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Cognition, Biology and Idealist Philosophy
By Axel Randrup
aarandrup@myinternet.dk
International Center for Interdisciplinary Psychiatric Research, CIRIP,
Bygaden 24 B, Svog. DK-4000 Roskilde, Denmark
http://hjem.wanadoo.dk/~mob79301/ciripactivities.html
September 9, 2006. Electronic publication only.
Abstract
The basic philosophy of mainstream biology, the philosophy of materialist realism,
assumes the existence of a material world independent of human observation and
cognition. The scientific study of cognition in the context of biology has, however,
led to the result, that all our thoughts and cognitions, including the assumption of a
material world, are dependent on our cognitive apparatus in its present stage of evolution.
I think, this shows a contradiction within materialist philosophy, and I therefore find, it is
impossible to make a contradiction-free account of cognition based on this philosophy.
An account of natural science, biological evolution, and cognition based on an idealist
philosophy is offered, and it is argued, that this account is free of contradictions. In the
idealist philosophy "material objects" are regarded as concepts based on sensory
experiences.
Key words : Cognition, evolution, philosophy of science, idealist ontology,
idealism, materialist philosophy, time, psychological Now.
Introduction
The scientific study of cognition in the context of biology assumed from the beginning ,
like all mainstream biology, the existence of a material world independent of the human
observer (materialist realism). The study led, however, to the contradictory result, that all
our thoughts and cognitions, includimg the assumption of a material world, depend on the
human cognitive apparatus in its present stage of evolution.
It is my opinion, that this contradiction is an unavoidable consequence of the philosophy
of materialist realism, and that it therefore cannot be resolved within this frame of
reference. In the following I shall propose an idealist frame of reference, within which I
think it is possible to overcome the contradiction and arrive at a consistent account of
cognition.
Concepts Basic for the Study of Cognition, Biology and Idealist Philosophy
Natural Science Seen in the Optic of Idealist Philosophy
The idealist philosophy relied on here contends, that only conscious experience is real
[1 - 4]. In this idealist frame of reference natural science is regarded as a catalogue of
selected conscious experiences ("observations") acknowledged to be scientific. I think that
scientific "observations" must be regarded as extracts from whole perceptions. The
reading of a measuring instrument can serve as an example: usually only the position of the
pointer is recorded, while the colour and shape of the instrument together with many other
features of the perceptual whole are ignored [5]. To be acknowledged as scientific the
observation has to be intersubjective, and it can be seen that the extraction from the whole
perception facilitates intersubjectivity. Observations belong to the class of immediate
experiences we cannot change, i.e. to what Diettrich [6] calls Wirklichkeit and Berger
and Luckmann [7] call "reality".
Natural science, the catalogue of scientific observations is structured by means of concepts
and theories, which are also regarded as conscious experiences. Material objects are thus
regarded as heuristic concepts (or constructs) useful for expressing observations (visual,
auditory, tactile etc.) within a certain domain together with some of their mutual relations.
This reinterpretation of materialist objects allows a direct understanding and use of
traditional scientific theories without accepting their ontology [1,8]. This differs from
contemporary mainstream science, but it does maintain the methodological presupposition,
that all scientific research rests on empirical observations from which concepts and
theories are derived. The idealist ontology emphasizes even more the role of the empirical
evidence in science and is particularly open to new theories and to the application of more
than one theory and set of concepts to a domain of observations [9 - 13].
The idealist ontology also readily accomodates the intense nature-experiences known as
nature spirituality [1]. These intense experiences are felt by the experient to be essential
and important, indicating to him, that they must be real and that nature is primarily an
experience. Nature spirituality is also experienced as unifying "observer" and "observed"
and is therefore felt to be in conflict with the materialist view, that nature exists separated
from and independent of the "observer". Also on more secular ground many people resist
the alienation from nature entailed by strict materialist realism, and tend to retain naive
realism or scientific naive realism. The former means, that material nature is believed to be
as perceived, and the latter, that it is believed to be as experienced by scientific
observations, concepts, and theories, or nearly so. Both forms of naive realism may be
regarded as a mixture of materialist and idealist views.
Immaterialist views such as idealist philosophies, phenomenalism, and radical
constructivism have often been met with the objection, that they are based entirely on
private (individual) experiences, and thus are or lead to solipsism (only "my" experiences
exist). This objection, however, seems untenable. It is based on the presumption that
conscious experiences are always individual, but I think that collective (and egoless)
experiences are viable alternatives or complements to individual experience. A collective
experience is regarded as one experience associated with a group of persons as the subject,
the We, and related to all the brains of this group. This differs from traditional
neuropsychology which usually discusses conscious experiences in association with one
brain only. Persons, including the "I", as well as brains are here seen as heuristic concepts,
analogous to the concept of material objects mentioned above [2,3].
Time
In the idealist philosophy proposed here physical time and the placement of events in this
time is seen as a construction developed on the basis of experiences in the Now [3,4]. These
experiences include memories and anticipations which may be seen as special modes of
experience in the Now.
I think that the construction of physical time (and of other sorts of time) are based on these
special modes of experience and also on the experience of succession in the psychological
Now. The available evidence indicates that this experience of succession is possible, and
that the psychological Now has temporal extension and thus differs from the physical point
of time which is seen as infinitesimal having zero duration. I find that the evidence for this
provided by the psychologist Rubin is particularly clear and significant. Rubin performed
phenomenological studies of the immediate experience of time., some of them with " two
very short sound stimuli in the outer physical world succeeding one another." When the
interval between the two sound stimuli was a fifth of a second (in physical time), he
describes the immediate experience thus:
"Quite contrary to our general notion of time, the experience does not occur that one of the
sounds is present and that the other belongs either to the just expected future or to the
immediate past. Either both of them are past or both of them are future or both of thave the character of being present, although they are experienced as a succession." [14]
According to Rubin the perceptual Now can thus comprise the experience of succession.
Rubin also found that immediate experience of duration is possible in the perceptual Now.
Searching the literature I have found no direct replication, continuation or critique of
Rubins work, but there are several authors who on various grounds concur with Rubin
[3,4, both with references] . Thus Fraisse has like Rubin performed many
phenomenological observations and experiments on the psychology of time, and he thinks
that our perception of change is characterized by the integration of successive stimuli in
such a way that they can be perceived with relative simultaneity . He also states that, when
he hears the tick-tock from a clock, the tick is not yet part of his past, when he hears the
tock, so the order of the tick and the tock is perceived directly [15].
It should also be considered that different concepts (or constructs) of time exist in various
cultures as well as in modern advanced physics. These differ from the ordinary linear
physical time and comprise: cyclic time, spiral time, static time, imaginary time, sacred
time existing alongside with secular time, etc. [3,4]. Hawking describes imaginary time
which is a spatial and therefore static construct and states that like other theories in
physics, it is a mathematical model describing our observations. He finds that it is
meaningless to ask, whether the usual or the imaginary time is the correct or real one, the
question is, which description is the most useful [16].
Interestingly, the conception of time as constructed from the Now was already expressed by
Nicholas of Cusa (15th century):
"All time is comprised in the present or 'now'..... time is only a methodological
arrangement of the present. The past and the future, in consequence, are the development of
the present" (quoted in [17] p. 840).
Evolution
Even if the material conception of biological evolution is presumed, it is clear, that all the
observations leading to this theory have been made in our time, i.e. in a short span of time
compared with the presumed length of the biological evolution. This comes close to the idea
that the theory of evolution is a development of the present. In the idealist frame of
reference proposed here all the evidence is seen as being experienced in the Now, in the
focus or the periphery of its conscious content [3,4]. The theory of evolution itself,
associated with the theory of linear time is also regarded as experienced in the Now and
seen as a methodological arrangement of the present.
In this idealist view we construct the past from the present, while science usually tries to
see the causes for the present in the past and the causes for the past in a more distant past.
There is, however, a special case, where science to some extent relies on the present for
understanding the past. This is the use of the anthropic principle for understanding
certain features of the structure and evolution of the universe.
The anthropic principle is discussed thoroughly by Barrow. He states that we must accept,
that there are aspects of the large-scale structure of the universe, which do not have any
explanation in the conventional sense. They arise as random events in the first moments of
the universe's history. There are also a number of remarkable and apparently disconnected
"coincidences" in the universe. These structures and coincidences are, however, a necessary
condition for life in the present, and according to the anthropic principle their appearance
in the distant past is understood in relation to the fact that we exist now and observe the
universe. The anthropic principle may be seen as a complement to the standard theories in
cosmology [18].
The materialist exposition of biological evolution does not express the fact that all the evidence for the theory stems from our time. This must be stated as an addendum. Further,
when cognition is included in the theory of biological evolution, the theory leads to a
fundamental contradiction. This contradiction and its resolution by applicatiom of an
idealist frame of reference will be discussed in the next sections.
Discussions of the Fundamental Problem with the Materialist Exposition
It was argued in the Introduction, that the materialist exposition of cognition entails an
inevitable contradiction between the basic assumption of a material world independent of
the human observer and the conclusion, that all our thoughts and cognitions (including
the assumption of an independent material world) depend on our cognitive apparatus in
its present stage of evolution. Indeed in the light of the scientific study of cognition the
assumption of an independent material world appears to be self-contradictory.
Students of evolution and cognition have over the years struggled with this fundamental
problem. Thus Clark asks, what the proper attitude of the evoutionary epistemologist
should be towards science. Should he regard science as disclosing information concerning
the way the world is in itself, independently of the species-specific needs, bias and
cognitive orientation of the human life-form, or should he conceive it as intrinsically
limited and indelibly marked with the stamp of his own humanity ? Clark finds himself
attracted to the alternative of dropping the notion of the world-in-itself entirely, he prefers
to envisage theoretical models ultimately justified by keeping faith with observable
phenomena [19]. As the theoretical models can be seen as mental constructs, this view is
not far from the idealist views proposed in the present paper.
Ruse has written on evolutionary and Darwinian epistemology at length. He arrives at the
notion "common-sense realism" which he regards as an alternative to the either/or of
materialism/idealism [20] He thinks, that there is a real world, but not a real world
independent of us. "We cannot escape our own mind-injected element" [21]. Ruse
struggles with the problems originating in abstract philosophy and scepticism:
".... the human mind is such that, even if abstract philosophy leads to scepticism,
unreasoned optimism keeps us afloat. As human beings, we all believe in the reality of
causality and of the external world and of the worth of consiliences, whatever philosophy
might prove. And that is what counts." [21]. I will here contend, that we humans do not all
believe in the reality of an external world. I for one don't, and others are quoted below.
Ruse also states that "truth rests in coherence, not in correspondence" (i.e. correspondence
with an independent world) [21]. The latter statement is actually close to the idealist view,
I propose in this paper.
"Hypothetical realism" is a term, which earlier was often encountered in the literature on
cognition and biological evolution. It assumes that there exists a real world independent of
man, and that our knowledge about this world is dependent on our cognitive apparatus,
therefore hypothetical. But Löw criticized hypothetical realism, because he regarded also
the existence of the external world, materialistic realism itself, as hypothetical. He writes
explicitly:
"If reality is given us only through the glasses of our "ratiomorphic world-view
apparatus", then every statement about the "true" reality is, at the same time, a statement
viewed through such glasses and no "truer" than others." [22].
I concur with Löw and regard common sense realism and hypothetical realism as
compromises, which are insufficient for overcoming the fundamental paradox inherent in
the materialist account of evoutionary epistemology. More radical changes are required.
A Consistent, Contradiction-free Exposition Based on an Idealist Philosophy
The term "hypothetical realism" was used quite frequently in the 1980es , but seems to
have been forgotten in the 90es; in the journal, Evolution and Cognition (New Series)
published 1995 - 2004 the term is hardly ever found. But in this journal there are some
indications of views that are wholly different from materialist realism:
Thus Krall regards ".... objects as invariances in observations and not as something that
may or may not exist in reality" [23].
And Stotz writes: "No matter how far we we turn the spiral of knowledge gain, the
problem of demarcating subject from object remains insoluble. Much as we might even
"trivially" presuppose an objective reality and regard it as plausible, all our highly
complex theories are merely "assimilatory instruments" all the same: reality is always
mediated - an operational construct of cognition". [24].
In a very thoughtful account Diettrich states, on the basis of "complete constructivism" ,
that our perceptions contain regularities and specificities, we cannot influence, and these
unchangeable features of our perceptions he denotes by the German word Wirklichheit. In
daily language this German word means nearly the same as reality, but in Diettrich's
exposition reality ("materialist" reality) is seen not as something existing independent of
humans, but as a special human-made theory of Wirklichkeit [6]. This of course comes close
to my idealist descriptiion here of "material things" as mental concepts.
Diettrich realizes, that it has been used as a major objection to constructivist approaches,
that they may lead to solipsism. He counters this objection by stating, that the cognitive
efforts he describes are "human specific" (p. 111) and that the experience, that our
perception contains regularities we cannot influence, is a basic experience of "all men" (p.
105). I have denied, that solipsism is an implication of immaterialiat views by invoking the
notion of collective conscious experience (see the section on Natural Science above) and I
think that this is closely similar to Diettrich's argumentation.
In a way reminiscent of Diettrich's definition of of Wirklichkeit Berger and Luckman define
"reality" as a quality appertaining to phenomena that we recognize as having a being
independent of our own volition, we cannot "wish them away". Thus Berger and Luckman
do not define reality as independent of human observation or human cognition altogether,
only as independent of our volition [7].
The constructivist approach emphasizes epistemology more than ontology. But in the
idealist philosophy proposed here ontology is in the focus, and it asserts that only
conscious experience is real [1,4]. Conscious experience consists of immediate experiences
which we cannot change (the Wirklichkeit ) and experiences (concepts, theories) which we
can change and discuss, and which structure the immediate experiences.
Every immediate conscious experience has relations to many other conscious experiences,
and the experiences can be grouped in various ways.Thus visual, tactile, auditory etc.
experiences can be grouped together in such a way, that they become constitutive parts of
the construct (or concept), a "material" object. The very same experiences can also be seen
as constitutive parts of the construct, consciousness or mind of the experient. By
consciousness (individual or collective) I here understand the total of conscious experience
in the Now. In the construct consciousness the perceptual and conceptual experiences are
grouped together with other experiences such as emotions, aesthetic and ethic experiences
etc. (Wimmer and Ciompi [25] emphasize the opinion, that affect or emotion and cognition
form an inseparable interactive unit). In this view object and subject are not disentangled,
since they have constitutive elements in common. The construct, the "material" world, may
be regarded as a subset or subsystem of the construct, consciousness; this view has earlier
been expressed by the physicists Lindsay and Margenau, who began their book
"Foundations of Physics" with the statement: "Physics is concerned with a certain portion
of human experience" [9].
The grouping of perceptions (scientific "observations") into the constructs or concepts of
"material" objects expresses some regularities (or constraints) in the occurrence of these
experiences, and the grouping into a subject (I or We), seen as consciousness or mind
expresses other regularities. The latter is clearly understood, when we compare with the
splitting and loose associations encountered in communications with schizophrenic
patients. In the idealist exposition there is no logical contradiction in the grouping of the
same experiences into two different constructs, "material" object and consciousness. In
mathematics it is well known, that an element may be a member of more than one set, each
membership expressing relationships of the element with other elements. This of course
also means that two sets or two systems can have one or more elements in common. The consciousness or mind conceived as above has relations to the constructs, body and
brain. These relations too express regularities in the occurrence of perceptions and other
conscious experiences. It is clear, however, that these regularities are not in contradiction
with the other regularities or constraints mentioned above.
Consciousness is often conceived as individual, but as argued above and in previous
publications by the author [2 - 4]it may also be conceived as collective, shared by a group
of individuals. This agrees with the generally acknowledged central position of
intersubjectivity in science. The necessity to obtain intersubjectivity also gives some
constraint to concepts and to observations regarded as scientific. This is clearly felt, when
it is attempted to describe an unfamiliar new idea or observation in words and discuss it
with others.
Convincing evidence indicates that egoless conscious experiences occur too. Here there is no
subject like in monistic material realism, but an egoless experience of the world (perceived
or conceived) is still a conscious experience and avoids the dichotomy between the material
and the mental [2,4].
Conclusion
In the idealist philosophy a cognition is not of something, but rather an experience. Our
perceptual, conceptual, and other experiences are not of an external world, but the world
itself (and at the same time they are parts of our consciousness). We have visual, auditory,
and tactile experiences for example, and between these experiences we can experience
regularities and coherences, which may be expressed and experienced by concepts such as
"tree" for example or "a living animal in the past". In this way "a living animal in the
past" may be seen and experienced as a structure or arrangement of perceptual experiences
in the Now [3,4]. The same holds for the concept "evolution" and for scientific theories
such as Darwin's theory of evolution. Conscious experiences in the past (human or animal)
are understood on the basis of collective conscious experience across time [3,4].
Clearely, the fundamental paradox in the materialist exposition, the contradiction between
the world seen as independent of humans and also seen as dependent on the human
cognitive apparatus, does not appear in the idealist exposition.
References
HOW EXPERIENCED PHENOMENA RELATE TO THINGS THEMSELVES: KANT, HUSSERL, HOCHE, AND REFLEXIVE MONISM.
Max Velmans, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW. Email m.velmans@gold.ac.uk
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2006 (in press)
Abstract. What we normally think of as the “physical world” is also the world as experienced, that is, a world of appearances. Given this, what is the reality behind the appearances, and what might its relation be to consciousness and to constructive processes in the mind? According to Kant, the thing itself that brings about and supports these appearances is unknowable and we can never gain any understanding of how it brings such appearances about. Reflexive monism argues the opposite: the thing itself is knowable as are the processes that construct conscious appearances. Conscious appearances (empirical evidence) and the theories derived from them can represent what the world is really like, even though such empirical knowledge is partial, approximate and uncertain, and conscious appearances are species-specific constructions of the human mind. Drawing on the writings of Husserl, Hoche suggests that problems of knowledge, mind and consciousness are better understood in terms of a “pure noematic” phenomenology that avoids any reference to a “thing itself”. I argue that avoiding reference to a knowable reality (behind appearances) leads to more complex explanations with less explanatory value and counterintuitive conclusions—for example Hoche’s conclusion that consciousness is not part of nature. The critical realism adopted by reflexive monism appears to be more useful, as well as being consistent with science and common sense.
Keywords. Reflexive monism, thing itself, Kant, Husserl, Hoche, Velmans, phenomenology, noematic, knowledge, consciousness, mind
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In everyday life we take it for granted that the world that we see, hear, feel, smell and taste around is the real world—and we normally think of it as the “physical world.” However, the world as perceived is in many respects very different to the world as described by modern physics. This raises an immediate and perennial question: how does the world as perceived relate to what the world is really like? Or, to put in a Kantian way, how does the phenomenal world relate to the “thing itself”?
In Velmans (2000) I have developed a reflexive monist approach to answering this question, and given that aspects of my analysis are often misunderstood or misreported it has been a pleasure for me to see the careful and largely accurate account of some of these aspects given by Hoche (this issue) in the first part of his paper (sections 1 to 6.3 or pages x to y?).
Given that the following elaboration of my work can be read conjointly with Hoche’s paper, I will not repeat the analysis of reflexive monism that is given there. Put in the briefest terms, the reflexive model of perception shown in Figure 1 shows in microcosm how reflexive monism differs from dualism and reductionism. As shown, light rays reflected from the surface of an entity in the world (a cat) innervate the visual system and initiate perceptual processing. Afferent neurones, and cortical projection areas are activated, along with association areas, long-term memory traces and so on, and neural representations of the initiating event are eventually formed within the brain—in this case, neural representations of a cat. But the entire causal sequence does not end there. S also has a visual experience of a cat and we can ask S what this experience is like. In this case, the proper question to ask is, “What do you see?”1[1] According to dualism, S has a visual experience of a cat “in her mind”. According to reductionists there seems to be a phenomenal cat “in S’s mind” but this is really nothing more than a state of her brain. According to the reflexive model, while S is gazing at the cat, her only visual experience of the cat is the cat she sees out in the world. If she is asked to point to this phenomenal cat (her “cat experience”), she should point not to her brain but to the cat as-perceived, out in space beyond the body surface. In this, the way that the cat appears to S is similar to how it appears to E—as a perceived entity out in the world, albeit viewed from S's perspective rather than from E's perspective. 2[2] In short, an entity in the world is reflexively experienced to be an entity in the world.
It is, of course, impossible to illustrate all the complex relationships that obtain between experiences and the things that they are experiences of, along with the relationships between the “observations” of an external observer trying to make sense of what is going on in S’s mind/brain and the “experiences” of the subject, in such a simple two-dimensional, schematic figure. Unravelling these relationships takes up three chapters (chapters. 6, 7 and 8) of Understanding Consciousness. Given this, it is not surprising that in note 11, Hoche admits to being a little confused about the different ways that I refer to the cat in Figure 1 (throughout the book) depending on the relationship and the perspective under consideration. For example, viewed from the perspective of an external observer E, the cat is the object he can see in the world that causes S’s subjective experience. However, viewed from the perspective of the subject S, the perceived cat is what she experiences. S can’t perceive the causes of her current experience for the reason that the causes of perception operate preconsciously—and once she experiences the cat, these causal antecedents of her current perception have already operated. So, viewed from S’s “subjective” perspective, the perceived cat is the perceptual effect.
Things start to get even more complicated once one accepts that E is also an experiencing agent, with his own subjective perspective. Although he conventionally treats the cat that he can see as the cause of what S experiences, the cat’s visible properties result from his own preconscious perceptual processing, just as they do for S. Strictly speaking therefore, it is not the cat that he experiences that is the initiating cause of S’s perceptual processing, but the entity (or cat) itself.
There is far more to be said about all this, but given that it has all been elaborated elsewhere, and given that Hoche largely finds his way around the complexities, I won’t repeat this here. Rather, I will focus on the one issue that most concerns Hoche—how best to think about the relation of experiences to the things that are experienced.
How experiences relate to things themselves: resemblances to Kant
Hoche rightly describes the analysis that I give of this issue as “quasi Kantian”. In making a connection with aspects of Kantian thought (in Velmans, 2000, chapter 7), my intent was both to acknowledge the priority of his work and to take the opportunity of placing my own work in an appropriate context. Given this background, it is easier to understand and assess this aspect of reflexive monism, not just in terms of major similarities to Kantian thought, but also in terms of major points of difference. Put very briefly, the main points of similarity, as I see them, are
1. Kant argued that the “physical world” that we experience consists of phenomena. That is, “External objects (bodies) ... are mere appearances, and are, therefore, nothing but a species of my representations.” (Kant, 1781, p346). The brief description of the reflexive model of perception given above makes the same point, although it gets to it from a different direction.
2. Kant argued that these appearances are shaped by pre-existing categories of the mind, and I similarly accept that experienced phenomena are at least in part a construction of perceptual and cognitive processes that operate in the human mind/brain.3[3]
3. I accept (as Kant did) that human knowledge is constrained by the organs of knowledge (by the perceptual and cognitive processes that operate in the mind/brain).
Consequently
4. It is a mistake to confuse the phenomenal world constructed by the mind/brain with the world itself (variously termed the thing itself, the thing-itself, the thing-in-itself, reality itself, nature itself and other usages).
Indeed I think it worth stressing that these basic points have far older roots, in elements of Hindu and Buddhist thought and in the philosophy of Ancient Greece.
How experiences relate to things themselves: differences from Kant
However, unlike Kant, I argue that the thing itself is knowable, and given the fundamental nature of this difference, Hoche thinks that “it may seem doubtful whether Velmans was well advised referring to Kant at all” (p11?). He may be right.
According to Kant, the separation of the phenomenal world from the thing itself produces a clear separation between what can and cannot be known. One can know and explore the nature of the phenomenal world, and the "thing itself" is a transcendental reality that lies behind and brings about what we perceive. But, how it does so, “.... is a question which no human being can possibly answer. This gap in our knowledge can never be filled” (Ibid, p359). And, because our "representations" are all that we experience, he concludes that of the thing itself, “... we can have no knowledge whatsoever...." and "... we shall never acquire any concept.” (Ibid, p360)
I do not wish to skate over the fundamental problems raised by Kant’s analysis of how the mind’s own nature constrains what it can know. Kant is surely right to point out that we cannot have knowledge of “reality” in a way that is free of the limitations of our own perceptual and cognitive systems.4[4] We cannot make observations that are “objective” in the sense of being observer-free, or have knowledge that is unconstrained by the way that our cognitive processes operate. Our knowledge is filtered through and conditioned by the sensory, perceptual and cognitive systems we use to acquire that knowledge. Given this, we cannot assume that our representations provide observer-free knowledge of the world as it is in itself.
Nor is empirical, representational knowledge certain knowledge. For representational knowledge it is easy to see why this is so. Whether the representations be in humans, non-human animals or machines, a representational system can only have (access to) its own representations of that which it represents. Consequently, a system’s representations define the limits of its current knowledge. Lacking any other access to some ultimate reality or “thing itself,” there is no way that a representational system can be certain that its representations are accurate or complete.5[5]
Uncertainty therefore appears to be intrinsic to representational knowledge. Kant’s view that the thing itself is unknowable is nevertheless extreme. Knowledge that is uncertain and conditioned by the perceptual/cognitive processing of a knowing agent is still knowledge. So even if one accepts that knowledge of what the world is really like can only be partial, species-specific and tentative, it does not follow that the world itself is unknowable. Although it is logically possible that the world that we experience is entirely illusory (along with the concepts and theories we have about it), the circumstantial evidence against this is immense. We necessarily base our interactions with the world on the experiences, concepts and theories we have of it and these representations enable us to interact with it quite well. Kant’s extreme position is in any case self-defeating. If we can know nothing about the “real” world then no genuine knowledge of any kind is possible whether in philosophy or science – in which case one cannot know that that the thing itself is unknowable, or anything else.
Interpreted in Kant’s way, a theory of knowledge based on representations grounded in an unknowable “thing-itself” is also internally inconsistent. If the appearances of the external world are not representations of some aspect of the thing itself, then these appearances cannot really be representations, as there is nothing else for them to be representations of. Conversely, if they are representations of some aspect of the thing itself, the latter cannot be unknowable.6[6] Similarly, if we can “never acquire any concept” about what the world is really like, then our concepts and theories cannot be about anything “real.” Conversely, if these do provide a measure of knowledge about how things really are, then it cannot be true that of the thing itself “we can have no knowledge whatsoever.”
In sum, although there are no empirical certainties, one is ultimately left with a pragmatic choice: either our representations of the world tell us nothing about it (in which case all of our so-called knowledge must be groundless) or we adopt a form of critical realism in which our perceptual representations are taken to represent real things in a species-specific, sometimes useful, albeit uncertain way. I would argue that the latter provides a sounder foundation for a theory of knowledge. Broadly speaking, it is also the view adopted within modern science.
Einstein & Infeld, for example, admit that
“Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.” (Einstein & Infeld, 1938, p31)
It is nevertheless implicit that, for Einstein & Infeld, there really is a “closed watch” and that the “moving hands” and “ticking” tell us something (albeit uncertain) about its nature on which our theories about it can be based. Reflexive monism adopts a similar “critical realism”.
The reflexive model makes the conventional assumption that causal sequences in normal perception are initiated by real things in the external world, body or brain.7[7] Barring illusions and hallucinations our consequent experiences represent those things. Our concepts and theories provide alternative representations of those things. While neither our experiences nor our concepts and theories are the things themselves, in reflexive monism, things themselves remain the true objects of knowledge.
Although this position is neo-Kantian in some respects, the role that the “thing itself” plays is very different. Rather than the thing-itself (the “real” nature of the world) being unknowable, one cannot make sense of knowledge without it, even if we can only know this “reality” in an incomplete, uncertain, species-specific way. Conversely, if the thing itself cannot be known, then we can know nothing, for the thing itself is all there is to know.
Nor, in reflexive monism, can a sharp division be drawn between the phenomenal world and the thing itself that gives rise to it. Rather, both our mind/brains and our phenomenal experiences are embedded in, and manifestations of the reality that gives rise to and supports them—which has obvious consequences for what that reality must be like. Even if we cannot know that reality or thing itself as it is in itself, completely or with certainty, we can say that it must have the power to give rise to the particular configuration of mind/brain states and phenomenal experience that we can in principle observe and investigate (for example, with the technologies of neuroscience).
And even without such specialised technologies, we can, with reasonable confidence, say something about how mind/brains relate to phenomenal experiences. Broadly speaking, conscious experiences are both produced by mind/brains embedded in and interacting with their surrounds, and represent those surrounds or, in cases of self-reflection, represent their own operations (in the form of conscious feelings, thoughts, dreams, images and so on). It also seems reasonable to suppose that the forms that these mental representations take have developed under the constraints of biological evolution. Taken together, these suppositions provide reasonable grounds for a form of pragmatic epistemology. Being differentiated parts of the world that have evolved in a way that encourages successful interaction with (the rest of) that world, it is not surprising that our percepts and cognitions represent in a rough and ready way what the world is really like. Creatures that systematically misrepresent the world are unlikely to survive. Consequently, it is likely that, in a rough and ready way, our percepts and useful cognitions represent aspects of the (manifest) thing-itself.
In sum, knowledge is possible for the reason that both the organs of knowledge and the knowledge that they produce are manifestations of the same underlying reality, shaped by the constraints of evolution—and more to the point, knowledge in the broadest sense, is self knowledge (knowledge of the thing-itself by knowing creatures that are its own manifestations). From a reflexive monist point of view, we literally participate in the process whereby the thing itself knows itself.
Things themselves versus noematic phenomena in the Husserlian sense
According to Kant, phenomenal representations cannot be taken to represent what the world is really like because the thing itself is unknowable. According to reflexive monism, useful phenomenal representations can be taken to represent what the world is really like, because the thing itself is knowable, albeit in an uncertain, partial, approximate, species-specific way. According to Hoche, neither of these views has a secure basis. Instead, the relation of phenomenal representations to their objects should be understood as the relation of ‘noematic phenomena’ to the ‘noematic objects themselves’ that they represent (or ‘intentionally relate’ to), a terminology and conceptual system that he adapts from the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl.
If I understand it rightly, the point of departure for Hoche’s analysis is a fundamental point on which we agree—that in terms of phenomenology, there is no difference between a percept of an object and the object as perceived (see the simple description of the reflexive model of perception above). In my own analysis I nevertheless stress that there is a causal sequence in visual perception: light rays reflected from the surfaces of an object in the world activate processing in the visual system that eventually results in a percept of that object, which is (reflexively) seen as an object in the world. Consequently, although no phenomenological distinction can be drawn between a “percept of an object” and the “object as perceived”, a distinction can be drawn between these terms in two other ways: (a) these phrases direct our attention in different ways—the phrase “object as perceived” foregrounds or focuses attention on the object that is the initiating cause of perceptual processing, while the phrase “percept of the object” foregrounds the resulting percept or experience. (b) if we are interested in what the object that initiated processing is really like (as opposed to what it looks like) we can investigate it more deeply (e.g. with physical instruments), thereby (in my terms) penetrating more deeply into the nature of the object (or thing) itself. As such investigations proceed we may come to have very different views about the nature of the object (including, for example, quantum mechanical ones), even if the object itself does not change. Consequently, as I point out in Velmans (2000), the thing itself may also be thought of as a “reference fixer” required to make sense of the fact that we can have multiple investigations, experiences, concepts or theories of the same thing.
Drawn to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Hoche rejects the suggestion that there must ultimately be some “thing itself” that initiates perceptual processing which the resulting percept, in turn, represents. He nevertheless accepts that there must be an object that is experienced. Consequently he tries to make sense of the relation between an “object as perceived” and a “percept of that object” purely in terms of phenomenology, by arguing that with a little bit of further work on distinction (a) above, one can do away with distinction (b). According to him
“..the relation that obtains between those multifarious experiences and the one and same thing of which they are experiences can be aptly described in terms of ‘transcendental phenomenology’, especially in the ‘purely noematic’ version of it which I have developed elsewhere. On the face of it, the defining characteristic of such a ‘purely noematic phenomenology’ (or ‘pure noematics’) is the very point Velmans tries to drive home, namely, the assumption that, contrary to first appearances and engrained prejudices, we are not genuinely justified in making a distinction between a given subject’s conscious experience of an object at a certain moment in time and this object as experienced by that subject at that moment. Unlike Velmans, however, the advocate of such a purely noematic view of consciousness takes the terminological distinction between ‘the object (experienced)’ and ‘the object as experienced’ to be highly significant. A simple case in point is again Velmans’s example of my own seeing a cat. When I see a cat, the relevant conscious experience, to wit, my visual perception of it – or, speaking more down to earth: my seeing it – should again be considered to be the cat as seen, but unlike Velmans by these words I suggest one ought to understand, not simply the cat (which is) seen, that is, the cat as a Kantian ‘phenomenon’, but the cat as, qua, or in its capacity of being seen by me at the given moment in the given particular way, that is, as a ‘(noematic) phenomenon’ in the Husserlian sense. (p )
In footnote 16, Hoche goes on to explain that “Such noematic ‘phenomena’, or ‘objects in their capacity of being perceived’ by me at a certain moment in time, may be well compared to a bunch, or bundle, of rays or straight lines intersecting each other in one and the same point, which, for its part, would then correspond to the noematic ‘object itself’ – or, I take it, to what Velmans (2000: 163) calls the ‘reference fixer’”.
Hoche goes on to explain that
“ The position just outlined is confirmed by the fact that the cat which I see and the cat qua now being seen by me under specific circumstances are incompatible in that they can be given to me neither simultaneously nor in one and the same cognitive attitude. When I focus my attention or interest on the latter, i.e., on my present visual cat phenomenon (in the noematic sense of the word), I have to do with the cat in, or with, its present mode of subjectively appearing to me from a certain point of view, in a certain distance, and under certain lighting conditions; and the slightest noticeable change of one of these parameters suffices to make my cat phenomenon shade off into another one out of a continuum of visual phenomena which are related to each other in a specific though familiar way which permits us to interpret them as belonging together or intentionally referring to one and the same cat. But when I focus my attention or interest on this cat itself, i.e., on the cat which I see, then I have to do with an objective animal to the total exclusion of the continually changing modes of its subjectively appearing to me. So the objects which I perceive and the objects qua being perceived by me characteristically differ in that the latter are concrete entities in which every detail counts whereas the former are mere abstractions – abstractions, however, with which for at least two reasons in everyday life we have to content ourselves: First, it is principally impossible to identify and discriminatingly name ‘each and every single segment out of a continuum’ of noematic phenomena shading into, and in this sense belonging to, one another (e.g., my visual phenomena of, or intentionally referring to, one and the same cat sitting in front of me); and second, even if it were possible to do so, adopting such a reflective attitude of heeding the details of phenomenal concretion as our standard attitude would hopelessly overburden us. Rather, in everyday life we have to adopt a straightforward attitude in which we abstract from those details, or ‘look through’ them, and concentrate exclusively upon the things themselves. Correspondingly, I consider the reflective attitude to be a cancellation or suspension of that everyday abstraction, i.e., an uphill attempt to take the conscious phenomena in their full concreteness. In principle – scil., once we have acquired the necessary skill and practice – it is easy to switch to and fro between the straightforward attitude, centered on the things themselves, and the reflective attitude, attending to the wealth of phenomenal continua; but it is out of the question to focus simultaneously on a thing itself and on an element of a phenomenal continuum. Hence the different fields of abstract things themselves and of concrete noematic phenomena, excluding each other to the point of being well comparable to ‘incompatible quantities’ of microphysics, may be taken to define the correlative concepts of objectivity and subjectivity. For this reason I consider subjectivity, i.e., respectively my own conscious experience, to be so different from all objects in the natural world that we may downright call it ‘the negative’ of objective reality. In this sense I cannot but deny that consciousness is a part of nature.” (p )
I have to confess that I find some parts of this passage difficult to unravel, and the motivation for some of it difficult to understand—particularly towards the end. But I will try.
To take the easy bits first, I can understand the desire to understand everyday phenomenology and its objects in a way that avoids reference to an unknowable Kantian thing itself. I grant that it is possible to have an abstract sense of an ‘objective’ cat that somehow underlies the various views that we can have of it (under different lighting conditions, from different angles, and so on). I also would defend a careful, open-ended investigation of an object’s phenomenology to discern what might be revealed about it with careful attention (and which might not have been evident at first glance). That is all part of the European phenomenological tradition—and I have defended a critical version of that tradition in ways that I do not have space to develop here (c.f. Velmans, 2006a).
I have to confess, however, that I do not find Hoche’s attempt to compare our knowledge of cats themselves (or of other entities, events and processes themselves) to the intersection of their phenomenal appearances very useful. Nor, other than the desire to be as “concrete” as one can, is the motivation behind this “purely noematic” analysis apparent. The intuition that there is a reality lying behind phenomenal appearances that is neither entirely manifest in appearances, nor a simple abstraction derived from their convergence, has been an enduring feature of philosophy and empirical investigation for over 2,500 years. It was clear, for example, in the rationalist philosophy of ancient Greece, central to Galileo’s view that mathematics is the language in which the universe is written, and it is fundamental to much of modern science. The evidence that there are knowable aspects of the world, not directly revealed by or reducible to phenomenal appearances is simply overwhelming. To take a banal example, no amount of inspection of the colour red under different lighting conditions, colour contrasts and so on would reveal that it is the human mind/brain’s way of representing, what physics would describe as electromagnetic energy with wavelengths in the region of 700 nanometres. Nor is it obvious how one could deduce that e = mc2, or that eip = -1 from phenomenological convergence. As Dodwell (2000) points out, the latter relationships are quite extraordinary, given that e and p are transcendental numbers (that do not have an exact value), i (the square root of –1) is an imaginary number, and 1 is the most mundane number one can imagine. Of these, only the number 1 could even be said to have exemplars in phenomenal appearances!
Not surprisingly, Hoche’s attempt to force nature and the ways in which it can be known into such a simple mould leads to some counterintuitive conclusions. For example, towards the end of the passage cited above, Hoche decides that “abstract things themselves” defined in his “purely noematic” way constitute objectivity, whereas “concrete noematic phenomena” constitute subjectivity. This is another issue that I do not have space to pursue here—other than to say that in my understanding the relations between subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and “objectivity” are far more complex than this (cf Velmans, 1999, 2000 chapter 8, 2006b). One cannot make sense of them without, for example, understanding how “private” events relate to “public” events and how first- and third-person perspectives relate to each other. Hoche’s analysis also leads him to “deny that consciousness is a part of nature.” Few contemporary students of consciousness would agree with him, as this would block its investigation by any natural means. Reflexive monism asserts the opposite: both our mind/brains and our phenomenal experiences are embedded in, and manifestations of the reality that gives rise to and supports them, making consciousness an integral part of nature that can be investigated by a combination of first- and third-person techniques.
Hoche goes on to admit that
By denying that consciousness is part of nature, “… I may seem to manoeuvre myself in flagrant opposition to all serious contemporary scientists and philosophers, including even the most ‘soft-line’ exponents of non-reductive and non-physicalistic theories of consciousness.” He then tries to justify his sceptical doubts by recourse to a form of ‘semi-behaviourism’ when he notes that as far as he can know the experiences of his fellow men “..their conscious experiences are nothing but stretches of relevant situated behaviour, linguistic as well as non-linguistic. The reasons why I think I ought to defend, if only in this strictly limited version, a kind of old-fashioned behaviouristic ‘nothing-buttery’ are easily stated. First, nowadays only few people are prepared to admit that we have, in one way or other, an immediate access to another person’s subjective experiences. Second, as we had occasion to learn from Frege, Waismann, and Wittgenstein, it does not even make sense to say that somebody else has, or probably has, or possibly has, or possibly has not, conscious experiences similar to my own, from which it follows that all traditional and modern ‘inverted spectrum’ speculations, and even recent reasoning about ‘inverted’, ‘absent’, ‘fading’, and ‘dancing qualia’ […] lack a sound foundation [...]. Third, which is but a corollary, the attribution of consciousness, in the sense of subjective experiences, to other people and higher animals is neither verifiable nor falsifiable and hence not even open to purely empirical hypotheses. And fourth, as we speak about ourselves and our fellow-men in strictly the same interpersonal terminology of ‘psychological’ (or ‘psychical’) verbs and hence are definitely disinclined to deny the existence of ‘other minds’, the best option which I think we have is to identify another person’s perceiving, sensing, feeling, wanting, intending, acting, and the like, with precisely that stretch of his or her situated behaviour on the strength of whose observation we have a right to assert that he or she is perceiving, sensing, feeling, wanting, or intending something, or acting in such-and-such a way, and so forth.” (p )
Given behaviourism’s traditional opposition to incorporating conscious phenomenology into psychological science, or even admitting to its existence, Hoche’s transcendental phenomenology and his ‘semi-behaviourism’ make strange bedfellows. I have given a brief history of behaviourist approaches to consciousness along with an evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses in Velmans (2000, chapter 4) and little purpose will be served by recapitulating this here. Once again, however, Hoche tries to achieve too much with too little. Behaviourism says little about how the mind works, and provides no useful account of conscious experience. Those familiar with experimental psychology will know that despite its popularity in the first half of the 20th Century, from the 1950’s onwards the theoretical poverty of this approach, combined with the availability of more powerful information processing approaches, led to its virtual abandonment in cognitive science. It remains true that the conscious experiences of others cannot be directly accessed from an external observer’s third person perspective. Nevertheless, with the development of increasingly sophisticated combinations of first- and third-person methods, for example in 21st Century cognitive neuroscience, Hoche’s attempt to dismiss consciousness from nature based on a behaviourist understanding of other minds sounds very much like a lone voice from the past.
Hoche concludes his paper with an attempt to reanalyse psychophysical causation. Unfortunately his description of my own approach to this issue, involving dual-aspect, monist ontology, combined with a complimentary first- and third-person perspective epistemology is too cursory to solicit a detailed commentary. Instead he focuses on his own noematic approach, which ironically follows the dual-aspect approach that I develop in rough outline. For example, in Velmans, 1991a,b, 1993, 1996, 2002a,b I have argued that psychophysical causation presents a “causal paradox”: if the mind/brain is viewed from a third-person perspective, consciousness seems to be epiphenomenal, while viewed from a first-person perspective consciousness appears to be central for much of what we do. The challenge is to understand the causal interactions between consciousness and brain in a way that saves both these appearances.
In similar fashion Hoche writes that,
“…although it may be rightly taken for granted that material occurrences out in the world can causally provoke neurophysiological occurrences in my central nervous system as well as pieces of my overt behaviour (and vice versa), strictly speaking neither of them can cause, or be caused by, subjective conscious experiences of mine. Of course it would be preposterous to deny what appears to be clear-cut cases of psychophysical (or physiopsychical) causation; but we are confronted with the challenging task of conceptually reinterpreting such cases so as to agree with the prerequisites of anthropological complementarity properly understood.” (p ).
While this uses different language it expresses a very similar view. And, while Hoche does not formulate a resolution of this paradox in, say, the detail offered in Velmans (2000, chapter 11) or Velmans (2002a), it moves in a similar direction—for example, in his conclusion that correlations between conscious experiences and brain states can only be established intersubjectively (p 27?).
That said, Hoche’s noematic account strips away the ‘glue’ that holds my own account of psychological causation together—i.e. it abandons my suggestion that there really is a mind that really has a nature, in which real causal processes operate, which can be known in two complementary, first- and third-person ways. Hoche’s minimalism is consistent with the position that he adopts throughout his paper. Unwilling to posit any reality behind the appearances other than what can be abstracted from the conjunction of the appearances, he falls victim to the same problem: he can describe the appearances but he can’t explain them—the restricted tools that he permits himself simply cannot do the job.
In conclusion, let me say once again how much I appreciate Hoche’s careful analysis of some aspects of reflexive monism in the first part of his paper. I also respect Hoche’s attempt to argue for a more minimalist “purely noematic”, ‘semi-behaviourist’ position in the later part of his paper. However, in my judgment, his minimalism comes at a cost: his explanations are more complex, explain less, and have many counterintuitive consequences. Given this, I see no reason to abandon the critical realism that grounds reflexive monism. As science and common sense suggest, there really is a world behind the appearances that our percepts and theories represent.
References
Dodwell, P. (2000) Brave New Mind: A Thoughtful Inquiry into the Nature & Meaning of Mental Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Einstein, A. and Infeld, L. (1938) The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta. New York: Clarion Books, Simon & Shuster.
Hoche, H. ‘Reflexive Monism’ versus ‘Complementarism’: An analysis and criticism of the conceptual groundwork of Max Velmans’s ‘reflexive model’ of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (in press).
Kant, I. (1978[1781]) ‘Paralogisms of pure reason’, in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N.K. Smith, London: The Macmillan Press.
Velmans, M. (1991a) Is human information processing conscious? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14(4):651-701
Velmans, M. (1991b) Consciousness from a first-person perspective. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14(4):702-726.
Velmans, M.(1993) Consciousness, causality and complementarity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16(2), 404-416.
Velmans, M. (1996) Consciousness and the “causal paradox.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 19(3), 537-542.
Velmans, M. (1999a) ‘Intersubjective science’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 6(2/3): 299-306.
Velmans, M. (2000) Understanding Consciousness. London: Routledge/Psychology Press.
Velmans, M.(2002a) “How could conscious experiences affect brains?” (Target Article for Special Issue), Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9(11), 3-29.
Velmans, M. (2002b) “Making sense of causal interactions between consciousness and brain.” (reply to eight commentaries on my target article) Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9(11), 69-95.
Velmans, M (2006a) Heterophenomenology versus critical phenomenology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (in press)
Velmans, M. (2006b) An epistemology for the study of consciousness. In M. Velmans and S. Schneider, The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, New York: Blackwell (in press)
1[1] For the purposes of this example we are concerned only with the phenomenology of visual experiences, not with feelings about the cat, thoughts about the cat and so on.
2[2] While these views of the cat itself are numerically and perspectivally different, both S and E experience a cat out in the world, and in this respect their experiences are similar.
3[3] I suggest that phenomenal representations are “in part” constructed by the mind/brain, for the reason that I accept that the mind/brain is in turn embedded in a body, embedded in the world, so in a broader sense the phenomenal representations are constructed by the entire, interacting system.
4[4] We can of course extend the capacities of our perceptual and cognitive systems, by training or with the aid of technology. However, extending the range of our perceptual and cognitive systems does not free them of all constraints.
5[5] This point is supplementary to the classical philosophical distinction between (uncertain) contingent truth and (certain) necessary truth. Scientific knowledge can only be gained by empirical investigation because it is contingent on how the world happens to be (when it could be otherwise). Necessary truths are certain because they are true in any possible universe, so they do not require any empirical investigation.
6[6] Illusory phenomena might not represent anything real (other than the workings of the mind itself), in which case one could think of them as mental constructions which do not represent what they seem to represent. But if they are representations of the world they must tell us something about what the world is “really” like, or they are not representations of the world (in this usage, a complete misrepresentation does not count as a “representation”).
7[7] I use the neutral term “thing” as convenient shorthand here, but leave open the question of whether a given object of knowledge is better thought of as a thing, event, or process.
In Defense of Extreme (Fallibilistic) Apriorism
Barry Smith
Published in: Journal of Libertarian Studies , 12 (1996), 179-192. (This version avoids the misprints)
Introduction
I shall presuppose as undefended background to what follows a position of scientific realism, a doctrine to the effect (i) that the world exists and (ii) that through the working out of ever more sophisticated theories our scientific picture of reality will approximate ever more closely to the world as it really is. Against this background consider, now, the following question:
1. Do the empirical theories with the help of which we seek to approximate a good or true picture of reality rest on any non-empirical presuppositions?
One can answer this question with either a 'yes' or a 'no'. 'No' is the preferred answer of most contemporary methodologists -- Murray Rothbard is one distinguished counterexample to this trend -- who maintain that empirical theories are completely free of non-empirical ('a priori') admixtures and who see science as a matter of the gathering of pure 'data' obtained through simple observation. From such data scientific propositions are then supposed to be somehow capable of being established.
It is one solid result of modern philosophy of science that no such conception of the way scientific knowledge is gained and scientific hypotheses formulated can be acceptable. The philosophy of science has shown that certain categories (conceptions, hypotheses, assumptions) are necessarily presupposed if, for example, an empirical observation is to be scientifically usable. Every observation is in this sense 'theory-' or at least 'category-laden'. One cannot measure anything, and one can bring no results of measurement into correlation with one another, if one does not have prior concepts or categories of what one wants to measure.(1)
To carry out experiments in meaningful and systematic fashion, to represent the results of these experiments theoretically, and to process these results one needs assumptions, concepts, categories and other theoretical instruments. Logic and the theory of definition, as well as many branches of pure mathematics belong to this pre-empirical foundation of the empirical sciences -- 'pre-empirical' in the sense that it cannot be gained through induction or observation but rather makes induction and observation possible.
All scientists bring with them non-empirical presuppositions of different sorts, presuppositions which are usually tacit in nature, which will often seem trivial when made explicit, and which will therefore no less often lend sanction to the view that they are somehow empty or analytic, that they are all without exception derived from logic. Most twentieth-century philosophers of science have indeed assumed as a matter of course that scientific theories ought properly to consist entirely of empirical propositions (propositions amenable to empirical testing) built up on a foundation of strictly analytic propositions of logic and mathematics. This leads to the further question:
2. Are the propositions which express the pre-empirical assumptions of empirical science in every case analytic (tautological, lacking in content)?
'Yes', say the logical positivists. Logic, and all that one can derive from logic, together with conventional definitions, suffice in their view for the purposes of this non-empirical part of science. Many later analytic philosophers have also believed that this logical-positivist conception of the indispensable non-empirical foundation of science is the only one that can be seriously entertained. They have not, however, noticed, that the corresponding analyses even of the simplest examples of non-empirical propositions have still to be provided. Indeed, they let the matter rest at programmatic declarations and did not care about providing examples of any sort.
Consider for example the law of the transitivity of the part-whole relation.(2)
This law reads as follows:
[TRANS] If A is a part of B, and B a part of C, then A is also a part of C.
It may be that some of us may recognize a point in our lives when we first apprehended this law. But still, it is difficult seriously to entertain the thesis that our knowledge of the law is a result of empirical research, of observation and induction. The proposition in question is however clearly of extraordinary importance for every science and for every scientific experiment. Like many other laws pertaining to the simplest and most general relational categories, it is at the same time also entirely trivial. Now it is a common peculiarity of human beings that they like to turn away from trivial or elementary propositions of this sort and that they have a tendency to refuse to accept their peculiarities and their consequences: 'trop de vérité nous étonne', as Pascal once formulated the matter.(3)
Who, after all, is interested in the fact that human action exists, that pleasure is different from greed, that triangles are different from squares, that warnings are different from congratulatings, that Julius Caesar is not a cardinal number. It is for this reason possible that both philosophers and scientists have often overlooked the fact that all normal human beings are in possession of a whole host of such items of knowledge or insight. And for this reason also the temptation very easily arises to want to devalue such propositions by classifying them as 'analytic' or 'tautological' or 'lacking in content'.
The law of the transitivity of the part-whole relation is however - for all its triviality - not analytic according to the standard reading of this notion. According to this standard reading we are to define 'analytic' as follows:
A proposition is analytic if and only if it is either itself a law of deductive logic or it is capable of being transformed into such a law through the replacement of the defined terms it contains with corresponding definitions.
All bachelors are unmarried can be exhibited as analytic in this sense by substituting 'unmarried man' for 'bachelor' and noting that the result is an instance of the logical law All A which are B are B.
[TRANS], now, contains just one term which might come into question as 'defined', namely the relational term 'is a part of'. This expression is not a logical term; axioms governing the corresponding relation will be found in no standard logical textbook, and neither will [TRANS] itself. Unfortunately for the advocates of the logical positivist conception, however, it is also not definable. Rather it presents an example of one of those fundamental concepts with whose help the very process of defining scientific terms can sensibly begin.
According to the definition of 'analytic' that is standardly accepted by logical positivists and by analytic philosophers in general, then, the given law is synthetic. But might one not call into question the preferred definition of 'analytic'? Might one not, with Carnap and others, assert that the truth of a proposition such as [TRANS] is somehow a consequence of the rules of language?(4)
[TRANS] would then be lacking in content in the sense that it would have nothing to do with the actual world but rather only with our language. Yet the given law would clearly still obtain even if no language or rules of language should ever have evolved; indeed it would clearly still obtain even in a world lacking all cognitive subjects. Even then it would still for example be true that, of three arbitrary parts of a stone, or of a planet, if the first is part of the second, and the second part of the third, then the first is also part of the third. To conceive the law of transitivity as 'lacking in content' in the suggested fashion is therefore at least a mite more problematic than the defenders of the corresponding theories have normally supposed.
For this reason I shall assume in what follows that at least some of those non-empirical assumptions or hypotheses which are presupposed by the various branches of science are not analytic. The question then arises:
3. Do we have an infallible knowledge of all the synthetic pre-empirical propositions which are presupposed by the various sciences in the different phases of their development?
Already for purely logical reasons it is impossible that one should answer 'yes' to this question. For such pre-empirical assumptions have not always remained the same through the course of scientific development, and successive assumptions have not always been consistent with one another. As is shown by the developments of the last one hundred years in the relations between geometry and physics, the results of empirical research sometimes seem to exercise a retroactive control over pre-empirical assumptions and lead to their elimination or modification. The realm of the pre-empirical thus provides no royal road to indubitable knowledge. Much rather is synthetic pre-empirical knowledge a hard-fought achievement, and those who seek such knowledge must be ready to face many detours and setbacks on the way.
For the same (logical) reasons we should have to deny the thesis that the synthetic pre-empirical propositions at the core of science might all be true. Even in the realm of the pre-empirical there is no infallible knowledge and no truth-guarantee. We are dealing here with 'assumptions' in a strict sense of the word, assumptions which may, even if only in isolated instances, turn out to be false. Interestingly, traces of this fallibilistic conception of the a priori are present in Husserl, and already Leibniz spoke of a 'methodus conjecturalis a priori', which proceeds with the aid of hypotheses: '[assumere] causas licet sine ulla probatione'.(5)
With this, however, there arises the following question:
4. Could these assumptions be arbitrary?
Feyerabend has given a positive answer to this question, propounding what he calls an 'anarchistic theory of knowledge' and abandoning the scientific goal of truth in favour of a position of epistemological relativism. Feyerabend calls for a maximally broad and 'ever increasing ocean of mutually incompatible (and perhaps even incommensurable) alternatives' - of alternative counter- intuitive (and also 'counter-inductive') theories (1975, p. 30). As soon, however, as we attempt to imagine in concrete fashion what it would mean to practice science (or anything else) consciously and consistently according to the policy of arbitrariness, then we recognize that Feyerabend's doctrine of 'anything goes' is entirely indefensible. For however large and important the role of serendipity in science may be, it is surely obvious that the idea that scientists could apply arbitrary assumptions is impracticable. Even those who hold falsification to be the primary motor of scientific development must insist that the falsification of arbitrary assumptions would be a fruitless enterprise.
This, however, implies that there must be some criteria of evaluation which the scientist applies, whether consciously or not, in working out his assumptions, or through which he allows himself to be guided in determining which assumptions are and are not acceptable.
How, then, does this evaluation of scientific assumptions proceed? The answer to this question that is favoured by the positivists is in its simplest version as follows: we evaluate assumptionsexclusively according to their consequences, i.e. according to the principle of expedience or predictive power. We establish in other words that certain assumptions yield assertions about the future which are empirically confirmed - or at least not easily falsified.
A position of this sort is defended for example by Milton Friedman, at least in his methodological writings (especially his 1953). Friedman maintains that assumptions can be completely arbitrary, that they can even be false, if they only enjoy a certain power to generate predictions. It might for example turn out that an economic theory was developed which correlated stock-market movements with sun-spot activity, and then, so long as this theory enjoyed predictive power, it would as theory be fully acceptable. For the positivists, science evolves by becoming ever more concentrated on assumptions with predictive power. Theories and hypotheses which prove unreliable will be slowly filtered out.
We have accepted already that there can in this sense be a control even of the pre-empirical assumptions adopted by the natural sciences. This can indeed be counted as a scientific commonplace. The corresponding process of filtering out however, whether it is understood according to the classical model of empirical confirmation or according to the Popperian model of falsification, because it is purely retrospective in nature, does not take us further with respect to the just-mentioned problem of arbitrariness. The question of criteria of ex ante evaluation thus remains extent open (a consequence which we could incidentally have predicted, if we had kept in mind the example of pure mathematics, in which pre- (or non-)empirical assumptions are equally necessary, but where talk of predictive power is clearly inappropriate).
For it is of course not the case that the scientist occupies himself with arbitrary assumptions in the hope - and to the extent that the relevant assumptions were truly arbitrary this would have to be a groundless hope - that they will manifest in unexpected fashion a high predictive power. No scientist would ever consciously rely on pure arbitrariness in this fashion. The search for assumptions on the part of the scientist is subject rather to a whole host of ex ante (or as we might also say: a priori) controls. For he seeks only those assumptions which will give him a justified expectation of predictive power. The sun-spot example fails to awaken such expectations precisely because we can find no intelligible reason why sun-spots should cause stock-exchange movements. Even if we were to accept such a correlation as a fact, we would still be unsatisfied with the corresponding hypothesis, because we would feel no certainty that this correlation might not at any moment cease to obtain. Certainty of this sort is acquired only where we have some explanation as to why these and those stock-exchange phenomena are associated in a non-arbitrary fashion with these and those sun-spot phenomena.
What, then, are the criteria of ex ante evaluation which serve to temper arbitrariness? Here there is much that is to be said - for instance that our assumptions must in the normal case stand to other accepted assumptions in relations of logical consistency. For our present purposes however it will suffice to point out that these assumptions must, in general at least, be characterized by a certain plausibility. Scientists attempt to find assumptions in relation to which they can have a justified expectation that they be true.(6)
This holds not least for the category of synthetic pre- empirical assumptions. Indeed we want to claim that with the development of science the relevant synthetic pre-empirical propositions must come to be characterized by such plausibility to an ever increasing degree.Then, however, the question arises:
5. Might this sort of plausibility be always a contextual affair, so that an 'intrinsic' plausibility would be excluded?
It is commonly held that nothing is in itself plausible, that what one finds plausible depends always on one's presuppositions, perhaps also on certain background features of one's society or language, on the current state of the sciences, and so on. The thesis that all the pre-empirical propositions that are of interest to us here might enjoy only this sort of context-determined (perhaps we might call it 'hermeneutical') plausibility, is however rather improbable. I cannot, for example, imagine what it would be like for the plausibility of [TRANS] to be context-dependent in the suggested sense. [TRANS] is clearly accepted by all scientists, and it is presupposed also, it seems, in many of the simplest and most common human activities in all cultures, and it seems to be associated with no specific types of scientific problem or subject-matter. Moreover, it would similarly be difficult to conceive of a purely context-dependent plausibility for propositions like red is different from green or seeing is different from hearing.
There are, it follows, intrinsically plausible pre-empirical assumptions which play an indispensable (if often trivial) role in the advance of science and knowledge. In the philosophical literature on the topic of the a priori it is usually only certain selected examples of such propositions which are treated of, so that it can easily appear as if they could each be shown in turn to be 'analytic' or 'tautological' by some manipulation of definitions.(7)
The question however arises:
6. Whether the intrinsically plausible pre-empirical synthetic propositions which play an indispensable role in the sciences are truly given only individually, i.e. in such a way that there obtains no systematic relation between them?
Kant answered this question in the negative in that the whole of arithmetic and of physics are based in his eyes on synthetic pre-empirical presuppositions. In the last hundred years it has however come to be taken for granted in the literature that we have to deal here with only single, unconnected propositions. Thus for example the logical positivists, in their attempts to demonstrate the analyticity of all pre-empirical assumptions, have over and over again worked with the same few examples: the law of cause and effect, the proposition that nothing can be red and green all over - examples which, in their isolation, can be dismissed as being of at most curiosity interest and of negligible scientific import. A more careful investigation shows, however, that there are whole systems of such pre-empirical propositions, even leaving aside the examples to which Kant himself paid special attention. Not only is mereology a self-contained science of the laws of part and whole,(8)
there are also other sciences - or 'pre-sciences' (Vorwissenschaften) as Husserl's teacher Stumpf called them(9) - which consist exclusively in intrinsically plausible pre-empirical principles. Stumpf himself offers as examples what he called 'phenomenology' (which he defined as the theory of sensible phenomena), 'eidology' (the theory of non-sensory 'formations' given in experience, including value- and Gestalt-formations), and the 'general theory of relations' (the theory of relational concepts such as 'similarity, equality, intensity, logical and real dependence, the relation of part and whole, and so on' (op. cit., p. 37. These pre-sciences are according to Stumpf:
the atrium und the organon of every other science insofar as the object of every science includes their object, since all research makes use of relational concepts and laws ... In an ideal encyclopedia of knowledge everything which can be said about relations between arbitrary elements in general would have to come first (Op. cit., p. 39).
There are therefore, if Stumpf is right, whole systems of synthetic assumptions of a non-empirical sort, assumptions which enjoy an intrinsic plausibility and which play an important (even if easily overlooked) role in the sciences.
Husserl himself held that there were three a priori ontologies, three 'material a priori sciences' of thing, soul, and society: the pure science of nature, pure psychology and pure sociology, respectively. The ontology of things includes as branches the pure theory of space (geometry), pure time theory (chronometry), pure kinematics, and the pure disciplines of the possible deformations of spatial formations. The pure a priori science of the soul, first called by Husserl 'descriptive psychology' and associated with the 'rational psychology' of Christian Wolff has as its subject-matter the psychical experiences, perceptions, memories, imagination, expectations, decisions, choices, and so on, in other words thought experiences of every sort, as well as feelings and acts of will. The regional ontology of society, finally, concerns itself with cultural formations like state, law, custom, church and so on. (Schuhmann 1990)
Husserl's early followers in Munich, the so-called 'realist phenomenologists, and above all Pfänder, Scheler and Reinach, embraced wholeheartedly the project of working out in systematic fashion the entire pantheon of such theories and sub-theories, both formal and material. There are, first of all, the formal a priori disciplines of ontology and mathematics, including arithmetic, set theory, topology, mereology, the 'theory of objects' in Meinong's sense, and many others. We then have a priori disciplines dealing with the three-dimensional world of space and time, and with the objects of nature, including the overlapping disciplines of rational mechanics (Scheler 1913, p. 449n.), naive or qualitative physics (Hayes 1985, Smith and Casati 1994), kinaesiology, stereology, geometry, chronometry, and so on. We then have the various sub-disciplines of aesthesiology (theories of secondary qualities: cf. Witschel 1961): colourology, the a priori science of tones, of feelings of warm and cold, textures and so on. There then follow logic and the various disciplines associated with logic, including the theory of evidence, apophantic logic, concept-theory, decision theory, the logic of truth, and so on. Next come various sciences of 'rational psychology', sciences of beliefs and desires, feelings, values and valuings, including Scheler's material ethics and formal axiology and deontic logic, the a priori theories of imperatives (Pfänder 1982), of norms, of will, a priori aesthetics, the ontology of art and art works developed by Roman Ingarden, and so on. We then have various a priori sciences pertaining to the domain of language and expression (Holenstein 1975), universal and categorial grammars, the a priori sciences of phonology, and the theory of speech acts or categorial pragmatics developed by Reinach (1913; see also Mulligan (ed.), 1987) and later by Austin and Searle. In the same work Reinach conceived the project of a general a priori ontology of the entire domain of social interaction. Sub-branches of the latter might include praxeology, the a priori science of action, the a priori ontology of work, a priori economics, the a priori theory of institutions, of law, a priori politics,(10) the phenomenology of intersubjectivity, the a priori science of dialogue, a priori sociology, a priori geography, the a priori theory of the life world, eidetic history, a priori anthropology, and so on.
Of the non-formal disciplines on this list it is above all two whose principles and applications have been worked out in detail: the a priori theory of law worked out by Reinach in his "The A Priori Foundations of the Civil Law" of 1913 and the a priori science of economics worked out by successive generations of so-called 'Austrian economists' from Menger to Rothbard and beyond. Few in the tradition of Austrian economics have however taken cognisance of the fact that, as Reinach puts it, the realm of the ontological a priori is 'unsurveyably wide; whatever sorts of object we know, they all have their "what", their "essence", and of all essentialities essential laws hold.' (Reinach 1969)
On the standard praxeological account of economic science shared by Mises and Rothbard and succinctly stated in the latter's "In Defense of 'Extreme Apriorism'" of 1957, there are held to be certain fundamental axioms of economics which are both true and such that their truth is grasped immediately. The theorems of economics are then established via logical deduction from these axioms. There is in consequence no need for empirical testing of these theorems, which is fortunate since, as Rothbard points out, empirical testing is in any case impossible in the sciences of human action:
It is physics that knows or can know its "facts" and can test its conclusions against these facts, while being completely ignorant of its ultimate assumptions. In the sciences of human action, on the other hand, ? [t]here is no laboratory where facts can be isolated and controlled; the "facts" of human history are complex ones, resultants of many causes. These causes can only be isolated by theory, theory that is necessarily a priori to these historical (including statistical) facts. (1957, p. 315)
The only way to understand human behaviour, Mises and Rothbard hold, is by means of a priori categories which we are able to recognize in the complex and ever-changing warp and woof of history in virtue of the fact that we are ourselves historical agents who are ready-armed with an intimate knowledge of these categories through our own experience. In a similar way we are able to recognize the presence of instantiations of ethical categories in the warp and woof of history in virtue of the fact that as a result of our own experience as ethical subjects we have an intimate knowledge of ethical categories such as guilt, responsibility, obligation, and so on.
Rothbard draws a distinction between two approaches to the a priori as follows:
Professor Mises, in the neo-Kantian tradition, considers [the law of human action] a law of thought and therefore a categorical truth a priori to all experience. My own epistemological position rests on Aristotle and St. Thomas rather than Kant, and hence I would interpret the proposition differently. I would consider the axiom a law of reality, rather than a law of thought (1957, p. 318).
We are now in a position to understand what Rothbard means here by 'law of reality'. The definitive account of such laws is in fact to be found neither in Rothbard nor in Aristotle and St. Thomas but rather precisely in the writings of the Munich phenomenologists.
How is synthetic a priori knowledge possible? For the members of the Munich group, as also for Aristotle, Aquinas and Rothbard, there exists an ontological a priori, an a priori in reality. The a priori status of judgments, propositions, beliefs or 'laws of thought' that is so central to the Kantian approach then proves to be derivative of this more deep-lying a priori dimension on the side of the things themselves.
According to the Kantian conception, in contrast, science consists not so much in the attempt to construct a system of intrinsically intelligible assumptions, but rather in a 'coercion of nature' ('Nötigung der Natur') of such a sort that the latter comes to be formed in conformity with prior principles. Consider the following passage from Kant's first Critique:
When Galileo caused balls, the weights of which he had himself previously determined, to roll down an inclined plane ?, a light broke upon all students of nature. They learned that reason has insight only into that which it produces after a plan of its own, and that it must not allow itself to be kept, as it were, in nature's leading-strings, but must itself show the way with principles of judgment based upon fixed laws, coercing nature to give answer to questions of reason's own determining. Accidental observations, made in observance to no previously thought-out plan, can never be made to yield a necessary law, which alone reason is concerned to discover.(11)
This passage expresses an important epistemological insight to the effect that scientists, if they seek systematic results in the form of scientific laws, must undertake systematic observations guided by relevant scientific assumptions. Kant and his followers have however drawn ontological questions from this insight. They claim in fact to have shown that the object-domain which is in each case grasped by the scientist must first have been pre-formed and pre-constituted in some peculiar ('transcendental') fashion. This doctrine is then introduced by the Kantians into their explanation of the peculiarity of a priori propositions: the latter are now held to acquire their truth from the fact that we ourselves have in King-Midas-fashion imposed them upon reality, have coerced reality to have it fit our prior prejudices.
Now however we must ask:
7. Is it really true that, as the Kantians assert, intrinsically plausible or intelligible pre-empirical synthetic propositions are in some sense imposed upon the world by cognizing subjects?
That we have to answer 'no' to this question should be clear. Consider once again the example of the law of transitivity as this is applied to the parts of a stone or of a planet. This law would of course hold also in a world without thinking ('forming', 'constituting') subjects. It is thus impossible to conceive it as something subjective (a mere 'law of thought').
The thesis of the supposed subject-dependence of all laws of this kind - as originally formulated by Kant - is moreover not capable of being harmonized with the fact that pre-empirical assumptions are sometimes contradicted through retrospective empirical control. For the assertion that the given laws hold only because we have read them into the structure of the world, that the empirical world of what happens and is the case is itself a product of such reading in, surely excludes the possibility of conflict between such laws and empirical happenings.
The thesis that the world is 'transcendentally' formed leads further to the question why precisely these rather than those transcendental forms should be the ones through which the imposition of structure is effected. Once again, the problem of arbitrariness seems here to raise its ugly head. Many Kantians (and Popperians) are today content with an evolutionistic treatment of this problem. In their eyes those pre-scientific assumptions have come to dominate which enjoyed under the prevailing circumstances a greater capacity for survival or a greater adaptability than the available alternatives. But the proponents of this doctrine appeal in this connection to the results of a science - biology - which itself presupposes very many pre-scientific assumptions of its own. This means that they are precluded from extending their account to at least one important group of pre-scientific assumptions, since the assertion that a science which itself presupposes certain principles can itself serve to justify those principles contains an obvious vicious circle. The striving for a fully adequate picture of reality thus requires an answer to the question as to how pre-scientific assumptions arise and are justified that goes much deeper than the answer of the evolutionists. And as Husserl showed in the "Prolegomena" to his Logical Investigations, the same holds of every attempt to account for such assumptions through appeals to an empirical science.
Our realistic conception of the empirical sciences tells us, however, how we are to formulate an answer of the required sort. The striving on the part of scientists for intelligible assumptions can be justified by appeal to the fact that the world itself possesses certain intelligible structures - structures of the sort which are captured for example in the laws of mereology or colourology. The world itself is in many of its traits in itself intelligible.
The general idea is well conveyed by the Munich phenomenologists, for example by Scheler in his great critique of formalism (and in particular of Kantianism) in ethics (1913/16). Scheler is there concerned to establish the basis of an ethical theory which is 'a priori' in the sense that, as he puts it, 'its propositions are evident and can neither be tested by something that has been found, prior to such testing, by observation and induction nor be refuted by observation and induction' (translation, pp. 47f.) Our knowledge of such a priori propositions is gained by means of what Scheler calls an 'intuition of essences' of the sort that is involved, for example, when we grasp the colour red and grasp that it is different from green or blue, or when we grasp the essential interconnection between red and visual extension. We do not have to observe and check and carry out inductions in order to grasp that red is different from green, or that jealousy is different from greed.
Whenever we have such essences and such interconnections among them (which can be of different kinds, e.g., reciprocal, unilateral, conflicting, or, as in the case of values, ordered as higher and lower), the truth of propositions that find their fulfillment in such essences is totally independent of the entire sphere of observation and description, as well as of what is established in inductive experience. ? Hence the a priori is not dependent on propositions (or even on acts of judgment corresponding to them). It is not dependent, for example, on the form of such propositions and acts (i.e., on "forms of judgments," from which Kant developed his "categories" as "functional laws" of "thinking"). On the contrary, the a priori belongs wholly to the "given" and the sphere of facts. A proposition is only a priori true (or false) insofar as it finds its fulfillment in such "facts". (Scheler 1913/16, p. 448, translation, p. 49)
A priori knowledge thus rests on experience, since everything and anything that is given rests on "experience." He who wishes to call this "empiricism" may do so.(12)
? It therefore is not experience and non-experience, or so-called presuppositions of all possible experience (which would be unexperienceable in every respect), with which we are concerned in the contrast between the a priori and a posteriori; rather, we are concerned with two kinds of experience (translation, p. 52):
On the one hand is immediate intuitive experience of essences such as colours and shapes and their interrelations, and on the other hand is observational experience of what happens and is the case. Now however we have to consider the question:
8. Might the intrinsically plausible pre-empirical synthetic propositions all be false?
Certainly it might be that in the course of scientific development pre-empirical assumptions arise which correspond to no structures in the world and have only a somehow purely pragmatic value. From the realistic standpoint, however, the proportion of true pre-empirical assumptions must be considerable in every phase of this development. For the doctrine of scientific realism asserts not only that the world exists, but also that it corresponds broadly to the ideas we have about it. What the view presented here adds to this doctrine of scientific realism (which is, the reader will remember, here presupposed without argument), is the result that the true picture of reality broad strands of which are already in our possession must consist not only of accidentally true propositions which picture the accidents of reality, but also of true, necessary and contentful propositions which picture certain intelligible structures.
Such propositions can also be called 'a priori'. Note again, however, that the conception of the a priori that is then yielded turns out to be a non-Kantian conception. It claims that, where Kant wanted always to have the a priori viewed as something subjective, something pertaining purely to knowledge, there is in fact such a thing as an a priori in the world.
We affirm simply that there are synthetic intrinsically plausible true propositions, and that science strives to accumulate ever more of these; we do not however affirm that we know (or much less that we have certain knowledge about) which of the available candidates for such propositions are true among those which at any given time play a role in the really existing sciences. The given intelligible structural traits of reality can be overlooked or misinterpreted. The recognition that there are a priori structural traits in the world yields, to repeat, no easy sort of indubitable evidence in relation to the corresponding propositions. This fallibilistic doctrine of a priori laws of reality does however yield a nice solution to one age-old problem facing all defenders of the a priori. How, as Caldwell puts it (1984), does one choose between rival systems all of which claim to rest on a priori foundations? On the non-fallibilistic conception it is difficult to make sense even of the possibility of rival systems of this sort. On the conception here defended, in contrast, the existence of such rival systems can be seen to be a perfectly natural and acceptable consequence of the just-mentioned difficulties we will often fact in coming to know even the intelligible traits of reality. One adjudicates between such systems in the same way, then, in which one adjudicates between all rival scientific hypotheses, namely via a complex mixture of empirical and a priori considerations.
Conclusion
We can summarize the main argument of this paper as follows:
Do the empirical theories with the help of which we seek to approximate a good or true picture of reality rest on any non-empirical presuppositions?
Yes: Extreme empiricists
No: Are the propositions which express these pre-empirical assumptions in every case analytic (tautological, lacking in content)?
Yes: Logical positivists
No: Do we have an infallible knowledge of all the synthetic pre-empirical propositions which are presupposed by the various sciences in the different phases of their development?
Yes: Extreme Cartesians
No: Could these assumptions, which are presupposed by the empirical sciences, be arbitrary?
Yes: Feyerabend
No: The propositions in question must therefore be characterized by a certain plausibility. Is this plausibility always a contextual affair?
Yes: Hermeneutic relativists
No: There is therefore something like an intrinsic plausibility. Are the intrinsically plausible pre-empirical synthetic propositions which play an indispensable role in the sciences given only individually, so that we have only a few isolated examples thereof between which no systematic relations would obtain?
Yes: Ad hoc Kantianism
No: Is it really true, as the Kantians assert, that the intrinsically plausible or intelligible pre-empirical synthetic propositions here at issue are read into or imposed upon the world by us?
Yes: systematic Kantianism
No: Might the intrinsically plausible pre-empirical synthetic propositions all be false?
Yes: Epistemology Nihilism
No: Certain pre-empirical synthetic intrinsically plausible propositions thus require ontological correlates which are their truth-makers: there are intelligible structures in the world, which we could also call 'a priori structures'.
References
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Endnotes
1. See for example Popper 1972, pp. 187ff. A more powerful formulation of this same thesis is to be found already in the writings of Edmund Husserl's teacher Franz Brentano, for example in his 1982, pp. 1-10.
2. See my 1986, § 6 and 1990.
3. Pensées, 199. See Lafuma (ed.), p. 527.
4. See for example Carnap 1947, pp. 222-229.
5. For Husserl's fallibilism see for example his 1913, §§ 137f. and compare Føllesdal 1988. On Leibniz see Schepers 1971, p. 466.
6. Their eventual falsification might then teach us something important and essential. Cf. Popper 1972a, pp. 196f.
7. Against this, see Zelaniec 1992.
8. See chapter 1 of Simons 1987.
9. Stumpf 1907, pp. 39f.
10. See Schuhmann 1988.
11. KrV., B XIII; cf. Popper 1972, p. 189.
12. Compare Rothbard: 'I would consider the axiom [of action] a law of reality rather than a law of thought, and hence "empirical" rather than "a priori." But it should be obvious that this type of "empiricism" is so out of step with modern empiricism that I may just as well continue to call it a priori for present purposes.' (1957, p. 318)
HOW EXPERIENCED PHENOMENA RELATE TO THINGS THEMSELVES: KANT, HUSSERL, HOCHE, AND REFLEXIVE MONISM.
Max Velmans, Department of Psychology, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London SE14 6NW. Email m.velmans@gold.ac.uk
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 2006 (in press)
Abstract. What we normally think of as the “physical world” is also the world as experienced, that is, a world of appearances. Given this, what is the reality behind the appearances, and what might its relation be to consciousness and to constructive processes in the mind? According to Kant, the thing itself that brings about and supports these appearances is unknowable and we can never gain any understanding of how it brings such appearances about. Reflexive monism argues the opposite: the thing itself is knowable as are the processes that construct conscious appearances. Conscious appearances (empirical evidence) and the theories derived from them can represent what the world is really like, even though such empirical knowledge is partial, approximate and uncertain, and conscious appearances are species-specific constructions of the human mind. Drawing on the writings of Husserl, Hoche suggests that problems of knowledge, mind and consciousness are better understood in terms of a “pure noematic” phenomenology that avoids any reference to a “thing itself”. I argue that avoiding reference to a knowable reality (behind appearances) leads to more complex explanations with less explanatory value and counterintuitive conclusions—for example Hoche’s conclusion that consciousness is not part of nature. The critical realism adopted by reflexive monism appears to be more useful, as well as being consistent with science and common sense.
Keywords. Reflexive monism, thing itself, Kant, Husserl, Hoche, Velmans, phenomenology, noematic, knowledge, consciousness, mind
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In everyday life we take it for granted that the world that we see, hear, feel, smell and taste around is the real world—and we normally think of it as the “physical world.” However, the world as perceived is in many respects very different to the world as described by modern physics. This raises an immediate and perennial question: how does the world as perceived relate to what the world is really like? Or, to put in a Kantian way, how does the phenomenal world relate to the “thing itself”?
In Velmans (2000) I have developed a reflexive monist approach to answering this question, and given that aspects of my analysis are often misunderstood or misreported it has been a pleasure for me to see the careful and largely accurate account of some of these aspects given by Hoche (this issue) in the first part of his paper (sections 1 to 6.3 or pages x to y?).
Figure 1. A reflexive model of perception (adapted from Velmans, 1990, 2000)
Given that the following elaboration of my work can be read conjointly with Hoche’s paper, I will not repeat the analysis of reflexive monism that is given there. Put in the briefest terms, the reflexive model of perception shown in Figure 1 shows in microcosm how reflexive monism differs from dualism and reductionism. As shown, light rays reflected from the surface of an entity in the world (a cat) innervate the visual system and initiate perceptual processing. Afferent neurones, and cortical projection areas are activated, along with association areas, long-term memory traces and so on, and neural representations of the initiating event are eventually formed within the brain—in this case, neural representations of a cat. But the entire causal sequence does not end there. S also has a visual experience of a cat and we can ask S what this experience is like. In this case, the proper question to ask is, “What do you see?”[1] According to dualism, S has a visual experience of a cat “in her mind”. According to reductionists there seems to be a phenomenal cat “in S’s mind” but this is really nothing more than a state of her brain. According to the reflexive model, while S is gazing at the cat, her only visual experience of the cat is the cat she sees out in the world. If she is asked to point to this phenomenal cat (her “cat experience”), she should point not to her brain but to the cat as-perceived, out in space beyond the body surface. In this, the way that the cat appears to S is similar to how it appears to E—as a perceived entity out in the world, albeit viewed from S's perspective rather than from E's perspective. [2] In short, an entity in the world is reflexively experienced to be an entity in the world.
It is, of course, impossible to illustrate all the complex relationships that obtain between experiences and the things that they are experiences of, along with the relationships between the “observations” of an external observer trying to make sense of what is going on in S’s mind/brain and the “experiences” of the subject, in such a simple two-dimensional, schematic figure. Unravelling these relationships takes up three chapters (chapters. 6, 7 and 8) of Understanding Consciousness. Given this, it is not surprising that in note 11, Hoche admits to being a little confused about the different ways that I refer to the cat in Figure 1 (throughout the book) depending on the relationship and the perspective under consideration. For example, viewed from the perspective of an external observer E, the cat is the object he can see in the world that causes S’s subjective experience. However, viewed from the perspective of the subject S, the perceived cat is what she experiences. S can’t perceive the causes of her current experience for the reason that the causes of perception operate preconsciously—and once she experiences the cat, these causal antecedents of her current perception have already operated. So, viewed from S’s “subjective” perspective, the perceived cat is the perceptual effect.
Things start to get even more complicated once one accepts that E is also an experiencing agent, with his own subjective perspective. Although he conventionally treats the cat that he can see as the cause of what S experiences, the cat’s visible properties result from his own preconscious perceptual processing, just as they do for S. Strictly speaking therefore, it is not the cat that he experiences that is the initiating cause of S’s perceptual processing, but the entity (or cat) itself.
There is far more to be said about all this, but given that it has all been elaborated elsewhere, and given that Hoche largely finds his way around the complexities, I won’t repeat this here. Rather, I will focus on the one issue that most concerns Hoche—how best to think about the relation of experiences to the things that are experienced.
How experiences relate to things themselves: resemblances to Kant
Hoche rightly describes the analysis that I give of this issue as “quasi Kantian”. In making a connection with aspects of Kantian thought (in Velmans, 2000, chapter 7), my intent was both to acknowledge the priority of his work and to take the opportunity of placing my own work in an appropriate context. Given this background, it is easier to understand and assess this aspect of reflexive monism, not just in terms of major similarities to Kantian thought, but also in terms of major points of difference. Put very briefly, the main points of similarity, as I see them, are
1. Kant argued that the “physical world” that we experience consists of phenomena. That is, “External objects (bodies) ... are mere appearances, and are, therefore, nothing but a species of my representations.” (Kant, 1781, p346). The brief description of the reflexive model of perception given above makes the same point, although it gets to it from a different direction.
2. Kant argued that these appearances are shaped by pre-existing categories of the mind, and I similarly accept that experienced phenomena are at least in part a construction of perceptual and cognitive processes that operate in the human mind/brain.[3]
3. I accept (as Kant did) that human knowledge is constrained by the organs of knowledge (by the perceptual and cognitive processes that operate in the mind/brain).
Consequently
4. It is a mistake to confuse the phenomenal world constructed by the mind/brain with the world itself (variously termed the thing itself, the thing-itself, the thing-in-itself, reality itself, nature itself and other usages).
Indeed I think it worth stressing that these basic points have far older roots, in elements of Hindu and Buddhist thought and in the philosophy of Ancient Greece.
How experiences relate to things themselves: differences from Kant
However, unlike Kant, I argue that the thing itself is knowable, and given the fundamental nature of this difference, Hoche thinks that “it may seem doubtful whether Velmans was well advised referring to Kant at all” (p11?). He may be right.
According to Kant, the separation of the phenomenal world from the thing itself produces a clear separation between what can and cannot be known. One can know and explore the nature of the phenomenal world, and the "thing itself" is a transcendental reality that lies behind and brings about what we perceive. But, how it does so, “.... is a question which no human being can possibly answer. This gap in our knowledge can never be filled” (Ibid, p359). And, because our "representations" are all that we experience, he concludes that of the thing itself, “... we can have no knowledge whatsoever...." and "... we shall never acquire any concept.” (Ibid, p360)
I do not wish to skate over the fundamental problems raised by Kant’s analysis of how the mind’s own nature constrains what it can know. Kant is surely right to point out that we cannot have knowledge of “reality” in a way that is free of the limitations of our own perceptual and cognitive systems.[4] We cannot make observations that are “objective” in the sense of being observer-free, or have knowledge that is unconstrained by the way that our cognitive processes operate. Our knowledge is filtered through and conditioned by the sensory, perceptual and cognitive systems we use to acquire that knowledge. Given this, we cannot assume that our representations provide observer-free knowledge of the world as it is in itself.
Nor is empirical, representational knowledge certain knowledge. For representational knowledge it is easy to see why this is so. Whether the representations be in humans, non-human animals or machines, a representational system can only have (access to) its own representations of that which it represents. Consequently, a system’s representations define the limits of its current knowledge. Lacking any other access to some ultimate reality or “thing itself,” there is no way that a representational system can be certain that its representations are accurate or complete.[5]
Uncertainty therefore appears to be intrinsic to representational knowledge. Kant’s view that the thing itself is unknowable is nevertheless extreme. Knowledge that is uncertain and conditioned by the perceptual/cognitive processing of a knowing agent is still knowledge. So even if one accepts that knowledge of what the world is really like can only be partial, species-specific and tentative, it does not follow that the world itself is unknowable. Although it is logically possible that the world that we experience is entirely illusory (along with the concepts and theories we have about it), the circumstantial evidence against this is immense. We necessarily base our interactions with the world on the experiences, concepts and theories we have of it and these representations enable us to interact with it quite well. Kant’s extreme position is in any case self-defeating. If we can know nothing about the “real” world then no genuine knowledge of any kind is possible whether in philosophy or science – in which case one cannot know that that the thing itself is unknowable, or anything else.
Interpreted in Kant’s way, a theory of knowledge based on representations grounded in an unknowable “thing-itself” is also internally inconsistent. If the appearances of the external world are not representations of some aspect of the thing itself, then these appearances cannot really be representations, as there is nothing else for them to be representations of. Conversely, if they are representations of some aspect of the thing itself, the latter cannot be unknowable.[6] Similarly, if we can “never acquire any concept” about what the world is really like, then our concepts and theories cannot be about anything “real.” Conversely, if these do provide a measure of knowledge about how things really are, then it cannot be true that of the thing itself “we can have no knowledge whatsoever.”
In sum, although there are no empirical certainties, one is ultimately left with a pragmatic choice: either our representations of the world tell us nothing about it (in which case all of our so-called knowledge must be groundless) or we adopt a form of critical realism in which our perceptual representations are taken to represent real things in a species-specific, sometimes useful, albeit uncertain way. I would argue that the latter provides a sounder foundation for a theory of knowledge. Broadly speaking, it is also the view adopted within modern science.
Einstein & Infeld, for example, admit that
“Physical concepts are free creations of the human mind, and are not, however it may seem, uniquely determined by the external world. In our endeavour to understand reality we are somewhat like a man trying to understand the mechanism of a closed watch. He sees the face and the moving hands, even hears its ticking, but he has no way of opening the case. If he is ingenious he may form some picture of a mechanism which could be responsible for all the things he observes, but he may never be quite sure his picture is the only one which could explain his observations. He will never be able to compare his picture with the real mechanism and he cannot even imagine the possibility of the meaning of such a comparison.” (Einstein & Infeld, 1938, p31)
It is nevertheless implicit that, for Einstein & Infeld, there really is a “closed watch” and that the “moving hands” and “ticking” tell us something (albeit uncertain) about its nature on which our theories about it can be based. Reflexive monism adopts a similar “critical realism”.
Critical realism in the reflexive model
The reflexive model makes the conventional assumption that causal sequences in normal perception are initiated by real things in the external world, body or brain.[7] Barring illusions and hallucinations our consequent experiences represent those things. Our concepts and theories provide alternative representations of those things. While neither our experiences nor our concepts and theories are the things themselves, in reflexive monism, things themselves remain the true objects of knowledge.
Although this position is neo-Kantian in some respects, the role that the “thing itself” plays is very different. Rather than the thing-itself (the “real” nature of the world) being unknowable, one cannot make sense of knowledge without it, even if we can only know this “reality” in an incomplete, uncertain, species-specific way. Conversely, if the thing itself cannot be known, then we can know nothing, for the thing itself is all there is to know.
Nor, in reflexive monism, can a sharp division be drawn between the phenomenal world and the thing itself that gives rise to it. Rather, both our mind/brains and our phenomenal experiences are embedded in, and manifestations of the reality that gives rise to and supports them—which has obvious consequences for what that reality must be like. Even if we cannot know that reality or thing itself as it is in itself, completely or with certainty, we can say that it must have the power to give rise to the particular configuration of mind/brain states and phenomenal experience that we can in principle observe and investigate (for example, with the technologies of neuroscience).
And even without such specialised technologies, we can, with reasonable confidence, say something about how mind/brains relate to phenomenal experiences. Broadly speaking, conscious experiences are both produced by mind/brains embedded in and interacting with their surrounds, and represent those surrounds or, in cases of self-reflection, represent their own operations (in the form of conscious feelings, thoughts, dreams, images and so on). It also seems reasonable to suppose that the forms that these mental representations take have developed under the constraints of biological evolution. Taken together, these suppositions provide reasonable grounds for a form of pragmatic epistemology. Being differentiated parts of the world that have evolved in a way that encourages successful interaction with (the rest of) that world, it is not surprising that our percepts and cognitions represent in a rough and ready way what the world is really like. Creatures that systematically misrepresent the world are unlikely to survive. Consequently, it is likely that, in a rough and ready way, our percepts and useful cognitions represent aspects of the (manifest) thing-itself.
In sum, knowledge is possible for the reason that both the organs of knowledge and the knowledge that they produce are manifestations of the same underlying reality, shaped by the constraints of evolution—and more to the point, knowledge in the broadest sense, is self knowledge (knowledge of the thing-itself by knowing creatures that are its own manifestations). From a reflexive monist point of view, we literally participate in the process whereby the thing itself knows itself.
Things themselves versus noematic phenomena in the Husserlian sense
According to Kant, phenomenal representations cannot be taken to represent what the world is really like because the thing itself is unknowable. According to reflexive monism, useful phenomenal representations can be taken to represent what the world is really like, because the thing itself is knowable, albeit in an uncertain, partial, approximate, species-specific way. According to Hoche, neither of these views has a secure basis. Instead, the relation of phenomenal representations to their objects should be understood as the relation of ‘noematic phenomena’ to the ‘noematic objects themselves’ that they represent (or ‘intentionally relate’ to), a terminology and conceptual system that he adapts from the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl.
If I understand it rightly, the point of departure for Hoche’s analysis is a fundamental point on which we agree—that in terms of phenomenology, there is no difference between a percept of an object and the object as perceived (see the simple description of the reflexive model of perception above). In my own analysis I nevertheless stress that there is a causal sequence in visual perception: light rays reflected from the surfaces of an object in the world activate processing in the visual system that eventually results in a percept of that object, which is (reflexively) seen as an object in the world. Consequently, although no phenomenological distinction can be drawn between a “percept of an object” and the “object as perceived”, a distinction can be drawn between these terms in two other ways: (a) these phrases direct our attention in different ways—the phrase “object as perceived” foregrounds or focuses attention on the object that is the initiating cause of perceptual processing, while the phrase “percept of the object” foregrounds the resulting percept or experience. (b) if we are interested in what the object that initiated processing is really like (as opposed to what it looks like) we can investigate it more deeply (e.g. with physical instruments), thereby (in my terms) penetrating more deeply into the nature of the object (or thing) itself. As such investigations proceed we may come to have very different views about the nature of the object (including, for example, quantum mechanical ones), even if the object itself does not change. Consequently, as I point out in Velmans (2000), the thing itself may also be thought of as a “reference fixer” required to make sense of the fact that we can have multiple investigations, experiences, concepts or theories of the same thing.
Drawn to Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology, Hoche rejects the suggestion that there must ultimately be some “thing itself” that initiates perceptual processing which the resulting percept, in turn, represents. He nevertheless accepts that there must be an object that is experienced. Consequently he tries to make sense of the relation between an “object as perceived” and a “percept of that object” purely in terms of phenomenology, by arguing that with a little bit of further work on distinction (a) above, one can do away with distinction (b). According to him
“..the relation that obtains between those multifarious experiences and the one and same thing of which they are experiences can be aptly described in terms of ‘transcendental phenomenology’, especially in the ‘purely noematic’ version of it which I have developed elsewhere. On the face of it, the defining characteristic of such a ‘purely noematic phenomenology’ (or ‘pure noematics’) is the very point Velmans tries to drive home, namely, the assumption that, contrary to first appearances and engrained prejudices, we are not genuinely justified in making a distinction between a given subject’s conscious experience of an object at a certain moment in time and this object as experienced by that subject at that moment. Unlike Velmans, however, the advocate of such a purely noematic view of consciousness takes the terminological distinction between ‘the object (experienced)’ and ‘the object as experienced’ to be highly significant. A simple case in point is again Velmans’s example of my own seeing a cat. When I see a cat, the relevant conscious experience, to wit, my visual perception of it – or, speaking more down to earth: my seeing it – should again be considered to be the cat as seen, but unlike Velmans by these words I suggest one ought to understand, not simply the cat (which is) seen, that is, the cat as a Kantian ‘phenomenon’, but the cat as, qua, or in its capacity of being seen by me at the given moment in the given particular way, that is, as a ‘(noematic) phenomenon’ in the Husserlian sense. (p )
In footnote 16, Hoche goes on to explain that “Such noematic ‘phenomena’, or ‘objects in their capacity of being perceived’ by me at a certain moment in time, may be well compared to a bunch, or bundle, of rays or straight lines intersecting each other in one and the same point, which, for its part, would then correspond to the noematic ‘object itself’ – or, I take it, to what Velmans (2000: 163) calls the ‘reference fixer’”.
Hoche goes on to explain that
“ The position just outlined is confirmed by the fact that the cat which I see and the cat qua now being seen by me under specific circumstances are incompatible in that they can be given to me neither simultaneously nor in one and the same cognitive attitude. When I focus my attention or interest on the latter, i.e., on my present visual cat phenomenon (in the noematic sense of the word), I have to do with the cat in, or with, its present mode of subjectively appearing to me from a certain point of view, in a certain distance, and under certain lighting conditions; and the slightest noticeable change of one of these parameters suffices to make my cat phenomenon shade off into another one out of a continuum of visual phenomena which are related to each other in a specific though familiar way which permits us to interpret them as belonging together or intentionally referring to one and the same cat. But when I focus my attention or interest on this cat itself, i.e., on the cat which I see, then I have to do with an objective animal to the total exclusion of the continually changing modes of its subjectively appearing to me. So the objects which I perceive and the objects qua being perceived by me characteristically differ in that the latter are concrete entities in which every detail counts whereas the former are mere abstractions – abstractions, however, with which for at least two reasons in everyday life we have to content ourselves: First, it is principally impossible to identify and discriminatingly name ‘each and every single segment out of a continuum’ of noematic phenomena shading into, and in this sense belonging to, one another (e.g., my visual phenomena of, or intentionally referring to, one and the same cat sitting in front of me); and second, even if it were possible to do so, adopting such a reflective attitude of heeding the details of phenomenal concretion as our standard attitude would hopelessly overburden us. Rather, in everyday life we have to adopt a straightforward attitude in which we abstract from those details, or ‘look through’ them, and concentrate exclusively upon the things themselves. Correspondingly, I consider the reflective attitude to be a cancellation or suspension of that everyday abstraction, i.e., an uphill attempt to take the conscious phenomena in their full concreteness. In principle – scil., once we have acquired the necessary skill and practice – it is easy to switch to and fro between the straightforward attitude, centered on the things themselves, and the reflective attitude, attending to the wealth of phenomenal continua; but it is out of the question to focus simultaneously on a thing itself and on an element of a phenomenal continuum. Hence the different fields of abstract things themselves and of concrete noematic phenomena, excluding each other to the point of being well comparable to ‘incompatible quantities’ of microphysics, may be taken to define the correlative concepts of objectivity and subjectivity. For this reason I consider subjectivity, i.e., respectively my own conscious experience, to be so different from all objects in the natural world that we may downright call it ‘the negative’ of objective reality. In this sense I cannot but deny that consciousness is a part of nature.” (p )
I have to confess that I find some parts of this passage difficult to unravel, and the motivation for some of it difficult to understand—particularly towards the end. But I will try.
To take the easy bits first, I can understand the desire to understand everyday phenomenology and its objects in a way that avoids reference to an unknowable Kantian thing itself. I grant that it is possible to have an abstract sense of an ‘objective’ cat that somehow underlies the various views that we can have of it (under different lighting conditions, from different angles, and so on). I also would defend a careful, open-ended investigation of an object’s phenomenology to discern what might be revealed about it with careful attention (and which might not have been evident at first glance). That is all part of the European phenomenological tradition—and I have defended a critical version of that tradition in ways that I do not have space to develop here (c.f. Velmans, 2006a).
I have to confess, however, that I do not find Hoche’s attempt to compare our knowledge of cats themselves (or of other entities, events and processes themselves) to the intersection of their phenomenal appearances very useful. Nor, other than the desire to be as “concrete” as one can, is the motivation behind this “purely noematic” analysis apparent. The intuition that there is a reality lying behind phenomenal appearances that is neither entirely manifest in appearances, nor a simple abstraction derived from their convergence, has been an enduring feature of philosophy and empirical investigation for over 2,500 years. It was clear, for example, in the rationalist philosophy of ancient Greece, central to Galileo’s view that mathematics is the language in which the universe is written, and it is fundamental to much of modern science. The evidence that there are knowable aspects of the world, not directly revealed by or reducible to phenomenal appearances is simply overwhelming. To take a banal example, no amount of inspection of the colour red under different lighting conditions, colour contrasts and so on would reveal that it is the human mind/brain’s way of representing, what physics would describe as electromagnetic energy with wavelengths in the region of 700 nanometres. Nor is it obvious how one could deduce that e = mc2, or that eip = -1 from phenomenological convergence. As Dodwell (2000) points out, the latter relationships are quite extraordinary, given that e and p are transcendental numbers (that do not have an exact value), i (the square root of –1) is an imaginary number, and 1 is the most mundane number one can imagine. Of these, only the number 1 could even be said to have exemplars in phenomenal appearances!
Not surprisingly, Hoche’s attempt to force nature and the ways in which it can be known into such a simple mould leads to some counterintuitive conclusions. For example, towards the end of the passage cited above, Hoche decides that “abstract things themselves” defined in his “purely noematic” way constitute objectivity, whereas “concrete noematic phenomena” constitute subjectivity. This is another issue that I do not have space to pursue here—other than to say that in my understanding the relations between subjectivity, intersubjectivity, and “objectivity” are far more complex than this (cf Velmans, 1999, 2000 chapter 8, 2006b). One cannot make sense of them without, for example, understanding how “private” events relate to “public” events and how first- and third-person perspectives relate to each other. Hoche’s analysis also leads him to “deny that consciousness is a part of nature.” Few contemporary students of consciousness would agree with him, as this would block its investigation by any natural means. Reflexive monism asserts the opposite: both our mind/brains and our phenomenal experiences are embedded in, and manifestations of the reality that gives rise to and supports them, making consciousness an integral part of nature that can be investigated by a combination of first- and third-person techniques.
Hoche goes on to admit that
By denying that consciousness is part of nature, “… I may seem to manoeuvre myself in flagrant opposition to all serious contemporary scientists and philosophers, including even the most ‘soft-line’ exponents of non-reductive and non-physicalistic theories of consciousness.” He then tries to justify his sceptical doubts by recourse to a form of ‘semi-behaviourism’ when he notes that as far as he can know the experiences of his fellow men “..their conscious experiences are nothing but stretches of relevant situated behaviour, linguistic as well as non-linguistic. The reasons why I think I ought to defend, if only in this strictly limited version, a kind of old-fashioned behaviouristic ‘nothing-buttery’ are easily stated. First, nowadays only few people are prepared to admit that we have, in one way or other, an immediate access to another person’s subjective experiences. Second, as we had occasion to learn from Frege, Waismann, and Wittgenstein, it does not even make sense to say that somebody else has, or probably has, or possibly has, or possibly has not, conscious experiences similar to my own, from which it follows that all traditional and modern ‘inverted spectrum’ speculations, and even recent reasoning about ‘inverted’, ‘absent’, ‘fading’, and ‘dancing qualia’ […] lack a sound foundation [...]. Third, which is but a corollary, the attribution of consciousness, in the sense of subjective experiences, to other people and higher animals is neither verifiable nor falsifiable and hence not even open to purely empirical hypotheses. And fourth, as we speak about ourselves and our fellow-men in strictly the same interpersonal terminology of ‘psychological’ (or ‘psychical’) verbs and hence are definitely disinclined to deny the existence of ‘other minds’, the best option which I think we have is to identify another person’s perceiving, sensing, feeling, wanting, intending, acting, and the like, with precisely that stretch of his or her situated behaviour on the strength of whose observation we have a right to assert that he or she is perceiving, sensing, feeling, wanting, or intending something, or acting in such-and-such a way, and so forth.” (p )
Given behaviourism’s traditional opposition to incorporating conscious phenomenology into psychological science, or even admitting to its existence, Hoche’s transcendental phenomenology and his ‘semi-behaviourism’ make strange bedfellows. I have given a brief history of behaviourist approaches to consciousness along with an evaluation of their strengths and weaknesses in Velmans (2000, chapter 4) and little purpose will be served by recapitulating this here. Once again, however, Hoche tries to achieve too much with too little. Behaviourism says little about how the mind works, and provides no useful account of conscious experience. Those familiar with experimental psychology will know that despite its popularity in the first half of the 20th Century, from the 1950’s onwards the theoretical poverty of this approach, combined with the availability of more powerful information processing approaches, led to its virtual abandonment in cognitive science. It remains true that the conscious experiences of others cannot be directly accessed from an external observer’s third person perspective. Nevertheless, with the development of increasingly sophisticated combinations of first- and third-person methods, for example in 21st Century cognitive neuroscience, Hoche’s attempt to dismiss consciousness from nature based on a behaviourist understanding of other minds sounds very much like a lone voice from the past.
Hoche concludes his paper with an attempt to reanalyse psychophysical causation. Unfortunately his description of my own approach to this issue, involving dual-aspect, monist ontology, combined with a complimentary first- and third-person perspective epistemology is too cursory to solicit a detailed commentary. Instead he focuses on his own noematic approach, which ironically follows the dual-aspect approach that I develop in rough outline. For example, in Velmans, 1991a,b, 1993, 1996, 2002a,b I have argued that psychophysical causation presents a “causal paradox”: if the mind/brain is viewed from a third-person perspective, consciousness seems to be epiphenomenal, while viewed from a first-person perspective consciousness appears to be central for much of what we do. The challenge is to understand the causal interactions between consciousness and brain in a way that saves both these appearances.
In similar fashion Hoche writes that,
“…although it may be rightly taken for granted that material occurrences out in the world can causally provoke neurophysiological occurrences in my central nervous system as well as pieces of my overt behaviour (and vice versa), strictly speaking neither of them can cause, or be caused by, subjective conscious experiences of mine. Of course it would be preposterous to deny what appears to be clear-cut cases of psychophysical (or physiopsychical) causation; but we are confronted with the challenging task of conceptually reinterpreting such cases so as to agree with the prerequisites of anthropological complementarity properly understood.” (p ).
While this uses different language it expresses a very similar view. And, while Hoche does not formulate a resolution of this paradox in, say, the detail offered in Velmans (2000, chapter 11) or Velmans (2002a), it moves in a similar direction—for example, in his conclusion that correlations between conscious experiences and brain states can only be established intersubjectively (p 27?).
That said, Hoche’s noematic account strips away the ‘glue’ that holds my own account of psychological causation together—i.e. it abandons my suggestion that there really is a mind that really has a nature, in which real causal processes operate, which can be known in two complementary, first- and third-person ways. Hoche’s minimalism is consistent with the position that he adopts throughout his paper. Unwilling to posit any reality behind the appearances other than what can be abstracted from the conjunction of the appearances, he falls victim to the same problem: he can describe the appearances but he can’t explain them—the restricted tools that he permits himself simply cannot do the job.
In conclusion, let me say once again how much I appreciate Hoche’s careful analysis of some aspects of reflexive monism in the first part of his paper. I also respect Hoche’s attempt to argue for a more minimalist “purely noematic”, ‘semi-behaviourist’ position in the later part of his paper. However, in my judgment, his minimalism comes at a cost: his explanations are more complex, explain less, and have many counterintuitive consequences. Given this, I see no reason to abandon the critical realism that grounds reflexive monism. As science and common sense suggest, there really is a world behind the appearances that our percepts and theories represent.
References
Dodwell, P. (2000) Brave New Mind: A Thoughtful Inquiry into the Nature & Meaning of Mental Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Einstein, A. and Infeld, L. (1938) The Evolution of Physics: From Early Concepts to Relativity and Quanta. New York: Clarion Books, Simon & Shuster.
Hoche, H. ‘Reflexive Monism’ versus ‘Complementarism’: An analysis and criticism of the conceptual groundwork of Max Velmans’s ‘reflexive model’ of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (in press).
Kant, I. (1978[1781]) ‘Paralogisms of pure reason’, in Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, translated by N.K. Smith, London: The Macmillan Press.
Velmans, M. (1991a) Is human information processing conscious? Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14(4):651-701
Velmans, M. (1991b) Consciousness from a first-person perspective. Behavioral and Brain Sciences 14(4):702-726.
Velmans, M.(1993) Consciousness, causality and complementarity. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16(2), 404-416.
Velmans, M. (1996) Consciousness and the “causal paradox.” Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 19(3), 537-542.
Velmans, M. (1999a) ‘Intersubjective science’, Journal of Consciousness Studies 6(2/3): 299-306.
Velmans, M. (2000) Understanding Consciousness. London: Routledge/Psychology Press.
Velmans, M.(2002a) “How could conscious experiences affect brains?” (Target Article for Special Issue), Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9(11), 3-29.
Velmans, M. (2002b) “Making sense of causal interactions between consciousness and brain.” (reply to eight commentaries on my target article) Journal of Consciousness Studies, 9(11), 69-95.
Velmans, M (2006a) Heterophenomenology versus critical phenomenology. Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences (in press)
Velmans, M. (2006b) An epistemology for the study of consciousness. In M. Velmans and S. Schneider, The Blackwell Companion to Consciousness, New York: Blackwell (in press)