Over at Ktismatics John has an interesting post up making the case that we have direct access to our minds. John writes:

In my post I summarized some of the empirical evidence supporting the contention that much, if not most, human cognition takes place outside of conscious awareness. However, I decidedly did not propose that all of cognition is unconscious. We consciously attend to things, reason, solve problems, assemble stored memories, plan, evaluate information. And we’re self-reflexive about it: we are consciously aware that we’re reasoning, problem-solving, etc.

Doesn’t this mean that we have direct access to our own minds, at least to some extent? I’d say yes. If’ I’m aware that I’m solving a problem, and if both my awareness and my problem-solving are mental processes, then my mind has direct access to some of its own activities. If we’re consciously aware of the activities and outputs of our own consciousness, then that’s not just direct self-relation but also direct self-awareness of the self-relation. Consciousness is an emergent property of brain activity; unless we believe in the soul or some form of panpsychism there is no source of consciousness other than brain activity. So consciousness has to be in direct relation with the unconscious brain activity that generates it — doesn’t it? — even if that direct relation doesn’t take the form of conscious awareness of brain function. My hand is in direct connection with itself, even if it can’t hold itself in its grip. A bridge is in direct connection with itself, even if it can’s support itself on itself.

Yes and no. The claim that we do not have direct access to our minds is not the claim that our minds are not dependent on our brains, but rather that our introspective accounts of our mental activities are unreliable guides to how these mental activities function. In other words, the thesis that we can have knowledge of how our mental states function through self-reflexive conscious awareness of our internal states is here challenged.

read on!

To understand why this observation is philosophically important it is necessary to understand how claims about conscious awareness have functioned in the history of philosophy. In his second meditation, Descartes writes:

8. But what, then, am I ? A thinking thing, it has been said. But what is a thinking thing? It is a thing that doubts, understands, [conceives], affirms, denies, wills, refuses; that imagines also, and perceives. [ L][ F]

9. Assuredly it is not little, if all these properties belong to my nature. But why should they not belong to it ? Am I not that very being who now doubts of almost everything; who, for all that, understands and conceives certain things; who affirms one alone as true, and denies the others; who desires to know more of them, and does not wish to be deceived; who imagines many things, sometimes even despite his will; and is likewise percipient of many, as if through the medium of the senses. Is there nothing of all this as true as that I am, even although I should be always dreaming, and although he who gave me being employed all his ingenuity to deceive me ? Is there also any one of these attributes that can be properly distinguished from my thought, or that can be said to be separate from myself ? For it is of itself so evident that it is I who doubt, I who understand, and I who desire, that it is here unnecessary to add anything by way of rendering it more clear. And I am as certainly the same being who imagines; for although it may be (as I before supposed) that nothing I imagine is true, still the power of imagination does not cease really to exist in me and to form part of my thought. In fine, I am the same being who perceives, that is, who apprehends certain objects as by the organs of sense, since, in truth, I see light, hear a noise, and feel heat. But it will be said that these presentations are false, and that I am dreaming. Let it be so. At all events it is certain that I seem to see light, hear a noise, and feel heat; this cannot be false, and this is what in me is properly called perceiving (sentire), which is nothing else than thinking.

Descartes’ Meditations, especially the first three meditations, is essential reading on these issues. In the passage above Descartes argues that thought provides a ground of absolute certainty or incorrigibility, and is therefore the foundation or ground upon which all knowledge must be based. If, according to Descartes, thought has this special characteristic then this is because it is absolutely present to itself without any accompanying absence.

To understand the epistemological significance of this self-presence, it is necessary to understand just how re-presentation contains the possibility of error woven within it. Rather than beginning with thorny questions of how mind represents the world, it would perhaps be more illuminating to look at more common examples of representation from the worlds of law and politics. In law and politics a representative is a third party that comes between two people or groups of people, mediating their relation to one another. For example, a diplomat represents one nation to another nation. Neither nation relates directly to the other nation, but rather each nation only relates directly to the representative. This entails that any knowledge one of the nations has about the other nature is always received second-hand through the representative.

Here the relationship between representation and absence becomes evident. Insofar as the relationship between the two nations is mediated by a third party, insofar as their relationship to one another is indirect, the two parties are absent to one another and must rely on the reliability and honesty of the representative or diplomat for their access to each other. Consequently, mediated relations between parties always contain an element of doubt or uncertainty. The case is no different with representational theories of knowledge. The representation is a third term that comes between the knowing subject and the world to be known. What our minds relate to is not the object but our representations of objects. In this respect, representations have the structure of signs. As C.S. Peirce famously defined them, a sign is something that stands for something in some respect or capacity. In a clever twist, Umberto Eco, in A Theory of Semiotics, defines a sign as anything that can be used to deceive or tell a lie. Representations are entities that purport to stand for something else. As such, signs necessarily embody an absence insofar as what we directly relate to is not the world but the representation.

If signs and representations necessarily contain a degree of uncertainty or doubt, then this is because they embody absence within themselves, implying a present that is not, in fact, present. This point can be illustrated with reference to the final scenes of Kubric’s The Shining [around the 3:13 mark]:

Running through the topiary in the midst of a blizzard, the boy escapes the clutches of his crazed father through the skillful use of signs. The signs in question are his footprints in the snow. These footprints stand for the path the boy has taken. The father uses these signs to follow the boy’s trail. The boy, possessing a basic understanding of signs, steps back in his own footprints and then runs off in another direction, covering his tracks, so that his father will be led astray. Here the signs deceive his father and the boy fortunately escapes.

Here then we encounter ground zero of the question of our knowledge. Given that our signs or representations are the “presence of an absence” (i.e., the presence of something we are not directly related to), how can we determine the difference between those signs or representations that are veridical or accurate representations of the world and those that are not? If we are only directly related to our representations and not the world, then the question appears to be insoluble. Descartes’ sought an absolute foundation for knowledge that was beyond all doubt. Clearly our representations will not deliver us this foundation because they embody an absence that perpetually leaves room for doubt. What is needed is an absolute presence that would establish certainty. If thought, according to Descartes, provides such a foundation, then this is because my relationship to my thought is characterized by complete presence or immediacy (i.e., the absence of mediation) such that while I can doubt what my thought represents or stands for, I cannot doubt the simple having of this thought itself. While I can doubt whether or not I’m actually typing these words or am merely dreaming that I’m typing these words, I cannot doubt, according to Descartes, that I seem to be having this experience.

Thought, for Descartes, is thus unassailable or beyond all doubt because it embodies no absence or is characterized by immediate self-evidence and certainty. Initially Descartes’ gain here appears to be slight as we’re still in doubt about the existence of the world, other minds, our own bodies, our memories, and so on. However, Descartes does believe that he has opened up the domain of thought as a reliable field of investigation that cannot be doubted. The issue will now be one of determining whether or not we can, based on thought alone, establish the transcendence of the world in a way that is absolutely certain and this will require an investigation of the contents of our thought.

I will not here rehearse in detail the remainder of Descartes’ argument. Readers will find it in the third meditation. According to Descartes, the first thing of which we can be certain beyond ourselves is the existence of God. Since God is perfect he is therefore good. Insofar as God is good he cannot be a deceiver. Therefore, thinks Descartes, we can trust certain representations we possess as being accurate representations of the world.

Having briefly taken a detour through Descartes, it is now possible to re-situate the question of direct access with respect to our minds. Do we have, as Descartes suggested, direct access to our thought as Descartes suggested? Subsequent history and investigation has not been very supportive of Descartes’ hypothesis. In particular, neurology and psychoanalysis have both shed a great deal of doubt on Descartes’ equation of thought with awareness. John wrote:

We consciously attend to things, reason, solve problems, assemble stored memories, plan, evaluate information. And we’re self-reflexive about it: we are consciously aware that we’re reasoning, problem-solving, etc.

Is the suggestion that we are conscious or aware of doing these things really as self-evident as John suggests? I think not. Take our moral reasoning or problem-solving. In his recent book How We Decide (which is a terrific read, even if I disagree with it on many points), neurologist Jonah Lehrer recounts fMRI experiments with subjects engaged in moral deliberation. What these scans show is that moral decision making takes place primarily and in the first place in the amygdala, with the frontal cortex only subsequently becoming active after the decision has already been made. Moreover, those subjects that have significant damage or abnormality to their amygdala, transforming them into perfect Kantian calculative subjects, are often severely impaired where moral decision making is concerned. There is a strong connection here between sociopathy and such abnormalities among such subjects.

Now the amygdala is a region of the brain strongly connected to emotions and memory, while the frontal cortex is related to operations of higher reasoning. The significance of these observations with regard to the thesis that equates thought with awareness should be evident. Subjects who are asked why they wouldn’t steal candy at a grocery store will appeal to reasons such as potential consequences of their actions, the violation of some abstract moral principle like the categorical imperative or one of the Ten Commandments, etc. The fMRI scans reveal something different. Far from being a deliberative problem-solving process, the decision is already made at the level of unconscious emotional reactions. In other words, the higher-order problem solving activity comes ex post facto. The subject experiences these higher order reasoning processes as what led him to the decision, but the decision was already made behind his back at an unconscious level.

The conclusion to be drawn from this example– and examples of such findings could be multiplied infinitely –is that thought and awareness are not the same thing. There is a profound disadequation between how we experience ourselves (the domain of conscious awareness) and what produces these experiences (the domain of thought). Our self-reports based on conscious introspection are tremendously unreliable as guides as to why we do things. Consequently, when John writes:

If we’re consciously aware of the activities and outputs of our own consciousness, then that’s not just direct self-relation but also direct self-awareness of the self-relation. Consciousness is an emergent property of brain activity; unless we believe in the soul or some form of panpsychism there is no source of consciousness other than brain activity.

I cannot help but feel he’s missed the basic point of these discussions. This is clear from his references to panpsychism and the soul which are irrelevant to the issue under discussion. When a philosopher claims that we do not have direct access to our minds he is not claiming that the brain doesn’t produce the mind or that mind is not an emergent property of brain. One can adopt (as I do) the thesis that mind is an emergent property of brain and that we do not have direct access to our minds without being a panpsychist. The point here is epistemological, not ontological. What is at issue is whether conscious thought is a privileged domain of knowledge that can function as an absolutely secure foundation for all other knowledge as thinkers like Descartes, Hume (with his impressions or sensations), Husserl, and many others besides have argued. What researches in fields such as psychoanalysis and neurology have revealed is that far from being such a privileged and foundational domain, our relation to our own thought is every bit as deceptive and prone to error as our relationship to “external” objects in the world. As a consequence, there is no reason to grant conscious awareness a privileged and foundational role in philosophical thought. Our introspective reports as to why we think as we do are representational with respect to ourselves no less than with respect to objects (thereby embodying all the doubt we encountered in the relationship between representations and objects represented), and our introspective accounts of how thought actually functions are very likely to be extremely misleading and outright false. Yet if this point is granted, a number of assumptions, central axioms, and problematics governing contemporary philosophy are transformed significantly.

The problem of other minds is the problem of how to justify the almost universal belief that others have minds very like our own. It is one of the hallowed, if nowadays unfashionable, problems in philosophy. Various solutions to the problem are on offer. It is noteworthy that so many are on offer. Even more noteworthy is that none of the solutions on offer can plausibly lay claim to enjoying majority support.

[. . .]

There are (at least) two problems of other minds. There is the epistemological problem, concerned with how our beliefs about mental states other than our own might be justified. There is also a conceptual problem: how is it possible for us to form a concept of mental states other than our own. It is generally thought that the materials used to fashion the epistemological problem are the very same materials that produce the conceptual problem. The conceptual problem is generally raised in the context of solving the epistemological problem. One view here is that there can only be an epistemological problem if the conceptual problem is solved, but solving the conceptual problem solves the epistemological problem (Malcolm 1962a). That would be just as well since otherwise the epistemological problem would still be with us. More straightforwardly, some have thought that the conceptual problem is the difficult one without, tantalizingly, showing how easy it is to solve the epistemological problem (Nagel 1986, 19–20).

(Via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

I can still vividly remember my knowledge & inquiry thesis dealing with paradigms in Euclidean/non-Euclidean geometry.  My favourite part throughout the course of my thesis was actually stumbling across Steve Lovell, an amazing philosopher with years of experience in philosophical thought and academia. Truly it was the following quote (from his online article ‘Was there a Revolution in Geometry in the Nineteenth Century?’) that inspired me in the course of undertaking my thesis:

“…mathematics is a game in which we merely deduce the consequences of whatever rules we should care to invent. Some rules may be more interesting than others, but we cannot know a priori which are more true to reality.“

It’s natural to perceive the mathematical field of inquiry as a rigorous and iron-clad structure that can provide instant answers. It’s all supposed to add up right? But reading Lovell’s article, it’s impossible to remain in such a philosophical disposition, because as much as mathematics can provide the answers, we need to know the questions first.

To put it even more clearly, the mathematical is merely simulation engine with predetermined settings and conditions that can simulate the kinds of realities that exist.

Imagine a world where 1+1=1. A simple metaphysical difference from that of our own reality. But imagine the consequences of such a difference. If 1+1=1, everything would end in a single unit. Everything indistinguishable from each other; existing in singularity (pantheistic notions come to mind here).

A theological joke evinces this situation aptly:

“If 1+1=1, then God and I are one.“

prince parchments philosophical

A few years ago, I read the first chapter of Bertrand Russell’s The Problems of Philosophy. This week, I returned to it and finished the work.

Perhaps a more apt title for the book would be The Problems of Epistemology or even An Introduction to Epistemology, since Russell almost exclusively deals with the problems of our perception and knowledge of reality. (Epistemology is the study of the possibilities and limitations of human knowledge.)

My favorite part of the book, however, was the last chapter, in which Russell asks what value there is in philosophy. Here’s an excerpt:

[M]any men, under the influence of science or of practical affairs, are inclined to doubt whether philosophy is anything better than innocent but useless trifling, hair-splitting distinctions, and controversies on matters concerning which knowledge is impossible.

This view of philosophy appears to result, partly from a wrong conception of the ends of life, partly from a wrong conception of the kind of goods which philosophy strives to achieve. Physical science, through the medium of inventions, is useful to innumerable people who are wholly ignorant of it; thus the study of physical science is to be recommended, not only, or primarily, because of the effect on the student, but rather because of the effect on mankind in general. Thus utility does not belong to philosophy. If the study of philosophy has any value at all for others than students of philosophy, it must be only indirectly, through its effects upon the lives of those who study it. It is in these effects, therefore, if anywhere, that the value of philosophy must be primarily sought.

But further, if we are not to fail in our endeavour to determine the value of philosophy, we must first free our minds from the prejudices of what are wrongly called ‘practical’ men. The ‘practical’ man, as this word is often used, is one who recognizes only material needs, who realizes that men must have food for the body, but is oblivious of the necessity of providing food for the mind. If all men were well off, if poverty and disease had been reduced to their lowest possible point, there would still remain much to be done to produce a valuable society; and even in the existing world the goods of the mind are at least as important as the goods of the body. It is exclusively among the goods of the mind that the value of philosophy is to be found; and only those who are not indifferent to these goods can be persuaded that the study of philosophy is not a waste of time.

Philosophy, like all other studies, aims primarily at knowledge. The knowledge it aims at is the kind of knowledge which gives unity and system to the body of the sciences, and the kind which results from a critical examination of the grounds of our convictions, prejudices, and beliefs. But it cannot be maintained that philosophy has had any very great measure of success in its attempts to provide definite answers to its questions. If you ask a mathematician, a mineralogist, a historian, or any other man of learning, what definite body of truths has been ascertained by his science, his answer will last as long as you are willing to listen. But if you put the same question to a philosopher, he will, if he is candid, have to confess that his study has not achieved positive results such as have been achieved by other sciences. It is true that this is partly accounted for by the fact that, as soon as definite knowledge concerning any subject becomes possible, this subject ceases to be called philosophy, and becomes a separate science. The whole study of the heavens, which now belongs to astronomy, was once included in philosophy; Newton’s great work was called ‘the mathematical principles of natural philosophy’. Similarly, the study of the human mind, which was a part of philosophy, has now been separated from philosophy and has become the science of psychology. Thus, to a great extent, the uncertainty of philosophy is more apparent than real: those questions which are already capable of definite answers are placed in the sciences, while those only to which, at present, no definite answer can be given, remain to form the residue which is called philosophy.

This is, however, only a part of the truth concerning the uncertainty of philosophy. There are many questions—and among them those that are of the profoundest interest to our spiritual life—which, so far as we can see, must remain insoluble to the human intellect unless its powers become of quite a different order from what they are now. Has the universe any unity of plan or purpose, or is it a fortuitous concourse of atoms? Is consciousness a permanent part of the universe, giving hope of indefinite growth in wisdom, or is it a transitory accident on a small planet on which life must ultimately become impossible? Are good and evil of importance to the universe or only to man? Such questions are asked by philosophy, and variously answered by various philosophers. But it would seem that, whether answers be otherwise discoverable or not, the answers suggested by philosophy are none of them demonstrably true. Yet, however slight may be the hope of discovering an answer, it is part of the business of philosophy to continue the consideration of such questions, to make us aware of their importance, to examine all the approaches to them, and to keep alive that speculative interest in the universe which is apt to be killed by confining ourselves to definitely ascertainable knowledge.

Many philosophers, it is true, have held that philosophy could establish the truth of certain answers to such fundamental questions. They have supposed that what is of most importance in religious beliefs could be proved by strict demonstration to be true. In order to judge of such attempts, it is necessary to take a survey of human knowledge, and to form an opinion as to its methods and its limitations. On such a subject it would be unwise to pronounce dogmatically; but if the investigations of our previous chapters have not led us astray, we shall be compelled to renounce the hope of finding philosophical proofs of religious beliefs. We cannot, therefore, include as part of the value of philosophy any definite set of answers to such questions. Hence, once more, the value of philosophy must not depend upon any supposed body of definitely ascertainable knowledge to be acquired by those who study it.

The value of philosophy is, in fact, to be sought largely in its very uncertainty. The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. As soon as we begin to philosophize, on the contrary, we find, as we saw in our opening chapters, that even the most everyday things lead to problems to which only very incomplete answers can be given. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts which it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect.

Apart from its utility in showing unsuspected possibilities, philosophy has a value—perhaps its chief value—through the greatness of the objects which it contemplates, and the freedom from narrow and personal aims resulting from this contemplation. The life of the instinctive man is shut up within the circle of his private interests: family and friends may be included, but the outer world is not regarded except as it may help or hinder what comes within the circle of instinctive wishes. In such a life there is something feverish and confined, in comparison with which the philosophic life is calm and free. The private world of instinctive interests is a small one, set in the midst of a great and powerful world which must, sooner or later, lay our private world in ruins. Unless we can so enlarge our interests as to include the whole outer world, we remain like a garrison in a beleagured fortress, knowing that the enemy prevents escape and that ultimate surrender is inevitable. In such a life there is no peace, but a constant strife between the insistence of desire and the powerlessness of will. In one way or another, if our life is to be great and free, we must escape this prison and this strife.

Sometimes people just need to get bent. Do you know what I mean? No I am not saying people should go f*** themselves.  And I don’t mean bent in the game of Twister sense. Oh h…hold on. Some people do find Twister to be a form of erotic theatre, from what I have been told. So then if you are thinking of erotic practice, then yeah…you are somewhat in the neighbourhood of theoretical contextual terrain.

So what, you must be asking right now, am I rattling on about? I’m talking about Bent, the panel discussion that was held this past Tuesday evening at the Gladstone Hotel in Toronto. It was an evening of discussions about the complex multi-dimensionalities of intimate social and personal relationships.

I was impressed with the balance of personal accounts of different kinds of intimate relationships, and the theoretical experiential knowledge that was present in so much of the discussion. I was expecting an evening of stories stemming from everyday social realties relating to the terrain of sexuality and relational constructs. What also was present was epistemological abundance. In other words, the discourse present in the room was as energetic as it was reflexive.

Anyone who attended the evening certainly would have walked away with new knowledge and ideas about the various permutations, combinations, and definitions that can be attributed to relationships of intimate, romantic, sexual, and familial constructs. That is precisely the word to use when considering the notion of relationships discussed that evening: construct. I was happy to be in a place, post-graduate school days, where the discussions around partnership, marriage, intimacy, and gender were not tied to the ruling relational boundaries of essentialist formations. Identity is constructed along lines of how people as social actors make sense of the relationships existent in the social, yet quite often relationships are indicative of the identifications rather than identities that are present in our everyday realities. Monogamy, polyamorous, or however one may see and conceptualize their relationship needs and realties, are at the end of the day present formations identified within the structures of gender politics. But even if one acknowledges such political boundaries, boundaries may all they be when one attempts to think about their own identity formations as political in their own way, as stemming from the relentless and rigorous practices present in resistance and action that existed during the discussion.

In my mind, I see such events as a type of direct action against hegemony. Much like the ways French revolutionaries would meet in public houses to discuss methods and strategies to thwart their oppression via the politics of the Ancient Regime, in a somewhat less dramatic and of course in a non-covert way, such discussions are revolutionary. Discourse on the existence of queer-normative relationships happened. We learned about the construct of the leather family and how its complexities relate to the essentialist-normative structures of neo-liberalist families. We learned of kinksexual relational formations as they are present almost symbiotically in a normative, vanilla universe. And we learned that the sex trade has more similarities and related strands of purpose, practice, and meaning to psychological therapy than possibly realized before.

I use the term queer-normative quite specifically here. I like to play and mess around with the idea of normativity, specifically as derived from heteronormativity. Even if one discusses heteronormativity or hetero-normalcy, it implies it’s significance in binomial opposition to the queer other. So when I write queer-normativity, it is directed along the lines of appropriation and political semantics, aligning language with power, as power is aligned with it’s capacity in discussions of agency.

So, yes, overall, it was a good night.

(Part Two of this entry, to be posted later this week.)

“The most compelling aspect of the debate between Milton’s Satan and his fallen minions [in Paradise Lost] is its entirely non-Christian perspective on the workings of evil. Evil is action supervenient upon the rebel’s rational criticism of ‘good.’ It exercises a certain degree of liberty but, as the above quotation implies through its multiple puns on the word sentence, it does so within the confines of a predetermined war with ‘good’ that is always open, revealed, evident, clear. The Miltonian host of demons has the freedom to decide as it wills, but will always remain under certain constraints set upon them by God.

If one is honest with oneself, one is struck by the ramifications of thinking about God in this way. For one, if God establishes the struggle between ‘good’ and ‘evil’, then he is morally exempt from both ‘good’ and ‘evil.’ Humanity partakes in the struggle for good’s triumph over evil, but does so by the determining power of God who wrote the sentence-s Milton’s demons juggled among themselves! Consquently, the greater sin seems to be unlawfully ascribing to oneself the ability to transcend one’s moral obligation  under the law of God to (1.) obey or (2.) rebel…”

Autonomy is a kind of independence through self-governance. Kant was the most famous advocate of autonomy, thinking that it held the key to morality, though scores of other philosophers have thought it to be vitally important. It's one of those essentially contested concepts, though. People mean many different things by it — and this diversity seems not merely to be a product of linguistic dispute, but arguments over what sort of life is most worth living.

My conception of autonomy takes it to consist in being responsive to rationally authoritative norms. In short, we exercise an important sort of independence insofar as we manage to act upon reasons rather than any other contingent motivations we happen to be struck by. Here, what reasons we have are understood widely, and are not limited to the results of reflective inquiry: any rational actions could count, insofar as we've grasped what, if anything, we ought to do.

Constructivism about norms thinks that normative authority comes from correctly following procedures of practical reason. What we should do, ultimately, results from the structure of reason itself. Constructivists, taking their cue from a reading of Kant, also think that autonomy is important. Indeed, they think that autonomy somehow grounds normativity, providing internal criteria which broadly determine what we ought to do. This too involves the claim that freedom involves a kind of responsiveness to norms — those prescribed by the very structure of agents' practical reasoning and thus ones which are not externally imposed on the agent, and thus fit for expressing the agent's own autonomy. This is a sophisticated and ambitious kind of 'bootstrapping' strategy, as it is often called.

On the surface, it can seem that the shared commitment of myself and various constructivists to the idea that freedom is a form of normative responsiveness means that our views are substantively similar. However, my position with respect to normativity is a modest form of realism, whereby there is a kind of irreducibly normative authority of which people can become aware. In contrast, constructivism is a proceduralism which models normativity on the structures of a conception of democratic public reason. This is not what I want.

Instead, my variety of freedom as a kind of normative responsiveness is not one wherein we follow structural rules in order to achieve a legitimate outcome, but rather one in which we have a normative vision. (Ocular imagery is now deeply unfashionable in philosophy, but I think it ought to be reclaimed.) The point of the visual metaphor here is to emphasise that there is something there to be discovered, and its revelation to ourselves provides the backdrop against which we can act freely. So understood, being free requires us to see the world aright — understanding the significance of some situation which we are in, the requirements which it imposes upon us, whether or not we recognise them as ours. Acting upon this basis and within these bounds, with our eyes open and the particulars of the situation clear, including the nature of currents of motivation and the virtue and vices of different responses, provides us with a kind of autonomy. This is an ability to avoid being pushed around by brute forces and act with some purchase over ourselves. We thereby avoid being merely determined — the alternative is being influenced by factors whose significance is unclear, such that we have little basis for orienting ourselves and knowing what to pursue.

We may be unable, or just plainly fail, to resist unfavourable motivations or influences upon us. Even when fully aware of them and their true significance, this may still be so — the lure of the seedy desire, the satisfactions of high-handed moralism, may be too great — but this points to another sort of freedom: autocracy. This is the strength, favourable make-up, acuity or psychological agility to manage one’s psychology so as to execute a sense of what ought to be done. Autonomy and autocracy form a distinction but not a dualism: often knowing what to do is best conceived as a hands-on practical activity, where we are not guided by a clear intention nor criteria reflectively arrived at.

Autonomous agency, especially when put forward as an ideal, has often seemed retrograde though. It seems to hark back to the patriarchal ideals of the eighteenth century bourgeois: the rugged individual, independent and beholden to no-one who he does not choose to contract with in his own self-interest. Obviously, this is an ideological fiction: as a description of the conditions of any recognisably human life, which are ineliminably social, and always contain some moments of radical dependence, such as in childhood, sickness and infirmity; and as an ideal, with its autistic disregard for genuine communication, non-self-interested openness to the needs of others, and so on.

In implicitly endorsing autonomy then, it must be recalled that this is balanced through its entwinement with a conception of normative vision. So, we are not faced with egoism, and certainly not as an ideal. All sorts of things, people and situations make demands upon us and otherwise bend normative space in ways that we ought to respond to beyond our self-interest. On my conception of autonomy, failure to see this is a paradigmatic abrogation of freedom: fully free acts are those taken in as much awareness of their significance as possible.

Still, isn’t autonomy taken as an ideal in a problematic way? Egoism may fall by the wayside, but don’t other types of independence enter here as putatively valuable without justification? For example, it can seem that the influence of institutions, traditions and our peers are hastily too disdained, whereby it is ourselves who must pronounce upon right and wrong, whereby they are treated as mere interference. However, this charge would neglect two further features of my view.

Firstly, there is a role for second nature, as the training and conditioning which we all acquire in our development. In other words, we need to understand normativity in the context of the educative formation of people. This will involve acquiring and then being able to refine the skills of language use, empirical perception, coalescing of an emotional character and cognitive inquiry which are vital to being able to make the kinds of discriminations necessary to see the world in its full normative significance. Fully formed human agents are not possible without the nurtured and guided development which social forms such as institutions and traditions enable.

Secondly, often it will be difficult or impossible to exercise such skills without the concrete help or input of others. There may be more or less empirical cases of this. For example, there are inquiries so big as to be impractical if undertaken alone, as with many scientific projects. Or else, loneliness may retard our emotional health, leaving us unable to calibrate and hone our reactions. There are also cases where dialogical interaction seems integral. For example: intervening in an academic debate, in the humanities, say, where it is important that you are responding to ways of looking at the world which conflict with your own conception, going beyond your own horizons and ‘prejudices’. So, there may be various kinds of prompting from others which the social world affords us, and which enable us to get a better grip on the world, including its normative significance. This helps realise and sustain the skills which socially-mediated Bildung endows.

So, I think it is possible to advocate autonomy without falling into the ideological traps which have doubtless motivated many of its champions. We can accomodate varieties of dependence within the normative landscape which autonomy, as I conceive it, must be parasitic on. In this way, dependence becomes a condition of independence. The lesson here is that any attempt to think of autonomy as an ‘inner citadel’, an existentialist leap of willing, or an egoistic rugged individualism, ought to be challenged by the advocate of autonomy themselves.

     One way to read contemporary philosophy of religion and philosophical 
     theology is to view it as a series of attempts to determine how God
     became a problem in the West. . . .Their arguments already seem to be
     part of a high modernity which has been deconstructed by end-of-
     ontotheology arguments which claim that the only appropriate
     language for God in the postmodern context is no, not, never.**

Anthony Godzieba (Associate Professor, Villanova University) ought to be ashamed of himself!  

I know how God became a problem in the West. 

God finally—after trying for millennia—became a problem in the West (dare I assume speaking  for myself is speaking for “the West?”) in a 1400-square-foot apartment on a street—lined with live oak trees so old they spread a canopy over the street for neighbors to walk their dogs, the Asian-American medical students’ families to meet and talk and the gay melting-pot Americans to meet to plan rendezvous—in Dallas, Texas, United States, North America, the West, Earth. 

A canopy of (graitude?)

“For health and strength and daily bread, we give you thanks, O Lord.” Two-part, incipit an ascending octave leap on the dominant, the melody descending through the scale omitting the seventh. (I can write in the technical jargon of my discipline.) I have no idea when I first sang this as a blessing before a meal. 

The simple round is the gist of the Thanksgiving Eve sermon by the Rector of a large, wealthy, Episcopal parish in Dallas about the nature and need for Thanksgiving, We are to be grateful for what we have been given (presumably by God). 

The service was deeply moving, the “Noise of Solemn Assemblies” *** at its finest. The organ music was delicious. The choir sang Maurice Green’s “Thou Visiteth the Earth.” We sang the Thanksgiving hymns one might expect. I am emotionally and spiritually (?) engaged in services at this church (until the Creed when I either choke in grief or am enraged, and unable to say the words).  

All but the Credo

God became a problem not when Nietzsche announced his death (Nietzsche was myopic—he killed off only the Western god). God became a problem not with Heidegger’s convolutions; not with Kierkegaard’s grief—although that was close; not with Foucault’s Religion and Culture; not with Niebuhr, Faigley, Frankl, or Lyotard. Perhaps God became a problem with Baudrillard. 

God became a problem (and becomes a problem) each time a person (and then another, and another) discovers that the “metanarrative” (words invented by people in the above list are a problem) we have learned to be true (or we have assumed from infancy) is not. Life is not civilization, or theology, or good works, sociology, politics, love, hate, education, the economy, automobiles, wars in Iraq, or health care reform. And life is not “God.” 

God has worked up to being a problem for millennia. God tries to garner attention. God will, in fact, allow peoples’ lives to come unhinged, to be disasters, miserable, or intolerable. Or God will allow people to be happy, joyous, and free, to be billionaires, to have the power of the Presidency, to celebrate Thanksgiving in style and ease, and luxury. God allows these things (don’t go criticizing my theology—I don’t give a fig about theology; I report the facts as I see them) in order, now and then, to get one person’s attention. Each one who comes to the understanding that God is a problem has to do so alone. 

Discovering that the metanarrative, whatever version of it one has come to believe, is not true is one’s discovery that God is a problem. I can claim to have discovered this for the “West” in my apartment because, for me, the discovery is universal—it shakes my universe, so it must shake THE universe. And once discovered, the problem is never undiscovered. 

Discovering God is a problem means everything else is a problem. “For health and strength and daily bread, we give you thanks, O Lord” is meaningless (or at least problematic). Why give thanks for something that does not exist. God is a problem for me because I for so long had all of my hope, my comfort, my understanding of reality bound up with God.  

My grateful admission that God is a problem does not mean I have concluded God does not exist. How would I know? It means simply that, this Thanksgiving Day I cannot trust the metanarrative, what Wikipedia (Hah! laugh at my scholarship) calls the “abstract idea that is thought to be a comprehensive explanation of historical experience or knowledge.”  

I’m not throwing my lot in with Lyotard (although his work is clever) and the other “post-modernists.” They wrangle over metanarratives as surely as the ancient theologians who asked how many angels danced on the head of your hatpin. 

I don’t think about abstractions that explain history or knowledge. When my friends read philosophy in college and thought deep thoughts, I was learning organ music. I was drunk. I was trying to find sexual bliss. I read (and tried to write) novels. I can’t participate in discussions of Lyotard and Foucault (Foucault may have discovered that God is a problem). 

I grieve God as a problem. I am grateful for it. I assume that, if I live long enough (“what is life” is the first question one asks when one discovers that God is a problem), I may find some grace in the discovery. 

I do not want to over-emphasize the ways in which my body (mostly my brain) works differently than most human bodies. My twin disorders, Temporal Lobe Epilepsy and Bipolar Disorder, are perhaps not disorders at all. Perhaps they are the true gifts for which I celebrate Thanksgiving. They have forced me to understand God is a problem. Nothing is what it seems. Nothing is real. If reality is impossible to define, nothing survives when our bodies no longer participate in life on Earth. I am ill (but isn’t everyone?). One of my “illnesses” consists in a misfiring of brain cells that causes me dissociation, the physical beginning of my intellectual understanding that God is [unreal] a problem. 

Lately, I have been comforted, when I am overwhelmed knowing God is a problem, by the writings of Arthur Frank which I discovered in an article by Cristina Rocha. 

In The Wounded Storyteller, Arthur Frank argues that people use illness narratives ‘to repair the damage that illness has done to the ill person’s sense of where she is in life, and where she maybe going.’ He identifies three kinds of narratives—restitution, chaos, and quest. . . .Finally, in the quest narrative, ‘illness is the occasion of a journey that becomes a quest.’ The ill person has an active role in it, as s/he finds a sense of purpose in the illness, and uses it to undergo transformation. **** 

Thanksgiving Day is a day for me to remember my gratitude that God is a problem for me. I am grateful to be on a quest.

** Godzieba, Anthony J. ”Ontotheology to excess: imagining God without being. ” Theological Studies. 56.1 (March 1995): 3(18).  Associate Professor, Villanova University; Editor of Horizons, the journal of the College Theology Society.
*** Berger, Peter. The Noise of Solemn Assemblies; Christian Commitment and the Religious Establishment in America. New York: Doubleday, 1961. “Mainline Protestantism has always been in a symbiotic relationship with the middle-class culture, which is to a large extent its own historical product (after all, it is this type of Protestantism that has been a crucially important factor in the formation of American bourgeois civilization) and that continues to be its social context [in which people do not know God is a problem].”
**** Rocha, Cristina. ”Seeking healing transnationally: Australians, John of God and Brazilian Spiritism. ” The Australian Journal of Anthropology  20.2 (August 2009): 229(18).  Cristina Rocha is a staff member at the Centre for Cultural Research, University of Western Sydney.

We Plow the Fields and Scatter

Darwin's Black Box: A Must Read

Let me first say that science would not exist unless it where for Christianity.  In the history of Western Civilization, one has to ask themselves, ‘the Greeks were really really smart, why didn’t they invent the scientific method?’  The answer is simple, following Platonic and Neo-Platonic thinking, they did not think this world was real or intelligible.  It was not until Christianity presented a world created, ordered, and directed by a sovereign and benevolent triune God that the scientific method sprouted.  The consensus view in the history/philosophy of science is that science required the fertile soul of Christianity in order to grow.  Christianity took this world seriously.

1.  Darwin’s Black Box by Michael Behe  [l, e, p, s]

In my view, this book destroys the Neo-Darwinian (scientific rationalism) story of how life exists.  This book is a must read.  See also this previous blog post.

2.  Pensees by Blaise Pascal  [y, l, e, p, s]

Although not explicitly about science and Christianity, Pascal presents an epistemology that includes science, reason, and faith.

3.  Personal Knowledge by Michael Polanyi  [e, p, s]

Polanyi rightly challenges the objectivity and impersonality of the scientist.  Polanyi is very important in philosophy of science and is a worthwhile read.

4.  When Science Meets Religion by Ian Barbour  [l, e, p, s]

Barbour presents four possible relationships that science and religion might have.  Balanced read.

5.  The Soul of Science:  Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy by Nancy Pearcey and Charles Thaxton  [l, e, p, s]

Great critique of naturalism.  Pearcey is solid as usual.

6.  Darwin on Trial by Phillip Johnson  [y, l, e, p, s]

Is there enough hard evidence to prove Darwinism correct, were it to be put on a public trial?  Creative and damning question.

7.  The Edge of Evolution:  The Search for the Limits of Darwinism by Michael Behe  [l, e, p, s]

More Behe.  Good stuff.

8.  Evolution:  A Theory in Crisis by Michael Denton  [l, e, p, s]

Most think that this is the book that started the Intelligent Design movement.

9.  The Reason for God by Tim Keller  [c,y l, e, p, s]

Although not explicitly on the subject of science, like Pascal, Keller presents a third way between pure science/reason and pure faith.

10a.   The Language of God by Francis Collins  [l, e, p, s]

A look at DNA, from the director of the human genome project, and an evangelical Christian.

10b.  Inventing the Flat Earth:  Columbus and Modern Historians by Jeffrey Russell  [l, e, p, s]

Russell confronts the myth that people (esp. Christians) believed in a flat earth.  Pretty damning to an annoying and ignorant argument:

On page 1 of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae (that is, in the first article of the first question of the first part), he casually mentions the round earth on the way to proving something doctrinal: “the astronomer and the physicist both may prove the same conclusion: that the earth, for instance, is round: the astronomer by means of mathematics (i.e., abstracting from matter), but the physicist by means of matter itself.”  (via Between Two Worlds)

Honorable Mention:  Icons of Evolution by Jonathan Wells  [c, y, l, e, p, s]

I cannot stand behind anything else he has written, but Icons shreds the silly pictures commonly put in the textbooks you had growing up, demonstrating how they do not show Darwinian macroevolution.

(c=children; y=young adult; l=lay leader; e=elder; p=pastor; s=scholar)

Many people have requested a one-page summary of the new book. This one is under 400 words.

Roy Sablosky: NO ONE BELIEVES IN GOD (second draft, November 2009)

1. It’s not about belief
   1. That religion has to do with beliefs becomes implausible when you look at the behaviors it evokes. For example:
      1. Their “beliefs” challenged, people are often enraged, as if you had threatened not their opinions but their safety.
      2. One joins a group, not its “beliefs”. Self-described Catholics may differ profoundly with their church elders on important issues; they are Catholics despite their beliefs.
      3. Notoriously, church elders routinely flout the “beliefs” they most fervently espouse.
   2. Logically, claims of religious belief are meaningless.
      1. Religious propositions are incoherent. (This is by design. A slogan is catchier if no one knows what it means.) The word ‘god’, for example, is conceptually empty; the “problem of evil” has never been effectively challenged.
      2. Not being meaningful, religious statements can be neither meant nor believed. As Thomas Jefferson wrote: “I suppose belief to be the assent of the mind to an intelligible proposition.” Wittgenstein adds: “one cannot mean a senseless series of words.”
   3. Therefore, no one really believes in the teachings of any prophet or the existence of any god. It cannot be done. It does not happen. People who think they are doing it are mistaken.
2. It is memes plus authoritarianism
   1. Religious “beliefs” are memes: they are catchy just like germs are. They also evolve through natural selection; the religious memes circulating now have evolved over thousands of years to be very, very good at what they do.
   2. People are naturally deferential to authority figures.
   3. Authority and memetic self-replication combine to form religion.
3. What we should do
   1. Admit no religious exceptions to any legislation. A few examples:
      1. End tax breaks (that is: subsidies) for religious organizations and their personnel.
      2. Eliminate chaplaincy programs at all levels of government, including the armed services.
      3. Remove legislative impediments to abortion and birth control.
      4. Outlaw the teaching of antediluvian codswallop in public school.
      5. Government should ratify only civil unions, not “marriages”. Anyone willing and competent to sign such a contract should be allowed to.
   2. Per point 1, revise the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution. No part of any law should have a religious rationale. No proposal that uses religious terminology should become a law.

i have been silent a good while. i tried to force another entry a few times over the past few weeks, but the wisdom from my last post kept ringing in my ears, and i decided these to be wasted efforts and quit them. i analyzed why i felt so locked up, and discovered a combination of a simple lack of inspiration and a complex presence of doubt. this post is on truth, the strong inspiration which i believe to be the cure for doubt. it began as a collection of random thoughts about truth, which happened to fit together quite nicely.

we as people possess quite a torn nature, between belief and doubt – or unbelief, as i would more properly term it. unbelief manifests itself in all spheres of life, even if it is only found in one. how often do we stand not at crossroads, but at city centers, with seemingly infinite choices and skyscrapers blocking our view, making it all the more difficult to choose rightly? as i in a way discussed in my last post, there are those who let themselves be influenced so completely by their surroundings that it never becomes clear to them in what direction they are really striving. how often is seems that it is at the points when we make the most sincere effort to gain clarity about our lives that everything looks different, and here we are the most lost, like infants attempting to differentiate the world’s different subjects. we concentrate on something with all of our capacity, only to have some external minutia arise and destroy everything for us. what can we do?

i believe that the battle between truth and doubt is closely tied to the battle between belief and unbelief, since the latter coupling may be found to be the lurking forces behind the former. (as a note, the battle between fact and falsity i count differently). for how many contradictions there are in the truths we find (if we find them at all)! i do not wish to endeavor on the task of defining just what truth is, for i have constantly found this to be a task far too great for human capacity. rather, i set out to paint the truth with the colors of just what it does, for this, i believe, is what human beings mostly experience of it.

now when i write of the truth, it is important to know that i do not regard this as writing of “fact.” for how many there are who survey the world and collect its information, claiming the have discovered truths, yet are moved nowhere by them! to these sorts of things – “facts,” which merely provide a perceived foundation for the elaboration of others – i say that they only master (perhaps not even) a great wealth of details, but no more than that. after all, it may be found as foolishness the belief in facts. to the extent that there is a sort of unconscious life in such findings, there may be truth (yet it seems that this is rarely the case); but to the extent that there is not (the majority of the cases, i believe), this activity may be likened to that of a man who feeds the earth via the decomposition of his corpse. these, out of their soul-laziness, do nothing but live on the crumbs that fall from others’ tables, telling themselves that this is the best they can get (and give nothing back), to the point where they believe the lie. how long it must take them to reach anything of promise!

we live lives of facts, but doesn’t the fullest human life demand a bit more than such robotic natures? and how close do we, despite all of our so-called “knowledge,” usually live to insanity? we lull ourselves anxiously toward peace with facts, only to be awakened in a terrible sweat by a rigorous interrogation, which renders us truthless. when everything is said and done, as i have conjectured, everything we “know” is based on but a postulate of our senseless choosing.  but things cease to be postulates when they are no longer caged outside of us; when they roam freely inside of us, and us in them. when we base our thoughts not on something branded “objective,” but on something that is bound up inside us with the deepest roots, we find truth – a movement worth living for. rather, a movement that demands our living. it is not just a glimmer of a moment, but a deeper fire that continually scars our hearts with beautiful marks. when one apprehends truth, something happens, i believe, that life is taken on in a quite different manner then before.

we have come to an intellectual point in our history, i believe, where we have been told that we create the truth for ourselves. now based on my epistemology, this is a very tempting concept for me to subscribe to. but what a travesty life is for those who consider themselves to exist post-truth! what a source of lament it would be to live in such a state of arrogance and pride that we could not grasp anything at all, because we are too busy changing the world around us as we see fit! those live as bachelors who have worked hard, collected furniture, purchased an abode, and yet have no beloved with whom to share it all. what is it for? how unfortunate are those who, when they cannot alter everything to suit their liking, abdicate with a conscience of their own “competences,” as a decrepit veteran with a pension. they find not themselves, and then what can they hope to find? they expect to decide all of life’s externals before its fundamentals; but how much sense does it make for a cosmic body, thinking to form itself, decides the nature of its surface without first determining its center.

no; the truth is once for all, i believe (for in what other manner could the truth be?). but i believe that what one must do is find a truth that is “truth for me,” so to speak. for of what use would it be to discover a so-called objective truth to the point of a workable and infallible system of thought through which to formulate the meaning of everything, if it demanded no deeper meaning for my life? i have then only constructed a world not to inherit and enjoy, but merely to display behind glass for ticketed visitors, as parents who in their poverty are forced to relinquish the care of their children to someone “better suited.”

to personify the truth a bit, i do not believe truth to be something that wishes to stand before us cold and naked, causing us great discomfort and distrust, uncaring whether we acknowledge or receive it. rather the truth must be something that comes alive in us, and births a new spirit of life; it is to this extent that a truth must be a “truth for me.” for though the truth must be objective, what could beings so conditioned as humans know of such a thing, and what would it profit for the truth to appear to us as such? how many there are who experience life’s different impressions the way the sea sketches figures in the sand and then promptly erases them without a trace! yet to find truth, so often we delve still further into the sand, thinking to stumble upon some unique keenness of mind or spirit of inspiration.

so from this, a brief hope:

may we not be as those who believe in their firm grip, only to discover our hands to be filled with a cloud that has passed with the currents of the air. may we be not as captains who throw anchor into a sea of boundless depths, but rather as those who, against all rationale, allow the sea to move our crafts, even from the inside out. may we not seek to capture the truth as wind in our sails which we use to steer our vessels, but rather may we simply hope for the wind to fill our sails, and adopt such a humble posture of preparation. may we not endeavor to build the great ship, but rather the appropriate one. better still, may we not yearn to build a new ship at all, but rather to learn what our current craft is composed of; what it is best suited for; what best moves it. then finally we may sail.

may we sail.

I’m a bit groggy this morning. Last night my three year old daughter smacked her forehead against the coffee table and we had to take a trip to the emergency room. Seven stitches and five hours later we finally got home around one thirty in the morning and then didn’t get asleep until four or four thirty. I’m amazed at how well she handled everything. She was a real trooper. After the initial shock of all the blood– and boy do heads ever bleed! –she was rather nonchalant about the whole thing, making offhand remarks like “I bumped my head a little! I hit my head on table. Blood was everywhere! Sometimes that happens!” in an amused voice and, while calmly playing before leaving for the ER, “I don’t need to see a doctor and we don’t have any bandaids”. We danced in the hospital room and she charmed all the nurses and doctors. After everything was over she actually didn’t want to leave as she was having so much fun. That’s my girl! What a ham and little attention addict. At any rate, hopefully I’ll make some sense in this post.

Responding to a couple of my posts from earlier this week on translation, Nate over at Un-canny Ontology writes:

What is translation? And why do some things get translated and others do not?

Translation is more than a simple replication. Translation always involves a certain degree of interpretation in which what is inputted is always changed or transformed – from photons of light to complex sugars. Objects translate each other, they change each other without encountering each other directly, which means that objects first and foremost recognize each other.

I am pretty uncomfortable with Nate’s talk of objects “knowing” each other and “recognizing” each other as I think this implies a degree of intentionality (in the phenomenological sense) that only belongs to a subset of objects (humans, many animals, certain computer systems perhaps, social systems), not all objects. In my view, it’s necessary to distinguish between reflexive objects capable of registering their own states and relations to other entities like social systems or cognitive systems, and non-reflexive objects that do not have this characteristic. In other words, where non-reflexive objects are in question it’s important to emphasize that intentionality is not required for translation to take place and be operative in relations between objects.

read on!

Nonetheless, when this qualification is made, I do think Nate is asking a good question. I’m of two minds about this question. On the one hand, my initial thought is that it is not for philosophy to answer how translation takes place in any specific relation between objects. Initially this response might look like a dodge; however, it is premised on a distinction between the sort of thing philosophy does and the sort of thing other disciplines do.

Since I am on a Bhaskar kick lately, this point can be illustrated by analogy to Bhaskar’s ontology. Bhaskar asks the transcendental question “what must the world be like in order for our sciences to be possible?” Among his answers is the thesis that things must be structured and differentiated, they must be capable of acting without us knowing them or being aware of them (his generative mechanisms), they must be capable of acting without producing effects in all cases, they must have powers or capabilities, it must be possible to form more or less closed systems (for experiment to be possible and significant), and in open systems these generative mechanisms must be capable of acting without producing the sorts of effects we encounter when triggering a generative mechanism in the closed system of an experimental setting.

Bhaskar’s thesis is that the world must be this way for our science to be possible and for our practice of experimentation to be intelligible; however, his ontological claims about what the world must be like do not tell us what generative mechanisms actually exist, how they are structured, what powers or capabilities they have, and so on. What generative mechanisms exist is a task for direct inquiry in various disciplines, not something that philosophy can answer a priori. The case is similar with respect to translation. Philosophy can tell us that objects must translate one another when they interact and therefore draw our attention to the differences produced in interaction, but it has nothing of its own to say about what translation machines or mechanisms actually exist and how they are structured. This is the job of inquiry in other disciplines. Thus, for example, it falls to the biologist to investigate how leaves translate light into energy. Likewise, it falls to folks like Nate in the field of rhetoric to investigate how audiences are selectively open to certain speech-performances and how these performances on the part of a rhetor are translated by audiences into something else.

Nonetheless, and this is my second point, we can make some very general ontological claims about what objects must be like for translation to be possible. Hopefully these theses somewhat address Nate’s question. My tendency at present is to think of translation in terms of information theory. This should come as no surprise as the ontic principle is, in many respects, adapted from Bateson’s definition of information as “the difference that makes a difference.” So how should this be understood?

First, the concept of information is to be distinguished from that of noise. Information, as a difference that makes a difference, is something that stands out in contrast to noise. If, for example, a student in an introductory philosophy course has great difficulty reading Derrida’s essay “Differance”, this is not because the text is difficult or poorly written, but because the student, having just come to philosophy for the first time, lacks the background in philosophy that would allow the student to encounter the elements of the text as information. Everything in the essay seems significant and as a result it all becomes noise insofar as nothing can be distinguished in the essay by the student. Information can thus be thought in Gestalt terms as a relation between what leaps into the foreground (information) and what passes into the background (noise).

It’s important to note that for self-reflexive intentional objects like students, this relationship between foreground is a dynamic, not fixed, relation. Not only can these systems evolve such that elements that before were mere noise can take on the status of information, but also relations between foreground and background can shift back and forth, such that something that a moment ago belonged to the domain of noise now comes to the fore as information or a difference that makes a difference.

Second, and of great importance, it should be noted that information and noise are not ontological properties of the world, but are object-specific properties. There is no information “out there” in and of itself. Rather, objects “constitute” information for themselves. The idea that information exists “out there” and not simply for an object constitutes a sort of transcendental illusion within ontology that I’ll have to write about in the future. To put this point differently, information is only information for an object. Likewise, noise is only noise for an object. It is not the world that is disordered or chaotic, but rather the world for an object that is disordered or chaotic. Here I am drawing on the manner in which information is thought by systems theory and autopoietic theory.

Third, objects are only selectively open to other objects in the world. Take the example of sitting at a coffee shop with friends. All sorts of things recede into the background in this situation: the actions of the staff, the conversations of other people, the traffic that could be discerned through the window, the talking head babbling away on the television, the music playing in the background, etc. In this scenario we only share selective relations to the world about us. The rest largely disappears until another shift takes place in relations between foreground and background.

It now becomes possible to say a few very general things about the ontology of translation and what must be the case in order for translation to be possible. First, there must be an ontological distinction between stimuli and information. The term “stimulus” is not the happiest term as it still implies a reference to a receiving object. However, I would like to stipulate this term not as a reference to a receiving object, but rather treat it as a difference transmitted by another object. At any given time there are all sorts of stimuli flying about in the world that are not information for various objects. Thus, for example, at this very moment there are all sorts of radio signals pulsing through the air about me. These signals are real things that are out there. However, for me they scarcely exist and are not information as I have no way of receiving them. In order to receive them I need an additional black box– my nifty new iPhone or my computer –that can function as a mediator allowing me to relate to these stimuli.

Second, if there is a difference between information and stimuli, and if stimuli exist in all sorts of ways without being information, it follows that information is not something that is already out there, but rather is constituted by objects receiving these stimuli. This, I think, approaches Nate’s initial question. For information to be possible, certain things have to be true of objects. On the one hand, it is necessary that objects (generative mechanisms) exist that emit stimuli. On the other hand, objects must have channels and an internal structure (endo-relational structure) that organizes these stimuli into differences that make a difference. Channels are modes of openness to other objects in the world, while endo-relational structure, in part, is the mechanism by which stimuli are transformed into differences that make a difference.

Thus, for example, no matter how much I talk to a rock, I cannot compel that rock to get out of my way. While the sound-waves of my voice might indeed affect the rock in a variety of ways because the rock has channels for receiving differences in this sort of causal way, the rock cannot encounter those sound-waves as speech because it does not possess channels or an endo-relational structure for constituting sound-waves (stimuli) as speech (information) in the manner of other reflexive objects. Likewise, last night I could not heal my daughter’s wound through speech; however, when I function as a psychoanalyst for someone else, it is possible to cure a psychoanalytic symptom through the intervention of speech. The channels and endo-relational structure that constitute openness to different forms of difference are something that must be surveyed in every instance and that cannot be determined by philosophy a priori.

This point can be further illustrated with respect to the periodic table of elements. The periodic table is not simply a summary of what we’ve discovered about the endo-relational structure of various elements, but also, for those who know how to read us, tells the chemist, biologist, and physicist all sorts of things about channels or different possibilities of relation that can take place between elements. On the one hand, each element is a generative mechanism capable of producing a variety of actualities. On the other hand, elements are only capable of selectively relating to one another according to very precise laws and these relations generate new properties or actualizations when they take place.

A couple of further points. Over at the Pinnochio Theory, Shaviro riffs on Nate’s post and my own, writing:

I think that the source of this problem, in Nathan’s account, is the following. He says that ” objects first and foremost recognize each other,” precisely because — here paraphrasing Levi, and also to an extent Graham Harman — “objects translate each other, they change each other without encountering each other directly.” But as I’ve said before, my biggest disagreement with both Levi and Graham is that, for me, objects do encounter each other directly.

There’s a lot more in Steven’s post, but I wanted to zero in on this particular remark as I think it conflates my position with Harman’s. For Harman objects are absolutely independent or withdrawn from one another such that you get the question of how they can enter into relations with one another. Within my proposed ontology, objects do touch one another. What that don’t do is represent one another in the manner of a mirror representing an object. Rather, every relation between objects is a translation and every translation involves transformation. In certain respects, this places me closer to Latour and Whitehead in the sense that I do not place objects behind absolute “firewalls” as Graham does. Where I differ from Latour and Whitehead, is in holding that objects have a being that is not reducible to their relations to other objects (their endo-relational structure), and that the relations objects do entertain to other objects are selective. Where Whitehead and Latour hold that each actual occasion holds a definite relation to every other actual occasion in the entire universe, I hold that 1) objects only share relations to other particular objects and are unrelated to a number of other objects in the universe, and 2) that even if all other objects in the universe were to cease existing a particular object could continue to exist (something that is impossible in Whitehead’s and Latour’s universe). In part I believe this must be the case as inquiry would become impossible were objects to be related to all other objects as it would no longer be possible to form more or less closed systems within which inquiry takes place. Insofar as inquiry clearly does take place it follows that this thesis cannot be true.

My gloss on the “occasional” in Latour is thus somewhat different than Harman’s. Discussing Latour’s reference to occasions in Prince of Networks, Harman writes, “A thing is not separate from its relations [for Latour], and in fact ‘each element is to be defined by its associations and is an event created at the occasion of each of those associations’ (Pandora’s Hope, 165, emphasis added by Harman)” (80). Where Harman reads this as a reference to the philosophical doctrine of occasionalism, I read the reference to occasions in temporal terms as in the case of referring to things like “on this great occasion…” To speak of objects entering into relations with one another in occasions is thus to refer to the selective and limited nature of those relations, along with the fact that objects contingently encounter one another or encounter one another in an aleatory fashion. I would differ from Latour here in hold that it is not the occasion or the relations that make the object the object. The occasions can modify the manner in which the object actualizes itself, but this is quite different from suggesting that the object is its relations.

Despite these ontological differences, Harman and I do arrive at similar conclusions. If I am comfortable talking about objects “withdrawing” from one another then this is because translations that take place within an object always differ from the other object that instigates the translation or provides the input for the process of translation. The other day I came across this comment over at Another Heidegger Blog:

Why do you not address the most obvious problem of why vicar’s (representations) are central to the mechanism of causation between two inanimate objects?

Do you read as coherent that when a baseball hurls into a windshield it must FIRST send a representation of itself INTO the glass, and then it must brush this “vicar” into a state of phenomenenal breakdown, a breakdown which THEN results in the baseball cracking the glass? Does this make any sense to you? Aside from projecting a human caricature of experience and cognition, in what way does this actually seem to reveal how objects interact without human beings?

This is an example of what I would call an uncharitable interpretation of Harman’s position. It is important that we understand just what I have in mind by the “principle of charity”. The principle of charity does not consist in passively endorsing another position or refraining from criticism. Rather, the principle of charity is a necessary condition for philosophical discourse, requiring that we present the positions of other thinkers in the most reasonable and plausible light before proceeding to criticism of that position. Working on the premise that our interlocutor is a reasonable and intelligent person that genuinely wants to get at the truth, explain features of the world, and understand things– a premise that should be granted at the beginning of dialogue and revoked only when proven otherwise –we should ask ourselves, with respect to our interpretations of the positions of others, “is this a position that a reasonable person would endorse or advocate?” If our impression of another’s position is that it is batshit crazy insane, then it is likely we have misinterpreted the other person’s position, not that the author is making the absurd claim. Note, that the claim that a position is reasonable or a position that a rational agent could hold is not equivalent to the claim that the position is true. Of course, it comes as no surprise that this person’s reading of Harman would be so uncharitable, given that he confesses he’s only read of Harman’s theory of causality as developed in his early work presented at the speculative realism conference, and that he has not actually read Tool Being, Guerilla Metaphysics, or Prince of Networks.

The characterization of Harman’s position above is clearly absurd. Harman’s thesis is not that objects must first encounter other objects under the form of a “sensuous vicar” and then relate to them. Nor is it an anthropomorphization of relations between objects. Rather, Harman’s thesis is that objects only relate to one another selectively with respect to particular qualities, never exhaustively in terms of all the qualities that an object might possess or be capable of. Austin over at Complete Lies drives this point home nicely in his recent post on Harman’s theory of vicarious causation:

In Aristotle’s Categories he distinguishes between subjects and predicates. The Greek word for “subject” is hypokeimenon (ὑποκείμενον) meaning “underlying thing.” Essentially, it is that which is predicated but remains beneath the layers of predicates. We can also understand this through substance and accidents. The substance of the thing is that which the accidents adhere to without itself becoming anything fundamentally new. My car is still a car even if I have it painted a new colour for instance. The predicate “silver” does not alter the substance “car” in any substantial way. So there are substances and there are accidents. Great. The chief occasionalist insight to be made here is through the chain of causality. The position is one that says substances don’t touch each other. Let’s use an example. When I have a relationship with a person, there is more to that person than our interactions. Let us assume it is a romantic relationship between lover and beloved. Does this relation exhaust the other’s being? Is it not the case that there is far more to the person than their relation to me? While we would likely share much of our lives with each other, there remains a fundamental gap between the two of us. Don’t we interact on the level of accidents and not substance? When I talk to or touch my girlfriend, there is always more to her than these interactions. This is also the case for my interactions with non-human objects, for instance the relationship I have to the laptop I am writing this on. There are infinite possibilities for relations within a thing, it can interact with practically anything else in the universe in any number of ways, none of which could exhaust its possibilities. This is the point of the fire and cotton example. Cotton can do a lot more than burn, and the fire only engages the cotton on that level and not on the part of the cotton (to use improper language) that could become denim or a Q-Tip. While the fire destroys the cotton, this does not mean it has exhausted those potentialities, it has simply destroyed them.

The point is that there is always more possibilities open to any object than those actualized in any particular relation the object enters into. In many respects, then, Harman’s claim can be understood in counterfactual terms. One of his key points regarding the inexhaustibility of objects pertains to the inexhaustibility of their possible relations. If objects are always in excess of or more than their relations, if they only relate to one another under particular aspects or in terms of “sensuous vicars”, then this is because there is always an excess of other relations they could enter into under different aspects. I hope to expand on this a bit in the near future in terms of the sorts of transcendental illusions generated through the process of translation, giving transcendental illusion not an epistemological grounding restricted to thought or the human-world gap, but an ontological grounding.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what makes something unique. Since Aristotle we have described something as unique if all its properties are special to it, but I don’t like property talk because I tend to think that it biases our thinking towards linguistic problems and solutions. I don’t have the property of weighing mumble kilograms, I weigh mumble kilograms. So wondering what “having the property of” denotes is, I think, just a mistake of language.

When we try to set up our Kinds, natural or otherwise, what is it that we do? It seems to me that we use replaceability (or interchangeability from within the class, population or sample set) as the criterion for being “the same” with respect to some class. If you can replace any item of the class with any other item of the class, and make no difference (physical, logical, semantic, etc.) then both items are “the same”. A class is constituted by interchangeable items.

But there are degrees of interchangeability and replaceability. Consider an electron. Any electron in the universe can be replaced by any other electron in the universe without changing the charge and mass, etc. of the atoms and molecular bonds they constitute. Time and location do not matter because the properties, at the physical level, are constant.

Gold atoms are generally replaceable in the same way – atomic number 79 – but gold also has 18 radioisotopes of varying stability. So the class is interchangeable in the sense that the atomic number is invariant, but the other constituents of the atoms do vary, which means that they are not exchangeable without physical difference. So the class “gold” is a hybrid – partly replaceable and partly not. One might think, then, that “gold” is not a class, but that depends on what you assay. If you assay the number of protons, then it is a class. If you assay other things, like charge, mass, half-life and spin, then it is no longer a class. Science is the process of disentangling things you can group this way.

Now consider a biological species. All members of Escheria coli or Felis tigris are interchangeable in some rough and ready ways. To a certain degree they all play the “same” ecological role (tigers are all predators, so far as we know), and they are all reproductively “the same” (tigers mate with tigers, except when they mate with lions). They even have “the same” morphology (that is, their homology states are shared). But we know that every individual in a biological species is unique. They are not wholly replaceable.

Classes in the special sciences are less precisely defined by interchangeability. The items of their populations are distributed over different traits. If you replace one lion with another, it may do better or worse than its predecessor at defending territory, mating and such hunting as male lions do. Each lion is unique. It’s not unique like a snowflake, since the things that snowflakes do are largely unaffected by their different shapes*. It’s unique like an organism.

Classification in special sciences thus is of a different kind to classification in the physical (general) sciences. Location in space and time matters. Each item is only approximately “the same” as other items in the classes of special sciences, because they are both historical and particularistic.

This ties in nicely, I think, with Nancy Cartwright’s claim of the world being “dappled” and laws only applying roughly. We construct our classes as we progress in science, and each time we revise them, we do so on the basis of better information, more details used and occasionally the reconciliation of domains. A lot of the trouble people have with Millian Natural Kinds seems to me to be the identification of special kinds like species with general, or universal, kinds like subatomic particles or physical forces.

* Although, if the principle is that physical differences make a difference, this cannot be entirely true.

quantum?

There’s nothing unusual here. Except, perhaps, and only perhaps, my perception.

 

epistemology:
ἐπιστήμη – episteme-, “knowledge, science” + λόγος “logos” – “theory of knowledge,” 1856; branch of philosophy that investigates the limits of human knowledge

ontology:
ὄν, genitive ὄντος: of being (neuter participle of εἶναι: to be) and -λογία, “metaphysical science or study of being,” 692; branch of metaphysics that studies the nature of existence.

If you want to think about the origins of the universe you can find enough resources to keep busy for the rest of a natural lifetime. Stephen Hawkings (Brief History of Time); Richard Dawkins (The Greatest Show on Earth: The Evidence for Evolution and [absurdly] Everything You Know About God Is Wrong: The Disinformation Guide to Religion);  “The Universe,” and “How the Earth Was Made” on the Discovery Channel; the journal Astrobiology (“Why is the definition of life so elusive? epistemological considerations,” by Serhiy A. Tsokolov; “Signatures of a shadow biosphere,” by Paul C. W. Davies et al; and hundreds more); the evangelical Christian geneticist Francis Collins (The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief).

I read stuff—too much—what I  comprehend I can’t assimilate with what I “know.”

One can learn some sort of cosmic plan is behind the universe and the development of “life.” Or one can learn the universe—including homo sapiens—is a cosmic accident. One can discover the theory of evolution is incontrovertible. Or one can read Texas newspapers and find out why it’s not so. 

I’ve already written about all of this stuff here, and about my life-long, somewhat erratic and contradictory thinking about epistemology, ontology, evolution, and why I could never in a thousand years get the hang of using an I-Phone. But this stuff has been on my mind again in the past few days. 

This morning  I realized I didn’t have studs my ear, unusual because I’ve had two in that ear virtually constantly since 1980 when I entered a relationship in which a public sign was required for people to understand its dynamics. I took them out last Friday to have an MRI on my poor brain. My neurologist wants to see it for himself rather than relying on 15-year-old scans He keeps mentioning surgery on the TLE spots. I tell him he can have the whole brain to play with when I die. That doesn’t end the discussion. I took the diamond and the sapphire out of my earlobe four days ago and forgot to put them back. I decided to find different sparkles to wear. Yes, I am too old for such nonsense. It’s probably “arrested development” from being in love with Yul Brynner in The King and I when I was eleven.

I went looking for other ear studs. I live 24/7 in what most people would consider an intolerable mess. Stuff is here, there, and everywhere. I knew the box of sparkles (all genuine, some ridiculously expensive) was in the top drawer of my antique high-boy (burled walnut inlays on light wood, original brass pulls circa 1879). In the drawer were three socks I can’t find mates for, two empty underwear boxes, two hand towels, the plastic bag my C-Pap mask came in, other pieces of clothing, family pictures in frames, Mom’s old red-leather New Testament, two lacquered boxes with lots of interesting stuff in them, a box with a dozen or so rings I’d wear if I could stand to have anything on my hands, two original Colt Studios photographs given to me by a friend twenty years ago (worth something in some gay second-hand store), and two watches and a cameo pendant that belonged to my late ex-wife’s grandmother. The box with the diamonds, garnet, and the other sapphire was not in the drawer.

The stuff of my life.

My life? Exactly what is my life? That is not an idle question or an epistemological dilemma. Friends tell me to stop fretting: it is not a matter of angst that we may be living in parallel universes or that quantum mechanics has opened the possibility that we are flying off in all directions at all times and the fact is that nothing is real or solid, and we just think it is. The epistemology of ontology. The knowledge of being. I have no (certain) knowledge of my being.

When I was a kid having daily seizures (I wish TLE seizures were visible—I might have had care before I was 38 years old), I began to assume, since nothing “felt” real much of the time, that nothing IS real. Heisenberg’s principle in my brain? I knew the more I thought about what was whirling in my mind, the less certain I could be of my position in time and space. I knew the less I thought about the dissociation in my brain, the more certain I was of my place in time and space.

An then one day I discovered that I will die. That set off a chain reaction of trying to figure out whether or not I was really alive or ever had been, and if I were alive or ever had been, what that meant for the rest of my existence and why it had to end, but at the same time how bizarre were all of those theories and beliefs about eternal life that filled the hymns I played (and loved) as a child.

There’s a land that is fairer than day,
And by faith we can see it afar;
For the Father waits over the way,
To prepare us a dwelling place there.
In the sweet by and by, We shall meet on that beautiful shore:
In the sweet by and by, We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

The beautiful shore?

So now I am old; I must, by law, sign up for Medicare within six weeks. Got it? 65 approaches. My recurrent theme, the dreadful awareness that it’s all going to be over almost immediately for me. It could happen today.

And then what. Whom will I meet on the beautiful shore? No one. Because the beautiful shore isn’t. Or is it? And if the electrons whirling around at a speed that only a quantum physicist can think about that make up what is commonly held by other human beings to be my body suddenly stop whirling in exactly the same way they are right now, and the electrons that make up my breath stop moving in and out, and that causes the sub-atomic particles of the electrical synapses that make up my awareness to stop doing whatever it is they are doing right now (or do I—or some creature I can’t even comprehend—imagine they are doing what they are doing), and my “awareness” of myself ceases, then what happens to all of these sub-atomic particles whirling dizzyingly around the matrix that I experience as ME? Don’t they keep whirling dizzily around without me? And do I go on to the beautiful shore, or does the illusion that is “me” simply cease to exist and no one and no thing and no subatomic particle is any the wiser. Except I am not even aware that I am not aware any more.

And my brother and sister are left to sort out all that stuff in my high boy bureau and get rid of all this stuff floating around in my apartment and my nieces get my diamonds and then the universe (if there is a universe) waits for their subatomic particles to stop whirling so it can have back all of its stuff. People and diamonds.

One common criticism of Deleuze and DeLanda is that their ontolog(ies) suffer from what might be called “virtualism”. It’s important that some might not consider this a failing and that there is, I believe, a way of interpreting these thinkers so that this problem largely disappears. Roughly, virtualism would consist in treating the virtual as the domain of the “really real” and reducing the actual to mere “epiphenomena” that have but an epiphenomenal “being”. In the language of Roy Bhaskar’s ontology, the virtual can roughly be equated with the domain of “generative mechanisms”, while the actual would consist of events take place as a result of these generative mechanisms. Virtualism would thus treat these generative mechanisms as what are properly real, while the actual events engendered by these generative mechanisms would have a subordinate and lesser status.

The problem with this sort of virtualism is that it fails to observe a particular property of groups known as “closure” as described by mathematical group theory. Roughly, closure is the property of a group such that for a group G, all operations carried out on elements of G– say a, b –are also in G. Thus, for example, if group B consists of the numbers 1 and 2, the conjunction of 1 and 2– 3 –is also a member of the group. This point can be illustrated for material systems with respect to fire. A flame requires all sorts of generative mechanisms involving chemical and atomic reactions that are conditions of fire at the level of the “virtual” with respect to the flame as an actuality or event. However, it does not follow from this that the flame is itself an epiphenomenon or lacking in reality. The flame has all sorts of powers, capacities, are “able-to’s” that cannot be found at the level of the generative mechanisms themselves. Put otherwise, a flame is itself a generative mechanism with respect to other relations.

read on!

It seems to be that the demotion of the actual produced out of the virtual or generative mechanisms is a variant of Bhaskar’s epistemic fallacy. Here issues of epistemology are being conflated with issues of ontology in a slippage that goes unnoticed. In A Realist Theory of Knowledge Bhaskar argues that reality is itself stratified. By this he means that phenomena at one level are themselves based on a lower level of generative mechanisms. However, the phenomena at each level are themselves autonomous domains with their own unique structural properties that, while dependent on the lower level and impossible without the lower level, cannot be deduced from the lower level. Organic life is dependent on chemistry and impossible without chemistry, but it has its own internal generative mechanisms or structures that diverge from those of chemistry and are irreducible to chemistry.

Part of inquiry consists in 1) the discovery of these structures, but also 2) discovering these deeper structures on which these higher order structures are based. Virtualism, however, conflates the aims of inquiry with the nature of being. Put otherwise, it confuses its search for deeper level structures and generative mechanisms with the “epiphenomenalization” of the structure to be accounted for at a higher level. However, the fact that something is dependent on a deeper level structure or set of generative mechanisms does not undermine the emergent reality and generative mechanisms based on these deeper level generative mechanisms. In this connection, the “virtual” should not be understood as a distinct ontological domain apart from the actual, but as a relative term with respect to a domain of the actual. What functions as a “virtuality” for one domain of actuality can, is, in turn, an actuality for another domain of virtuality or generative mechanisms.

Doctrine of the Christian Life... oh so good

1.  Doctrine of God/Knowledge of God/Christian Life (Lordship Trilogy) by John Frame [y, l, e, p, s]

Frame is comprehensive in laying out the foundation for how we know God and how we live in light of the Scriptures.

2.  Systematic Theology by Wayne Grudem [y, l, e, p, s]

A highly readable systematic theology.

3.  Reformed Dogmatics vols. 1-4 by Herman Bavinck [p, s]

A solid Dutch Reformed work, translated well in English.  It is a pretty technical read but worth the effort.

4.  Institutes of Christian Religion (2 vol.) by John Calvin  [e, p, s]

Calvin’s classic, need I say more?

5.  Systematic Theology by Louis Berkhof  [e, p, s]

Fairly readable and thorough systematic.

6.  Salvation Belongs to the Lord by John Frame  [y, l, e, p, s]

This is Frame’s mini-systematic, a good first systematic.

7.  Institutes of Elenctic Theology by Francis Turretin [p, s]

Want to read the text that John Calvin’s seminary used?  Charles Hodge/Old Princeton also used this text.

8.  The Christian’s Reasonable Service (4 Vol) by Wilhelmus A Brakel  [l, e, p, s]

Thanks to Reformation Heritage Books you can now actually find these books in the same place.  He was a Dutch Pastor who wrote this 4 volume systematic theology for the people in his church.

9.  A New Systematic Theology Of The Christian Faith by Robert Reymond [e, p, s]

Reymond has written a sound Presbyterian systematic theology.

10. Christian Beliefs by Wayne and Elliot Grudem [c, y, l, e, p, s]

This book is a heavily condensed version of #2 on this list.  I included Christian Beliefs because the text is understandable to all people of all ages.  I think it is important to have at least one book that covers all ages.

Honorable Mention:  Christian Theology by Millard Erickson [y, l, e, p, s]

(c=children; y=young adult; l=lay leader; e=elder; p=pastor; s=scholar)

The post below can be enlarged by scrolling to the bottom of the post and clicking on the “full page” and “zoom” buttons.

Although it was only in the first half of the twentieth century that the term personalism became known as a designation of philosophical schools and systems, personalist thought had developed throughout the nineteenth century as a reaction to perceived depersonalizing elements in Enlightenment rationalism, pantheism, Hegelian absolute idealism, individualism as well as collectivism in politics, and materialist, psychological, and evolutionary determinism.

In its various strains, personalism always underscores the centrality of the person as the primary locus of investigation for philosophical, theological, and humanistic studies. It is an approach or system of thought which regards or tends to regard the person as the ultimate explanatory, epistemological, ontological, and axiological principle of all reality, although these areas of thought are not stressed equally by all personalists and there is tension between idealist, phenomenological, existentialist, and Thomist versions of personalism.

[ . . . ]

Personalists hold personhood (or “personality”) to be the fundamental notion, as that which gives meaning to all of reality and constitutes its supreme value. Personhood carries with it an inviolable dignity that merits unconditional respect. Personalism has for the most part not been primarily a theoretical philosophy of the person. Although it does defend a unique theoretical understanding of the person, this understanding is in itself such as to support the prioritization of moral philosophy, while at the same time the moral experience of the person is such as to decisively determine the theoretical understanding. . . . Stressing the moral nature of the person, or the person as the subject and object of free activity, personalism tends to focus on practical, moral action and ethical questions. (Continue)

(Via Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)

Renee Descartes is often credited with skepticism in its modern form. The Cartesian “doubt everything” skepticism has spawned four hundred years of philosophical work in metaphysics and epistemology. The philosophical skeptic always begins with doubt, whereas generalized and widespread metaphysical doubt is oft considered a view of the past, skepticism continues to prompt strong philosophical work in current epistemology. Writing in the 1940’s Wittgenstein declared the death of philosophy in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. Metaphysics was already held in precarious regard prior to the Tractatus but received a fatal blow after the book’s publication. Wittgenstein’s proclamation that “Most propositions that have been written about philosophical matters are not false but senseless” destroyed many metaphysicians’ careers. However, Wittgenstein seems to have changed his mind between the publication of the Tractatus (1922) and his work published posthumously (he died in 1951). In On Certainty, Wittgenstein engages skepticism with ferocity, and the pithy yet unfinished work shows Wittgensteintrying to make sense of doubt, belief, and knowledge. It is generally accepted that Wittgenstein changed his views markedly during his life; but how much is still being debated. The corollaries between the Tractatus and his later work, specifically On Certainty and the Philosophical Investigations, are striking. “To all of them the logical structure is common” but the ultimate philosophical implications of the early work are much more final in scope. The maturation process and his philosophical activities changed Wittgenstein. He held fast to the idea that philosophy needed to be shown through processes and the final product was not a theory but the changes in thought while doing philosophy.
Wittgenstein’s theory of knowledge is revised significantly in On Certainty from the theories set forth in the Tractatus. I will argue that as Wittgenstein’s philosophy changed, his epistemology became much stronger as it became increasingly indeterminate. Contingent knowledge becomes the onus in Wittgenstein’s revised epistemology. He hints at and skirts the issue in On Certainty, but evidence from the Philosophical Investigations supports this claim of revision. The Tractatus is used as a reference point; exploring how much Wittgenstein changed his philosophy and the areas that were revised during his life after the publishing of the Tractatus is as important as the differences between the texts. Wittgenstein claimed, “Philosophy is not a theory but an activity” , if we examine the results of the philosophical activity, which are recorded in his posthumous work, we are then able to extrapolate meaning. Wittgenstein’s “activity” was the time after the Tractatus was written until his death in 1951.
On Certainty begins as a refutation of G. E. Moore’s paper: “Proof of the External World”. Moore claimed that because he has one hand and another hand that there was indeed an external world. Wittgenstein finds this unacceptable. Its unacceptability, however, is not based on idealism, he thinks that knowledge and belief are much more complicated than merely stating “This is my hand”. Wittgenstein’s argument begins with the subliminal ambiguities and complexities with the proposition “I know …”. Within the language game, “knowing” manifests itself in a multitude of situations, the proposition “I know the answer to the question” means something entirely different from “I know that my name is Gordon Speagle”. In the former, I might not know the answer to the question. If I am asked what the capital of Illinois is and I answer “Vandalia”, I was wrong in saying that “I knew” the answer. It seems that the “not knowing” of the first proposition is a mistaken belief, I did not have the knowledge, I only believed that I did. Wittgenstein asks if it is even possible to be wrong, (if I am of sound mind) about my name. No, it is not possible nor does it make any sense to ask if I am wrong. If someone asks me if I am “sure that my name is Gordon Speagle”, of course I am sure, the certainty is founded on something unavailable to the proposition “I know that the capital of Illinois is Vandalia”. I might have thought “I knew” the capital of Illinois, but it is absolutely senseless for me to entertain the thought “I think my name is Gordon Speagle”.
The language game is the structure that all doubts and knowledge take place within. Only within the language game are we able to have knowledge and the capacity to doubt. Knowledge presupposes the ability and the function of doubting. “If you tried to doubt everything you would not get so far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty.” We can only doubt once we have knowledge, this is a major theme in On Certainty. What is the knowledge that is presupposed and consequently enabling the possibility to doubt? Doubt is subservient to knowledge. Universal doubt is epistemically incomprehnsible. It is not illogical to doubt everything, but applying it without a presupposition of foundational knowledge is incoherent. Wittgenstein asks “Can one say: where there is no doubt there is no knowledge?” . What are the implications if one does accept the proposition? The proposition changes the subservience of doubt into an equal relationship with knowledge. The knowledge/doubt relationship changes from conditional to bi-conditional. The implications hinge on the definition of knowledge and belief. It is impossible to accept the proposition. The proposition implies that knowledge is dependent on doubt as much as doubt is dependent on knowledge. We cannot doubt if we do not know.
Wittgenstein cannot reasonably determine why a proposition such as “My name is Gordon Speagle” is immune to doubt. It does not have the same indubitable properties that mathematical truths contain. “Property” is a vague term anyway. Can “2 +2 = 4” be said to consist of properties? But aside from the metaphysical questions about what it is to be a number, the mathematical proposition seems to be founded on knowledge that is much more certain than “My name is Gordon Speagle”, yet I will no more doubt my name than I will basic arithmetical propositions. Where is our certainty of knowledge acquired? Wittgenstein claims, “When a child learns language it learns at the same time what is to be investigated and what not” . This seems plausible, but it implies that certainty in knowledge is a wholly human construct, the language game is fraught with parameters that are explained when a child begins to participate. I cannot accept this unless there is a fissure in the definition of “certainty”; Wittgenstein seems to take issue with this as well. Is this problem to be resolved with Occham’s razor? Is the problem merely an inability of language to appropriately distinguish between types of certainty? It is extremely lazy to claim this dilemma is the result of vagueness in language. Austineans might proceed in that route, but I am unwilling to accept an Ordinary Language solution to the abstruseness intrinsic in certainty. We think and act with certainty; the “certainty” of my name is phenomenologically indistinguishable between my “certainty” that 2 + 2 = 4, yet the logic behind the mathematical proposition is infallible, my name is merely contingent, but the contingent certainty is no less valid to me than the logic underlying the mathematics.
The privative language argument in the Philosophical Investigations helps clarify what Wittgenstein means when he claims that fruitful investigations are taught. Wittgenstein argues for the impossibility of a private language; not the impossibility of having an internal dialogue or thoughts or cognitions in specific languages, but the inability to create and implement a language known only to the person who created it. He uses sensations, specifically pain, to clarify his stance. He uses a thought experiment in which no person in the world had any visible physical expression of pain; consequently there exists no specific word for pain. A certain man in this world decides to define the sensation he has (comparable to “pain” in our language game) with a sign each time he experiences the sensation. How would he use this sign? His definition is only ostensive; it serves absolutely no purpose. Wittgenstein uses a striking metaphor to explain his rejection of the idea of a privative language

Why can’t my right hand give my left hand money? […] When the left hand has taken the money from the right, etc. we shall ask: “Well, and what of it?” And the same could be asked if a person had given himself a private definition of a word; I mean if he has said the word to himself and at the same time has directed his attention to a sensation

How is the private language refutation applicable to the skepticism in On Certainty? The refutation reinforces his claim that children are taught what is appropriate for investigation and what is not. An investigation, philosophical or other, cannot exist outside the language game. Certain investigations are logically impossible; the privative language argument shows this. Without a communicative referential chain between the word and sensation, and also a common use of the word among speakers of the language, the word is meaningless. Without the language game there is no knowledge.
Wittgenstein is extremely ambivalent toward a concrete definition of certainty. The problematic area is between contingency and a prioricity. A priori is a loaded term, but seems appropriate when defining the nature of basic mathematics when compared to the contingency of my name being “Gordon Speagle”, Remarkably, though he spends the duration of On Certainty to showknowledge, certainty, and doubt, he gives an extremely concise definition of knowledge in Philosophical Investigations.: “And here “know” means the senselessness of uncertainty”.

The philosopher’s treatment of a question is like the treatment of an illness

Examining an illness in its nascent stages is typically the most productive strategy for treatment. Unfortunately, as Wittgenstein notes, this is an impossibility in many philosophical questions; we must examine and “treat” the symptoms. How are we certain of anything? Certainty is presupposed by doubt, which is presupposed by knowledge. How are we to have access to knowledge, is it purely empirical? If knowledge were purely empirical, the language game would not begin in the first place. Noam Chomsky’s “poverty of stimulus” argument claims that humans are born with a predisposition to learn language and that there are certain grammatical and syntactical constructions that are consistent in all spoken languages. Though Chomsky’s argument is not without criticism, there is a vast body of evidence that supports it. It seems that we are preprogrammed to learn language. In what seems to be a concession of some sort, Wittgenstein writes

I want to regard man here as an animal; as a primitive being to which one grants instinct but not ratiocination. As a primitive creature in a primitive state. Any logic good enough for a primitive means of communication needs no apology from us. Language did not emerge from some kind of ratiocination.

I think Wittgenstein lays the foundation for an explanation as to why some seemingly metaphysically unjustified knowledge is certain. Animal instincts guide and direct action among all living species. The nestling and nursing instinct of infants is not based on whether or not the mother is present, they are born with such adaptations in order to ensure their survival. The development of language was naturally selected. Wittgenstein seems to acknowledge this, but in the Tractatus he writes, “The Darwinian Theory has no more to do with philosophy than has any other hypothesis of natural sciences” . He seems to have changed his mind. The link between psychology and evolution was in its nascent stages in the era of the Tractatus’ publication, but was his change of philosophical direction a product of the advancement of the natural sciences or a result of his years of thought and investigation? Does it matter?
Instincts are contingent; yet they were and are necessary for our survival. Instincts in species vary, but I will deal specifically with them in human beings and their role in our evolution. Instincts could have been different; they depend on the environmental circumstances and other factors that foment natural selection. In fact, the variety of species in the world is evidence that instincts are contingent. All life evolved from single celled organisms, yet different factors inculcated different instincts and the result after about 7 billion years is the plethora of life on the planet earth. Contingent properties are what separate an amoeba from a killer whale. Instinctual properties are present because of a long evolutionary history; species survive because of different mutations that ensure their fitness. Initially these properties were purely physiological, but as different species evolved and brains developed, behaviors became instinctual. Bird migration, predator/prey relationships, and eventually complex social environments in the primates are all examples of behavioral instincts. Instincts presuppose the logic of language. There is an innate logic to grammar and syntax that is impossible to think about illogically, but this type of ratiocination only developed after our instincts were firmly entrenched into our psychological constitution. We were only able to ask such questions that are contrary to our instincts [e.g. “Did the earth exist before I was born?”], after we had developed a language game that allows us to think about such questions. If primitive creatures had had the ability to think propositions that were contrary to their instincts, they would not have survived. If a bear wonders whether or not her cubs exist while she is out foraging in order to feed them, she wastes energy and time that will inevitably negatively impact the overall fitness of her species. The contingent nature of animal instincts is what allows us to question them now that we have developed a complex language game that allows such doubt.
Are instincts properties? Yes, it is impossible to consider a living creature without them. But they are not necessary. All our instincts could have been different. “A property is internal if it is unthinkable that its object does not possess it” “Objects” in the Tractatus are recursively explained. Wittgenstein gives numerous explanations on the nature and properties of objects, their “function” (for lack of a better word, he insinuates that they have no function, but using the word “purpose” implies too much agency as well as role, and the word “meaning” is essentially a linguistic property in the language game). Is it possible to use an interpretation of the Tractatus to consider human beings as objects? I am taking such a liberty, Wittgenstein seeks to redefine the world through propositions and logic, and it is impossible to remove human beings and their consequent thoughts from this picture of things. It is not “unthinkable” to consider a species with instincts that are different from what they have. Unless he is arguing for determinism, which he is not, then instincts are certainly contingent and therefore can be thought of as different. It is also impossible to consider a higher function species without instincts, it seems that instincts, whatever the function, are internal properties of objects. One might reply “But if you can think of a different property for an object, you are merely thinking of a different object” or “Instincts are types, different manifestations of instincts are just tokens, you are being too specific with semantic categorizations”. The potential refutations lack any practical application. My identity holds even though I have different physical characteristics from when I was 5 years old. I am not a different object because I have grown. If the token/type distinction is used in refutation, it becomes an infinite regress and egress, a never ending splitting of hairs. I can think of a mole without its instinct to burrow, this mole is destined for extinction, but it is not impossible to imagine. Single celled organisms, the progenitors of all higher functioning species, exist without any cognitive abilities; they are essential living things without instincts. Wittgenstein himself opened the door for an evolutionary application of doubt; he acknowledges that instincts are the properties of primitive animals and therefore allows for the possibility of an evolutionary explanation for contingent certainty.

It is as if “I know” did not tolerate metaphysical emphasis

In the latter half of On Certainty, the distinction between “I know” and “I believe” is “shewn”. As typical of Wittgenstein, he does not explicitly state a definition of either, he uses aphorism to elucidate the concepts. “Knowing” has much more epistemologically force than “believing”. “Believing” is vulnerable to doubt, and a contradiction between one’s beliefs and the facts does not carry with it the same detrimental effects that finding out that one is wrong in their knowledge. I believe that the tree I am looking act is not plastic. If upon further investigation I discover that it is indeed plastic, I do not think that all trees are plastic, I merely consider it a mistake in perception. The distinction between knowledge and belief is the potentiality of doubt and the degree of such. Knowledge is susceptible to deep epistemological doubt, and consequently the realization that our knowledge was flawed or entirely wrong separates philosophical skepticism from generalized skepticism. Doubt concerning our beliefs is not uncommon. Beliefs are inferred from knowledge. Without any knowledge, there is no belief. I “know” that my name is Gordon Speagle, belief is implied by knowledge. If I know something it is superfluous to declare that I believe it as well. But knowledge does not guarantee the truth-value of a belief. A theory of knowledge is required before the possibility of even discussing belief. But an error in the inference from knowledge can lead to false beliefs. It is illogical to have false knowledge. False knowledge is not knowledge; it is an ill-founded belief. Knowledge does not allow the possibility of error. Belief is distinct from knowledge insofar as beliefs can be wrong, and if so they are not grounded on knowledge. Knowledge does not allow for the possibility of falsity.
Contingent certainty is why I can say with the same assurance that “My name is Gordon Speagle” as I can say “2 + 2 = 4”. But how is the certain proposition of “My name is Gordon Speagle” related to our atavistic instincts, which allow for contingent certainty? As primitive creatures lacking ratiocination, we acted purely instinctually. As language and the scaffolding of the language games developed, instinctual behaviors began to manifest themselves in the language games. Why is it that children do not question their textbooks when they are told that all matter is made up of very small particles that are predominantly empty? Instinctually, human children have evolved to believe adults. This adaptation ensures the survival of the species. The primitive human children who did not mimic their parents or do as they were instructed were eradicated from the gene pool; they would have died prior to reproductive age. Many philosophers eschew reference or evidentiary data from the Natural Sciences in philosophical writing, especially when discussing a theory of knowledge. We have reached a point in the study of human thought and evolutionary biology where it is impossible not to intermingle evolution and philosophy, and it is anthropocentric to continue to hold that epistemology is immune to evolutionary explanations.
A priori knowledge is a controversial topic in epistemology. Since Quine’s article “Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, many analytic philosophers have discounted the existence of any a priori knowledge, and it has been somewhat of a taboo term in philosophical circles. Quine argued in his essay, that since some knowledge thought to be a priori has since been revised, the notion of the a priori in general should be discarded. Quine uses the example of Euclidean geometry. In his axioms, Euclid laid the groundwork for classical geometry; all triangles add up to 180 degrees, two lines parallel to one another will never intersect. However, as our knowledge of the world increased, so did our understanding of pure and applied mathematics. Triangles on non-Euclidean planes, such as hyper curved surfaces, can add up to more than 180 degrees. Consequently, because Euclidean geometry was thought to be undeniably a priori for so long, the fact that it is not forces the entirety of what is considered a priori into a state of revision. Quine’s argument changed epistemology, and though I agree that the not all knowledge once thought to be a priori actually is, I am unconvinced that the notion should be abandoned all together. “An a priori true thought would be one whose possibility guaranteed its truth” I claim that “2 +2 =4” is just such a thought. Wittgenstein was a constructivist in his view of mathematics, but I don’t think that has any bearing on whether or not basic arithmetical operations are a priori. The certainty of such propositions, mathematical and logical is determined by their a prioricty.
Contingent certainty is based on adaptive instincts. Language developed long after our biological and psychological instincts were programmed into humans via Natural Selection. Our certainty that the world existed prior to our birth, my certainty that my name is Gordon Speagle, a person’s certainty that she had never been to Saturn, this type of certainty has the same force that an a priori logical proposition does, but the foundation of certainty in the contingent propositions is a byproduct of our biology. Wittgenstein grants that animal instincts play a major role in why we are certain of things, which for all intents and purposes should not be immune to doubt. Basic arithmetical propositions are immune to doubt. When I perform the calculation of 3 x 3, I do not doubt the certainty of the calculation when I determine that the answer is in fact 9. If one were to propose an answer different than 9, the doubt would not fall onto the validity of the calculus itself, but on the ability of the person to appropriately understand the calculus. Regardless of what a person thinks about the notion of a priori knowledge, the certainty corresponding to such knowledge is undeniably powerful. Contingent certainty, it seems, though logically perfectly available to incredulity, does not follow such logic. I am as certain of contingent knowledge as I am of a priori knowledge.