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 hit my head on table, blood was everywhere!” 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.

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.

Yesterday afternoon/evening I was hanging out with a few friends and we had a really long conversation (~5 hours) about philosophy, theology, literature, psychology… just about everything, really. It was one of the more productive such sessions I’ve had in a while, in terms of bringing together disparate ideas and synthesizing them, as well as coming up with new ways of looking at things; one of the easiest to explain results (though not at all the most important) was this idea of “mental types.”

The basic idea is, there are certain great writers (philosophers, writers of fiction, poets, etc) with whom each individual identifies more than other. So it is an interesting exercise for a person to identify them and then draw what conclusions may be drawn from that list about himself.

This approach has its dangers, of course. We don’t want to say person X is better than person Y for thinking in a certain way, but also, we don’t want to become relativists, saying all ways of looking at the world are equally valid. But, I think, if we realize this danger we have a good chance of avoiding it.

So what writers do I most identify with?

• J.R.R. Tolkien, obviously, though perhaps less so than a few years ago.
• Herman Melville, whose philosophy I disagree with in many ways but whose approach to the world feels very similar to mine.
• Gerard Manley Hopkins, whose poetry resonates with me in a way few others’ does.
• Thomas Aquinas, whose dry, Q/A approach to theology I recognize as flawed, but whose systematic nature is very similar to my own.
• Ludwig Wittgenstein, whom I have not read much of but who I feel like I understand more than really any other modern philosopher.

What do these people have in common? I have a few theories:

• They are interested in the self, and how the self relates to the world. Melville’s Moby-Dick is about, among many other things, how man attributes his own symbols and meaning to the world at large, and attempts to make himself omniscient and omnipotent; Hopkins’ most important poems all deal with both the self taking in all of creation and the self isolated, cut off from nature; and Aquinas and Wittgenstein, given their fields of study, are almost forced to address this question.
• They are interested in the world itself, and do not approach the world purely phenomenologically; they give the world an independent existence, which they examine as interesting in its own right. Tolkien created an entire mythology; Melville spends pages upon pages in Moby-Dick describing whale skeletons and the history of whaling; Hopkins tried to understand the inscape of things by examining them until he almost became them; and Aquinas followed Aristotle in categorizing all of nature.
• They have a  real sense of the divine in nature; as my German teacher told us  the Romantics said, “Natur ist sichtbare Geist, Geist ist unsichtbare Natur.” Tolkien has the concept of faerie, Melville has the Whale as a symbol for God; Hopkins’ entire worldview was based around the idea of sacramentality, and similarly for Aquinas; and Wittgenstein’s one statement about prayer, as I recall, involved a man walking in the woods pounding his walking stick.
• They are fascinated by language, and the power of words, rather than passively using language without examining its nature. Tolkien was a linguist; Hopkins made up his own words and cared immensely about how words could carry meaning; and Wittgenstein said that “there is an entire mythology stored within our language.”

There are also a few writers who, although clearly great, I do not really identify with. The two most important, I think, are

• Plato. Why? Because, I suppose, he is too much an idealist for me; he refuses to deal with the world. He skips straight to the isolated self.
• And Dostoevsky. Why? Because he also refuses to take on the world, dealing only with people and God; his books are about morality and inter-personal relationships, but never about the larger world.

Well then. What does this tell us? If there is any conclusion to be drawn from it, it is that I am a realist; I refuse to allow people to ignore the world, and I identify most with writers who have the same preoccupation with the world itself, rather than ideas.

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Just don’t want to be stagnant and just keep on studying, for now I tried still life painting from a photograph.Took me about 2 hours and 15 mins.

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.

I am still experimenting with the diagram below, but as I was teaching the concept of translation in Harman’s Prince of Networks today, I found it to be a useful heuristic device for thematizing just what is new or interesting in Latour’s concept of translation. Scroll past the Scribd diagram for a bit of commentary.

Clearly I have adapted this diagram from Hjelmsleves model of the sign. All of us are familiar with the relation between the signifier and the signified in Saussurean linguistics (to the left). In naive theories of linguistic translation (NTTs), the idea is that the concept remains the same (content), while it is only the signifier (expression) that changes. There are any number of reasons that this concept of translation is mistaken. I outlined some of these shortcomings in a previous post, so I won’t repeat them here. Latour’s concept of translation is broader than that of translation as it applies to linguistics or the transposition of texts from one language to another. The key point to take home from his analysis– and he doesn’t spell these implications out himself –is not so much the fact that a translated text always differs from the text that it translates, but rather that the process of translation produces something new, regardless of whether the relation is between texts in different languages, conscious minds to world, or relations between objects. What Latour wishes to do, I think, is generalize the concept of translation, such that translation is no longer restricted to the domain of language, nor requiring the involvement of living beings of some sort, but rather involves any relations among actants, human or nonhuman, living or material.

Hjelmslev’s key innovation in the domain of linguistics and semiotics was to recognize that both the plane of expression (loosely the signifier) and the plane of content (loosely the signified) have a form and substance that can enter into different relations with one another. Here I am partially basing my analysis of Deleuze and Guattari’s treatment of Hjelmslev’s model of expression and content as developed in “The Geology of Morals” in A Thousand Plateaus. This discussion would require a far more developed analysis than I’m capable of giving at the moment. For those who are interested, it would be worthwhile to refer to DeLanda’s early work on this essay (here and a number of Delanda’s articles, podcasts, and talks can be found here), as well as the first chapter of A User’s Guide to Capitalism and Schizophrenia by Brian Massumi. While I don’t entirely share the ontological commitments of either of these thinkers, their works nonetheless provide some pointers in the direction I’m thinking.

read on!

Hopefully I’ll have more time to elaborate on the diagram above in the near future (I’m in a rush now), but to understand what’s at stake it’s helpful to take a brief detour through Aristotle’s four causes. I apologize for the inelegance of my diagrams. Hopefully my diagram of Aristotle’s four causes in the upper right hand corner of this paragraph (click to expand) will convey some of the sense of his sorting. The important point to keep in mind here is that Aristotle’s term “cause” (aition) is closer to what we might mean by “reason” than how we think of “causes” today. Each of the four causes is a way of answering the question of what and why a thing is. The efficient cause is therefore that by which something is produced. The material cause is that out of which something is produced. The formal cause is the structure or pattern of a thing. And the final cause is the goal or that for the sake of which something is produced. It will be noted that bisecting the four causes is a dotted line distinguishing what is potential (δύναμις) from what is actual (ἐνέργεια). If the material cause and the efficient cause are associated with potentiality, then this is because matter– for example clay –has the potential to take on many different forms through the agency of an efficient cause. Likewise, if form and finality are associated with actuality, then this is because structure or pattern (the formal cause) indicate that matter has taken on a determinate form, whereas something is actual when it reaches its goal or telos. I take it that these distinctions are well known, so I will not elaborate on them in greater detail here with the proviso that much more can and should be said.

Closely associated with the distinction between matter and form and potentiality and actuality is the distinction between passivity and activity. In a crude version of the Aristotlean schema matter is the passive principle and form is the active principle. Returning to the Saussurean schema of the sign under NTT (the naive theory of translation), the signified as the constancy of meaning is the form or active principle that in-forms the signifier or passive material of expression. This reveals another dimension of form: it is what remains constant or identical in all of its instantiations in matter. The role of matter is simply to take on form, without contributing anything to form beyond the mere instantiation of that form in an existent. Referring to another inelegant diagram in the left above (click to enlarge), we can call this the ontology of “sovereignity”. The sovereign can be anything from a king to a general to a father to God to a boss to a teacher. The sovereign functions as the efficient cause containing the form as an ideational structure (like an architect’s or engineer’s blueprint) that is then imposed on a passive matter. The key point here is that causation is conceived in a unidirectional fashion, passing from the sovereign and his blueprints to the passive matters to be in-formed.

It is now possible to discern the innovation in the adapted Hjelmslevian schema. In the relation between Actant1 and Actant2 there are arrows between the two schemas. These arrows indicate one actant acting upon another actant. It will be noted that both actants possess both a form (structure, pattern) and a substance (a “materiality” broadly construed). As Harman often puts it “there is no such thing as un-form-atted matter. In addition to each actant possessing a form and a matter, each matter contains both a content and an expression. Here content– and I need to say much more about this –can be understood as the other actants that an actant has “appropriated” to constitute itself as an actant, while “expression” can be understood as the manner in which the actant has “actualized” itself qualitatively at a particular point in time. In Harman’s language, content can be understood as the “withdrawn” being of an actant, while expression could be understood as the “sensuous vicar” by which this withdrawn being is expressed for another being. Why, then, the additional dimension of matter for each of these actants? Because in addition to the internal composition of each actant or its content (what I call the endo-consistency of a being which is roughly analogous to Suarez’s “substantial forms”), the being of any actant is infinitely decomposable into other actants or entities. With great caution we can refer to this “matter” as “hyper-chaos”, so long as we note that this hyper-chaos is structured and that its apparent “disorder” is only disorder from the standpoint of the structured being of a particular actant (more on this another time).

The diagram at the beginning of this post requires a great deal more commentary than I can give it here. The shift from the Aristotlean model where we have– at least in thought –pure unformed matter that is completely passive or a sort of “hyletic flux”, thereby requiring in-forming-ing from another actant to my adapted version of Hjelmslev’s model where all actants have both a form (structure, pattern) and a substance (formed matter) initially appears slight. However, if we refer back to Aristotle’s model the significance of this slight shift becomes apparent. If each actant involved in an inter-act-ion has form, then it follows that the actant receiving the action of another actant cannot merely be a passive matter taking on the form of the other actant (the ontology of sovereignity). Rather, because actant2 itself has form, structure, or pattern, it too is an active principle. Yet as an active principle it too must contribute difference. Yet, if this is the case, then it follows that the form of actant3– the outcome produced by the interaction of actant1 and actant2 –cannot merely be the instantiation of the form of actant1, but must instead be a “synthesis” of the forms of actant1 and actant2 producing something new through this inter-act-ion. A task and a critique are here announced at the ontological level. The critique would be a critique of all those vestiges of the ontology of sovereignity where some set of actants is treated as consisting merely of passive materials that take on the form of some other actant. The positive task would be to trace these imbrications of forms in inter-act-ion, investigating the manner in which they produce new forms as a result of the “struggle” between these forms. It now becomes clearly why the alternative ontology is a horizontal, flat, immanent, or networked. No longer can one actant stand apart from the rest imposing a unidirectional, form-bestowing causality on all the others. Rather, the so-called “sovereign” now becomes an actor in a field of actors where causality is bi-directionality and where form is a result of inter-act-ions among actants rather than an identity preserved across chains of inter-act-ions like a signified behind a signified that is in-different to its instantiations in other matters.

From Toy Story to Bolt, animation has brought us an array of wonderful characters to cherish and enjoy. This roundup highlights a selection of simply awe inspiring 3D characters.

Stunning 3D Characters

Captain Jack Sparrow

Created using 3DSmax, Zbrush and Photoshop, the attention to detail and expression are fantastic.

Bobby, The Little Octopus

Textured using ZBrush and decorated with Blender, taking 5 days of work. Bobby is a unique and fascinating piece of work.

Harlequin

Hauntingly realistic, Harlequin is truly a spectacular piece of art. At first glance, one might think this was a well lit photo.

Science Doc

Modeled in maya and rendered in Mental Ray, Science is an excellent character, with matching production values.

Goblin Mechanic

Inspired by Max Cant’s soldiers when modeling the furnace on his back he is full of expression and crammed with an array of wonderful details.

Will Smith Caricature

Hilarious and superbly created using Cinema 4D, ZBrush and Photoshop. It has a warmth and charm that make it stand out.

Jelly Spider Friend

Realistic and a little creepy, this is beautifully crafted with amazing colors and textures. The lighting adds to the freakish feel of the piece.

Cloud Tribute

A tribute to the popular Final Fantasy character Cloud, the emotion behind the eyes is extremely powerful.

Beautiful Vanadisa

Created in Daz Studio with a rendering time of over 22 hours, this is a simply breathtaking 3D portrait.

Isabelle

Modeled using a combination of Poser, Vue, Cinema 4D and Photoshop CS, she has a real sense of mystery and magic.

Art Ventura

A wonderful caricature, Art Ventura solves mysterious CG cases. The behind the scenes of its creation is worth viewing.

Ogryn Stare

The artists first project using ZBrush with the entire piece taking over two days. It makes great use of textures.

Rose

A beautiful pose and composition, great use of light and a thoroughly captivating expression make Rose a compelling piece.

Emocionado

A funny and charming piece with great attention to detail on the cloth patterns and the stubble on the chin.

Aztec Priest

Inspired by Mel Gibson’s movie “Apocalypto”, this Aztec Priest is detailed, imaginative and original.

Cyber Goth

Created using a combination of Poser and Photoshop, the design on her scalp and the eye markings really draw the eye.

Samurai Troll

The texture work in the armor plates and skin are amazing given that the artist views this as a work in progress.

Smoking Creature

I don’t what’s more frightening, the hideous character or the amazing amount of realism he possesses.

Kai

This is Kai, Nariko’s dedicated friend (from Heavenly Sword). Created using Poser, Vue and Photoshop.

Shadow Conscious

Absolutely incredible detail, the artist really captured the emptiness in her eyes and created a character deep in thought.

Female Vampire

Inspired by the vampire film 30 Days of Nights, this female vampire looks really realistic and deliciously evil.

Arwen

Created using Cinema 4D, Poser, Vue and Photoshop with an obscene render time, Arwen is a pearlescent beauty.

Fries With That

Fantastic modelling, texturing and shading make this utterly realistic, you will think it’s a photograph. An amazing achievement in 3D realism.

Suspicious Minds

An incredibly striking, beautiful, realistic and moving portrait with an interesting story behind it.

The Worlds Enemy

A superb model of Sephiroth from Final Fantasy with the rendering taking 3 hours and the post production taking 6 hours.

Chris In 3D

An absolutely stunning combination of Poser and Photoshop work. Do yourself a favor and check out this render’s immaculate details.

Cyborg Head 01

The level of detail is nothing short of amazing, enhanced by the textures and lightning that give this 3D render superb qualities.

Ethereal

Artwork based on the W40k universe, it’s an Ethereal from the TAU empire, taking 2 days to complete using Cinema 4D, ZBrush, VRay and Photoshop.

Knight of the Temple

A lone knight of the Temple, standing guard. The chainmail and stone are particularly brilliant in detail and texture.

Grandma

Just awesome detail, amazing textures, superb blending and the befuddling expression on the woman’s face make this a wonderful piece of work.

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

From the Wikipedia page on Realism (you can access the individual links there)

•Entity realism, a philosophical position within scientific realism

•Epistemological realism, a subcategory of objectivism

•Hyper-realism or Hyperreality, the inability of consciousness to distinguish reality from fantasy

•Mathematical realism, a branch of philosophy of mathematics

•Moderate realism, a position holding that there is no realm where universals exist

•Modal realism, a philosophy propounded by David Lewis, that possible worlds are as real as the actual world

•Moral realism, the view in philosophy that there are objective moral values

•Mystical realism, a philosophy concerning the nature of the divine, advanced by Nikolai Berdyaev

•Naive realism, a common sense theory of perception

•New realism (philosophy), a school of early 20th-century epistemology rejecting epistemological dualism

•Organic realism or the Philosophy of Organism, the metaphysics of Alfred North Whitehead, now known as process philosophy

•Philosophical realism, the belief that reality exists independently of observers

•Platonic realism, a philosophy articulated by Plato, positing the existence of universals

•Pseudorealism, a genre of art initiated by Indian artist Devajyoti Ray where reality is appraoched via abstraction

•Pseudorealism, a term coined by American Film critics, used to describe films in which digital unreal images are created and amalgamated with regular scenes thereby creating an ilusion that is difficult to distinguish from reality
.
•Quasi-realism, an expressivist meta-ethical theory which asserts that though our moral claims are projectivist we understand them in realist terms

•Representative realism, the view that we cannot perceive the external world directly

•Scientific realism, the view that the world described by science is the real world

•Transcendental realism, a concept implying that individuals have a perfect understanding of the limitations of their own minds

•Truth-value link realism, a metaphysical concept explaining how to understand parts of the world that are apparently cognitively inaccessible

DOGS

Acrylic on canvas

11 1/2″ x 15″

2009

My friends Saren and Susan are responsible for this latest obsession. On our walk last week, when we were hiking around the woods with the dogs, we got around to one of our favorite subjects…food…and I forget how… but it was revealed that I did not own a crock pot. Not sure how I made it through this first half century without one  but, after another mile or so, they had convinced me that I NEEDED one.

After my usual compulsive internet researching and two horrific days of trudging through the land of Oz…aka…obscenely overstocked retail zoos…I collapsed in a shopping meltdown and ordered this one on line…

She arrived on the anniversary of my grandmother’s birthday which is a very good sign as she was a wonderful cook…so in her honor I have named her Phyllis.

And, since Pat nursed me through the melt down with such grace and good humor…I decided that the inaugural feast would be her favorite…pulled pork.

The goal is to be able to make suppers that I can throw together in the morning and let cook all day so that when I come home from the studio the cooking is done. And so that if I lose track of time and forget to stop painting…Pat can eat dinner before midnight. Phyllis passed all the tests.

An elegant look, clean simple design, easy to use, easy to clean, big enough for meals that can last for days, and…yes Susan and Saren, I thank you !

Bon appetite…

Kachina, 8″ x 10″

Take a trip to Santa Fe Thanksgiving weekend and stop by Gallery 822 on Canyon Road. Small works by the galleries 13 artists will be available for purchase.The artists will be in attendance Saturday, Nov 28 3-5 pm. Yes, I will be there, too

My painting Kachina will be available. It is 8″x10″, oil on board

Iunewind is a 3D artist whose designs are nothing short of being exceptional. Imagination, when blended with 3D artwork brings in a new dimension of Realism. Iunewind is from Samara, Russia. His tools of trade are mainly 3DS Max and Photoshop. His works have become desktop wallpapers for many around the world. By the amount of detail present in each of his designs, i believe he spends around a couple of days or even more to get the stuff close to perfection. He has won numerous awards in the design community. You can take a look at them here

I have featured some of his works here, the most awesome ones which I loved. You can download them by clicking on the image. Be sure to check out his gallery.

He has also posted a tutorial on how to create one of his designs : Summer Cocktail. The image you see below is what I am talking about. If you have some sound knowledge and experience in using 3D Max or Cinema 4D, I suggest you give this a try. The results are astounding!!

You can visit his personal portfolio here : Iunewind

You can also visit his DeviantArt profile for more of his works : Iunewind @ DA

According to Robert Scholes, “Realism is a game that only God can play. Man is not in a position to recreate God’s world on paper.”

So why strive to deliver, when we cannot achieve total truth? Half truths, part truths, but not total truth.

We want to know the truth because we want assurance: that somehow, in this crazy world that we live in, something in what we perceive as our reality is certain. Although complete certainty, like total truth, cannot be achieved, we need something to secure us that what’s going on is real.

As much as we want it to be otherwise, the ones we rely on to deliver us the truths are only humans, and they cannot see all sides of issues. They can only report what they remember seeing or hearing and plenty of things are relative. What may be right could be wrong, what’s good may actually be bad, and what’s true to someone could be a lie to another.

There is no such thing as complete certainty, and there is no such thing as total truth.

What we strive for is up to only a particular level of each, so that our perception of reality could be grounded. Truth comes only when we want it to be true, and what’s real only becomes real when we think of it to be.

As for reaching total truth, complete certainty and absolute reality, only God is capable of doing. No matter how hard we try, we are, after all, “not it a position to create God’s world on paper.”

I saw the new Willem Dafoe play, IDIOT SAVANT,  a couple nights ago and I’m still thinking about it. It’s experimental theater by Richard Foreman, although at this stage, I’m not sure what’s experimental about it. Everyone seemed to know exactly what to do and how to do it.

Willem Dafoe’s performance was excellent, as expected, but there was something about it that really intrigued me. The play pretty much does away with any fourth wall. There’s a sort of gate, I guess, which serves as a physical barrier upstage, but the actors, and Dafoe was expert at this, never really pretended to be anywhere else. They were on a stage, in front of an audience.

What was amazing to me was how Dafoe included the audience in the show, without directly engaging them. There was this amazing feeling that we were all in this together, we were all here to enjoy something and it had as much to do with us watching him, as it did him performing. In a sense, it was like watching the host of a variety show, but only in that inclusive way a host might talk to the audience.

Like I said, the actors never talked directly to the audience. It was much more of an unwritten contract between him and the audience that they shared the experience.

So, naturally, I’ve been wondering how that feeling could be recreated in a film. I am not talking about a character, or an actor, talking to the camera. How do you insinuate the audience to be part of the experience when you are watching a film? In a sense, when an audience is engaged in a film, it makes the film more enjoyable for everyone, so just by being good, or not boring, there’s some of that. But, in a theater, the actors aren’t set on celluloid and can react back to that invisible conversation that’s been started. Maybe it can’t be done, but it would be interesting to figure that out and try it.

Today we introduce a first video of the SimplyEngine (our new 3D simulation engine). This video shows a demo we created around the use case of a UAV (unmanned aerial vehicle) simulation in a city center.

If you want to learn more about our drone simulation, check out this page. We’ll also make a longer post here in the following weeks to give you a more detailed view of our work on this simulation. By the way if you have questions or comments, feel free to ask

Note: This is an ongoing series depicting the path of Bronte, a Hunter in the dark and cell-shaded world of Borderlands. It will attempt to paint a picture of what the game is like as well as provide commentary of some of the most spectacular moments from the game. Narrative is in black. Bugs and design flaws are in red. Memorable or ‘whoa!’ moments, and positive points are in blue. Enjoy!

Links:

• The Borderlands Chronicles: Part I.
• The Borderlands Chronicles: Part II.

Sid Meier’s Vending Machine Tycoon

I am in the Arid Hills. It doesn’t look much different from the previous areas, just looks like more of the same: drab, dry, dead. But there is a certain comfort in familiarity, so I trudge on, boomstick in hand, looking for pieces of some legendary sniper rifle and a mine gate key.

There are vending machines to my left where I can get rid of any unwanted items in my impossibly large backpack. I don’t understand how Dr. Zed and Marcus can be such successful vending machine entrepreneurs on Pandora. They seem to have vending machines in literally every corner of this world. How do they get them there? Who keeps them maintained? Don’t they get attacked when they come to restock, pluck out sold items and collect cash? And how is it that no one ever breaks into these machines?

Skag Scars

A skag roars in the distance. Sounds big. I go through a drain pipe to the first cross-section. There are several caves about 50 paces ahead of me, and quite a few of the skags are already on patrol. They are all either my level or a level above. But unlike my first few encounters with the bastards, I am much better prepared this time around. My sniper rifle does a whopping 145 damage per shot, and Bloodwing is maxed out to do the most damage per flight.

I spot an Alpha Skag in the group. They are well-armored, and take the most amount of shots to kill. Using a sniper is out of the question if it starts charging. But I have my trusty sub-machine gun with me, and despite a sheer lack of skill with the weapon, I know it can dispatch foes if they get up close and personal. Aim and accuracy matter little if most of your vision is filled with a skag’s teeth. But patience is a virtue, and instead of firing at the first skag I can track through my scope, I wait patiently, and inch forward one tiny step at a time. In time the Alpha spots me. He roars, opening its mouth in all directions, letting out a terrifying howl. I smile. Big mistake.

A single shot down its pie-hole dispatches my first foe without much trouble. I hear multiple howls, without wasting a second, I turn around and sprint to the drainage pipe I just came from.

Choke point.

I dispatch them one at a time. Single-shot precision kills. At least two of them go down mid-air, as they leap at me, mouth wide open, in an attempt to bite off a piece. I laugh as one skag literally explodes into chunks of smoldering flesh. “What”,  I say, “you didn’t like that?” And I start laughing. It’s a triumphant moment. I feel superior to the creatures that died by my hands in every conceivable way. But this is just the beginning, and I had the advantage of the choke point. That is more of an exception than the rule. This world isn’t all that forgiving.

More skags at the next ridge. Not too much trouble. The previous area had several barrels that I lure them to. The blue ones explode with a large amount of electrical damage, green ones are corrosive, whereas red ones simply explode. Quite handy.

My momentary high is short-lived as I spot a poor soul impaled on a large pike. Subtle.

Separation Anxiety

There is a bandit camp around the ridge. Two of them patrol a sniper’s nest up top. A quick succession of head shots alleviates that problem. But the camp is another story. In the blink of an eye, my shield is gone, as well as half my health bar. I missed the grenades that had been lobbed at me by the one of the raiders because my field of vision was severely limited through the scope of my sniper. Cursing under my breath I fire back at the rifleman. He has already taken cover, and with all the bullets slamming into me, I cannot seem to get off a clean shot. A midget shot gunner, however, is not so lucky.

Bloodwing stirs, and I set him lose. “Give ‘em hell, Bloodwing!” I yell. I tuck in to the right, out of the line of fire, my health nearly depleted. Bloodwing circles overhead once, then twice, and then continues the pattern. I am confused. Why isn’t he attacking? It isn’t clear to me then, but it appears Bloodwing is afraid of being too far apart from me, which limits him to a certain range. I am mildly irritated. Gonna have to train that damn bird better. He finally makes one last sweep overhead, and returns to me.

Keeping the rock outcropping between me and the barrage of endless bullets, I inch closer to my enemies, and then let Bloodwing loose a second time. This time he beelines to the crouching raider behind the barricade, ripping the poor bastard to shreds. Since I have focused on making Bloodwing a true agent of death, not only does he solve my problem with the raider, upon returning to me, he also restores a big portion of my health.

Revitalized, I switch to the SMG and come out of hiding guns blazing, lobbing two grenades at the remaining foes. It does not take too long, and within minutes they lie at my feet, fresh bullet-holes gaping like the unending depths of a dark, dreary abyss.

I hear something shriek overhead. Rokks. These guys have very little health, but in large groups they can swarm you, and rip your insides out in seconds. There is trouble ahead. I can feel it in the air. I better be careful.

Hugging Chemical Barrels is a Bad Idea

After clearing out another small camp, and inching close to the edges to keep my distance from the rokks overhead, I spot another sniper perch in the distance. I crouch, debating if I should send in my personal agent of death on wings, or dispatch him with a single bullet? Bloodwing would not be able to get him at that range. He has already established that any considerable length of distance between us causes him severe separation anxiety. And that is when I notice the corrosive acid barrel next to the lookout. A single shot explodes the barrel, showering him in acid. I watch his surprised expression through the scope, as the acid eats away at his body, literally devouring him whole. Good riddance.

The Fourth Piece of the Puzzle

My map tells me the four pieces of the legendary sniper rifle are in the next camp. I start shooting. Psychotic midgets, shotgunners, badass bruisers, they all succumb to the overwhelming firepower I pack, backed by the ferocious talons of my trusty companion. It’s a little odd they some of them come out of hiding only after the very last combatant on the field has been eliminated. I have a feeling if they all came at once, I would be swarmed, overwhelmed and killed. This all seems a little too… easy.

The sniper rifle has four parts I need to secure. I have found only three so far. I make several circuits of the camp, and my map indicator offers little help. I am a little frustrated, three other three pieces were essentially just lying about, why isn’t this one? It is then that I notice that only one of the buildings in the camp has an upward pointing arrow. And if that is not enough of a hint, there are three storage cabinets on the roof of the structure as added incentive. I jump above, and grab the last piece. But what truly annoys me is that this last piece was a good distance away from where my map marker suggested.

Sledge is a Cocky Bastard!

My map tells me the mine key is in Sledge’s Safehouse, which seems to be just up the hill from my present location. I take out my sniper rifle to scope out the area. The criminal hideout sits atop a small hill about 100 paces ahead of me. So ballsy are the inhabitants, that they have made no attempts to hide the entrance. In fact, upon closer inspection, the entry point prominently displays the words: “Sledge’s Safehouse.”

Cocky bastards! (See what I did there?)

Bloodwing stirs restlessly. He can sense the blood of the upcoming battle. I pet his head. I check my weapons, making one last round of the camp to pick up any additional ammunition. Satisfied that all my ordinance is in order, I start my short trek to the safe house.

Time to hunt!

Links:

• The Borderlands Chronicles: Part I.
• The Borderlands Chronicles: Part II.

Since the recession, I have had to cut back my work in incense and perfume.  It’s just too expensive for me right now to do anything exciting with that, so because I’m a hopeless INFJ with complicated OCD issues, I have returned to painting.  Hey, it keeps me out of single’s bars! 

Just wanted to share my latest work with you.

Painted from a photo taken by my wonderful friend, Krist Panos. Krist is a monk and he lives on the Holy Mountain, praying for all of us!

Living in the desert, the sunset is never the same, never truly capturable.

By the way, you realize I am a terrible photographer, right???? That’s an art, that although I’ve studied theory of it abit, I am no good at it.

Recently, Pavle died at the age of 95. May his memory be eternal! I plan to paint this when the time is right.

FRIEND

Oil on canvas

2005

So, we can rather safely conclude that we cannot be certain about anything. I’m not absolutely certain we can’t. A particular fact which I am unsure whether it can be certain or not is, ‘Something exists, have existed, or will’, which seems rather solid. But the question itself is very peculiar, so I wonder if it at all can be properly comprehended. And it might be possible to construct thoroughly bizarre models in which this is not true, despite the phænomena we so commonly perceive – I do not know, however ridiculous it sounds.

But just because we cannot be absolutely certain about anything, it does not follow that we can only be equally certain about everything. And furthermore, radical skepticism is a very unproductive position, one which we cannot really take seriously. It is paper doubt, not real and living doubt.

But from a position of absolute agnosticism, how do we proceed?

I would suggest to make a few tentative assumptions about how we can gain knowledge. However, care must be taken at this stage. There are several kinds of assumptions – there are working assumptions, methodological assumptions, axiomata, et cetera. Here I mean a methodological one. We can test a working assumption (“I assume that there is vacuum in this tube now”), but we cannot test a methodological one (“I assume my perceptions not to be systematically misleading”). We might always reach a point where a methodological assumption may become testable; nothing is not open for future revision.

Once we have a sufficiently strong groundwork of assumptions, we can from them deduce new truths, which will hold given the assumptions. We can construct arguments. The strength and necessity of arguments lies in that we can only be wrong in the concluson if we are wrong in an assumption. Certainity becomes inherent in the system.

For each assumption we make, there is a risk, even if likely vanishingly small, we may be wrong. This is true for all assumptions. What we then need to do is be parsimonious, that is, raze with Occam’s razor. Never assume more things than you need to make your model, explanation or theory work.

Which assumptions we initially make may fall as it does; with any luck they prove themselves fruitful or not. To assume logic, to assume we are not systematically misled in thought and perception, to assume that we need the ability to transfer knowledge and not acquiesce in mystic epistemic individualism, and to assume some kind of coherency in the reports we give and the reports people think they hear or read from us are examples of good starting points. Now, what is important are a few assumptions we should not make:

1. Realism

Realism is the position that our theories describe real things. In many ways, this may seem as if it is the natural conclusion via Occam’s razor, but in fact it is not. To assume that our theories describe real things is positing a new set of entities. We do not need them to make our theory work. To posit that strings exist when this is an untestable proposition, when we can just as well say that the maths perfectly describe the real observable events, is to make an unjustified, uneconomical assumption. They could exist or they could not. We do not need them, however.

As Sokal and Bricmont wrote in Intellectual Impostures:

This is rather like asking whether, given a finite set of points, there is a unique curve that passes through these points. Clearly the answer is no: there are infinitely many curves passing through any given finite set of points. Similarly, there is always a large (even infinite) number of theories compatible with the data – and this, whatever the data and whatever the number. (p.80)

This is not to say that realism is useless. Having a realist interpretation has often been very useful for experimenters, made theories more relatable and easy to understand, and perhaps more beautiful. One can perhaps argue about them at a level of very low, but still present, certainity. Materialism and dualism both do seem like bigger stretches than does neutral monism. But it is important to be aware that strictly speaking, they are all less rigorous and solid positions than antirealism.

2. Common Sense

Common sense is a very common method of estimating truth. It’s, er, in the name. Regardless, it is not good to utilise this, for the simple reason it is not common enough, and often at odds with fact even when it is. I doubt it is common sense that the denial of the antecedent in implicature means the implicature is true regardless if the consequent is (that is,  the sentence “If bananas are a type of worm, then the Prime Minister of Sweden is Fredrik Reinfeldt” is true). Nor would it be common sense to say that 0.999… = 1, when in fact it is. Many more examples may be shown of common sense erring.

Merely for the fact it feels right or it is common people think it right, it does not follow it is sensible to believe it.

3. Intuition

Intuition is hard to account for. It’s hard to give any reason it should be right; it merely feels that way. It may be – but it constitutes a poor argument for the matter. It varies among people and certain types of it may be said to be common sense of one variant or another. The veracity of an intuition is not good to judge on basis of it being one, but rather on its own merits. Some intuitions may be useful, but as a general area of source of knowledge, it seems to be poor rationality to accept it. After all, intuition is not transferable and it only makes sense to the person who has it.

Again. Merely for the fact it feels right or it is common people think it right, it does not follow it is sensible to believe it.

A note about procedure of knowledge: One must make a distinction between a source of knowledge and a justification of it. What I am concerned about here is justification. As far as reaching new facts goes, any method could and should be used. One can never know from where we may get new facts to incorporate. A mathematician may very well intuitively feel that a certain answer to whether the Riemann hypothesis is correct; then the intuition would be the source of that knowledge. But it would not be justified until he produced a proof.

Over at Complete Lies Mikhail and I have been having a rather pleasant conversation about object-oriented ontology. Even though he is leveling criticisms at my position, I am deeply appreciative of the manner in which he has expressed them. At any rate, at one point in our exchange I think we really get to a fundamental difference between our respective philosophical intuitions. These issues are of potential interest to a wider audience so I thought I’d post them here. Mikhail, of course, is welcome to respond here too if he likes. At any rate, at one point in our exchange, I write:

It seems to me that you’re conflating theory with the world. An ontology is not the world but a theory of the world. It is possible for that theory to be mistaken. Noting that there are different ontologies is merely pointing out that there are different competing theories of what being is. Each of these theories are trying to get at the truth and each of these theories critiques other positions and offers arguments in favor of its position. I am not “polishing my perspective”, but presenting a position or theory of the being of beings. In other words, I am trying to get at reality or the being of objects.

To this Mikhail responds,

I might be conflating theory with the world since I don’t think there’s a pre-theoretical world and that I can ever compare a theory with a world it theorizes and therefore see how it does or does not fit. So for me there is no one true theory of the world, since that presupposes that I have an access to this world and so on.

I think this is a fantastic remark– offhand as it is –on Mikhail’s part because it really gets at the fundamental difference between realisms and anti-realisms. I think this is one major point on which I disagree with anti-realisms. In my view this position undermines the possibility of any fallibilism so we’re left without the means of determining why we should choose one theory over another. Because everything is already immanent to theory and because any criteria by which we might choose among rival theories is itself already an element of theory, we are unable to provide any “non-theory laden” criteria for choosing among theories. Now, this observation does not undermine Mikhail’s thesis because this could just be the way things are, but it is nonetheless an issue worth thinking about.

read on!

Additionally, this position, I think, leaves us without the means of determining why theories change over time, instead leaving us in the position of holding that theories just spontaneously bloom out of nowhere. Because there is nothing other than theories and because everything that we experience, talk about, or think about is already defined by a theoretical framework, it follows that any change a theory undergoes must itself be the spontaneous result of the theory or the mind from which the theory is spawned. In this respect, we become like Atlas, having to hold the entire weight of the universe on our shoulders.

Finally, evoking a line of argument from Andrew Collier in his book Critical Realism, it seems to me that every theorist, whether realist or anti-realist, is realist about something. The question is one of determining where the realism lies. It is with respect to this observation that delicious paradoxes of self-reflexivity arise with respect to anti-realism. In other words, anti-realisms, I believe, tend to forget to apply their own thesis to their own position.

In the claim that Mikhail’s making it seems that he holds that theories (not what they’re purportedly about) are real. But here we can ask the question “how do we have any more access to theories than we do to the world?” For example, we can argue that Kant has a theory and that it is possible for a person to be a Kantian. But what is it that gives the anti-realist access to Kant’s theory? No doubt the anti-realist will say “I read his books, the secondary lit, etc.” Good! But still this problem of access emerges with respect to the anti-realist’s relationship to Kant’s theory. Within the framework of the anti-realist’s thesis– that there is no world to which we can compare a theory to judge it –it seems to follow that there is no independent text to which the anti-realist can compare his interpretation of Kant. So what is it that warrants us in saying that Kant’s text (or any other theoretical text) exists at all?

The anti-realist could respond by saying “Yes, of course this is true! This is precisely what Derridean deconstruction and Gadamerian hermeneutics has taught us about texts!” But note, the problem now emerges with respect to Gadamerian hermeneutics and Derridean deconstruction because they are texts and we must account for how we have access to them. In other words, we are led to the conclusion that the thesis that Derrida’s text or Gadamer’s text exists is a unwarranted and dogmatic assertion because it fails to interrogate our access to these texts and the limits belonging to that access. As a consequence, we inevitably seem led to a solipsistic position where we can no longer claim anything exists but ourselves. But wait! Here I am reminded of a classic philosophy joke that really isn’t very good. “Descartes goes to a restaurant and has a wonderful and very filling meal. After his meal the waiter comes up to his table and asks ‘Would you like dinner, Monsieur?’ to which Descartes responds ‘I think not’ and promptly puffs out of existence.” In other words, applying the principle of parity, we must apply the question of access to ourselves as well and here we find that there is no real self to which we could compare our theory of ourselves. Therefore it would be dogmatic to claim that our selves exist!

At the beginning of his book Critical Realism Collier makes a profound observation:

Don’t worry, I am not going to argue for realism along the lines of ‘ten million sun readers can’t be wrong’– or the well-known bit of graffiti that parodies such statements. The point is rather that this apparent obviousness [of realism to the layperson outside of academia] presents a problem for realists. Two opposite problems, in fact: it might be thought that realism is too obviously true to be worth saying; or it might be thought that anything so obvious to commensense is probably false, like the ideas that the sun rises, that pigs sweat, that men are more rational and women more emotional, and so on. Oddly, these two objections are often combined: realism is both dismissed as obvious, and replaced by a non-realist account which is supposedly less ‘naive’.

But the following considerations suggest that the ordinary person’s realism is not necessarily more naive or likely to be wrong than the non-realism of some academics. Let us look at what might be called regional non-realisms. By this phrase I mean views that some particular group of phenomena or of natural or social forces, which are generally taken to exist, do not. An example would be the “Christian Science’ view that pain and illness are unreal. We will generally find that they are held by people who have no practical dealings with the region concerned. I am not, of course, claiming that all regional non-realisms are false. But a great many that are false sustain themselves by practical disengagement from the aspect of the world about which they are non-realists. I doubt whether any surgeons have been converted to Christian Science. Now academics, at least in the arts, are mainly engaged in meta-discourse– that is, talking about talking –and do not, in their professional capacity, interact much with extra-linguistic realities. They are therefore prone to non-realism about such things. (3 – 4)

Because academics in the arts primarily traffic in meta-discourse or talk about talk, they are realists about talk and non-realists about the extra-discursive regions with which they don’t deal. This is a suggestion worth pondering as we engage in these debates.

Alright, it’s been a long day so I’m done for the evening. Tomorrow is pretty hectic so it’s likely I won’t get to any comments before tomorrow evening or Friday, i.e., failure to post right away doesn’t mean your comment has been deleted.

I apologize for the hiatus… I’ve been somewhat out of commission, but I promise to start blogging again very soon.