Philosophers that interest you, and why (Jazzfanz Philosophy Thread)
- Thread starter Sandy Braille
- Start date
I did speak to that point, and you denied that you made it...
And no, that wouldn't be profoundly different AT ALL. Why would it be? A human is profoundly different from a mouse. You can give a mouse faster brain and infinite memory, but they'd never discover quantum physics. Their intelligence lacks the breadth of pattern recognition, assigning of meanings and categories, and general theory building capability. An A.I. with more memory is no different than a human with an integrated hard drive in their brain. An amazing technology, but not a new paradigm of existence.
♪alt13
Well-Known Member
You never once refered to the psychology of man.
You are profoundly different than someone who is mentally handicapped. A sentient being with more processing and more memory would see us as equally handicapped.
Didn't your hated transcendentalists emerge under the new paradigm of the industrial revolution.
♪alt13
Well-Known Member
waaaahhhh
I have more memory and faster processing than most of my coworkers. I don't think of myself as profoundly different.
♪alt13
Well-Known Member
It's a matter of scale. How about someone with down syndrome? Do you think that if all people had down syndrome we would be nearly as advanced? I imagine if you were one of very few people on the planet without it you would think of yourself as different.
AtheistPreacher
Well-Known Member
[size/HUGE] fixed [/size];638735 said:
Reading Deleuze himself is daunting. I tried reading A Thousand Plateaus and was mostly lost, I think I need to just keep reading it until I can penetrate the language. I like what the guy has to say, but he's one where I often prefer to read people writing on Deleuze rather than the man himself. He can be so opaque.
FWIW, check out this edited book on Deleuze, Whitehead, and Butler. Amazon will let you preview the first few pages of every chapter:
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0...mp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=0823232093
I like your definition. But I believe an AI could be different if we intend it to be.
In the first place, human intelligence is not complete or flawless. Because it's based on the data it can receive, process, produce and invent. Our data entry is limited to our senses, we can process only a tiny bit of the data scale that universe offers, a tiny bit scale of the frequencies. However, we can produce new knowledge and new data about the unknown but it's not the same with the direct data entry that our brain can receive.
An AI that can receive and process a larger scale of light frequencies, for instance, may have a different intelligence structure.
Edit: On a second thought, I'm not sure if it would be a different intelligence because at the and it all comes down to the processing of the data which is through nothing but math and logic principles, and they are pure, certain and constant.
I understand what Siro trying to state, intelligence isn't born from humans, humans just obtained it through the evolution, or lets say through time instead of evolution, for the allergic people to that word.
I don't think I'm profoundly different from people with Down's Syndrome. I think you're underestimating a lot of people with Down's Syndrome. I think advancement may have come more slowly, but it would have reached this stage, nonetheless.
AtheistPreacher
Well-Known Member
I thought I'd post about ten pages of Richard Rorty, because they've been on my mind lately. The passage below is from his book Philosophy and Social Hope, and it outlines Rorty's "antiessentialism" -- the idea that nothing has intrinsic properties, but only webs of relations. Rorty is often misunderstood here as saying that there is no such thing as truth. While there is something to this statement, it is not quite the case.
Anywho, I find this passage extraordinarily interesting, and I'd love to hear what others think, whoever has the time to read it all. Personally I find Rorty a lot more readable and enjoyable than a lot of other philosophers I could name... although those people who immediately begin to fall asleep at the first sight of philosophical jargon are probably best-served by skipping to page 52.
Note that the numbers in between paragraphs are page numbers, and the one ellipsis (...) denotes a place where I have omitted a few paragraphs in a futile attempt at brevity.
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Ever since the seventeenth century, philosophers have been suggesting that we may never know reality, because there is a barrier between us and it -- a veil of appearances produced by the interaction between subject and object, between the constitution of our own sense organs or our minds and the way things are in themselves. Since the
50
nineteenth century, philosophers have been suggesting that language may form such a barrier -- that our language imposes categories on objects which may not be intrinsic to them. Pragmatists reply to seventeenth-century arguments about the veil of appearances by saying that we need not model knowledge on vision. So there is no need to think of the sense organs or our ideas as intervening between a mental eye and its object. Instead, pragmatists say, we can think of both as tools for manipulating the object. They reply to nineteenth-century arguments about the distorting effect of language by saying that language is not a medium of representation. Rather, it is an exchange of marks and noises, carried out in order to achieve specific purposes. It cannot fail to represent accurately, for it never represents at all.
Pragmatists insist on nonocular, nonrepresentational ways of describing sensory perception, thought and language, because they would like to break down the distinction between knowing things and using them. Starting from Bacon's claim that knowledge is power, they proceed to claim that power is all there is to knowledge -- that a claim to know X is a claim to be able to do something with or to X, to put X into relation with something else. To make this claim plausible, however, they have to attack the notion that knowing X is a matter of being related to something intrinsic to X, whereas using X is a matter of standing in an extrinsic, accidental, relation to X.
In order to attack that notion, they need to break down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic -- between the inner core of X and a peripheral area of X which is constituted by the fact that X stands in certain relations to the other items which make up the universe. The attempt to break down this distinction is what I shall call antiessentialism. For pragmatists, there is no such thing as a nonrelational feature of X, any more than there is such a thing as the intrinsic nature, the essence, of X. So there can be no such thing as a description which matches the way X really is, apart from its relation to human needs or consciousness or language. Once the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goes, so does the distinction between reality and appearance, and so do worries about whether there are barriers between us and the world.
The term 'objective' is defined by antiessentialists not in terms of a
51
relation to intrinsic features of objects but rather by reference to relative ease of attaining consensus among inquirers. Just as the appearance-reality distinction is replaced by distinctions between relative utility of descriptions, so the objective-subjective distinction is replaced by distinctions between relative ease in getting agreement. To say that values are more subjective than facts is just to say that it is harder to get agreement about which things are ugly or which actions evil than about which thing are rectangular. To say that X is really blue even though it appears yellow from a certain angle and under a certain light, is to say that the sentence 'X is blue' is more useful -- that is, can be employed more frequently -- than the sentence 'X is yellow.' The latter sentence is useful only for occasional, evanescent purposes.
...
52
The panrelationalism I advocate is summed up in the suggestion that we think of everything as if it were a number.
The nice thing about numbers, from my point of view, is simply that it is very hard to think of them as having intrinsic natures, as having an essential core surrounded by a penumbra of accidental relationships. Numbers are an admirable example of something which it is difficult to describe in essentialist language.
To see my point, ask what the essence of the number 17 is -- what it is in itself apart from its relationships to other numbers. What is wanted is a description of 17 which is different in kind from the following
53
descriptions: less than 22, more than 8, the sum of 6 and 11, the square root of 289, the square of 4.123105, the difference between 1,678,922 and 1,678,905. The tiresome thing about all these descriptions is that none of them seems to get closer to the number 17 than do any of the others. Equally tiresomely, there are obviously an infinite number of other descriptions which you could offer of 17, all of which would be equally 'accidental' and 'extrinsic'. None of these descriptions seems to give you a clue to the intrinsic seventeenness of 17 -- the unique feature which makes it the very number that it is. For your choice among these descriptions is obviously a matter of what purpose you have in mind -- the particular situation which caused you to think of the number 17 in the first place.
If we want to be essentialist about the number 17, we have to say, in philosophical jargon, that all its infinitely many different relations to infinitely many other numbers are internal relations -- that is, that none of these relations could be different without the number 17 being different. So there seems to be no way to define the essence of seventeenhood short of finding some mechanism for generating all the true descriptions of 17, specifying all its relations to all the other numbers. Mathematicians can in fact produce such a mechanism by axiomatizing arithematic, or by reducing numbers to sets and axiomatizing set theory. But if the mathematician then points to his neat little batch of axioms and says, 'Behold the essence of 17!' we feel gypped. There is nothing very seventeenish about those axioms, for they are equally the essence of I, or 2, of 289, and of 1,678,922.
I conclude that, whatever sorts of things may have intrinsic natures, numbers do not -- that it simply does not pay to be an essentialist about numbers. We antiessentialists would like to convince you that it also does not pay to be essentialist about tables, stars, electrons, human beings, academic disciplines, social institutions, or anything else. We suggest that you think of all such objects as resembling numbers in the following respect: there is nothing to be known about them except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other objects. Everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all
54
the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations. The system of natural numbers is a good model of the universe because in that system it is obvious, and obviously harmless, that there are no terms of relations which are not simply clusters of further relations.
To say that relations go all the way down is a corollary of psychological nominalism: of the doctrine that there is nothing to be known about anything save what is stated in sentences describing it. For every sentence about an object is an explicit or implicit description of its relation to one or more other objects. So if there is no knowledge by acquaintance, no knowledge which does not take the form of a sentential attitude, then there is nothing to be known about anything save its relations to other things. To insist that there is a difference between a nonrelational ordo essendi and a relational ordo cognoscendi is, inevitably, to recreate the Kantian Thing-in-Itself. To make that move is to substitute a nostalgia for immediacy, and a longing for a salvatory relation to a nonhuman power, for the utopian hope which pragmatism recommends. It is to reinvent what Heidegger called 'the ontotheological tradition'.
For psychological nominalists, no description of an object is more a description of the 'real', as opposed to the 'apparent', object than any other, nor are any of them descriptions of, so to speak, the object's relation to itself - of its identity with its own essence. Some of them are, to be sure, better descriptions than others. But this betterness is a matter of being more useful tools -- tools which accomplish some human purpose better than do competing descriptions. All these purposes are, from a philosophical as opposed to a practical point of view, on a par. There is no over-riding purpose called 'discovering the truth' which takes precedence. As I have said before, pragmatists do not think that truth is the aim of inquiry. The aim of inquiry is utility, and there are as many different useful tools as there are purposes to be served.
Common sense -- or at least Western common sense -- has trouble with the claim that numbers are good models for objects in general because it seems counterintuitive to say that physical, spatiotemporal objects dissolve into webs of relations in the way that numbers do.
55
When numbers are analysed away into relations to other numbers, nobody mourns the loss of their substantial, independent, autonomous reality. But things are different with tables and stars and electrons. Here common sense is inclined to stick in its toes and say that you cannot have relations without things to be related. If there were not a hard, substantial autonomous table to stand in relation to, e.g., you and me and the chair, or to be constituted out of hard, substantial, elementary particles, there would be nothing to get related and so no relations. There is, common sense insists, a difference between relations and the things that get related, and philosophy cannot break that distinction down.
The antiessentialist reply to this bit of common sense is pretty much the one Berkeley made to Locke's attempt to distinguish primary from secondary qualities - the reply which Peirce called the first invocation of the pragmatist principle. The contemporary, linguistified form of Berkeley's reply is: All that we know about this hard, substantial table - about the thing that gets related as opposed to its relations - is that certain sentences are true of it. It is that of which the following statements are true: It is rectangular, it is brown, it is ugly, made out - of a tree, smaller than a house, larger than a mouse, less luminous than a star, and so on and on. There is nothing to be known about an object except what sentences are true of it. The antiessentialist's argument thus comes down to saying that since all sentences can do is relate objects to one another, every sentence which describes an object will, implicitly or explicitly, attribute a relational property to it. We antiessentialists try to substitute the picture of language as a way of hooking objects up to one another for the picture of language as a veil interposed between us and objects.
Essentialists typically rejoin, at this point, that psychological nominalism is a mistake, that we should retrieve what was true in empiricism, and not admit that language provides our only cognitive access to objects. They suggest that we must have some prelinguistic knowledge of objects, knowledge that cannot be caught in language. This knowledge, they say, is what prevents the table or the number or the human being from being what they call a 'mere linguistic construct'. To illustrate what he means by nonlinguistic knowledge, the essentialist,
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at this point in the argument, usually bangs his hand on the table and flinches. He thereby hopes to demonstrate that he has acquired a bit of knowledge, and a kind of intimacy with the table, which escapes the reach of language. He claims that that knowledge of the table's intrinsic causal powers, its sheer brute thereness, keeps him in touch with reality in a way in which the antiessentialist is not.
Unfazed by this suggestion that he is out of touch, the antiessentialist reiterates that if you want to know what the table really, intrinsically, is, the best answer you are going to get is 'that of which the following statements are true: it is brown, ugly, painful to banging heads, capable of being stumbled over, made of atoms, and so on and on'. The painfulness, the solidity, and the causal powers of the table are on all fours with its brownness and its ugliness. Just as you do not get on more intimate terms with the number 17 by discovering its square root, you do not get on more intimate terms with the table, closer to its intrinsic nature, by hitting it than by looking at it or talking about it. All that hitting it, or decomposing it into atoms, does is to enable you to relate it to a few more things. It does not take you out of language into fact, or out of appearance into reality, or out of a remote and disinterested relationship into more immediate and intense relationship.
The point of this little exchange is, once again, that the antiessentialist denies that there is a way to pick out an object from the rest of the universe except as the object of which a certain set of sentences are true. With Wittgenstein, he says that ostention only works against the backdrop of a linguistic practice, and that the self-identity of the thing picked out is itself description-relative. Anti-essentialists think that the distinction between things related and relations is just an alternative way of making the distinction between what we are talking about and what we say about it. The latter distinction is, as Whitehead said, just a hypostatization of the relation between linguistic subject and linguistic predicate.
Just as the utterance of a noun conveys no information to people who are unfamiliar with adjectives and verbs, so there is no way to convey information except by relating something to something else. Only in the context of a sentence, as Frege told us, does a word have
57
meaning. But that means that there is no way of getting behind language to some more immediate nonlinguistic form of acquaintance with what we are talking about. Only when linked up with some other parts of speech does a noun have a use, and only as the term of a relation is an object an object of knowledge. There is no knowledge of the subject without knowledge of what sentences referring to it are true, just as there is no knowledge of a number without knowledge of its relations to other numbers.
Our sense that we can know a thing without knowing its relations to other things is explained away by antiessentialist philosophers as a reflection of the difference between being certain about some familiar, taken-for-granted, obvious relations in which the thing stands and being uncertain about its other relations. Seventeen, for example, starts out by being the sum of 17 ones, the number between 16 and 18, and so on. Enough such familiar statements, and we begin to think of 17 as a thing waiting to get related to other things. When we are told that 17 is also the difference between 1,678,922 and 1,678,905 we feel that we have learned about a rather remote, inessential, connection between it and something else, rather than more about 17 itself. But when pressed we have to admit that the relation between 17 and 1,678,922 is no more or less intrinsic than that between 16 and 17. For, in the case of numbers, there is no clear sense to be given to term 'intrinsic'. We do not really want to say that 17, in the secret depths of its heart, feels closer to 16 than to numbers further down the line.
Antiessentialists suggest that we also brush aside the question of whether the hardness of the table is more intrinsic to the table than its colour, or whether the atomic constitution of the star Polaris is more intrinsic to it than its location in a constellation. The question of whether there really are such things as constellations, or whether they are merely illusions produced by the fact that we cannot visually distinguish the distance of stars, strikes antiessentialists as being as bad as the question of whether there really are such things as moral values, or whether they are merely projections of human wishes. They suggest we brush aside all questions about where the thing stops and its relations begin, all questions about where its intrinsic nature starts
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and its external relations begin, all questions about where its essential core ends and its accidental periphery begins. Antiessentialists like to ask, with Wittgenstein, whether a chessboard is really one thing or 64 things. To ask that question, they think, is to expose its foolishness - its lack of any interesting point. Questions which have a point are those which meet Wiam James's requirement that any difference must make a difference. Other questions -- such as those about the ontological status of constellations or of moral values -- are 'merely verbal' or, worse yet, 'merely philosophical'.
The residual essentialism of common sense may rejoin to all this that antiessentialism is a sort of linguistic idealism: a way of suggesting that there was really nothing there to be talked about before people began talking -- that objects are artefacts of language. But this rejoinder is a confusion between the question, 'How do we pick out objects?' and, 'Do objects antedate being picked out by us?' The antiessentialist has no doubt that there were trees and stars long before there were statements about trees and stars. But the fact of antecedent existence is of no use in giving sense to the question, 'What are trees and stars apart from their relations to other things - apart from our statements about them?' Nor is it of any help in giving sense to the sceptic's claim that trees and stars have non-relational, intrinsic, essences which may, alas, be beyond our ken. If that claim is to have a clear meaning, we have to be able to say something more about what is beyond our ken, what we are deprived of. Otherwise, we are stuck with Kant's unknowable Thing-in-Itself. From the antiessentialist's point of view, the Kantian lament that we are for ever trapped behind the veil of subjectivity is merely the pointless, because tautologous, claim that something we define as being beyond our knowledge is, alas, beyond our knowledge.
Anywho, I find this passage extraordinarily interesting, and I'd love to hear what others think, whoever has the time to read it all. Personally I find Rorty a lot more readable and enjoyable than a lot of other philosophers I could name... although those people who immediately begin to fall asleep at the first sight of philosophical jargon are probably best-served by skipping to page 52.
Note that the numbers in between paragraphs are page numbers, and the one ellipsis (...) denotes a place where I have omitted a few paragraphs in a futile attempt at brevity.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
49
Ever since the seventeenth century, philosophers have been suggesting that we may never know reality, because there is a barrier between us and it -- a veil of appearances produced by the interaction between subject and object, between the constitution of our own sense organs or our minds and the way things are in themselves. Since the
50
nineteenth century, philosophers have been suggesting that language may form such a barrier -- that our language imposes categories on objects which may not be intrinsic to them. Pragmatists reply to seventeenth-century arguments about the veil of appearances by saying that we need not model knowledge on vision. So there is no need to think of the sense organs or our ideas as intervening between a mental eye and its object. Instead, pragmatists say, we can think of both as tools for manipulating the object. They reply to nineteenth-century arguments about the distorting effect of language by saying that language is not a medium of representation. Rather, it is an exchange of marks and noises, carried out in order to achieve specific purposes. It cannot fail to represent accurately, for it never represents at all.
Pragmatists insist on nonocular, nonrepresentational ways of describing sensory perception, thought and language, because they would like to break down the distinction between knowing things and using them. Starting from Bacon's claim that knowledge is power, they proceed to claim that power is all there is to knowledge -- that a claim to know X is a claim to be able to do something with or to X, to put X into relation with something else. To make this claim plausible, however, they have to attack the notion that knowing X is a matter of being related to something intrinsic to X, whereas using X is a matter of standing in an extrinsic, accidental, relation to X.
In order to attack that notion, they need to break down the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic -- between the inner core of X and a peripheral area of X which is constituted by the fact that X stands in certain relations to the other items which make up the universe. The attempt to break down this distinction is what I shall call antiessentialism. For pragmatists, there is no such thing as a nonrelational feature of X, any more than there is such a thing as the intrinsic nature, the essence, of X. So there can be no such thing as a description which matches the way X really is, apart from its relation to human needs or consciousness or language. Once the distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic goes, so does the distinction between reality and appearance, and so do worries about whether there are barriers between us and the world.
The term 'objective' is defined by antiessentialists not in terms of a
51
relation to intrinsic features of objects but rather by reference to relative ease of attaining consensus among inquirers. Just as the appearance-reality distinction is replaced by distinctions between relative utility of descriptions, so the objective-subjective distinction is replaced by distinctions between relative ease in getting agreement. To say that values are more subjective than facts is just to say that it is harder to get agreement about which things are ugly or which actions evil than about which thing are rectangular. To say that X is really blue even though it appears yellow from a certain angle and under a certain light, is to say that the sentence 'X is blue' is more useful -- that is, can be employed more frequently -- than the sentence 'X is yellow.' The latter sentence is useful only for occasional, evanescent purposes.
...
52
The panrelationalism I advocate is summed up in the suggestion that we think of everything as if it were a number.
The nice thing about numbers, from my point of view, is simply that it is very hard to think of them as having intrinsic natures, as having an essential core surrounded by a penumbra of accidental relationships. Numbers are an admirable example of something which it is difficult to describe in essentialist language.
To see my point, ask what the essence of the number 17 is -- what it is in itself apart from its relationships to other numbers. What is wanted is a description of 17 which is different in kind from the following
53
descriptions: less than 22, more than 8, the sum of 6 and 11, the square root of 289, the square of 4.123105, the difference between 1,678,922 and 1,678,905. The tiresome thing about all these descriptions is that none of them seems to get closer to the number 17 than do any of the others. Equally tiresomely, there are obviously an infinite number of other descriptions which you could offer of 17, all of which would be equally 'accidental' and 'extrinsic'. None of these descriptions seems to give you a clue to the intrinsic seventeenness of 17 -- the unique feature which makes it the very number that it is. For your choice among these descriptions is obviously a matter of what purpose you have in mind -- the particular situation which caused you to think of the number 17 in the first place.
If we want to be essentialist about the number 17, we have to say, in philosophical jargon, that all its infinitely many different relations to infinitely many other numbers are internal relations -- that is, that none of these relations could be different without the number 17 being different. So there seems to be no way to define the essence of seventeenhood short of finding some mechanism for generating all the true descriptions of 17, specifying all its relations to all the other numbers. Mathematicians can in fact produce such a mechanism by axiomatizing arithematic, or by reducing numbers to sets and axiomatizing set theory. But if the mathematician then points to his neat little batch of axioms and says, 'Behold the essence of 17!' we feel gypped. There is nothing very seventeenish about those axioms, for they are equally the essence of I, or 2, of 289, and of 1,678,922.
I conclude that, whatever sorts of things may have intrinsic natures, numbers do not -- that it simply does not pay to be an essentialist about numbers. We antiessentialists would like to convince you that it also does not pay to be essentialist about tables, stars, electrons, human beings, academic disciplines, social institutions, or anything else. We suggest that you think of all such objects as resembling numbers in the following respect: there is nothing to be known about them except an initially large, and forever expandable, web of relations to other objects. Everything that can serve as the term of a relation can be dissolved into another set of relations, and so on for ever. There are, so to speak, relations all the way down, all the way up, and all
54
the way out in every direction: you never reach something which is not just one more nexus of relations. The system of natural numbers is a good model of the universe because in that system it is obvious, and obviously harmless, that there are no terms of relations which are not simply clusters of further relations.
To say that relations go all the way down is a corollary of psychological nominalism: of the doctrine that there is nothing to be known about anything save what is stated in sentences describing it. For every sentence about an object is an explicit or implicit description of its relation to one or more other objects. So if there is no knowledge by acquaintance, no knowledge which does not take the form of a sentential attitude, then there is nothing to be known about anything save its relations to other things. To insist that there is a difference between a nonrelational ordo essendi and a relational ordo cognoscendi is, inevitably, to recreate the Kantian Thing-in-Itself. To make that move is to substitute a nostalgia for immediacy, and a longing for a salvatory relation to a nonhuman power, for the utopian hope which pragmatism recommends. It is to reinvent what Heidegger called 'the ontotheological tradition'.
For psychological nominalists, no description of an object is more a description of the 'real', as opposed to the 'apparent', object than any other, nor are any of them descriptions of, so to speak, the object's relation to itself - of its identity with its own essence. Some of them are, to be sure, better descriptions than others. But this betterness is a matter of being more useful tools -- tools which accomplish some human purpose better than do competing descriptions. All these purposes are, from a philosophical as opposed to a practical point of view, on a par. There is no over-riding purpose called 'discovering the truth' which takes precedence. As I have said before, pragmatists do not think that truth is the aim of inquiry. The aim of inquiry is utility, and there are as many different useful tools as there are purposes to be served.
Common sense -- or at least Western common sense -- has trouble with the claim that numbers are good models for objects in general because it seems counterintuitive to say that physical, spatiotemporal objects dissolve into webs of relations in the way that numbers do.
55
When numbers are analysed away into relations to other numbers, nobody mourns the loss of their substantial, independent, autonomous reality. But things are different with tables and stars and electrons. Here common sense is inclined to stick in its toes and say that you cannot have relations without things to be related. If there were not a hard, substantial autonomous table to stand in relation to, e.g., you and me and the chair, or to be constituted out of hard, substantial, elementary particles, there would be nothing to get related and so no relations. There is, common sense insists, a difference between relations and the things that get related, and philosophy cannot break that distinction down.
The antiessentialist reply to this bit of common sense is pretty much the one Berkeley made to Locke's attempt to distinguish primary from secondary qualities - the reply which Peirce called the first invocation of the pragmatist principle. The contemporary, linguistified form of Berkeley's reply is: All that we know about this hard, substantial table - about the thing that gets related as opposed to its relations - is that certain sentences are true of it. It is that of which the following statements are true: It is rectangular, it is brown, it is ugly, made out - of a tree, smaller than a house, larger than a mouse, less luminous than a star, and so on and on. There is nothing to be known about an object except what sentences are true of it. The antiessentialist's argument thus comes down to saying that since all sentences can do is relate objects to one another, every sentence which describes an object will, implicitly or explicitly, attribute a relational property to it. We antiessentialists try to substitute the picture of language as a way of hooking objects up to one another for the picture of language as a veil interposed between us and objects.
Essentialists typically rejoin, at this point, that psychological nominalism is a mistake, that we should retrieve what was true in empiricism, and not admit that language provides our only cognitive access to objects. They suggest that we must have some prelinguistic knowledge of objects, knowledge that cannot be caught in language. This knowledge, they say, is what prevents the table or the number or the human being from being what they call a 'mere linguistic construct'. To illustrate what he means by nonlinguistic knowledge, the essentialist,
56
at this point in the argument, usually bangs his hand on the table and flinches. He thereby hopes to demonstrate that he has acquired a bit of knowledge, and a kind of intimacy with the table, which escapes the reach of language. He claims that that knowledge of the table's intrinsic causal powers, its sheer brute thereness, keeps him in touch with reality in a way in which the antiessentialist is not.
Unfazed by this suggestion that he is out of touch, the antiessentialist reiterates that if you want to know what the table really, intrinsically, is, the best answer you are going to get is 'that of which the following statements are true: it is brown, ugly, painful to banging heads, capable of being stumbled over, made of atoms, and so on and on'. The painfulness, the solidity, and the causal powers of the table are on all fours with its brownness and its ugliness. Just as you do not get on more intimate terms with the number 17 by discovering its square root, you do not get on more intimate terms with the table, closer to its intrinsic nature, by hitting it than by looking at it or talking about it. All that hitting it, or decomposing it into atoms, does is to enable you to relate it to a few more things. It does not take you out of language into fact, or out of appearance into reality, or out of a remote and disinterested relationship into more immediate and intense relationship.
The point of this little exchange is, once again, that the antiessentialist denies that there is a way to pick out an object from the rest of the universe except as the object of which a certain set of sentences are true. With Wittgenstein, he says that ostention only works against the backdrop of a linguistic practice, and that the self-identity of the thing picked out is itself description-relative. Anti-essentialists think that the distinction between things related and relations is just an alternative way of making the distinction between what we are talking about and what we say about it. The latter distinction is, as Whitehead said, just a hypostatization of the relation between linguistic subject and linguistic predicate.
Just as the utterance of a noun conveys no information to people who are unfamiliar with adjectives and verbs, so there is no way to convey information except by relating something to something else. Only in the context of a sentence, as Frege told us, does a word have
57
meaning. But that means that there is no way of getting behind language to some more immediate nonlinguistic form of acquaintance with what we are talking about. Only when linked up with some other parts of speech does a noun have a use, and only as the term of a relation is an object an object of knowledge. There is no knowledge of the subject without knowledge of what sentences referring to it are true, just as there is no knowledge of a number without knowledge of its relations to other numbers.
Our sense that we can know a thing without knowing its relations to other things is explained away by antiessentialist philosophers as a reflection of the difference between being certain about some familiar, taken-for-granted, obvious relations in which the thing stands and being uncertain about its other relations. Seventeen, for example, starts out by being the sum of 17 ones, the number between 16 and 18, and so on. Enough such familiar statements, and we begin to think of 17 as a thing waiting to get related to other things. When we are told that 17 is also the difference between 1,678,922 and 1,678,905 we feel that we have learned about a rather remote, inessential, connection between it and something else, rather than more about 17 itself. But when pressed we have to admit that the relation between 17 and 1,678,922 is no more or less intrinsic than that between 16 and 17. For, in the case of numbers, there is no clear sense to be given to term 'intrinsic'. We do not really want to say that 17, in the secret depths of its heart, feels closer to 16 than to numbers further down the line.
Antiessentialists suggest that we also brush aside the question of whether the hardness of the table is more intrinsic to the table than its colour, or whether the atomic constitution of the star Polaris is more intrinsic to it than its location in a constellation. The question of whether there really are such things as constellations, or whether they are merely illusions produced by the fact that we cannot visually distinguish the distance of stars, strikes antiessentialists as being as bad as the question of whether there really are such things as moral values, or whether they are merely projections of human wishes. They suggest we brush aside all questions about where the thing stops and its relations begin, all questions about where its intrinsic nature starts
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and its external relations begin, all questions about where its essential core ends and its accidental periphery begins. Antiessentialists like to ask, with Wittgenstein, whether a chessboard is really one thing or 64 things. To ask that question, they think, is to expose its foolishness - its lack of any interesting point. Questions which have a point are those which meet Wiam James's requirement that any difference must make a difference. Other questions -- such as those about the ontological status of constellations or of moral values -- are 'merely verbal' or, worse yet, 'merely philosophical'.
The residual essentialism of common sense may rejoin to all this that antiessentialism is a sort of linguistic idealism: a way of suggesting that there was really nothing there to be talked about before people began talking -- that objects are artefacts of language. But this rejoinder is a confusion between the question, 'How do we pick out objects?' and, 'Do objects antedate being picked out by us?' The antiessentialist has no doubt that there were trees and stars long before there were statements about trees and stars. But the fact of antecedent existence is of no use in giving sense to the question, 'What are trees and stars apart from their relations to other things - apart from our statements about them?' Nor is it of any help in giving sense to the sceptic's claim that trees and stars have non-relational, intrinsic, essences which may, alas, be beyond our ken. If that claim is to have a clear meaning, we have to be able to say something more about what is beyond our ken, what we are deprived of. Otherwise, we are stuck with Kant's unknowable Thing-in-Itself. From the antiessentialist's point of view, the Kantian lament that we are for ever trapped behind the veil of subjectivity is merely the pointless, because tautologous, claim that something we define as being beyond our knowledge is, alas, beyond our knowledge.
LogGrad98
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AtheistPreacher
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For anyone who's interested -- or just tremendously bored, or suffering from insomnia -- I've just finished re-writing the Wikipedia article on Alfred North Whitehead, one of the most important philosophers of the 20th century, and my own primary influence:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead