Logos

by Tallis Raymond

  Frequently, of course, sense-making is more than just a matter of waiting. It is the product of active investigation: parting the bushes to identify what is making the rustling noise; turning an object over to see what it is; climbing to the top of a tree to find the source of an illumination. The investigations seeking the answers to local “whats” and “whys” are often solitary rather than systematic. Under such (customary) circumstances, they may be so much part of a seamless flow of individual experience that the notion of (distinct) “explanation” hardly gets a toe-hold. There are simply local realizations – “recognitions” – that are inseparable from seeing, hearing, or otherwise sensing.

  Ultimately, we come to more complex, purposive sense-making journeys, explorations, where we seek in order to find, where we look out for signs, or make measurements and, having made measurements, compare our findings with others, see patterns, and make calculations on the basis of them, ascending from a series of individual measurements to a perceived pattern and, descending from the pattern, anticipate, or count on, an individual outcome. The purposive search for sense, for explanation, may be driven by puzzlement (coloured by a range of feelings ranging from idle curiosity to fear) that demands relief. In saying this, I am highlighting something that is insufficiently noticed: the widening distance between informal, continuous sense experience – where solutions to puzzles are as it were in a solvent – and formal planned observations leading eventually to precise measurements in the context of scientific questions, to the production of theories, and the putting of those theories to practical use; between the continuity of fulfilled expectations that are visible only when they are unexpectedly defeated, and – via basic and less basic “sussing out” and crossword-level puzzling and proofs that seem satisfactory – the “Eureka!” moments that have echoed down the years. Such moments may still be driven by sense experience. After all, the original Eureka moment, was made possible by Archimedes going back to sensory basics and seeing the water rise as he stepped into his bath, thus enabling him to reach the solution to a problem he had failed to solve by abstract thought.5

  Thus, aspects of the ascent from the basic connectedness of successive moments, the recognition that “what is going on now” as part of something that is ongoing, to the sense that what is going on here can be relied upon to be happening elsewhere, indeed everywhere, to ever-growing powers of prediction, ceaselessly strengthened by reflected-upon correction.

  Sense-making above a very elementary level is often a shared activity, even though the cooperating partners may not be physically co-present. It begins with manifestly joined attention which in turn presupposes a complex awareness of another person, or groups of one’s fellows, as we draw on a common pool of sense and sense-making. From our earliest months, we are surrounded by explainers, classifiers and connectors – foremost among them our parents, and others responsible for our upbringing. This development of shared sense-making is an essential step in the cognitive growth of humanity away from the animal umwelt. At any rate, the joint pursuit, or confirmation, of the sense we have made ranges from puzzling together over the nature of something jointly visible, “that thing over there”, to the mighty collective enterprises of science in the research laboratory; from the child’s “Wazzat?” to CERN, where sustained, formalized, funded, regulated curiosity is directed towards an agreed set of questions.

  Sense-making is simplifying. The infinitely complex reality that surrounds us is treated largely as foreground signal to background noise. Our senses are filters and that which is not filtered out is itself subject to further filtration, as the non-salient is exiled to a penumbra of relative inattention. This is evident at a very basic level: active looking (as opposed to mere gawping) involves overlooking: seeing that thing over there, my gaze overflies everything that intervenes between me and it. The most powerful and effective mode of simplification is something deeply mysterious: the generalizing ability of our consciousness – more broadly of our mind (as some classification may be unconscious or liminal). We see an individual as an instance of a type and, conversely, see types as instantiated in individuals. Very little of the observed item is registered in the process of whatever is necessary to diagnose its general nature, to allocate it to a class. To describe something as a “tree” is to overlook the millions of individual leaves, its height and location, the patterns in its bark, and so on.

  It scarcely needs saying that the generalizing capacity of human consciousness is vastly extended, and its products stabilized so that they can be further built upon, by speech and writing. Language gives generality a realm of its own and relocates a world of items set out in physical space to a different kind of space that we may call “hermeneutic”, “semantic”, “discursive”, “rational” or “truth value” space. Its inhabitants are set out in a manner entirely different from the side-by-side of material objects. The boundless multi-dimensional trellis of articulated meaning does not fit into the physical world. Its elements do not map onto points in the space and time occupied by things we walk between, as moving bodies between other bodies. It is this that lies behind the truth, articulated by the cognitive psychologist Jerry Fodor that “the semantic (and/or the intentional) will prove permanently recalcitrant to integration in the natural order.”6

  As has been observed since ancient Greek philosophy, the relationship between particulars and the general classes to which they are allocated is teasingly chicken-and-egg. The class of “stones” is built up out of individual stones but stones can be allocated to that class only if we have the idea of the latter beforehand. Without the idea of a class of stones, I could not know that this item is a stone, or that this item and that item are both to be allocated to the class of stone; and without stones the class would be empty. Given, however, that we enter a world populated by classifiers (our fellow humans), we are presented with the chickens and the eggs side by side.

  Even so, the transformation of “what is in front of us” into membership of classes has provoked much, and much profound, discussion. The menagerie of classes makes explicit the mystery of generality in a physical world constituted of particular items. The problem of “universals” has been a major strand in the history of thought, and rightly so. To look at a cup, occupying a location in space, and enduring over a definite stretch of time, and to connect it by membership of a class with a realm that is not so located, is to exercise a fundamental power of our own consciousness and of ourselves as sense-making animals.

  It is hardly surprising that the classes to which items are allocated – stabilized in words – were elevated into the Forms and Ideas of Plato and construed as inhabitants of a divine realm. The Platonic story respects the miracle of our own understanding, evident even in this, its seemingly most elementary, form. The Platonic divine realm is a projection – from our sense of our own transcendence of the material world in which we are bodily located. Ideas of the eternal, disembodied mind, spirit, or soul of human beings are nourished by the Platonization of the seemingly humble notion of distinct classes that find a home in them. To reject these items as the “mere” result of reification of the referents of general terms, is to miss something important. Universals are a striking reflection of the mystery of the explicit generality that lies at the heart of sense-making. This remains true irrespective of whether universals are understood realistically, as (say) properties that exist in themselves, or in a nominalist fashion in which they are identical with certain linguistic predicates.

  The extreme realism of the Platonist tendency to manufacture supernatural entities out of the classes to which we allocate objects – and consequently to envisage a world parallel to (and even superior to) that which is accessed by our senses – has complex roots. It may be in part due to the two-faced nature of words as on the one hand verbal tokens that can be seen and heard and, on the other, the invisible and inaudible verbal types (such as the names of classes) they instantiate and that to which they refer. In virtue of being written dow
n or spoken on an individual occasion, they are separate from the items they can be used to mean, even when those meanings constitute reference to particular entities. The classes can be tokenized in a locality – as in the case of the words on this page you are reading – but they are not themselves confined to any place where a token occurs. They seem to have a reality other than (and, for Platonists, superior to) the transient material of the tokens that express them. Classes, unlike classified individuals, do not occur.

  The Platonic vision inadvertently highlights something else that reaches to the heart of the (uniquely human) relationship to the world. A classified object is not merely a stimulus whose sense is tied to a mandated response. Take something simple such as a cup. It is out there; I recognize it for what it is; I may use it to drink from; or simply note it; or I classify it in another way – as, for example, an item to measure out a quantity of flour, or as a collectible, or as a way of impressing someone else, or as a missile. The class “cup” is thus doubly dissociated from the material objects that instantiate it: the word “cup” can be applied to an indefinite number, and a wide range, of objects; and a given object may fall under a wide range of general terms (“cup”, “souvenir”, “ladle”). Most importantly, the item is held in readiness, as something that may be mobilized at any time to serve some purpose. It has a sense that is, as it were, frozen, or at least paused, rather than being gathered up into the flow of consciousness and action. The classification that allocates items before us to a “what” shapes our anticipations of what to expect of it, and guides us how to interact with it, but also opens it up to other possible uses. More importantly, verbal classification elevates the classified object above the space and time in which it is encountered. The connection of an entity with its class is a path that does not belong to the natural world, as the quotation from Fodor highlights.

  Classified stuff – ready to be elevated to ingredients, aids, and other items that may help us meet our desires (however remote from immediate or any biological needs) or embody anticipated threats (again often remote from, or only very indirectly connected with, threats to our organic existence) – forms the background of the taken-for-granted, of the good-enough sense, that we navigate our busy way through as we pass our lives. It is, of course, supplemented by the closely woven fabric of higher-order sense that forms the specifically human contribution to our world: the intelligible behaviour of others informed by our personal expectations of, and relations with, them; by the law and institutions with their regulations that may run to thousands of pages; and by all the formal and informal unreciprocated and mutual obligations that attach to our many roles in private and public life.

  I have sketched some of the elements that go into making the background against which we make ordinary, continuing, sense of the, or of a, world or indeed of the multiplicity of worlds we enter and leave in the incessant, often involuntary, tourism that constitutes our lives, the natural and human public realm that endures from moment to moment, day to day, year to year. It is out of this humus there flowers the sense-making that has prompted this book: the kind that leads to the miracle of the highest level of (partial) comprehensibility of the universe.

  For each of us, that background is a private take on a collective reality sustained not only by the habits of the material and natural world, but also by language and other sign systems (and anything may become a sign if someone uses or sees it as such), by practices, artefacts, institutes and obligations. Such background intelligibility has a coherence and unity – at least from one moment to the next. It is not episodic or focal but a sustained, connected, distributed field of mattering or of that which might matter. It is a landscape of familiarity, a continuum of meaning. The explicit sense-making we associate with “working things out”, puzzling over things, typically arises in response to an interruption in sense: it is sense-making that dawns only after a delay, a surprise, a trip in an otherwise seamless flow of sense-making consciousness, an affront to our expectations. Our cognitive advance has been driven to a very great extent by making the most of such interruptions, resisting immediate understanding; by breaking with familiarity, “untaking” the “for granted”. Let us look at this a little more.

  Disciplined inquiry is frequently in rebellion against automatic (common) sense-making. The sciences (and sometimes the humanities) actively cultivate uncertainty and “problematize” the seemingly unproblematic.7 The kind of sense-making, the comprehensibility that astonished Einstein sufficiently for him to speak of it as “an eternal mystery”, is different in this important respect from the sense that I make of what is around me as I walk in the park of an afternoon, although much of that sense will have been the result of previous effortful sense-making going back to my infancy. Science is the product of sustained and deliberate bafflement, a cultivated and cooperative puzzlement shared over centuries across vast numbers of individuals who are often aware of each other only as fellow contributors to the great game of understanding the natural world. If we think of one of the drivers to the general theory of relativity – the observation of the anomalous path of the planet Mercury that puzzled Einstein for nearly a decade before he completed his theory – we get a startling example of how science advances through individuals capable of being astonished by phenomena that are simply not observed by others, and who are willing to stick with their astonishment until it is resolved at an appropriate level.

  The example illustrates something else: sense-making that is neither produced or consumed on the spot or indeed indexed to a particular spot but is permanently available to be invoked or mobilized to repair a hole in understanding, to address uncertainty. A theory is stored sense, pickled or frozen interpretation, available to be used when required. The other aspect of this is the way scientific inquiry requires a willingness to pass through, and even dwell in, a desert of senselessness – evident in contingent laws, naked numbers standing for constants – en route to technologies that can enhance agency.

  The long delay often seen before scientific sense-making delivers practical application (or even confirmation) is perhaps its most striking and impressive feature. Not only do we see something far removed from the response of an organism to a stimulus but an unequivocal expression of something disinterested at the heart of scientific inquiry – a feature to which we shall return in Chapter 4. The equation or law discovered by investigators working at a particular place and a particular time will have drawn on the cooperative sense-making of a largely invisible congregation of predecessors. And it will find its subsequent use in the work of any number of individuals at any place and any time. This patience in exploiting understanding – a willingness to cultivate understanding that does not deliver immediate benefits – is perhaps more readily tolerated because, after the agricultural revolution, humans became accustomed to actions whose purpose was fulfilled in the remote future. Sowing seed in the spring made sense only in relation to the expected harvest in the autumn.

  To emphasize the distance between sense-making and application in solving problems of daily life, is not to be starry-eyed about science.8 Scientists are as venal, vain, competitive and ambitious as their fellows. But for the most part they will advance their reputation only by separating their immediate interests from the sense they make of the cells, atoms, or volcanoes they are researching. The great French physiologist Claude Bernard famously (perhaps apocryphally) advised his colleagues to “Put off their imagination as they put off their overcoat as they enter the laboratory, and put it on again, as you put on your overcoat, as you leave”. Ditto ambition.

  The reward for this self-denying ordinance is technologies that have put the biblical miracles in the shade. Our capacity to talk to someone 10,000 miles away who has been picked out by a satellite makes Moses’ striking of the rock unimpressive and Jesus’ conversion of water into wine small beer. And science – its methods and fruits – pervade every aspect of our lives. As Ernest Geller has put it: “[W]hile once upon a time there was
science within the world, now it is as if the world were within science; science became the container, the world the content”.9

  It is difficult to exaggerate the importance of the “de-localization” of sense-making, and the decoupling of sense-making from the time and circumstance of encounter with that which has to be made sense of. We make better sense of the world through this delay. So, while much science may be motivated by a desire to control the natural world rather than purely to understand it, these motives are often better served by a pursuit of what appears to be pure, disinterested understanding. Blue skies research may ultimately deliver more practical benefits than more narrowly instrumental inquiry. A willingness to scratch our individual and collective heads over a conundrum that may be seen to be illustrative of more general problems has served us well in our endeavours to free ourselves from nature. It marks a distance between on the one hand solving problems by trial-and-error, seen in many species, and on the other, approaching them with reason and insight scarcely developed outside of humanity. Likewise, the habit of setting ourselves problems for the pleasure of solving them, irrespective of whether such recreational sense-making has practical benefits. The delay between encounter and sense-making draws on and expands a temporal order, a temporal depth, that is not known in the natural world. This, and a comparable liberation from space as we make shared sense of things, is key to our capacity to act upon the natural world from a virtual outside.

  Delay is an important feature of human inquiry in another sense. It takes the form of rising above the flow of experience to formal observation. This is most striking when we make a measurement. We take measurement for granted and do not see how strange it is. It is special not merely because it is quantitative and objective but because it seems to stand outside of experience: it is as it were “an experience by appointment”; one that is requisitioned and designed for a purpose. Measurement is the key to the journey that leads from the flow of everyday consciousness to the discovery of hidden causes, laws, or general principles.