here. Posted by doctorzamalek Filed in Uncategorized Leave a Comment » LikeBe the first to like this post. […]
April 14, 2011 at 6:58 pm
[…] OOO Realism and Epistemology (via Larval Subjects .) Over at Ecology Without Nature, Morton cites one of the questions he received at DePaul: I was interested in how your work and other critiques of correlationism deal with the question of epistemology and justification. Kant's critique of our attempt to grasp the real is precisely a caution against onto-theology… I wonder how these worries about falling into an onto-theology that can never ground itself or provide justification are dealt with in … Read More […]
April 15, 2011 at 11:12 am
[…] has a neat post here which cogently sets out the Object-Oriented-Approach to epistemology and its relationship to […]
October 11, 2011 at 5:58 pm
“OOO, as I understand it, is incapable of epistemological realism. OOO makes no claim to represent entities as they are in-themselves. Within the framework of OOO such representations are impossible because entities are withdrawn. Withdrawal entails that realist representation is impossible. Here special attention should be paid to the details of Harman’s actual arguments. Harman does not argue that Kant is wrong to say that we can’t represent things-in-themselves but rather only ever encounter phenomena, Harman argues that what Kant says of human-object relations is true of all object-object relations. What Harman thus contests is Kant’s privileging of the human-object relation, not the basic thesis that humans “distort” the in-itself.”
Every time I read this I think to myself, “Oh, great!” I’m a big fan of OOO, but, I’m a bit frustrated by this. It’s these kinds of statements that make me think that OOO is essentially another idealist philosophy.
If we can never know or come to represent entities as they are in-themselves, then what is the point of doing science?
Seriously. Why give cancer researchers money if they can never get to know the cancer they’re studying? We should just save the money.
Why look up at the sky at night and wonder about the universe? We can never really know the objects as they are in themselves, so why bother.
Sorry. I’m sorry I’m a bit frustrated.
Recently, I’ve been finding myself siding more and more with the naive realists. What is the matter with naive realism anyway? Do you know?
October 11, 2011 at 6:23 pm
There’s a whole chapter of The Democracy of Objects devoted to scientific inquiry and experimental method. Perhaps your worries will be assuaged there.
October 11, 2011 at 7:15 pm
Thanks. I’ll take a look. I’ve been reading that book anyway lately. It’s written in a refreshing, straightforward style.