Measurement extracts numbers from objects, events, or intervals. Such extraction is predicated on, and perhaps justifies in an iterative way, a prior abstraction, whereby material is reduced to a quantifiable aspect or a concatenation of parameters. Even in the case of something as basic as size, measurements are made on abstractions. We may approach a body of liquid as something that has (say) depth, volume, weight, density, transparency, temperature, viscosity, solvency, temperature-dependent expansion and so on. We quantify these separately, though they cannot be separated in the material itself or as it is directly experienced. When we jump into a swimming pool, we cannot jump separately into its depth, its volume, its temperature, its viscosity, etc. The use of instruments tuned to these individual parameters introduces another gap between measurement and the flux of experience.
The outcomes of measurement are located in a space increasingly remote from that occupied by the objects and events that are directly encountered, including those that have been subject to measurement, and indeed from the lived space of the measurer. This is an important foundation for the most fundamental Copernican revolution: namely, one that displaces the subject from the centre of her world and relocates her as a small item in that world. As a mode of encountering the world that is ultimately answerable to experience but at the same time outside of it, measurement starts the process that has taken us to a remarkable place from which we could look at our world from the outside. It is an important element of our awakening from the umwelt granted every organism to a world-picture that only humans entertain. While experience remains the ultimate foundation of objective knowledge, the latter stands to the former as the roots of a tree in the soil to its leaves spread out in space.
These fundamental differences may be lost sight of when measurements – even those undertaken in advanced science – are characterized simply as “experiences”. Describing science, as Quine does, as a direct descendent of experiences and identifying the latter with “neural intake” overlooks the chasm between the informality and passivity of daily experience and the formal activity of scientific or any other disciplined observation, whether it is physics or ornithology. In this gap lies the basis of our awakening out of our subjective point of view to a widening intersubjective reality whose imagined asymptote is an appearance of the world as a reality that would be common to all actual and possible subjects; to an ideal or non-subjective subject, something that Arthur Eddington expressed when he said of general relativity using tensors that it “symbolized absolute knowledge” because “it stands for the subjective knowledge of all possible subjects at once”.4
Convergence on a number is a process both of waking out of our private or personal view and, on this account, reaching a seeming approximation to the intrinsic properties of the object. Size, which is most closely identified with number, is apparently an intrinsic property of an object. This is connected with Galileo’s distinction between what were later to be called “primary” and “secondary” qualities:
I feel myself impelled by necessity, as soon as I conceive of a piece of matter or corporeal substance, of conceiving that in its own nature it is bounded and figured in such and such a figure, that in relation to others it is large or small, that it is in this or that place, in this or that time, that it is in motion or remains at rest, that it touches or does not touch another body, that it is single, few, or many; in short, by no imagination can a body be separated from such conditions; but that it must be white or red, bitter or sweet, sounding or mute, of a pleasant or unpleasant odour, I do not perceive my mind forced to acknowledge it necessarily accompanied by such conditions; so that if the senses were not the escorts, perhaps the reason or imagination of itself would never have arrived at them.5
(emphasis added)
To discover what, in colour, is intrinsic to objects, we need to translate them into wavelengths, so they, too, acquire the status of primary qualities. The agreement in numbers – the replacement of perceptions by agreed quantities – is thus a passage from secondary (subjective, mind-based) qualities to primary (numerical object-based) measures and an awakening out of ourselves to a nature whose language, as Galileo famously said, was that of mathematics. While we may assume that primary qualities are experienced by animals, they are not experienced as encoded in numbers, nor stripped of secondary qualities. This is the path to the notion that the world-in-itself is mathematical, a system of magnitudes; that if things spoke for themselves, they would speak in some dialect of mathematics. The subnumerate experience of sunbathing is relegated to a cognitively inferior place compared with knowledge of the physics and physiology of the impact of light and heat on the body. From Parmenides’ notion that sense experience is a source of erroneous opinion rather than truth, to Descartes’s idea of sensations as muddled thoughts, and beyond to the idea of the universe as (seen aright) a system of magnitudes – thus the gathering prejudice against sense experience.
The universal appeal to measurement – to empirical data drained of phenomenal or subjective experience – to reveal what is out there has accustomed humanity to the idea that what is “out there” may be entirely different from the way it appears to us as we go about our daily business. This was accepted wisdom long before relativity theory and quantum mechanics seemed utterly to discredit the folk ontology of daily life. The distinctive authority of natural science is expressed in the assumption that truth (even the useful truths of applied science) is beyond what is, or even can be, lived or subjectively experienced: impressions of size or intensity, never mind importance, or value, are displaced by numbered quantities. The corollary of this is that the truth about the material world is equidistant from all subjects and, beyond this, the reinforcement of the conviction that what is truly real can be accessed only by getting ourselves as subjects out of the way. This reinforces a view, established early in the Western intellectual tradition by Parmenides and Plato, that we need to look past the deliverance of our senses, and our subjective experiences, to access reality. The important difference, however, is that it is measurement, rather than reason guided by intuitions and logic, that is the means by which we rise above our subjectivity.
It is a story that is difficult to evaluate. It has been told both as a tale of triumph – the cognitive conquest of mindless nature – and as one of spiritual impoverishment and disenchantment. The ambivalence has been captured succinctly by Erwin Schrödinger:
[A] moderately satisfying picture of the world has only been reached at the high price of taking ourselves out of the picture, stepping back into the role of the non-concerned observer … while the stuff from which our world picture is built is yielded exclusively from the sense organs as organs of the mind … yet the conscious mind itself remains a stranger within that construct, it has no living space in it.6
The very possibility of conscious subjects becomes increasingly difficult to explain in a world of objects and when the advance of understanding is measured in terms of a progressively more objective viewpoint. The self-undermining of a world-picture based upon objective science becomes more evident when it is appreciated that the first-person is not merely a perspective but the very possibility of a perspective from which alone knowledge can be acquired. There is no third person without a first-person. The givenness of things has to be given to someone.
And there have been profound consequences that go beyond the loss of the authority of the phenomenal content of experience and the manifest image of the world. The privileging of quantity over quality has gone hand in hand with the focus on mechanisms over meaning. W. T. Stace, writing in the wake of the Second World War, highlighted the consequences of developing a world-picture that, except insofar as it enhanced our capacity to control and pacify nature, was void of human significance:
The founders of modern science – for instance, Galileo, Kepler, and Newton – were mostly pious men who did not doubt God’s purposes. Nevertheless, they took the revolutionary step of consciously and deliberately expelling the
idea of purpose as controlling nature from their new science of nature. They did this on the grounds that inquiry into purposes is useless for what science aims at: namely the prediction and control of events. To predict an eclipse, what you have to know is not its purpose but its causes. Hence science from the seventeenth century onwards became exclusively an inquiry into causes. The conception of purpose in the world was ignored and frowned on. This, though silent and almost unnoticed, was the greatest revolution in human history.7
The material rewards brought by this self-denying, or subject-marginalizing, ordinance have been immense. Science, after all “works” in several senses of that word. It has extended our capacity to predict aspects of the physical world to an unimaginable degree in terms of both reach and accuracy and it has vastly amplified our ability to manipulate that world to achieve our goals, including ones that pre-scientific man had not even thought to entertain – such as talking to a friend 10,000 miles away, to take a relatively trivial example. Equally impressive are the kinds of achievements we discussed in Chapter 1; for example, assembling a coherent account of the material world in which lower-order laws are subsumed under higher-order ones and all that happens can be presented as an expression of a handful of forces that might one day be reduced to a single force or a unified field. What we can know, and what we can do on the basis of what we know, has been extended beyond anything humankind for most of its history could have imagined.
In the light of such achievements, it is difficult, and would even be perverse, to resist the conclusion that natural science, while beginning with the experiences of the individual subject and being ultimately “cashed” in such experiences, uncovers a fundamental reality that transcends our subjectivity and shows the latter to have been in some sense cognitively deficient. An anti-realist interpretation of science would make its efficacy and coherence – and its obvious progress, notwithstanding regular revolutions in thought – inexplicable.8
However, resist we must. Nagel’s cautionary note is relevant. It is the case that: “a view or a form of thought is more objective than another if it relies less on the specifics of the individual’s make up and position in the world, or on the character of the type of creature he is”.9 However,
Although there is a connection between objectivity and reality – only the supposition that we and our appearances are parts of a larger reality makes it reasonable to seal understanding by stepping back from appearances in this way – still not all reality is better understood the more objectively it is viewed.10
At the very least, we need a certain constitution – quite narrowly defined – in order to be able to access or contribute to the objective view. This is not, however, as compelling a critique of claims to objectivity as it sounds. After all, the majestic vision of the universe delivered by Newton’s laws of motion owes nothing important to the scientist’s personality, era, cultural context, even his species. Such a world-picture does not belong to an umwelt, even less to the parochial concerns of a bewigged seventeenth-century member of the middle classes. Newtonian science is not contaminated by Newton-the-man. F = ma is not merely third-person; it is no person.
There is, of course, no shortage of ways in which the subject can push back against those successive Copernican revolutions by which we have expelled ourselves from the various centres of the world and have come to see ourselves as smidgeons of cognition located in a place that does not even count as “remote”, given that remoteness is an anthropocentric notion. Every moment of our lives – whether we are in love or just in a hurry, worrying about a crying baby or our reputation, or fretting over the future of humanity or looking forward to our lunch – is charged with meanings that the natural world as described by the most powerful science cannot accommodate. What is more, the technology that science has delivered is deployed in lives that rest on unreconstructed common sense. The invention of the laptop computer, on which I am typing this, drew on the same quantum mechanics that denies the self-identity of the elements of matter, and replaces stuff with probability waves. And yet the device is safely situated on my desk and was transported thither by movements that could be captured by Newtonian, even Galilean mechanics. Science itself must be conducted in the everyday world of rooms with floors, doors and windows, using macroscopic bits of equipment and involving cooperation rooted in a shared “now” of embodied subjects experiencing an everyday world in an everyday way. Both inside and outside the laboratory, it is the world of Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. In this world, reality consists of the objects that surround us, stones we could kick in Johnsonian fashion if we were inclined to defend the folk ontology of daily life. The chairs we sit on exist in defiance of the non-local, probabilistic, entangled world of quantum mechanics, and we eat our breakfast before we set out on our journey to work, however relativity theory may throw into question a fixed order of events, unless they are connected in a causal manner that quantum theory cannot accommodate.
It could be argued that this is not evidence of the fundamental truth of unreconstructed folk ontology. Rather, it exposes the incorrigibility of the human animal: humanity is simply unable to live at the level of its highest cognitive achievements, to imagine, never mind live within, the reality its collective brightest self has discovered. Our falling short of living in the objective reality we have uncovered through measurement, that is, is itself a measure of the extent to which we are hostage to that part of ourselves which is engaged in our daily life, a recitative of the mundane to which we return after brief arias of intellectual space travel. We are always going to return to the places where our habits of reaction and the needs that shape them are formed – to something not far from “where all the ladders start / In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart”.11
The reason for the resistance of our immediate world-picture to be reformed by what we have learned through measurement-led science is that our knowledge has got ahead of our condition as living organisms. The manifest image is what we need, as both Locke and many contemporary philosophers have argued. Consider Locke:
The infinite wise Contriver of us and all things about us has fitted our senses, faculties, and organs to the conveniences of life, and the business we have to do here … If by the help of microscopic eyes … man could penetrate further than ordinary into the secret composition and radical structure of bodies, he would not make any great advantage by the change, if such an acute sight would not serve to conduct him to the market and exchange, if he could not see things he was to avoid at a convenient distance, nor distinguish things he had to do with, by those sensible Qualities others do.12
James Ladyman, who has argued that reality is a mathematical structure in which there are no things only relations – in particular those weird ones that are revealed by quantum mechanics – deals with the fact that we do not see the world like this in a way similar to Locke’s; however, he substitutes for the God of religion the God of evolution, namely survival: “[P]roficiency in inferring the large-scale and small-scale structure of our immediate environment, or any features of parts of the universe distant from our ancestral stomping grounds, was of no relevance to our ancestors’ reproductive fitness”.13 This meta-epistemological explanation of the difficulty we have in seeing, accepting or even conceiving the truth about what is real, actually presupposes the reality of the items – namely medium-sized, self-identical human beings (and their “stomping grounds”) who have knowledge derived from negotiation with a world made of medium-sized self-identical objects – to which his ontology denies reality.
There is clearly much work to be done in reconciling our everyday image of the world around us and the scientific image that has had such colossal, and largely beneficial, consequences. It remains true that the employment of the fruits of cognitive advance is inevitably anchored in unreformed every day or direct experience. Even when, as is necessarily the case, science goes beyond experience – as when general laws are guessed at – it will be subject to testing by experience. If expe
rience seems to have the first word, it also has the last word. Not only are the claims of science tested in (to use Quine’s phrase) “the tribunal of experience” which they face not one-by-one but “corporately”.14 The entire quest for scientific truth is immersed in the sea of individual experience and its fruits enjoyed likewise.
We have already alluded to another way of capturing the miracle of the apparent escape from “mere subjectivity”: the passage from umwelt to world-picture. Jakob von Uexkull introduced the term umwelt to capture how different organisms experience the same environment differently.15 Each species is attuned to an outside, according to its needs and the sense organs and active structures that serve them. It is this that defines the environment or surroundings with which the organism engages. The same meadow will be differently experienced by a bee rooting in a flower (part of its humwelt perhaps), a grazing cow, and a farmer harvesting hay. Each organism – insect, herbivore, human – is enclosed in the closed bubble of a world defined by the systems that secure its survival.
That the notion of an enclosing umwelt does not apply to human persons should be sufficiently obvious. The world we live in is not defined by the properties of our body, even those of our sensory systems. We participate in a community of minds creating, modifying, utilizing, sharing, and challenging “thatter” or knowledge, which we shall discuss in the next chapter. We are self-conscious, even at times self-narrating, creatures; embodied subjects at a distance from our environment, engaging with absences and not just presences, acting as well as reacting, responding to entertained possibility and not just to actualities, filtered through passive senses, that are around us.
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