b)
The intuition of the object “in its own right” is the first hint of a detachment from the perspectives through which things are encountered, and the needs – with associated value judgements – that they might serve. This is an essential first step towards the deindexicalized vision of science. That objects are available to all and everyone reinforces the intuition that they have an existence in themselves. The developing awareness that others have different (literal) points of view revealing different worlds and that these have equal validity extends our sense of the world – as a public, shared realm.
c)
The transcendence that is implicit in experience of objects, such that the basis of perception is exceeded by the perceived object, is made explicit in shared knowledge. For example, the items in the visual field are more than the seen.
d)
Our awakening out of sentience, and a widening sense of an ontology of items beyond our subjectivity, is accelerated by discourse. We are able from our earliest years to draw on others’ knowledge, taking much of our intelligible outside world “off the shelf”. We get to know of vastly more than we could ever experience first-hand and about things and states of affairs that are only distantly related to experience.
e)
Associated with this headline truth about discourse are a couple of other consequences that have particular relevance to escape from subjectivity. Word-mediated knowledge belongs to no-one, not even to the person who discloses it to us. While possession of knowledge may enhance personal power, true knowledge, unlike experience, is impersonal. “The fact that x” is not owned by you or me but is part of a world outside of any of us; only mistakes, misinterpretations, and lies have personal ownership, although they ape the impersonality of true knowledge. Knowledge is not “held” in the way that a belief is and while facts may change their character as they pass from person to person, at the heart of knowledge there is the assumption that its content is independent of the mental soil of the knower.
f)
Knowledge is not directly translatable into subjective experience. Facts are invisible, inaudible, tasteless, cannot be smelt, or fingered. The testimony of others, that is, not only liberates us from the confines of our sensorium, but liberates us from the confines of any sensorium. Every fact is part of a view from nowhere. This is connected with the general nature of the object of knowledge – a chair, a tree, etc. – even when the referent of any proposition in which the knowledge is expressed is a particular – “that chair”, “the tree outside the window”.
g)
If this is less obvious than it should be, it is because we are conscious that factual statements are the product of judgements and the latter have had a toe-hold in viewpoints, based on sense experience necessarily bound to a perspective. But facts transcend the perspectives which generate or underwrite them. This is true at quite a basic level. It is a subjective experience to see an object a long way away. When, however, I say that an object is a long way away, I have made that perspective explicit, and created the context in which it can be overcome. A cognitive space is opened up in which other perspectives can be accommodated; for example, in which the object is “near” to other subjects or, indeed, to other objects.
h)
The liberation from the subjective viewpoint afforded by making the viewpoint explicit is evident in any mode of representation. A painting, for example, may show figures in a distance. That “distance” – which can be seen close-up by the viewer in the gallery – becomes itself an object. The figures are lifted from the landscape in which they are located and their distance is revealed as relative to the viewpoint of the painter or (more precisely) the viewpoint the painter wished to depict. To see perspective is no longer to be in thrall to it.
i)
At the root of shared knowledge – the testimony of others that liberates us from our subjective viewpoint – is the joining of attention. In a communication even as primitive as pointing,1 there is a faith in a common awareness of a shared reality which is susceptible to being encountered by anyone and everyone. This is the vital first stage in the passage to the scientific “view from nowhere”. The speech-mediated testimony of others is built on our sense of an objective reality which we only minutely sample through our own experiences. The intersubjective joining of attention, directly to things that are present, or through the mediation of speech to things that exist but are beyond the circle of presence, is equally, or more, potent as a means of awakening us from our own viewpoint when there is no agreement regarding the object of attention, such that parties have to defend their beliefs as to what is the case. While animals may be dimly aware of viewpoints other than their own – as when a predator sneaks up on its prey or the latter hides from the former – there is limited consciousness of the other’s awareness of other objects, of a sensory field anchored to a different centre.
j)
We see a path of gradual awakening from the naked moment of experience, to stretches of experience checked for internal consistency, layered critical self-consciousness, participation in corrective dialogue exercised in a polyphasic and polyphonic fabric of meaning, teased out in discourse, in arguments, shared and unshared practices, in conflict and cooperation, and in a dozen modes of agreement and disagreement. All of these processes are accelerated by the preservation of speech, and the knowledge transmitted in it, in the written word. Writing is central to epistemic sharing within and across moments, within and between individuals, within and across communities, generations, and epochs.
k)
Written sentences extend our cognitive reach beyond our meat-enmired sentience, taking further something that is implicit in all discourse; namely, liberation from the “here and now”. What is referred to on the page is not located in the place where the record is set down or read. With this comes a vast amplification of the sense that the world – of people, places and things – is bigger than any one can experience, know, know of, or even understand.
l)
The pre-scientific expansion of knowledge-by-description,2 the testimony of communities, and cultures, and the accumulated intelligence of the ages, opens up a world from which we are largely absent and in which our individual preoccupations do not count, or are not central. The other aspect of this is awakening out of the magic thinking which spreads our minds, our individual or communal subjectivity, and our needs and preoccupations, sometimes located in spirits and deities, into the universe. With the (comparatively recent) “disenchantment” of what is out there, a world picture develops in which agency is overwhelmingly displaced by impersonal forces and causes and we acknowledge a material reality whose behaviour is largely deaf to our wishes and indifferent to our fate.
m)
At the very least, intuitions imported from everyday life, flavoured with meaning, significance and purpose, are no longer regarded as a reliable guide to the nature of things. The Copernican revolution that challenged the most universally and continually visible feature of our days – the movement of the sun round the earth; the basic laws of mechanics according to which there is no fundamental difference between movement at uniform velocity in a straight line and the state of rest; and the relativization of “up” and “down” to the direction of the centre of massive bodies – are ubiquitous manifestations of the distance between how things seem and how they are.
n)
The acknowledgement of a disconnection between our judgement and reality culminates in an evolving sense that we neither are, nor are at, the centre of the world in which we find ourselves. The accepted world picture is no longer arranged around the collective ego of humankind. We inhabit a world – first intimated in objects that have intrinsic reality independent of our experience of them – that must be understood on its, not our, terms. Those terms are ultimately expressed in hidden laws that science eventually uncovers. The sense of those laws lies in their interconnectedness rather than any direct connection with the immediate meaning of
our experiences and needs.
Thus, a very sketchy sketch of some of the steps in the path – taken uniquely by humans – out of the putative starting point of the sentient subject awake only to his or her own sensations towards a full-blown picture of the world. The experimental science that has been so central to the cognitive development of humankind is a relatively recent phenomenon. Most of the steps described above are pre-scientific; indeed, they provide the necessary ontological or epistemological platform for scientific inquiry.
At the heart of science, building on observation and the disciplined imagining of conjecture, is of course measurement. That this is a key to the escape from our individual and collective subjectivity hardly needs spelling out – although there are anti-realist accounts of science that will contest this. However, the nature of measurement deserves more detailed attention. We have become so used to it – it is after all ubiquitous in technology and all aspects of our daily life as well as being the lifeblood of science – that its astonishing nature is usually concealed from us. We also take for granted its crucial role in liberating us from the constraints of subjectivity. Measurement decisively marginalizes the perspective of the subject and subjective impressions of size, extensity, distance and intensity. Sense experience with its secondary qualities is demoted to (merely) “subjective experience” which has diminishing authority on what is taken to be the nature of things, on how they truly are, what they are like. Measurement lies at the heart of science – our most spectacular source of intellectual advance and of the globalization of world pictures.
Measurement reduces what is there to quantities and consequently to what can be agreed upon. “How much?” is clearly less contentious than, for example, “How good?”, or even “What kind?”. The consensus moreover seems to be true to the object rather than merely a reflection of herd behaviour: it appears (at least to those who are not of a conventionalist or operationalist persuasion) to generate knowledge about what the object would look like even if it were not being looked at. Notwithstanding jibes about “lies, damned lies, and statistics”, measurement settles disagreements because it seems not only to be objective but also, as it were, on the side of the item being measured. You may think the table is big and I think it is small but both of us – and indeed strangers we have never met across the globe, and across the ages – must agree that it is 2 feet by 2 feet – leaving aside variations, irrelevant to the present discussion, that may result from frames of reference in relative velocities that are a significant fraction of the speed of light. Measurement, in short, seems to be uniquely liberating from individual or even collective subjectivity. The quantities it generates are contrasted with the (merely) secondary qualities delivered by direct sense experience. This is in part due to the healthy suspicion that drives the ever-increasing sophistication of measurement: the concern for reliability, for repeatability within and across observers, and for control of any measuring instruments, expressed in calibration and recalibration. Our sense of what is the case is grounded in a sense of what anyone would find to be the case: the intersubjective passes over into the objective. The escape from subjectivity in testimony which is authenticated through being put to the test is taken to a new limit, as the measurement is subjected to quality control.
The instinct or appetite for consensus has deep roots. We do not set out as monads whose sensory windows are blacked out by the fact that experiences cannot be directly shared. The starting point for the journey from experiencing subject to objective knowledge is not a stand-alone “I”. Even at an early stage in development, “I” grows through interaction with other “I”s. The sense we make of the world (including ourselves) is joint and several from the start. “We” is as profound as “I”. The journey from meaningful experience to shared sense-making is shorter than may be typically described by philosophers who envisage as a starting point a torrent of sense data presented to an isolated individual consciousness.
Long before the rise of quantitative science, consensus in measurement played a major role in social coherence – in regulating the exchange of goods and services, assessing productivity, determining and apportioning just reward, and drawing up and delivering on contracts. In this respect, science as we now know it was a relative late development in the exploitation of the possibilities of measurement. The story of the origin of the geometry that ultimately delivered the general theory relativity – namely that it provided a way of assessing areas of land when they had to be reapportioned after boundaries had been erased by the annual Nilotic floods – may be apocryphal. It is, however, a reminder of how measurement was woven into the fabric of our lives long before it was crucial to the advance of natural science. Even when it was tied to solving local practical problems and addressing homely quarrels over quantities – how much is mine and how much is yours – the principles underlying it had universal application.
Measurements stand outside of the flow of experience in which we are immersed. This is especially true of scientific measurement. It is, first of all, active: it is the culmination of a journey from (relatively) passive seeing to more active looking, to deliberate scrutiny, and thence to expert observation.3 The latter is closely prescribed as to its topics (which will have emerged from the history of a discipline) and its methods. What we seek and how we seek it is remote from what we happen to see. What is more, individual measurements explicitly stand for a whole class of observations, apt to be incorporated into general laws. That is one of the reasons why the discrete actions that are scientific measurements may be very complex and have a vast background of assumptions and concepts and scholarship. Not only may they require the requisitioning, setting up, and employment of instruments of varying degrees of sophistication, in more recent scientific inquiry, they may also involve travel to facilities and cooperation with others. At any rate, a measurement is an experience by appointment, even when the appointment is with an instrument that is sought out, picked up, and used, rather than another person. While there is no right and wrong way to have an experience, there most certainly is a right and wrong way to have, or more precisely carry out, a measurement. The run-up to the moment of measurement may include instruction in relevant techniques and broader training in the surrounding disciplines. There are rules governing, and standards of, measurement; quality controls that ensure reproducibility within and across individuals, and within and across disciplines and cultures. (Such standards developed in science feed back into everyday life via the bureaux and other institutions of “weights and measures” that uphold those standards.) Measurement and theory are braided together both historically and conceptually. Theories are tested by measurements and the instruments that make measurements possible are themselves built according to a nexus of theories that pick out the parameters that are measured and underwrite the connection between what is seen on the dial and what is being measured. The distance between direct experience and measurement is further extended by the processes of calibrating devices against standards and checks for accuracy and precision. Behind these norms is the idea of an asymptote in which quantitative observation is entirely congruent with the size of that which is observed.
These characteristics underline how remote scientific measurement is from the mere receptivity of gawping or the happenstance of everyday experience. It is to a greater or lesser degree independent of the circumstances under which it takes place and the rest of the life of the individual making the measurement – the journey to the lab, the lunch-break, the contractual requirement of the job. Of course, experience is still key; but the kind of experience that is generated by measurement is as distinctive and as remote from the sensory impressions of moment-to-moment daily life as the methods by which they are acquired. We position ourselves to make measurements: a measurement is something that is done, a completed measurement is an achievement. Its outcome is a result, a datum or data-point that may or may not confirm expectations, predictions, or correspond to a desired value. The result “fits”, or i
mportantly does not fit, with what is anticipated or aimed at, having a place in an entire network of findings coordinated by concepts, the latter being in part implicit in the units in which the measurement is expressed.
Measurements are typically pure quantities expressed in a number – a location in a scale or a quantity of units. Numbers have no properties or none that are salient. They are without qualities and location – except within a scale or an order of magnitude – and do not belong to the experiential flux of the person who obtained the result or the place in which it was obtained. Their home is within the data set to which they belong and, in the case of scientific measurements, the laws, or nexus of laws, which they confirm, illustrate, or express. Results, or findings, in short, belong to no-when, no-where and no-one. Measurements flatten difference: they homogenize. All units are, by definition, identical: six feet of flesh and six feet of rock are identical in terms of the measurement made. They are (importantly) without evident perspective or phenomenal appearance, except that necessary for them to be made visible and shared. Any phenomenal appearance – for example the colour, size or font of the numbers on the dial – is irrelevant just as anything specific to the person who obtained the result is a contaminant. The irrelevance of the phenomenal characteristics of any representation of a “data-point” is underlined by the fact that analogue results can be digitized. Equally irrelevant are many of the specific details of the process generating the result; for example, my entering a room, picking up a detector at a particular time in a particular place and putting it down ditto. Whatever sense experience is associated with obtaining or experiencing the measurement – the act of measurement – is stripped off in the “result”: it is as irrelevant as a coffee stain on a page in a physics textbook. A measurement is (to borrow a term used by Heidegger in another circumstance) a “de-experience”.
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