Thus the basis of the possibility of escaping from the windowless parish of an embodied subject. This seems an appropriate juncture for a sideways (and critical) re-examination of the claim, associated with Mach and Quine, that there is a continuum from irritation of nerve endings to the highest reaches of science. Here, it will be recalled, is Mach: “there is no difference between ordinary experience accessible to any being endowed with a nervous system and scientifically organized experiment. There is no break in continuity between science … and modes of behaviour characteristic of the entire animal world.”11 We can now see at least two major breaks in the path “from stimulus to science”, long before we get to the decisive break constituted by measurement, as discussed in Chapter 5. The first is the full-blown intentionality of a telereceptor such as vision, which locates its perceptual object at an explicit distance from itself. The second is the reflexive location of the perceiving subject in its field of perception, explicitly shared with others. The sense that “it” is out there, which has as its correlative the sense that I am here, is transformed into the sense I, too, am “out there”. This mini-Copernican revolution comes from the experience of being in another’s perceptual field and consequently being an “over there” object to another’s “over-here” subject. We are displaced from the implicit centre of the places in which we find ourselves. We are over-there as much as over-here.12 When I tell you that I am here, I know that the “here” in question is “there” to you.
This deindexicalization of the ego is a crucial step in the transcendence of the body en route from umwelt to Weltanschauung, sense experience to world-pictures. There is a democratization of the space in which we find our place as an “anywhere”, so that we can feel ourselves to be at the edge, on the outside, or at an address that belongs to a system of addresses. We shrink as our knowledge grows and the frame of reference in which we locate ourselves as objects of knowledge expands, growing from chair to room to street to village to town to country to planet to galaxy. The growth that shrinks us – at least when we see ourselves as objects of knowledge – is driven most potently by the deindexicalized space of discourse. The world of facts, which we enter via the spoken or written testimony of others, is liberated from here and now and from there and then. Facts belong to no-one and are anchored nowhere. The face with which we face the world is a collective face; or an individual representation of a collective gaze.
There is a yet more fundamental discontinuity necessary for the transition from the organism wired into material nature courtesy of its nervous system and a knowing subject facing the world. It becomes evident by default in Quine overlooking it:
To account for knowledge of an external thing or event in itself, the naturalistic epistemologist looks rather to the external thing or event itself and the causal chain of stimulation from it to one’s brain. In a paradigm case, light rays are reflected from the object to one’s retina, activating a patch of nerve endings each of which initiates a neural impulse to one or another center of the brain.13
(emphasis added)
Quine conflates the process by which the light from the object gets into the eye and stimulates the brain with that by which the gaze looks out and sees the object. By fusing the two, he takes away the ground-floor discontinuity that uncouples the perceiving subject from the perceived world and so opens the path to the knowledge available to the subject as a participant in a community of minds. He seems, however, to acknowledge the need for a discontinuity in order for a transmission of energy to count as a stimulus: “an economical strategy in defining the stimulus is to intercept the causal chains just at the subject’s surface. Nothing is lost, for it is only from that point inward that the chains contribute to the subject’s knowledge of the external world.”14 It is not clear why the surface of the organism should be so privileged, given the causal continuity from object to brain. Or, indeed, the brain. As we observed with functionalism, naturalist epistemology offers nothing to supply the viewpoint, the reference point, that divides input from output, the embodied subject from the world he or she faces. It fails in this regard because of an almost wilful tendency to overlook the intentionality that turns incoming light into outward looking vision and creates the space of knowledge.
It is in the space of knowledge that the subject is distanced from the body that breathes, aches, feels warm or cold, and imports its own darkness and opacity into the cognitive realm. To see how things might be if the body were left on its own to manage its portfolio of knowledge, we have only to look at what results when carnality reasserts itself through dysfunction as in toxic confusional states. The body doing its own thing – as when my parts of my brain are engulfed by spontaneous discharges and I lose consciousness and make involuntary movements in an epileptic fit – is closed off from the shared world.
Thus, the good and bad news about the second relatum: the knower who is not an organism but an embodied subject. The cognitive history of the person is distinct from a register of the processes of the human organism, which (as we have discussed above) are for the most part hidden from us. While it is possible to trace the steps by which the primate organism H. sapiens became the platform of personhood, the story is complex and this is not the place to attempt it.15
But we are still not yet out of the wood, although the knowing subject is in part liberated from the flesh that is its necessary condition. We began with the observation that “thatter” and “facing the world” imply an external relationship between two relata – the object and the subject must be radically other. The understanding of the object must sooner or later bump into a brick wall – which we might call “matter” or “stuff” or “substance” – if its objectivity is to be authenticated. Without such an opaque underpinning, we are in danger of dissolving the world into something internal to the mind, a view rejected – and hopefully discredited – in Chapter 3. And the subject, too, seems to be denied the possibility of being utterly transparent, given that it must be inseparable from a body which must have intrinsic, non-transparent properties if it is to support the life that enables it to be conscious and hence to be capable of knowledge and for it to lay claim to a viewpoint, localized in space and time, from which to experience the world. The carnality of its being seems to threaten to cloud it as a lens on reality other than itself. However, through intersubjectivity, particularly that mediated through language, it seems able to wipe its spectacles, break its attachment to time and place, and, at least partially, get out of its own way.
The gap between an, in some residual respects senseless, subject and an, in some respects senseless, object remains but this may not seem fatal to any endeavour to drill down to unpeeled reality, given that “reality” is a relational notion: it is real for someone. What is more, even the brick wall of cognitive opacity, is made of “stuff”, “matter”, or “substance” which are terms that carry a halo of meaning, occupying a location in a semantic field, which enables them to be incorporated into a world-picture that aims to be complete. As Keskinen, glossing Quine, has put it:
The notion of reality “apart from human categories”, as separate from the parochial point of view of one or another theory, is from Quine’s perspective meaningless … The notion of reality is always part of a theory, and the real objects in the real world are always objects of some theory … theoretical posits.16
We must conclude, therefore, that the very idea of a world-picture without a separation between the image and that which is depicted in it, and without an irreducible remainder of opacity in both relata, is a contradiction. It is one that is close to the delusion that the truths that supervene on Being can somehow rejoin it, in the guise of an intrinsic, unmediated givenness of Reality, the self-intimation of what-is in an entirely transparent language. Such a world-picture would simply be an iteration – and per impossibile an iteration without replication of, or addition to, it – of what is imaged. The categories of truth and reality would be swallowed up into the relationship things have to t
hemselves in virtue of being themselves; which is no relationship at all. If “being themselves” seems to be a relationship, it is so only when the question of reidentification arises. A pebble is the pebble it is – is “that pebble” – when the question of its identity arises, when it is picked out, and this could hardly be extended to the totality of things, even less to that totality picking itself out.
In the vicinity of the intuition that is driving us to such strange places is the idea that there is, or could be, or indeed ought to be, a language, a mode of representation that is not only without ambiguity but which is, as it were, the native tongue of things-in-themselves – a characteristica universalis that was not only universally understood but potentially understood by the universe.
There are evident problems with this idea – which we shall discuss in Chapter 8 – but we encounter serious difficulties long before arriving at what seems to be a reductio ad absurdum of the notion of rendering the (human and natural) world we live in cognitively transparent. It concerns an apparent darkness at the heart of mental contents, alarmingly in the very place where the subject seems to escape the cloudiness coming from the knowing subject’s being embodied. It has attracted much philosophical discussion in recent decades under the heading of “externalism about mental contents”. It is the concern that we may not know what our desires and beliefs and above all our thoughts are actually about. This is a particularly intimate form of ignorance. It is connected with the very fact that liberates us from the parish of our individual carnal being: namely that the cognitive face we turn to the world is a collective face and speaks with a language that belongs not to ourselves but to a boundless community of speakers.
Externalism asserts that whether mental contents have a certain property is not determined solely internally but depends at least in part on their environment or context. Consequently, they may not be what we, who have them in mind, think they are. For the present I want to focus on those mental items that are most closely related to language: namely, thoughts. Nothing would seem to be more cognitively transparent than the thoughts I am thinking to myself. I may not know what my body is up to but at least I should know what my mind is up to – at least to the extent of knowing what I think – believe, hope, etc. – and, more particularly, knowing what I am thinking about.
Alas, this does not seem to be the case. Counter-intuitively, I am not, in the end, an infallible judge of the content of my own thoughts.17 At a very basic level I may be thinking about something that I believe exists when in fact it does not. Consequently, I may be mistaken that the object of my thoughts corresponds to a referent located in the real world. I may also mis-identify the item I am thinking about. I have a clear image of a man doing something I saw him doing yesterday and think that I am thinking about Roger when in fact it is William that I am thinking about.
But it is more intimate mistakes that are more relevant to our present concerns. Semantic externalism is “the thesis that the meaning and reference of some of the words we use is not solely determined by the ideas we associate with them or by our internal physical state”.18 The contents of our thoughts depend in part on communal linguistic practice: I think using Everyman’s words. To use the favourite example introduced by Hilary Putnam, consider a situation where the earth has a remote twin. Water on earth is H2O. On twin earth there is a twin-water, identical with H2O in every respect except that it is composed of a different chemical compound XYZ. When the inhabitant of twin earth thinks or believes that “Water quenches thirst” his belief is not about water but about XYZ. In other words, the content of his thought or belief is dependent on external facts.19 I am mistaken as to what I think I am thinking to myself.
Semantic externalism has been challenged on many grounds. My own view is that its apparent significance is at least in part based on a muddling of levels at which judgement is being made. Such a muddle could make the case for externalism with respect to accurate perception. I correctly see an object in front of me as a chair. I happen also to subscribe to the view that chairs are made of atoms, not knowing that the idea of discrete atoms has been replaced by the wave functions of quantum mechanics. This does not discount my seeing a chair as seeing a chair because correctly seeing a chair is independent of (say) seeing a chair made of atoms on the basis of (incorrectly) seeing that it is made of discreet atomic particles. It might be argued that semantic externalism is not about the correctness or otherwise of our thoughts but about how terms get their meaning and that the term “water” gets its meaning independent of what one believes of the concept water. Even so it still seems to undermine the assumption that we know what we are thinking about. It does not seem to deliver the reassurance that, from an objective point of view, we are unassailable authorities on what we are thinking about.
What remains relevant to our discussion of semantic externalism, and more broadly of externalism with respect to mental contents, is the very possibility that there can be a divorce between what (say) I am thinking about and what I think I am thinking about. To say of someone that he does not know what he is talking about is bad enough; but it is more disturbing to discover that there is the permanent possibility of our not knowing what we are thinking about; that the thoughts in which we present our sense-making to ourselves may be characterized by a divergence between psychological content and linguistic content, or between the intentional objects of on the one hand psychological and on the other linguistic contents. There seems to be a darkness in the most intimate mode of sense-making. This is additional to the fact (which we shall discuss in the next chapter) that our idiolect – the personal vocabulary used and understood in a way unique to ourselves – does not map directly on to the language in which collective sense-making is expressed.
While it is possible to be mistaken as to the object of our thought, and hence as to what we believe or hope or wish to be the case, for the most part we do know what it is we believe. It is, however, sufficiently disturbing that it is possible that our thoughts may not only deceive us about the nature of the world but they may be deceived as to their own contents. There is, however, a further greater challenge to the notion that we make cognitive progress. We have seen how the cognitively curdled state of the incarnate subject is at least in part redeemed by the collective transcendence of the community of minds. However, understanding and the intelligibility of the world is not ultimately a matter of the collective, any more than it is experienced by the archives and databases where it is stored. In the end, it is individual minds, individual subjects, who are the bearers of the comprehended world. While our world-picture is rescued by the community of minds from our messy individual bodies, it has to be known by or in or to our individually messy minds.20 The messiness of our individual minds is the other side of our uniqueness; of our irreplaceability; of the fact that we are never to be cashed without remainder into finite clusters of general classes which we instantiate.
Thus, the inevitable resistance of “what is there” to full comprehension, in virtue of its necessarily being “other” to our inquiring, knowing minds, and the latter being situated in, and to some extent, coloured by our status as embodied subjects. Even where there is no such colouring, the necessary mutual otherness of mind and the world it endeavours to comprehend, so that the former is about, of the latter, would ensure an incommensurateness between them; between thought and its objects. This necessary distance is evident even in the most powerful acts of understanding of what there is: natural science. The reduction of the world to values of variables and those values to patterns, to mathematical structures, empties what-is of its “stuffness” as well as draining it of phenomenal qualities. This emptied vision of reality is an inevitable consequence of imagining that it is revealed at the end of the process by which we are gradually cognitively liberated from experience, which is local and perspectival, to a viewpoint that is the totality of things seen from the totality of all possible viewpoints. In short, featurelessness.
We don’t h
ave to subscribe to the largely nonsensical ideas of Jacques Lacan to acknowledge the profound truth of his famous assertion that “The real is what resists symbolisation absolutely”.21 That which resists – in the sense of being other than – symbolization might seem to be almost a matter of definition: reality is that of which things are said, not what is said.22 More profoundly, reality, thought of as pure-in-itself, must lie beyond the reach of the interactive relationships that are evident in, because they underpin, perception, occasion discourse, and are the substrate of action, indeed all that enters sense-making. There can be no self-portrait of reality; no unmediated ontology. It has always to be mediated. Ontology without epistemology is possible only at the level of abstract argument.23 It is not available as the undistorted, unmediated, givenness of Stuff, of what-is. It can be given only through the lens of a recipient other than the Given; or makes that-which-is The (mythical or non-mythical) Given.
There is, therefore, a darkness at the heart of the known. It is not merely interstitial, in the sense of lying in the interstices of any explanatory schema, but is infra-cognitive, eluding the ordering of things. This is a sense in which order, even that which is most faithful to what-is, is imposed as well as found. Whether we call it “matter” or “energy” or “Being” or “beings” it is there at the start and at the end of the cognitive journey. We end with bare existence, the necessary bearer of properties, with the faceless fact that there is Something (to be faced) rather than Nothing. When we engage with that Something we do so through individual things that, as we ascend cognitively, are generalized to the point where they are featureless, often represented through purely mathematical structures. Thus, the inexpungable darkness at the heart of things and what we might call “the law of the conservation of mystery”. We must not conclude from this that the world is overall without meaning – if only because the sense of the lack of overall meaning could not be found in a truly meaningless world.
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